The “Famous Places” of Japanese Buddhism: Representations of Urban Temple Life in Early Modern Guidebooks

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-242
Author(s):  
Kevin Bond
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
Bourgeois Culture

This paper examines the commercial and recreational cultures of the urban Buddhist temple during Japan’s Edo or early modern period (1603–1868) as depicted in popular guidebooks to famous places ( meisho ki). Encouraged by advances in travel and communication, and a vibrant bourgeois culture, meisho guidebooks presented religious sites to the common public not as static, immobile spaces catering only to otherworldly spiritual concerns, but as open and elastic geographies simultaneously offering immediate material rewards and leisurely and commercial attractions to visitors. As unique media of local religion, guidebooks reflect how the reputation and allure of popular Buddhist temples among the general public were driven by the commodification of local legends and objects of worship, as well as material pleasures of religious spaces. This paper argues the importance of guidebooks in the production of public knowledge and expectation about religious sites in early modern Japan. These guides reveal material concerns and entertainment not as having been antithetical to the operation of Buddhist institutions, but rather as supports for the spread of Buddhist teachings and popularization of deity worship among the urban populace.

Overview of the research work of Prof. Fumiko Sugimoto

Impact ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (7) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
Fumiko Sugimoto
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
The 19Th Century

Professor Fumiko Sugimoto has been analysing the history of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century with a focus not only on the temporal axis but also on the relationships between specific spaces and the people who live and act as subjective agents in these spaces. During the past few years, she has been endeavouring to decipher the history in the period of transition from the early modern period to the modern period by introducing the perspective of oceans, with a focus on Japan. Through the study of history in terms of spatial theory that also takes oceans into consideration, she is proposing to present a new concept about the territorial formation of modern states. [Main subjects] Law and Governance in Early Modern Japan Judgement in Early Modern Society The Evolution of Control over Territory under the Tokugawa State A Human Being in the Nineteenth Century: WATANABE Kazan, a Conflicting Consciousness of Status as an Artist and as a Samurai Early Modern Maps in the Social-standing-based Order of Tokugawa Japan The World of Information in Bakumatsu Japan: Timely News and Bird's Eye Views Early Modern Political History in Terms of Spatial Theory The Emergence of Newly Defined Oceans and the Transformation of Political Culture.

Two Early Modern Revolts

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Early English ◽  
Right To Buy

This chapter continues the discussion of early English social criticism with a consideration of two uprisings of the early modern period: Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and the Midland Rising (1607). These uprisings were formidable instances of organised resistance to enclosure and related changes, and the texts which have come down to us concerning them connect that resistance to a belief in the original equality of all human beings, the common humanity of rich and poor, and the fundamental right of everyone to live (including the right to buy essential provisions at a fair and affordable price).

Secularization and the Jōruri Plays

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Koh Kawata
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Classical Concept ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Historical Processes

Abstract This paper aims to show, primarily through analysis of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century jōruri 浄瑠璃 plays, the radical changes in the vision of salvation shared among ordinary people, focusing especially on Jōruri monogatari 浄瑠璃物語, Sonezaki shinjū 曽根崎心中 and Kinpira jōruri 金平浄瑠璃, and highlights how such changes are related to contemporary social processes of secularization. José Casanova famously claimed that the classical concept of secularization as the decline of religious belief is not adequate for the task of understanding general historical processes. Nevertheless, an equivalent to this process of religious decline is an important phenomenon in early modern Japan. In this secularization process, Japanese people of the early modern period sought more secular visions of salvation. Strong, persistent attention to kokoro 心 (mind or spirit), regarded as the means of realizing secular values such as wealth or happiness, was an expression of these concerns. Analyzing jōruri plays reveals how the increasing power of the centralized state, defeating religious powers one by one, became the key to changing people’s visions of salvation and thus, of secularization processes.

scholarly journals So That It Might Become Clear: The Methods and Purposes of Narrative Abridgement in Early Modern Jain Purāṇic Composition

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 355
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Clines
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Multiple Strategies ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Era

Scholars have long known that Jain authors from the early centuries of the common era composed their own versions of the story of Rāma, prince of Ayodhyā. Further, the differences between Jain and Brahminical versions of the narrative are well documented. Less studied are later versions of Jain Rāma narratives, particularly those composed during the early modern period. This paper examines one such version of the Rāma story, the fifteenth-century Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa by the Digambara author Brahma Jinadāsa. The paper compares Jinadāsa’s work with an earlier text, the seventh-century Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa, authored by Raviṣeṇa, as Jinadāsa explains that he has at hand a copy of his predecessor’s work and is recomposing it to make it “clear”. The paper thus demonstrates the multiple strategies of abridgement Jinadāsa employs in recomposing Raviṣeṇa’s earlier narrative and that, to Jinadāsa, this project of narrative abridgement was also one of clarification.

“Democratic estate”as the cultural nest of the Early Modern Period. Case of Poland

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-297
Author(s):  
Vasily G. Shchukin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Common People ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
The Common ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
The Village

The article describes the phenomenon of the so-called “democratic estate”, which took on the function of a cultural nest. Democracy, in accordance with Russian tradition, dating back to the discourse of the intelligentsia of the XIX century, is identified with the plebeian, motley origin of the inhabitants of the estate. This problem is considered on the basis of the art culture of Krakow at the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX centuries. In the era of modernism, in the wake of the neo-romantic enthusiasm for the problems of the national spirit and the “organic” life of the common people, in western Galicia, which is one of the provinces of Austria-Hungary, such forms of homestead life appeared that could be called exceptional, unique against the background of other manifestations of the democratization of the estate. Cracow artists and then poets and playwrights, discovering the beauty of the village of Małe Bronowice, located near Cracow, and captivated by folk costumes and the beauty of village girls, married them one by one and moved to village huts, but at the same time transformed the latter into real cultural nests. One of these weddings — the poet Lucian Rydel and the daughter of the village headman Jadwiga Mikołajczyk — inspired the outstanding artist and playwright Stanislav Wyspiańsky to create the most famous national drama of the modernist era — the play “The Wedding” (1901). This work, among other things, depicts the tragedy of mutual misunderstanding of the people and the intelligentsia, which impedes the national revival and, ultimately, the restoration of the country’s independence. The author of the article seeks to prove that the “democratic estate” served not only the necessary simplification of the educated stratum of society, but also the introduction of a high, essentially metropolitan culture into the life and consciousness of the lower strata.

scholarly journals Life Writing "from Below" in Europe: Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB1-LWFB9
Author(s):  
T. G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Common People ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Popular Classes

The term life writing “from below” is intended to be broad (accommodating) in a double sense: as regards the social status of authors, but also the genre of writing. The phrase “from below” draws on an analogy with the now well-established formulation “history from below” (Sharpe; Hitchcock). In the first instance it refers to authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy. Depending on the society and period in focus, such authors may be slaves, serfs, peasants, crofters, landless labourers, artisans, industrial workers … and may be referred to as—or may designate themselves—plebeians, the labouring poor, the common people, the popular classes, artisans, proletarians, the working class. For the early modern period, James Amelang explains his choice of the term “popular autobiography”:

The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices, 1600–1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inger Leemans
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
General Public ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The South ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
South Sea

In the early modern period, bourses were scenes of physical exchange. As most of our stock trade has grown into a virtual interplay between online traders and algorithms, researching the embodied stock trade of the early modern bourse floor can provide insight in the performance of trade and the role violence and pain played in this sector. This chapter researches the physical practices of stock trade on the Amsterdam exchange in the 17th and 18th century, with special attention for the role of the general public in this ‘financial theatre’. While exploring economic practices and concepts through images, artists made use of concepts of physicality to make distinctions between different kinds of trade. This becomes all the more transparent in the 1720s, when the South Sea Bubble spurred a wind trade in visual and textual commentaries. Cartoons, poems and theatre plays represented speculative trade through the image of clashing and hurting bodies. When and why did the stock trade hurt? What was the role of the public and the governing bodies in this deep play? How can the economy’s sick and hurting body be cured? This chapter will analyse the sensitivities of the painful stock trade practices on the bourse floor and in the theatre.

scholarly journals ‘The Military Mirror of Kai’: Swordsmanship and a Medieval Text in Early Modern Japan

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wert
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Cultural Arts ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
Modern Japan ◽  
The Military

AbstractSwordsmanship emerged as a new field of knowledge in early modern Japan (1600–1868), a time of relative peace. During the most violent periods of Japanese history, the latter half of the medieval period (1185–1600), samurai conducted warfare mostly on horseback, using the bow and arrow, or by leading massive armies filled with soldiers who used pikes, halberds, and even firearms. In this paper, I will trace the origins of early modern swordsmanship to the late 16th century during the transition between the medieval and early modern periods, when teachers of swordsmanship and their sword ‘styles’ first appeared in texts. Of these texts I will focus on ‘The Military Mirror of Kai’, purportedly written during the late 16th century, and a widely-read text among samurai of the early modern period. A mix of fact and fiction, the ‘Mirror’ became a source of fantasy and inspiration for samurai and non-samurai alike. It is also the earliest source of writing about swordsmanship, which was influenced by, and grew alongside, other medieval cultural arts such as

Seville and Manila: Illegal trade, corruption, and the phenomenon of trust in the Spanish Empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eberhard Crailsheim
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Illegal Trade ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Trading Networks

At the beginning of the early modern period, the two port cities of Seville and Manila became bottlenecks in the rich inter-oceanic trade connecting Europe, America and Asia. To control this trade, the Spanish Crown tightly regulated all traffic between these continents and levied heavy taxes on all merchandise. The stricter the regulations became, the more the merchants tried to outwit them through contraband trading and bribery. Within this setting, it was often impossible for merchants to bring cases of non-compliance of agreements to the official courts. Hence, the question arises, how were merchants, lacking an institution in charge of penalizing dishonest commercial conduct, able to find the trust in partners to establish trans-oceanic trading networks? This note argues that the answer lies in the common ground that united certain groups of shared mental models, which enabled the merchants to trust in the social coercive power of these groups and consequently to trust their partners overseas.

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