[Buddha-l] The upaya express

[Franz Metcalf]

Joanna,

> Ok, so if they've traditionally made most of their bread off the
> funeral biz and didn't do much for duhkha, then who did? Pure
> Land? Sokka gakkai? or are they all going Christian like most of
> the Koreans did?

Few Japanese are converting to Christianity (as compared with  
Koreans). It's just not a very religious culture, right now. We need  
to remember how exceptional among developed countries the US is in  
active religious practice.

Interestingly, your question has generated a 13th century answer. It  
has been generally asserted that in the early Kamakura period the  
established Buddhist schools (Kegon, Tendai, Shingon, and several  
smaller schools) "didn't do much for dukkha. So, the great suffering  
of the people in those times of civil war gave rise to the new  
Kamakura Buddhisms: Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen. *These* forms, it  
was argued, put the means of salvation--even in those times of mappo  
(the degeneration of the dharma)--into the hands of the people and so  
these three new forms of Buddhism quickly became the three largest  
school in Japan, and have remained so. Recently, more careful  
scholarship has undermined this explanation. And, as we are now  
discussing, the last hundred years of Japanese materialism and  
Buddhist collaboration with militarism has reduced Buddhism to a kind  
of funerary religion.

I am being simplistic, but this is the trend. Obviously Japanese  
Buddhists, themselves, are clutching at straws (perhaps in fancy  
drinks) to try to reverse it.

Franz Metcalf