Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One Myoshinji: Institution, history, and structure

1.1 Ideology, lineage, and premodern history

Legendary beginnings

Tradition, transmission, and sacred kinship

Myoshinji, gozan, and Muromachi

Tokugawa: Bakufu, honmatsu seido, and danka seido

1.2 Meiji Zen: Modernization and invented traditions

Buddhist responses

Zen and Myoshinji developments

Lay Zen

1.3 Postwar and contemporary Myoshinji Zen

Judicial and institutional and structure of religious organizations

Myoshinji institutional structure

Zen temples

Economy

Social, laicized, and international Zen

1.4 Summary

Chapter Two Zen Buddhists

2.1 Men with or without rank: shukke, zaike, and a discussion of terminology

2.2 The clergy

Shukke: "Leaving home" and returning as a ritual process

Shukke as returning soryo

Dharma rank and hierarchy; status and stratified clerical systems

Alternative career mobility: ango-e

Clerical offi ces

The priest

The priest wife and the Zen family

Temple sons

Nuns

2.3 The laity

Householder or believer: zaike, danka and danshinto

Sect-transcending laity; users, clients, and occasional Buddhists

Religious confraternities

2.4 Mixed categories

Intellectuals, critics, and enlightened laymen

Foreigners

2.5 Summary

Chapter Three Zen religious practice

3.1 Rituals and ritualization

Myoshinji categories and classifying as religious practice

Categories of religious practice

3.2 Zen ideas and practice

3.2.1 Objects of belief and religious practice

Superhuman agency, powers, and ideal states

Cultural ideal values

3.2.2 Subjective qualities and practices

Some theoretical remarks on "belief "

Belief, commitment, and "meaning to mean it" in the Myoshinji context

Ritual practice and how to do it right

3.3 Religious education

Education, training, cultivation, and mission

Cultivating the clergy

Cultivating the laity

The strategy and reality of training and cultivation

3.4 Monastic practice

Ritualized monastic life

Alms-begging and exchange

3.5 Ritualized events; clerical rites of passage

Ordaining the monk

Installing the master

Installing the priest

Initiating the dead

Structure and semantics of clerical rites of passage

3.6 Lay and clerical rituals

3.6.1 Daily service and rituals of worship

Reihai: Temple and domestic worship

Worship as ideal ethical and soteriological practice

3.6.2 Ritual texts and doing things with words

Rhetoric, semantics, and magic

Myoshinji texts

Ritualization of texts

3.6.3 Rituals of realization: zazen and zazenkai

Meanings, structures, and ideals of meditation

Meditation practice

3.6.4 Calendrical rituals

Seasonal rituals

Pilgrimage

Sectarian and Buddhist calendrical rituals

Memorial days of patriarchs and sect founders

Statistics and semantics of calendrical rituals

3.6.5 Local Zen folk rituals

Daruma-cults and festivals

Manninko kojusai: dining, healing, and circumambulating toilets

Local folk Zen, an interpretation

3.6.6 Rites of passage

Lay ordination; jukai-e and receiving the precepts

Rituals of sociocultural and biological order

Rituals of death and dying

Funeral rituals

Structure and meaning of the traditional Zen Buddhist funeral

Ideas and ideals of death

Modernization, institutionalization, and ritual context

3.7 Summary

Chapter Four Conclusion

Plural Zen

Umbrella Zen

Hierarchical Zen

Power play and exchange

Zen rituals and practical meaning

Zen and the study of religion

Appendix

Bibliography

Index