This dissertation considers how Chinese models of Buddhist social organization and Pure Land thought undergirded the Japanese monk Chōgen’s campaign to restore the Great Buddha of Tōdaiji, destroyed in the Gempei civil war at the end of the 12th century. While Chōgen’s activities as chief solicitor of the campaign partially owed to his network of social connections earned through a selective Buddhist education, Chōgen’s three pilgrimages to China were crucial for providing much of the knowledge, methods, and technologies that made possible the largest religious and civil engineering project attempted in Japan to that time.
Though nominally a Buddhist monk, Chōgen embodied the ideal of a polymath. In order to recreate Japan’s foremost Buddhist symbol, he was compelled to assume a wide range of responsibilities: fundraising among aristocrats and warriors; forming a network of lieutenants, donors, and common devotees; managing temple estates that provided revenues; developing transportation infrastructure to carry materials and supplies; casting the Great Buddha statue; overseeing religious rites; and finally, rebuilding Tōdaiji’s halls. These diverse activities required creative forms of religio-social networking and technologies not extant in Japan.
During his travels to the Chinese port city of Ningbo, as well as the religious mountains of Tiantaishan and Ayuwangshan, Chōgen learned of Pure Land halls built by lay confraternities, and adopted them as models for the later sanctuaries he constructed around Japan for proselytization and fundraising purposes. He also borrowed organizational principles from Chinese Pure Land societies from the urban centers of Ningbo and Hangzhou in order to create a massive Pure Land network in his homeland that embraced former militants from the civil war, the imperial family, monastics from a wide range of institutions, and even the common populace – all of whom contributed to the Tōdaiji rebuilding effort.
Ultimately, the fields of religion and technology that Chōgen imported from China not only enabled the reconstruction of Japan’s most important Buddhist temple, but also brought Japan into the fold of an emerging East China Sea religious macroculture of the late 12th and early 13th centuries that expanded with the activities of traders and later Japanese pilgrims who would emulate Chōgen’s voyages. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/33493371 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Ingram, Evan |
| Contributors | Abe, Ryuichi |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | embargoed |
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