Where Will Our Field Go after Stone: An Assessment of Jacqueline Stone’s Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Ryûichi Abé (Columbia University)

Society for the Study of Japanese Religion
Chicago AAS Annual Meeting, March 23, 2001

        As James Dobbins’ detailed analysis has made clear, Jacqueline Stone’s Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism is a groundbreaking work in the study of T’ien-t’ai/Tendai Buddhism.  It has also made a seminal contribution in the study of medieval Japanese religious history.  As a student whose specialty lies outside Tendai studies, I benefited most from Stone’s volume in the following areas.  First, her work illustrates effectively that original enlightenment played a central role in the development of medieval Tendai philosophy.  Most admirably, she did so by drawing a larger historical contour in which to place her argument:  that the idea of original enlightenment was perhaps the most important undercurrent that ran across diverse Buddhist traditions in medieval Japanese society.  Second, unlike most modern scholars who study the subject by limiting their scope to the realm of doctrine, Stone demonstrates repeatedly that the evolution of original enlightenment thought was ingrained deeply in the growth of institutions such as monastic structure, lineage formation, and lay communities that supported the clergy.  Thus her book has provided us with a novel perspective from which to rethink, drastically differently from existing scholarship, the relationships among Buddhist schools in medieval Japan.  Having read Stone’s book, the historical interaction between the Tendai, Shingon, and Nara Schools, on one hand, and the New Kamakura Schools, on the other, in their philosophical, ritual, and social-political dimensions, look far more complex than we once presumed.  Third, I find in Stone’s work a model for creating a constructive relationship with Japanese scholarship.  She not only thoroughly mastered massive literature on the subject in Japanese, but provided us with a rigorously critical analysis of how modern Japanese scholarship on hongaku shisô developed.  Her use of Japanese scholarship is refined as well as balanced.  In contrast to many typical studies in Japanese, which are often overly specialized, Stone has presented us the most comprehensive picture to date of medieval Japanese hongaku ideas.  Hers is one of the few works that has much to offer even to experts of specialized interests in Japan.
        The contents of Stone’s volume have already been carefully interpreted by her readers in some leading academic journals, who all gave rave reviews.  Instead of writing yet another report on the same topic, I intend below to give an assessment of a long-term influence her work will exert in our field.   Before I do so, however, two quick comments in Stone’s defense.  Some questioned her choice of the Nichiren School as an example for illustrating the influence that original enlightenment thought exerted on the New Kamakura Buddhism.  True, more readers may have benefited from a comparison with Dogen, Shinran, and their orders.  However, I found her decision to use Nichiren’s school not only most obvious but also most fascinating.  Most obvious, because Nichiren understood himself as a reviver of “Tendai Hokkeshû,” the term Saichô used to describe his new establishment.  Most fascinating, because while Nichiren proposed to remove the influence of Esoteric Buddhism from Japanese Tendai tradition, he incorporated various Mikkyô ritual elements in his creation of the Lotus Sûtra cult.  Anyone interested in the problematic relationship between original enlightenment thought and Mikkyô should find her study of Nichiren and his school rewarding.   It is often said that Stone’s book is extremely challenging reading, aimed only at the most advanced graduate students and expert scholars.  Certainly her work is anything but light reading. However, the difficulty in reading her book results largely from the subject matter, not from her style of writing, which I find throughout her volume lucid, terse, and cogent.  Stone’s writing reflects a sophisticated application of contemporary social theories.  But in contradistinction to overly theory-laden works, which we often find in our field, and thanks to her effort to abstain from theoretical jargon, her use of terms such as “discourse” and “paradigm” are self-explanatory even for those readers who lack knowledge in modern and postmodern theoretical literature.  I have been using Stone’s book in my undergraduate seminars.  As long as I am patient and assign her book in short sections, undergraduate students absorb a great deal of Stone’s rich offering.
        There are many areas of our knowledge of medieval Japanese Buddhism that Stone’s work encourages us to reevaluate.  Let us start with the relationship between Old Buddhism (kyû bukkyô ) and New Buddhism (shin bukkyô).  Refuting the conclusions of many conventional studies on the Buddhism of the Kamakura period, Stone illustrates clearly that some central doctrines of Old Buddhism, such as original enlightenment thought, continued to be the essential theoretical foundation for the development of many New Buddhist schools.  “Acceptance or denial of original enlightenment thought was not the fault line along which the “old”/”new” divide occurred.  Far more important to the emergence of the new movements were such factors as their success in forming new institutions or kyôdan; their grounding in social economic bases different from those of the Tendai temple-shrine complexes of the capital; and the particular ideological orientation inherent in their commitment to single practice...” (p. 362)  Stone’s work significantly blurs the distinction between the Old Buddhism and New Buddhism in their doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings.  A simplistic reading of Stone’s conclusion suggests that she urges us to find their difference most clearly manifested in social, economic, and political arenas.   However, the implication of her study as a whole on the New Buddhism and Old Buddhism as categories seems to be more complex.  To begin with, her analysis of the development of the early Nichiren School in Kantô (Chapter Seven) shows that the school competed squarely with the Tendai school, not only in its doctrines and ritual practices, but also in terms of its strategy to acquire new followers.  “From their inception, [the ‘new’ Buddhist movements] had shared with the parent Tendaishû a particular paradigm of liberation . . . they began actively to appropriate many of the forms and conventions of the medieval Tendai tradition and developed them in new directions.” (p. 301)  Since we have learned that the development of original enlightenment thought intertwined deeply with institutional formations, it is by no means surprising if a New Kamakura Buddhist school grounded in original enlightenment thought developed a social and political structure comparable to that of the Tendai School.   What, then, was truly new about New Kamakura Buddhism?  Overall, Stone’s study encourages us not only to problematize the relationship between the Old Buddhism and New Buddhism but also to question the legitimacy of kyû bukkyô and shin bukkyô as historical concepts.
        Another significant contribution of Stone’s book is the manner in which she makes it possible for us to reconfigure the particular historical quality of “medieval” Japanese religion. On the development of uniquely medieval Tendai institutions that provided the ground for the growth of original enlightenment discourse (such as Tendai esoteric ritual systems, the kuden lineage tradition, and dangisho in Kantô), Stone comments: “All this distinguishes medieval Tendai from the Tendai of the early Heian period and makes it, in effect, a ‘new Buddhism.’  This new medieval Tendai began to emerge somewhat before, and then developed coevally with, the so-called new Kamakura Buddhism. . . .  The burgeoning of new forms of practice, ritual, doctrine and modes of transmission that it encompassed fundamentally challenges the received picture of medieval Tendai as a static, moribund ‘old Buddhist’ tradition. . . .”  (p. 152)  Stone thus points to a strong correlation between the growth of original enlightenment thought and typically medieval religious culture.  Elsewhere she states:  “The present study has approached hongaku thought as representative of a new paradigm or ‘reimagining’ of liberation that emerged and became influential in the early medieval period.  This paradigm was characterized by nonlinearity, that is, by the conviction that enlightenment is directly accessible in the present moment, and that practice represents the expression of enlightenment, not merely the means to achieve it.” (p. 362)  Here Stone modestly limits her scope to the Tendai and new Kamakura schools.  However, if one uses the term sokushin jôbutsu (which requires the idea of original enlightenment as its theoretical premise) in place of hongaku, and considers the popularized practice of abhisheka (or kanjô) as its ritual actualization, it is immediately obvious that what Stone proposes above is also applicable to the medieval Shingon and Nara Schools.  Stone continues: “This way of thinking about Buddhist liberation also stressed dependence upon a single factor, whether faith, insight, or a specific practice; accessibility, at least in theory, to all persons, even (or especially) those of limited capacity...” (p. 362)  Again, we can adopt this statement as a way to illustrate many prominent figures in the Shingon and Nara Buddhist community — for example, Myôe, who advocated the chanting of “Kômyô shingon” as a postmortem salvific practice for the sinned, Eizon, who used the same mantra chanting as one of his campaigns to save outcasts,  and the nun Shinnyo and her disciples, whose worship of relics helped them revive Hokkeji and other ancient convents.
        Then, is it appropriate for us to expand Stone’s argument and conclude that what made notably new the way Buddhism was practices across diverse schools in medieval Japan was the reimagining of liberation along the line of the nonlinear paradigm, which Stone has generally described as “hongaku discourse”?  Stone rightly rejects a tendency in some scholars of hongaku to describe original enlightenment thought as a totalizing scheme or as a unifying theory. However, can we at least single out this nonlinearity as a hallmark of medieval religious culture?  In what ways does Stone’s theory improve our knowledge of how medieval Japanese society came into existence and how it came to an end?  How does her work change the way we compare the development of medieval “Japanese” Buddhism with its counterparts on the continent?  How does the hongaku paradigm help us understand the grand integration between esoteric ritual systems and exoteric doctrines in many monastic centers?  Is this nonlinear paradigm also effective in explaining Buddhism’s relationship with other religious traditions?  --  for example, Confucian studies, a large part of which was preserved within medieval Buddhist monastic systems; and the Shinto shrine establishment that continued to grow powerful by maintaining its alliance with medieval Buddhism.  There are legion other questions her work inspires us to consider.  Suffice it to note that thanks to Jacqueline Stone’s monumental achievement, all these areas of medieval Japanese history have become appropriate topics for us to investigate further — with renewed interest.
        What emerges from Stone’s study is a new way to understand medieval Japanese society, from the point of view of religious history:  Japan’s medieval period is the age during which original enlightenment discourse maintained its dominance over other types of discourse in the production of the social order.  Stone’s nonlinear paradigm provides us with an attractive new perspective through which to address wide-ranging issues — for example, Buddhism’s role in constructing the prevailing medieval ideology; the continued expansion of Buddhism’s popularity among the masses for their social and political mobilization; and Buddhism’s contribution to the development of medieval Japanese art, literature, and performing arts.   In short, Stone has succeeded in opening up the hitherto isolated field of Buddhist doctrinal studies by making it immediately relevant to various areas of medieval Japanese studies.