Biographies of Non-Eminent Monks

My present research aims to provide a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary Japanese Buddhism as it functions within the lives of its professional practitioners across different sects today. More specifically, my work adopts a trans-sectarian scope and an interdisciplinary approach in order to provide the first comprehensive study of contemporary temple priests, their lives, and their institutions.
Contemporary Japanese Buddhism has started to receive some attention in the last few years with a monograph on one Rinzai Zen group (Borup 2008), a book-length treatment of modern-day Tendai (Covell 2005), and a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies dedicated to research on traditional Buddhist sects in the contemporary period (2004). There is still an implicit assumption among scholars, however, that the study of post-war Buddhism falls neither within the purview of Religious Studies nor of Buddhist Studies. Robert Sharf has identified an “unfortunate division of labour” in Buddhist Studies that keeps Buddhologists from studying modern and contemporary forms of Buddhism and has anthropologists producing synchronic ethnographies that fail to adequately reflect on history and doctrine (Sharf 1995). A central theoretical goal of my overall research is to address this problematic division of labour through a careful consideration of historical forces and doctrinal teachings alongside ethnographically oriented research, consideration of broad discursive forces (legal, political, institutional, etc.), and a sociological analysis of priestly opinion.