Product Description: This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the combinatory tradition that dominated premodern and early modern Japanese religion, known as honji suijaku (originals and their traces). It questions received, simplified accounts of the interactions between Shinto and Japanese Buddhism, and presents a more dynamic and variegated religious world, one in which the deities' Buddhist originals and local traces did not constitute one-to-one associations, but complex combinations of multiple deities based on semiotic operations, doctrines, myths, and legends...read more

Product Description: These essays from the fin de siècle Japanese Zen priest Uchiyama Gudo, provides entry into an aspect of Buddhist history that is otherwise little known, the relations that can be constructed between the buddhadharma and radical political critique and action.

Product Description: A discussion of the Buddhist discourse of nonsentients, or the idea of plants and inanimate objects becoming buddhas, from the perspective of an intellectual history, with an explanation of the ideological and economic reasons behind the doctrines' introduction...read more