Pure Land, Real World : Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination

University of Hawai'i Press

Pure Land, Real WorldModern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination\nAuthor(s): Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Richard K. Payne\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Hawai'i Press, United States\nImprint: University of Hawai'i Press\nISBN-13: 9780824892449, 978-0824892449\nSynopsis\nFor close to a thousand years Amidas Pure Land, a paradise of perfect ease and equality, was the most powerful image of shared happiness circulating in the Japanese imagination. In the late nineteenth century, some Buddhist thinkers sought to reinterpret the Pure Land in ways that would allow it speak to modern Japan. Their efforts succeeded in ways they could not have predicted. During the war years, economist Kawakami Hajime, philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and historian Ienaga Sabur?left-leaning thinkers with no special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to any Buddhist institutionseized upon modernized images of Shinran in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise to .