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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Layman, Can You Spare a Dime?,
By Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan (Hardcover)
Gradually our mental image of Kamakura Buddhism is becoming much richer and more complex, and this excellent book makes a major contribution to that process. "Alms and Vagabonds" is indeed full of a great many intriguing insights on the development of Buddhism during this time, insights from a wide variety of perspectives, all of which Goodwin elucidates quite naturally in a study of what would at first glance seem to be a small, simple, and minor facet of Japanese Buddhist history.
The book's focus on "kanjin" turns out after all to be an incredibly fruitful one. First of all, the concrete details of this phenomenon, in which itinerant monks went about soliciting donations from rich and poor for the building, rebuilding, and maintenance of Buddhist temples and the like is interesting in its own right. How did it develop? What was its rationale? Who were these monks and how did they make their pitch? Who were the donors, and what was in it for them? There's a real story here, one that the author shares with us after a lot of careful, in-depth, original research. Second of all, "kanjin" allows us to see the socioeconomic nuts and bolts of Kamakura Buddhism in a rare fashion; religion is never cheap, after all, and here we have the story of how all those temples, icons, rituals, sutras, and such were funded--and of how they were replaced when destroyed or damaged. This in turn has the effect of placing Buddhism squarely within the context of Japanese history, both in terms of the era's convoluted record of political twists and turns and open warfare as well as in the almost imperceptibly changing textures of everyday life. However, this is hardly a reductive analysis. The very real and utterly sincere religious motivations and conceptualizations informing "kanjin" both for the monks and the donors are explored in great depth, and this in turn ties in with the spread of Buddhism among the general populace and with the revival movements (such as Shingon Ritsu) within the established Buddhist schools--overturning the misperception that Kamakura Buddhism was only about Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen. As is doubtlessly clear, something like sociology of religion--or else cultural history of religion--is the key methodological approach here, but Goodwin also gets quite specific in describing the biographies, religious orientations, and kanjin campaigns of key Buddhist monks, especially Jokei, Chogen, and Eizon and their efforts on behalf of Kasagidera, Todaiji, and religiously-motivated public infrastructure projects and charity work. In fact, a key characteristic of this excellent study is its flawless sense of balance. Buddhism is portrayed neither as a cynical money-making machine nor a haze of disembodied doctrines, neither as a faceless historical process nor an episodic saga of great individuals. Rather, the socioeconomic and spiritual realities dovetail in fascinating ways, monks and layfolks with their own stories to tell are in turn part of a bigger, longer story. And an easily ignored aspect of medieval Buddhist life turns out to quietly revolutionize everything we might have thought about the subject.
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