Jacqueline Stone | Princeton University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jacqueline Stone
Princeton University Press eBooks, Jul 13, 2018
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Sep 24, 2022
Between 1945 and 1951, the Nichiren Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai, which had disbanded du... more Between 1945 and 1951, the Nichiren Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai, which had disbanded during the Pacific War, regrouped and burgeoned in a massive proselytizing campaign led by its second president, Toda Jōsei. This effort intertwined three aims: to spread faith in the Lotus Sūtra as the basis for Japan's postwar reconstruction; to establish an ideal government based on Buddhist principles; and to build a national ordination platform as Japan's sacred center. Driving it was Toda's conviction, inherited from his teacher, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, that Japan was suffering a profound malaise and could only be saved by embracing Nichiren's teaching. That message formed a powerful link between wartime and postwar Soka Gakkai organizations. It drew Makiguchi into conflict with wartime ideology, leading to his arrest; amid postwar hardships, it found eager reception and shaped what would become Japan's largest religious movement.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2016
Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that the... more Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that their dead had indeed achieved the Pure Land. They legitimated the practices of specific religious communities and were also linked to the forming of favorable karmic connections (kechien)—to teachings, persons, places, or objects—deemed able to assist one’s own efforts to achieve ōjō. Signs showed which practitioners, living or dead, were worthy of reverence as objects of kechien. Corporeal signs, such as remarkable preservation of the corpse, helped people to negotiate otherwise incommensurable understandings of death as both defiling and as the moment of encounter with the Buddha. Identifying auspicious signs, often through revelatory dreams, also allowed those concerned to cope with deaths that would otherwise have seemed senseless or tragic by recasting them as instances of ōjō. Since signs could be recognized only by the living, ōjō as a social fact was determined by survivors.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1998
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Nov 1, 1999
Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2011
Stone Jacqueline I. Hanano Jūdō, Tendai hongaku shisō to Nichiren kyōgaku (Tendai Original Enligh... more Stone Jacqueline I. Hanano Jūdō, Tendai hongaku shisō to Nichiren kyōgaku (Tendai Original Enlightenment Thought and Nichiren Doctrinal Studies), 2010. In: Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 20, 2011. Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese Religion. pp. 259-268
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Jun 1, 2002
Anyone who has read even a little about medieval Japanese religion has no doubt encountered at le... more Anyone who has read even a little about medieval Japanese religion has no doubt encountered at least one reference to the immensely influential Tendai Buddhist discourse of "original enlightenment" (hongaku), the assertion that all beings are Buddhas inherently. And anyone who has studied a bit further may well have been struck by the profound ambivalence surrounding "original enlightenment thought" (hongaku shisñ) as discussed in modern scholarship. On one hand, it has been touted as the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophical achievement, the quintessential expression of Japanese spirituality, and the basis of medieval aesthetics. On the other, it has been condemned as a pernicious influence that corrupted orthodox Buddhist scholarship, undermined morality, and even legitimized political oppression. Nowhere has this ambivalence appeared more strikingly than in discussions of the relationship between Tendai hongaku thought and the Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren Buddhist movements that emerged during the Kamakura period (1185-1333). Original enlightenment thought, one reads, was the intellectual matrix from which these new movements emerged, but they found their true identity in rejecting it. This book represents an attempt to make sense of the original enlightenment discourse, its place in medieval Japanese religion, and the issues involved in its study. I have found it necessary to consider this subject in two broad contexts: that of the medieval Buddhist world, in which ideas of original enlightenment emerged and flourished, and that of twentieth-century scholarship, whose methods and assumptions have shaped the way medieval Japanese Buddhism has been understood. In both contexts, the subject of original enlightenment thought intersects another issue that has generated much scholarly interest of late: that of rethinking the nature of the Buddhist developments of the Kamakura period, long considered the formative moment in Japanese Buddhist hisxi
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, May 29, 2020
The Japanese Buddhist leader Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) taught exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra... more The Japanese Buddhist leader Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) taught exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra, a scripture widely revered as the Buddha’s highest teaching. Nichiren asserted that in the present, degenerate age, other teachings, being provisional, have lost their efficacy; only the Lotus Sūtra is profound and powerful enough to lead all men and women to liberation. The form of Lotus practice that he taught—chanting the sūtra’s title or daimoku題目 in the phrase Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō南無妙法蓮華経—was available to all, whether monastics or laity, and regardless of education, ability, or social level. Often celebrated as a man of action, Nichiren was also an innovative thinker who welded some of the subtlest Mahāyāna doctrines to a universally accessible form of practice. Nichiren held that faith in the Lotus Sūtra would enable practitioners to realize buddhahood with this very body (J. sokushin jōbutsu即身成仏) and that spreading that faith would transform the current world into an ideal buddha land. Nichiren’s harsh criticisms of other Buddhist forms drew hostile responses from both government officials and leading prelates; he was twice exiled and attacked repeatedly, while some of his followers were imprisoned, had their lands confiscated, or were even killed. In his lifetime, he could claim at most a few hundred followers. But after his death, Nichiren’s following—known first as the Lotus sect (Hokkeshū 法華宗) and later as Nichirenshū 日蓮宗—would grow to become one of Japan’s major Buddhist traditions. Today, more than forty officially registered religious bodies, both traditional temple organizations and lay Buddhist movements, claim derivation from Nichiren. Some have a significant international presence. Modern critics have often labeled Nichiren intolerant on account of his Lotus exclusivism; at the same time, he set an example of principled resistance to worldly authority that continues to encourage dissenters. Nichiren’s ideal of actualizing the buddha land in this world has also inspired multiple forms of Buddhist social activism.
Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2006
Les XIIe et XIIIe siècles ont vu la diffusion de la pensée du honji suijaku, qui maintient que le... more Les XIIe et XIIIe siècles ont vu la diffusion de la pensée du honji suijaku, qui maintient que les buddhas et les bodhisattvas s'étaient manifestés sous des formes appropriées au milieu local en tant que kami japonais. L'idée de considérer les kami comme des avatars des divinités bouddhiques a-t-elle mené à un affaiblissement dans la rigueur de l'action menée contre la pollution (imi), et en particulier la pollution de la mort, traditionnellement observée dans le culte des sanctuaires ? Telle est l'impression que l'on pourrait retirer des contes didactiques de l'époque Kamakura (1185-1333) qui présentent de manière récurrente le cas d'un moine qui encourt inopinément la souillure de la mort mais à qui on permet toujours de s'approcher du sanctuaire et d'en vénérer le kami. D'autres sources, cependant, suggèrent que l'on a continué à observer la prohibition concernant la pollution de la mort, non seulement dans les sanctuaires des kami, mais également dans bien des temples bouddhiques ; et que l'on a adapté les idées du honji suijaku de façons diverses, soit pour affirmer la nécessité de continuer à observer les tabous sur la pollution, soit pour suggérer qu'ils sont inapplicables du point de vue sotériologique. Les histoires de kami ne tenant pas compte de la pollution, elles indiquent moins un relâchement des prohibitions concernant la souillure qu'une concurrence de définitions de la pureté soutenues par différentes écoles bouddhiques. Les clercs qui occupaient des postes officiels, responsables des prières visant à protéger la nation et les rites des kami durent maintenir la pureté rituelle, alors que les moines reclus ou ascétiques pratiquant en dehors de l'organisation officielle des temples n'étaient pas liés par de telles restrictions et considéraient que la pureté consistait non pas à éviter la souillure mais à abandonner tout attachement au monde. Les pratiquants de cette dernière tendance pouvaient ainsi avoir affaire à la pollution de la mort et ils en vinrent à se spécialiser dans les rites centrés sur le lit de mort et les rites funéraires.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2016
During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal ... more During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.
Religious Studies Review, Jun 1, 2011
complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisticated study to date of Chinese autobiograp... more complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisticated study to date of Chinese autobiographical literature, W. Bauer's massive and erudite Das Antlitz Chinas (1990). The absence of any engagement with Bauer's analysis of the notions of autobiography, self-representation, and person in the Chinese tradition represents a missed opportunity to integrate this solid specialized study into the larger world of scholarly inquiry.
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, May 1, 1994
Princeton University Press eBooks, Jul 13, 2018
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Sep 24, 2022
Between 1945 and 1951, the Nichiren Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai, which had disbanded du... more Between 1945 and 1951, the Nichiren Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai, which had disbanded during the Pacific War, regrouped and burgeoned in a massive proselytizing campaign led by its second president, Toda Jōsei. This effort intertwined three aims: to spread faith in the Lotus Sūtra as the basis for Japan's postwar reconstruction; to establish an ideal government based on Buddhist principles; and to build a national ordination platform as Japan's sacred center. Driving it was Toda's conviction, inherited from his teacher, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, that Japan was suffering a profound malaise and could only be saved by embracing Nichiren's teaching. That message formed a powerful link between wartime and postwar Soka Gakkai organizations. It drew Makiguchi into conflict with wartime ideology, leading to his arrest; amid postwar hardships, it found eager reception and shaped what would become Japan's largest religious movement.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2016
Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that the... more Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that their dead had indeed achieved the Pure Land. They legitimated the practices of specific religious communities and were also linked to the forming of favorable karmic connections (kechien)—to teachings, persons, places, or objects—deemed able to assist one’s own efforts to achieve ōjō. Signs showed which practitioners, living or dead, were worthy of reverence as objects of kechien. Corporeal signs, such as remarkable preservation of the corpse, helped people to negotiate otherwise incommensurable understandings of death as both defiling and as the moment of encounter with the Buddha. Identifying auspicious signs, often through revelatory dreams, also allowed those concerned to cope with deaths that would otherwise have seemed senseless or tragic by recasting them as instances of ōjō. Since signs could be recognized only by the living, ōjō as a social fact was determined by survivors.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1998
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Nov 1, 1999
Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2011
Stone Jacqueline I. Hanano Jūdō, Tendai hongaku shisō to Nichiren kyōgaku (Tendai Original Enligh... more Stone Jacqueline I. Hanano Jūdō, Tendai hongaku shisō to Nichiren kyōgaku (Tendai Original Enlightenment Thought and Nichiren Doctrinal Studies), 2010. In: Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 20, 2011. Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese Religion. pp. 259-268
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Jun 1, 2002
Anyone who has read even a little about medieval Japanese religion has no doubt encountered at le... more Anyone who has read even a little about medieval Japanese religion has no doubt encountered at least one reference to the immensely influential Tendai Buddhist discourse of "original enlightenment" (hongaku), the assertion that all beings are Buddhas inherently. And anyone who has studied a bit further may well have been struck by the profound ambivalence surrounding "original enlightenment thought" (hongaku shisñ) as discussed in modern scholarship. On one hand, it has been touted as the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophical achievement, the quintessential expression of Japanese spirituality, and the basis of medieval aesthetics. On the other, it has been condemned as a pernicious influence that corrupted orthodox Buddhist scholarship, undermined morality, and even legitimized political oppression. Nowhere has this ambivalence appeared more strikingly than in discussions of the relationship between Tendai hongaku thought and the Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren Buddhist movements that emerged during the Kamakura period (1185-1333). Original enlightenment thought, one reads, was the intellectual matrix from which these new movements emerged, but they found their true identity in rejecting it. This book represents an attempt to make sense of the original enlightenment discourse, its place in medieval Japanese religion, and the issues involved in its study. I have found it necessary to consider this subject in two broad contexts: that of the medieval Buddhist world, in which ideas of original enlightenment emerged and flourished, and that of twentieth-century scholarship, whose methods and assumptions have shaped the way medieval Japanese Buddhism has been understood. In both contexts, the subject of original enlightenment thought intersects another issue that has generated much scholarly interest of late: that of rethinking the nature of the Buddhist developments of the Kamakura period, long considered the formative moment in Japanese Buddhist hisxi
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, May 29, 2020
The Japanese Buddhist leader Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) taught exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra... more The Japanese Buddhist leader Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–1282) taught exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra, a scripture widely revered as the Buddha’s highest teaching. Nichiren asserted that in the present, degenerate age, other teachings, being provisional, have lost their efficacy; only the Lotus Sūtra is profound and powerful enough to lead all men and women to liberation. The form of Lotus practice that he taught—chanting the sūtra’s title or daimoku題目 in the phrase Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō南無妙法蓮華経—was available to all, whether monastics or laity, and regardless of education, ability, or social level. Often celebrated as a man of action, Nichiren was also an innovative thinker who welded some of the subtlest Mahāyāna doctrines to a universally accessible form of practice. Nichiren held that faith in the Lotus Sūtra would enable practitioners to realize buddhahood with this very body (J. sokushin jōbutsu即身成仏) and that spreading that faith would transform the current world into an ideal buddha land. Nichiren’s harsh criticisms of other Buddhist forms drew hostile responses from both government officials and leading prelates; he was twice exiled and attacked repeatedly, while some of his followers were imprisoned, had their lands confiscated, or were even killed. In his lifetime, he could claim at most a few hundred followers. But after his death, Nichiren’s following—known first as the Lotus sect (Hokkeshū 法華宗) and later as Nichirenshū 日蓮宗—would grow to become one of Japan’s major Buddhist traditions. Today, more than forty officially registered religious bodies, both traditional temple organizations and lay Buddhist movements, claim derivation from Nichiren. Some have a significant international presence. Modern critics have often labeled Nichiren intolerant on account of his Lotus exclusivism; at the same time, he set an example of principled resistance to worldly authority that continues to encourage dissenters. Nichiren’s ideal of actualizing the buddha land in this world has also inspired multiple forms of Buddhist social activism.
Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2006
Les XIIe et XIIIe siècles ont vu la diffusion de la pensée du honji suijaku, qui maintient que le... more Les XIIe et XIIIe siècles ont vu la diffusion de la pensée du honji suijaku, qui maintient que les buddhas et les bodhisattvas s'étaient manifestés sous des formes appropriées au milieu local en tant que kami japonais. L'idée de considérer les kami comme des avatars des divinités bouddhiques a-t-elle mené à un affaiblissement dans la rigueur de l'action menée contre la pollution (imi), et en particulier la pollution de la mort, traditionnellement observée dans le culte des sanctuaires ? Telle est l'impression que l'on pourrait retirer des contes didactiques de l'époque Kamakura (1185-1333) qui présentent de manière récurrente le cas d'un moine qui encourt inopinément la souillure de la mort mais à qui on permet toujours de s'approcher du sanctuaire et d'en vénérer le kami. D'autres sources, cependant, suggèrent que l'on a continué à observer la prohibition concernant la pollution de la mort, non seulement dans les sanctuaires des kami, mais également dans bien des temples bouddhiques ; et que l'on a adapté les idées du honji suijaku de façons diverses, soit pour affirmer la nécessité de continuer à observer les tabous sur la pollution, soit pour suggérer qu'ils sont inapplicables du point de vue sotériologique. Les histoires de kami ne tenant pas compte de la pollution, elles indiquent moins un relâchement des prohibitions concernant la souillure qu'une concurrence de définitions de la pureté soutenues par différentes écoles bouddhiques. Les clercs qui occupaient des postes officiels, responsables des prières visant à protéger la nation et les rites des kami durent maintenir la pureté rituelle, alors que les moines reclus ou ascétiques pratiquant en dehors de l'organisation officielle des temples n'étaient pas liés par de telles restrictions et considéraient que la pureté consistait non pas à éviter la souillure mais à abandonner tout attachement au monde. Les pratiquants de cette dernière tendance pouvaient ainsi avoir affaire à la pollution de la mort et ils en vinrent à se spécialiser dans les rites centrés sur le lit de mort et les rites funéraires.
University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2016
During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal ... more During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.
Religious Studies Review, Jun 1, 2011
complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisticated study to date of Chinese autobiograp... more complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisticated study to date of Chinese autobiographical literature, W. Bauer's massive and erudite Das Antlitz Chinas (1990). The absence of any engagement with Bauer's analysis of the notions of autobiography, self-representation, and person in the Chinese tradition represents a missed opportunity to integrate this solid specialized study into the larger world of scholarly inquiry.
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, May 1, 1994