Abstract

This essay provides a critical analysis of the concept “Japanese Buddhism.” “Japanese Buddhism” is an inherently ambiguous phrase, and this allows it to conceal a host of problematic theoretical commitments. On the one hand, the phrase is relatively bland—a mere locative identifying the various forms of Buddhism found in Japan. On the other, however, it can be used with a different kind of adjectival intent, identifying a unique kind of Buddhism, a Buddhism that is Japanese. In contrast, the expression “Buddhisms of Japan” is explicitly employed as an alternative to “Japanese Buddhism.” These usages are intentional—not simply a matter of stylistics, but serving meta-theoretical ends. In fact, it is in this realm of meta-theory that the following critique of three prominent approaches to the study of the thought and practice of the Buddhisms of Japan—one theoretical and two disciplinary—is leveraged. The distinction between theoretical and disciplinary creates something of an unbalanced structure in the following, since the theoretical issue—the tendency to essentialize “Japanese Buddhism” in one way or another—is common to both of the disciplinary approaches examined here, that is, comparative philosophy and comparative religion. It is necessary to subvert the very idea that there is any one correct way to represent Japanese Buddhism against which other representations may be judged. Such a project is necessarily doomed to failure. This is clear once we shift our understanding of the referent of the phrase “Japanese Buddhism.” Rather than having any fixed referent, whether as a Platonic ideal form, a natural kind, or a class noun, it is a social construction, one that operates within a sociology or economy of knowledge. To presume that “Japanese Buddhism” has a fixed referent, an ahistorical essence or a transhistorical identity, that can be represented, conceals the role of selection underlying the referent. In other words, “Japanese Buddhism” is not something discovered but, rather, something made, an artifact of both popular and academic discourse. Such a claim, of course, does not imply that there are not indefinitely many things that can be pointed to stipulatively as instances of Japanese Buddhism. Indeed, the constructed nature of the concept is indicated by this overwhelming number of possible stipulative referents and the plurality of ways in which they can be grouped and categorized.