Download or read book The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion written by Bernhard Scheid and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese Middle Ages were a period when forms of secrecy dominated religious practice. This fascinating collection traces out the secret characteristics and practices in Japanese religion, as well as analyzing the decline of religious esotericism in Japan. The essays in this impressive work refer to Esoteric Buddhism as the core of Japan’s "culture of secrecy". Esoteric Buddhism developed in almost all Buddhist countries of Asia, but it was of particular importance in Japan where its impact went far beyond the borders of Buddhism, also affecting Shinto as well as non-religious forms of discourse. The contributors focus on the impact of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese culture, and also include comparative chapters on India and China. Whilst concentrating on the Japanese medieval period, this book will give readers familiar with present day Japan, many explanations for the still visible remnants of Japan’s medieval culture of secrecy.
Download or read book The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion written by Bernhard Scheid and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese Middle Ages were a period when forms of secrecy dominated religious practice. This fascinating collection traces out the secret characteristics and practices in Japanese religion, as well as analyzing the decline of religious esotericism in Japan. The essays in this impressive work refer to Esoteric Buddhism as the core of Japan’s "culture of secrecy". Esoteric Buddhism developed in almost all Buddhist countries of Asia, but it was of particular importance in Japan where its impact went far beyond the borders of Buddhism, also affecting Shinto as well as non-religious forms of discourse. The contributors focus on the impact of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese culture, and also include comparative chapters on India and China. Whilst concentrating on the Japanese medieval period, this book will give readers familiar with present day Japan, many explanations for the still visible remnants of Japan’s medieval culture of secrecy.
Download or read book In Search of Japan s Hidden Christians written by John Dougill and published by SPCK. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians is a remarkable story of suppression, secrecy and survival in the face of human cruelty and God’s apparent silence. Part history, part travelogue, it explores and seeks to explain a clash of civilizations—of East and West—that resonates to this day. For seven generations, Japan’s ‘Hidden Christians’ preserved a faith that was forbidden on pain of death. Just as remarkably, descendants of the Hidden Christians continue to practise their beliefs today, refusing to rejoin the Catholic Church. Why? And what is it about Japanese culture that makes it so resistant to Western Christianity?
Download or read book A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism written by William E. Deal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism offers a comprehensive, nuanced, and chronological account of the evolution of Buddhist religion in Japan from the sixth century to the present day. Traces each period of Japanese history to reveal the complex and often controversial histories of Japanese Buddhists and their unfolding narratives Examines relevant social, political, and transcultural contexts, and places an emphasis on Japanese Buddhist discourses and material culture Addresses the increasing competition between Buddhist, Shinto, and Neo-Confucian world-views through to the mid-nineteenth century Informed by the most recent research, including the latest Japanese and Western scholarship Illustrates the richness and complexity of Japanese Buddhism as a lived religion, offering readers a glimpse into the development of this complex and often misunderstood tradition
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy written by Hugh B. Urban and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrecy is a central and integral component of all religious traditions. Not limited simply to religious groups that engage in clandestine activities such as hidden rites of initiation or terrorism, secrecy is inherent in the very fabric of religion itself. Its importance has perhaps never been more acutely relevant than in our own historical moment. In the wake of 9/11 and other acts of religious violence, we see the rise of invasive national security states that target religious minorities and pose profound challenges to the ideals of privacy and religious freedom, accompanied by the resistance by many communities to such efforts. As such, questions of secrecy, privacy, surveillance, and security are among the most central and contested issues of twenty-first century religious life. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is the definitive reference source for the key topics, problems, and debates in this crucial field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising twenty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts: Configurations of Religious Secrecy: Conceptual and Comparative Frameworks Secrecy as Religious Practice Secrecy and the Politics of the Present Secrecy and Social Resistance Secrecy, Terrorism, and Surveillance. This cutting-edge volume discusses secrecy in relation to major categories of religious experience and individual religious practices while also examining the transformations of secrecy in the modern period, including the rise of fraternal orders, the ongoing wars on terror, the rise of far-right white supremacist groups, increasing concerns over religious freedom and privacy, the role of the internet in the spread and surveillance of such groups, and the resistance to surveillance by many indigenous and diasporic communities. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, comparative religion, new religious movements, and religion and politics. It will be equally central to debates in the related disciplines of sociology, anthropology, political science, security studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan written by Christine Guth and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Crafts were central to daily life in early modern Japan. They were powerful carriers of knowledge, sociality, and identity, and how and from what materials they were made were matters of serious concern among all classes of society. In Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan, Christine M. E. Guth examines the network of forces--both material and immaterial--that supported Japan's rich, diverse, and aesthetically sophisticated artifactual culture between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Exploring the institutions, modes of thought, and reciprocal relationships among people, materials, and tools, she draws particular attention to the role of women in crafts, embodied knowledge, and the special place of lacquer as a medium. By examining the ways and values of making that transcend specific media and practices, Guth illuminates the 'craft culture' of early modern Japan"--
Download or read book Secrecy written by Hugh B. Urban and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powers of political secrecy and social spectacle have been taken to surreal extremes recently. Witness the twin terrors of a president who refuses to disclose dealings with foreign powers while the private data of ordinary citizens is stolen and marketed in order to manipulate consumer preferences and voting outcomes. We have become accustomed to thinking about secrecy in political terms and personal privacy terms. In this bracing, new work, Hugh Urban wants us to focus these same powers of observation on the role of secrecy in religion. With Secrecy, Urban investigates several revealing instances of the power of secrecy in religion, including nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic; the white supremacist BrüderSchweigen or “Silent Brotherhood” movement of the 1980s, the Five Percenters, and the Church of Scientology. An electrifying read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban’s reflections on a vexed, ever-present subject.
Download or read book Secrecy s Power written by Clark Chilson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shin has long been one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan. As a devotional tradition that emphasizes gratitude and trust in Amida Buddha, it is thought to have little to do with secrecy. Yet for centuries, Shin Buddhists met on secluded mountains, in homes, and in the backrooms of stores to teach their hidden doctrines and hold clandestine rites. Among their adherents was D. T. Suzuki’s mother, who took her son to covert Shin meetings when he was a boy. Even among Shin experts, covert followers were relatively unknown; historians who studied them claimed they had disappeared more than a century ago. A serendipitous encounter, however, led to author Clark Chilson’s introduction to the leader of a covert Shin Buddhist group—one of several that to this day conceal the very existence of their beliefs and practices. In Secrecy’s Power Chilson explains how and why they have remained hidden. Drawing on historical and ethnographic sources, as well as fieldwork among covert Shin Buddhists in central Japan, Secrecy’s Power introduces the histories, doctrines, and practices of different covert Shin Buddhists. It shows how, despite assumptions to the contrary, secrecy has been a significant part of Shin’s history since the thirteenth century, when Shinran disowned his eldest son for claiming secret knowledge. The work also demonstrates how secrecy in Shin has long been both a source of conflict and a response to it. Some covert Shin Buddhists were persecuted because of their secrecy, while others used it to protect themselves from persecution under rulers hostile to Shin. Secrecy’s Power is a groundbreaking work that makes an important contribution to our knowledge on secrecy and Shin Buddhism. Organized around the various consequences concealment has had for covert Shin Buddhists, it provides new insights into the power of secrecy to produce multiple effects—even polar opposite ones. It also sheds light on ignored corners of Shin Buddhism to reveal a much richer, more diverse, and more contested tradition than commonly is understood.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions written by Erica Baffelli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an overview of current cutting-edge research in the field of Japanese religions, this Handbook is the most up-to-date guide to contemporary scholarship in the field. As well as charting innovative research taking place, this book also points to new directions for future research, covering both the modern and pre-modern periods. Edited by Erica Baffelli, Andrea Castiglioni, and Fabio Rambelli, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions includes essays by international scholars from the USA, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand. Topics and themes include gender, politics, the arts, economy, media, globalization, and colonialism. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions is an essential reference point for upper-level students and scholars of Japanese religions as well as Japanese Studies more broadly.
Download or read book Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan written by Fabio Rambelli and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by consecration rituals (kanjō) of Buddhist origin. This is the first book to address in a comprehensive way the multiple forms and aspects of these rituals also in relation to other Asian contexts. The multidisciplinary chapters in the book address the origins of these rituals in ancient Persia and India and their developments in China and Tibet, before discussing in depth their transformations in medieval Japan. In particular, kanjō rituals are examined from various perspectives: imperial ceremonies, Buddhist monastic rituals, vernacular religious forms (Shugendō mountain cults, Shinto lineages), rituals of bodily transformation involving sexual practice, and the performing arts: a history of these developments, descriptions of actual rituals, and reference to religious and intellectual arguments based on under-examined primary sources. No other book presents so many cases of kanjō in such depth and breadth. This book is relevant to readers interested in Buddhist studies, Japanese religions, the history of Japanese culture, and in the intersections between religious doctrines, rituals, legitimization, and performance.
Download or read book Japan s Private Spheres Autonomy in Japanese History 1600 1930 written by William Puck Brecher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan's Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 explores the genesis and historical development of autonomy and its evolving relationship with public authority in early modern and modern Japan.
Download or read book Secrecy s Power written by Clark Chilson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shinra My jin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian Mediterranean written by Sujung Kim and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work offers a transnational account of the deity Shinra Myōjin, the “god of Silla” worshipped in medieval Japanese Buddhism from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. Sujung Kim challenges the long-held understanding of Shinra Myōjin as a protective deity of the Tendai Jimon school, showing how its worship emerged and developed in the complex networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean”—a “quality” rather than a physical space defined by Kim as the primary conduit for cross-cultural influence in a region that includes the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the East China Sea, and neighboring coastal areas. While focusing on the transcultural worship of the deity, Kim engages the different maritime arrangements in which Shinra Myōjin circulated: first, the network of Korean immigrants, Chinese merchants, and Japanese Buddhist monks in China’s Shandong peninsula and Japan’s Ōmi Province; and second, that of gods found in the East Asian Mediterranean. Both of these networks became nodal points of exchange of both goods and gods. Kim’s examination of temple chronicles, literary writings, and iconography reveals Shinra Myōjin’s evolution from a seafaring god to a multifaceted one whose roles included the god of pestilence and of poetry, the insurer of painless childbirth, and the protector of performing arts. Shinra Myōjin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” is not only the first monograph in any language on the Tendai Jimon school in Japanese Buddhism, but also the first book-length study in English to examine Korean connections in medieval Japanese religion. Unlike other recent studies on individual Buddhist deities, it foregrounds the need to approach them within a broader East Asian context. By shifting the paradigm from a land-centered vision to a sea-centered one, the work underlines the importance of a transcultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of Buddhist deities.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan written by Rebekah Clements and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868.
Download or read book Reiki Practice and Surrender written by Dori-Michelle Beeler and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2021-01-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors discuss the religious spiritual healing practice Reiki, revealing components of it that help transform the message held by the alleged life-force called reiki energy into meaning expressed in efficacy for the recipient's body, mind and spirit. Components that are analyzed include but are not limited to, touch, symbols, initiation, and precepts. The practitioner's surrender to a combination of internal and external authority - with reiki energy being part of that - is a crux in Reiki practice and one means with which practitioners speak of beneficial effect. This work contributes to academic knowledge about how practicing a religious or spiritual practice may contribute to one's well-being and flourishing life. Moreover, it explores the question of the nature of Reiki in academic definitions of religion.
Download or read book Assembling Shinto written by Anna Andreeva and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of religious ideas and practices. These stages illuminate the medieval pedigree of Ryōbu Shintō (kami ritual worship based loosely on esoteric Buddhism’s Two Mandalas), a major precursor to modern Shinto. In analyzing the key mechanisms for “assembling” medieval forms of kami worship, Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century master narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why groups of religious practitioners affiliated with different cultic sites and religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism’s teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations."
Download or read book The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan written by Yijiang Zhong and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yijiang Zhong analyses the formation of Shinto as a complex and diverse religious tradition in early modern and Meiji Japan, 1600-1868. Highlighting the role of the god Okuninushi and the mythology centered on the Izumo Shrine in western Japan as part of this process, he shows how and why this god came to be ignored in State Shinto in the modern period. In doing so, Zhong moves away from the traditional understanding of Shinto history as something completely internal to the nation of Japan, and instead situates the formation of Shinto within a larger geopolitical context involving intellectual and political developments in the East Asian region and the role of western colonial expansion. The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan draws extensively on primary source materials in Japan, many of which were only made available to the public less than a decade ago and have not yet been studied. Source materials analysed include shrine records and object materials, contemporary written texts, official materials from the national and provincial levels, and a broad range of visual sources based on contemporary prints, drawings, photographs and material culture.
