1st Edition
Buddhist Exchanges Between India and Japan Japanese Buddhists Encountering India and Modern Buddhist Studies
This book examines the role of Buddhism in India–Japan relations through three approaches.
First, it studies the history of interactions between India and Japan, especially through Buddhist pilgrimages from Japan to India and how it has influenced both Japanese and Indian Buddhism, particularly the Buddhist revival movements and the development of Buddhist sacred sites, such as Bodhgaya, in India. Second, it analyses the ideological implications of these Buddhist interactions between Japan and India by focusing on the role of Japanese monks and scholars as agents of Buddhist encounters between the two countries, and their contribution towards Buddhist scholarship in Japan, and the development of ideologies such as Buddhist nationalism or Pan-Asianism in India, Japan as well as in other Asian countries. Finally, it highlights how these historic Buddhist linkages between India and Japan has led to transnational collaborations between Buddhists / Buddhist organizations as well as the governments of the two countries, and the use of Buddhist heritage as a soft power in the diplomatic relations between India and Japan.
Drawing on inter-disciplinary studies, the essays in the volume will be of interest to scholars in history, heritage studies, religious studies, especially Buddhist studies, international relations, and Asian studies.
Introduction: Narratives in Buddhist Exchanges between India and Japan
Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya
Introduction: Japanese Buddhists Encountering India and Modern Buddhist Studies
Togawa Masahiko
1. Bodhisena and the Consecration of the Great Buddha: “India” in the History of Japanese Culture
Kojima Yasuko
2. Longing for India: Japanese Buddhists and India
3. Following the Footsteps of Shakyamuni: Nanjō Bun’yū’s Journey to India
Paride Stortini
4. A Trajectory of the Literary Work by Kimura Nichiki: Indo-Japanese Relationship in 20th Century Bengal
Sumit Kumar Barua
5. From Bongaku (梵学) to Indo Tetsugaku (印度哲学): Indology at Japanese Public Universities from the Meiji to the Taishō Eras
6. Shaku Kōzen and Japanese Buddhists in the Revival of the Bodh Gaya Temple
7. The Bodh Gaya Restoration Movement by Anagarika Dharmapala and the Japanese Buddhists
8. Ōtani Kozui and India: Seeking the Origin of the Eastward Spread of Buddhism
Nohnin Masaaki
9. Japanese Engagement with Tibetan and Indian Buddhism: Kawaguchi Ekai
M N Rajesh
10. The Prajna Paramita Conference Revisited: Japan–India Cultural Interactions at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Okamoto Yoshiko
11. “Proselytizing in the “Western Paradise”: India in the making of Fuji Nichidatsu and Nipponzan Myohoji
12. The Monks Between Japan and India: Buddhist Conversion Movements in India and the Buddhists of Japan
Funahashi Kenta
13. “The Road by Which Buddhism Came”: Buddhist Diplomacy of Japan, India and China
Bessho Yusuke
Biography
Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Delhi. She holds a doctoral degree in Religious Studies from the University of Tokyo, Japan. She previously worked as an Associate Professor at the Nagoya City University and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto.
Togawa Masahiko is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of South Asia, and Comparative Studies of Religion at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). He graduated from Keio University, Japan, and studied at Calcutta University, North Bengal University, and Visva-Bharati University in India from 1992-1997, conducting live-in fieldwork within a village in Bengal, and compiled an ethnography on ritual practices and inter-caste relations.
