Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan. By James L. Ford

Extract

Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan, which on the surface is a conventional study of the eminent Buddhist priest Jōkei (1155–1213), actually adds another important installment to our revision of Buddhist history in medieval Japan. Jōkei appeared in twentieth-century scholarship largely as an opponent of the newly emerging Pure Land Buddhist movement of the charismatic master Hōnen (1133–1212). Specifically, Jōkei was the reputed author of a nine-point critique of Hōnen's movement, in which the Kōfukuji temple in Nara, a bastion of Japan's Buddhist establishment, petitioned the imperial court in 1205 to suppress the movement. Author James L. Ford argues that this depiction of Jōkei is one-dimensional, omitting many aspects of his religious life that were more representative of medieval Buddhism than Hōnen's movement was. It is only because Pure Land Buddhism later became a dominant force in Japan that Jōkei, who was far more eminent in his own day than Hōnen was, has been eclipsed. Ford thus proposes to use Jōkei as a prism through which to elucidate medieval Japanese Buddhism and to critique the vexed concept of Kamakura Buddhism that has held sway in modern scholarship.