Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism

·期刊原文
Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism
Reviewed by James H. Foard
The Journal of Religion
Vol.78 No.2
Pp.320-321
1998.04
Copyright by University of Chicago

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Faure, Bernard. Translated by Phyllis Brooks. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996. xvi+329 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Most of those who will read this book will have already read Bernard
Faure's previous volumes from Princeton, The Rhetoric of Immediacy
(1991) and Chan Insights and Oversights (1993), the two most
important works on Chan and Zen ever published in a Western
language. Therefore, many will approach this book wanting to know
its relationship with those two. As Faure tells us, the fact that
the present work was originally written for a French audience means
that it uses some of the same materials found in the earlier books;
but he hopes that readers will find this one "complementary, not
redundant" (p. xiii). I found it complementary. Other readers should
be warned, however, that if they intend to pursue a particular topic
in the Chan/Zen tradition, they may find this volume redundant. For
some topics, such as the Arhats in East Asia (pp. 88-96) or the
Japanese kami (pp. 96-113), they will find the fuller discussion
here. For other topics, however, much of the same information is
given as before, and many are discussed more satisfactorily in one
of the other two volumes (e.g., death and relics in Rhetoric). On at
least one occasion (p. 238), I realized I had already read virtually
the same sentences elsewhere (Rhetoric, p. 170).
The book is nevertheless complementary for two reasons: its focus on
the texts relating to a single individual, and its use of the idea
of imaginaire to understand those texts. The individual is Keizan
Jokin (1268-1325), third in succession to Dogen (1200-53), the
founder of the Japanese Soto "sect" of Zen. Keizan has been seen by
previous scholars as a reformer, adapting his religion to local
conditions and accommodating esoteric Buddhism to make Soto a
powerful institution. As a result, he has been referred to as the
"second founder" of Soto. Faure has not written a biography of
Keizan. Instead, he concentrates on the texts attributed to him,
particularly the Records of Tokoku, a heterogeneous text for which
Keizan was only partly responsible.
Faure concentrates on this particular text, rather than on the more
"ideological" texts for which Keizan's authorship is surer, because
it allows him to explore the Zen imaginaire of early
fourteenth-century Japan. Following Jacques Le Goff's studies of the
European Middle Ages, Faure uses this term to indicate "the way
beliefs are rendered into images" (p. 3) that mediates, among other
things, "form and formlessness" (p. 281). The products of this
medieval imaginaire--icons, myths, local deities, relics, and much
more--are the very things that Zen ideology calls into question. The
premise of this volume (and in various fashions of all Faure's work)
is that this imaginaire was from the very beginning as present in
Zen as were discourses on emptiness and enlightenment. Its presence
in Keizan's universe, therefore, cannot be attributed solely to
popularizing and esoteric syncretism. In his own way, Faure must
once again struggle as mightily as any Mahayana thinker ever did
with the "two truths"--although in a modern idiom of enormous
erudition--in order to show us how a man whose religious ideology
rejected all imagination could describe himself as having been a
tree-deity "with the head of a dog, the body of a kite, and the
belly and tail of a serpent" (p. 30).
The genres of Keizan's imaginaire, furthermore, are not his, but
extend backward and forward in time, so that his text seeks to
homologize its expressions with what he perceives as eternal ones.
In the end, Faure cannot recover Keizan except as an intersection of
East Asian thoughts and images at a particular moment and place. He,
too, must move forward and backward in time, from China to Japan and
back, away from and toward Keizan. It is this last movement that
impresses most and distinguishes this book from Faure's previous
work. Here we have an intellectual biography that does not so much
place an individual in history as find a history in an individual.
Finally, Faure's use of Le Goff's terms suggests the possibility of
mutually illuminating comparisons with parallel studies of medieval
Europe. Faure, along with others such as Carl Bielefeldt and William
Bodiford, has reconstructed the study of Zen as a religion to the
point that scholars of religion generally should begin turning to
this field to find what they would not expect: a rich tradition of
icons, rituals, myths, and magical power. This volume is the best
place for them to start.