Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism(Buddhism and Modernity)

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition's birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Sakyamuni, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan's growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism's foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition--in the heart of Japan.

About the Author :
Richard M. Jaffe, an associate professor of religious studies at Duke University, is the author of Neither Monk nor Layman and editor of the Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki.

Review :
"Fascinating . . . Jaffe's work consistently and elegantly brings the dynamic and changing world into his discussions of the flow of ideas, and it is made much stronger thereby. . . . I have long argued that readings of religion that ignore the history of their own time and place can be intriguing in an isolated and jewel-like capacity, but they also lack depth and the vibrancy possible in a dynamic, more fulsome history. Jaffe has provided us with just such a dynamic and fulsome history here."--James E. Ketelaar "Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies" "Richly documented, engagingly narrated, and methodologically innovative. . ."-- "Journal of the American Academy of Religion" "Jaffe explores the overseas travels made by Japanese Buddhists to India and the surrounding regions of South Asia between the beginning of the Meiji era and early twentieth century . . . As Jaffe demonstrates, Japanese Buddhists accepted and embraced nineteenth and twentieth-century Orientalist scholarship and Western (European and American) models of religious practices along with their South Asian and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asian Buddhist roots to reconceptualize Japanese Buddhism during Japan's modern era. More importantly, he notes that the emergence of Indian Buddhist and Sanskrit studies in Japanese Buddhist sectarian universities owes much to the importation of Western scholarship into Japan as well as to the training Japanese Buddhists received in South Asia. By the 1930s, Japanese Buddhists considered pilgrimage to Buddhist sites in India as a significant act of Buddhist devotion, and Japanese Buddhist scholars educated in South Asia were teaching in many of the sectarian universities in Japan."-- "Journal of Asian Studies" "Jaffe's Asia-centric focus also contributes significantly to research on modern Japanese Buddhism, introducing a number of important figures previously unknown to English-language readers, people who should be more widely known. . . . The extent and range of the personal records is one of the great strengths of the book. . . . The richly researched chapters are long and detailed; the translations and references generous, breaking ground for future studies."-- "Journal of Japanese Studies" "An exceptionally well-researched and insightfully presented account of Japanese Buddhist travelers to South Asia during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the overall reception and impact of Indian Buddhism on the understanding and production of Japanese Buddhist temples, texts, and various aspects of intellectual and material culture in the modern period."--Steve Heine, Florida International University "This book gives a stimulating inside view on the impacts that the significantly entangled areas of Buddhism and globality have on the real lives of actors in modern societies."--Christian Koch "Reading Religion" "Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhismis an expansive, ambitious, and absorbing book. . . . Jaffe's work here has the hallmarks of a superb history of modern Japanese Buddhism: it presents evidence gathered from a remarkably wide-ranging set of archives, engages with both individual thinkers and institutions as historical actors, and reveals a sure grasp of the economic and political contexts in which religious ideas were rearticulated without reducing the ideas to those contexts. At the same time, by reading Japanese Buddhist modernism in terms of flows taking place between Japan and South Asia, Seeking Śākyamuni pushes against the limits of modern Japanese Buddhist history as a category. Jaffe's work here represents a provocative challenge to one way that the field of Buddhist Studies has organized itself, and a model of how to do things differently."-- "Journal of Buddhist Ethics" "Seeking Śākyamuni merits a wide readership, which should include scholars and practitioners of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia...This reviewer hopes that Seeking Śākyamuni will inaugurate new streams of research, and new ways of conceiving 'Buddhism in Japan, ' for decades to come."--Micah L. Auerback "Journal of Religion in Japan" "In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism."--Samee Siddiqui "New Books Network" "A fascinating account of Japanese visitors to India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Notably, these were seekers and pilgrims, rather than pleasure-seekers. Their stories have been rehabilitated in Richard Jaffe's recent book, Seeking Sakyamuni . . . In the political imagination of modern India, Japan is the land that gave succour to Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA). In the technological imagination of modern India, Japan is the land that will quickly and efficiently connect the trading centres of Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Seeking Sakyamuni takes us back to a time before the INA and the bullet train, when the two countries were brought together by the interest of spiritually inclined Japanese in the greatest of all Indians."-- "Hindustan Times"