![]() | Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination Subjects: Pure Land Buddhism -- Japan -- History; Buddhism and politics -- Japan -- History; Utopias -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism; Kawakami Hajime 1879–1946; Miki Kiyoshi 1897–1945; Ienaga Saburo 1913–2002; For close to a thousand years Amida's Pure Land, a paradise of perfect ease and equality, was the most powerful image of shared happiness circulating in the Japanese imagination. In the late nineteenth century, some Buddhist thinkers sought to reinterpret the Pure Land in ways that would allow it speak to modern Japan. Their efforts succeeded in ways they could not have predicted. During the war years, economist Kawakami Hajime, philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and historian Ienaga Saburō--left-leaning thinkers with no special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to any Buddhist institution--seized upon modernized images of Shinran in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise to resist the demands of a state that was bearing down on its citizens with increasing force. Pure Land, Real World treats the religious thought of these three major figures in English for the first time. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. |
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