Abstract
This essay provides a critical analysis of the concept “Japanese Buddhism.” “Japanese Buddhism” is an inherently ambiguous phrase, and this allows it to conceal a host of problematic theoretical commitments. On the one hand, the phrase is relatively bland—a mere locative identifying the various forms of Buddhism found in Japan. On the other, however, it can be used with a different kind of adjectival intent, identifying a unique kind of Buddhism, a Buddhism that is Japanese. In contrast, the expression “Buddhisms of Japan” is explicitly employed as an alternative to “Japanese Buddhism.” These usages are intentional—not simply a matter of stylistics, but serving meta-theoretical ends. In fact, it is in this realm of meta-theory that the following critique of three prominent approaches to the study of the thought and practice of the Buddhisms of Japan—one theoretical and two disciplinary—is leveraged. The distinction between theoretical and disciplinary creates something of an unbalanced structure in the following, since the theoretical issue—the tendency to essentialize “Japanese Buddhism” in one way or another—is common to both of the disciplinary approaches examined here, that is, comparative philosophy and comparative religion. It is necessary to subvert the very idea that there is any one correct way to represent Japanese Buddhism against which other representations may be judged. Such a project is necessarily doomed to failure. This is clear once we shift our understanding of the referent of the phrase “Japanese Buddhism.” Rather than having any fixed referent, whether as a Platonic ideal form, a natural kind, or a class noun, it is a social construction, one that operates within a sociology or economy of knowledge. To presume that “Japanese Buddhism” has a fixed referent, an ahistorical essence or a transhistorical identity, that can be represented, conceals the role of selection underlying the referent. In other words, “Japanese Buddhism” is not something discovered but, rather, something made, an artifact of both popular and academic discourse. Such a claim, of course, does not imply that there are not indefinitely many things that can be pointed to stipulatively as instances of Japanese Buddhism. Indeed, the constructed nature of the concept is indicated by this overwhelming number of possible stipulative referents and the plurality of ways in which they can be grouped and categorized.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “praxis” is used here to indicate the irreducible dialectic between the conceptual and the practical, or what in religious terms might be called doctrine and practice. The distinction appears to me to be an artifact of analysis. As used here “praxis” is in explicit opposition to formulations that dichotomize the two, whether doctrine or practice is given precedence. The distinction is based on a dualism of thought and action, itself a problematic one. See Bell, especially first three chapters (Bell 1992).
- 2.
While the term “comparative philosophy” appears to be well established and unproblematic, use of the term “comparative religion” may strike some readers as atavistic. The very fluidity of the ways in which the field of study is identified—comparative religion, religious studies, history of religions, Religionswissenschaft, and so on—reflects one of the points that I am attempting to demonstrate here. The study of religion, when distinguished from theology, originates in a comparative sensibility: Enlightenment universalism, validating all humanity, confronted with the reality of religious pluralism. Comparative in its very origins, then, the academic study of religion does not necessarily entail evaluations as to true or false, which is rather the work of apologetics. For what is still one of the best treatments of the origins of “comparative religions” see Sharpe (1986). Several other works are of value for understanding the origins of the category “religion” and its study, such as Dubuisson (2003).
- 3.
Here I am distinguishing generalities from generalizations, the latter statements that are based on some statistically informed analysis of observed phenomena.
- 4.
As common as the problematic issues discussed below have been, it is important to note that in both fields there does seem to be an increasing methodological sophistication. In this regard we refer the reader to Garfield and Edelglass, Edelglass and Garfield, and Heisig et al., as important contributions that balance the issues of universally human and culturally delimited with sensitivity (Garfield and Edelglass 2011; Edelglass and Garfield 2009; Heisig et al. 2011).
- 5.
By “Westernized knowledge” I mean here simply that system of knowledge that has the concepts and categories of Euro-American culture as its framework. Despite the fact that this culture is increasingly globalized, that does not mean that its structures and assumptions are in any sense neutral. In fairness, I should note that this notion already presumes a constructivist conception of knowledge, that there is no knowledge that is culturally neutral (see McCarthy 1996; Habermas 1971; Berger and Luckmann 1966; Hacking 2000).
- 6.
Natural kind theory is, of course, a complex and contested epistemological position. I am using the term here in a rather traditional—or perhaps even loose—sense, such as that suggested by W.V. Quine, who used the term to refer to sets of objects that share characteristics in such a fashion that it is possible to reliably attribute by induction characteristics of some members of that set onto other members (see Quine 1969).
- 7.
This was particularly evident in the United States in the period after the Second World War, when “area studies” was created in order to respond to the perceived threats of the Soviet Union and the destabilization following the breakdown of colonial empires. This dimension became particularly evident with what was originally called the National Defense Education Act of 1957.
- 8.
Implicitly, any form of Buddhist praxis that does not fit with this presumption is deviant or abnormal.
- 9.
Employing this organizational principle for the historiography of Buddhism in Japan is based on political history, which ought to be recognized as in tension with religious history. The dominance of political history is demonstrated by the dependence upon a system of historical periods, which itself imposes the presumption of a unifying essence within the framework of these historical periods—thus the history of Buddhism in Japan is divided by the political categories, such as the familiar Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Meiji, etc. (see Payne 1998).
- 10.
- 11.
The kinds of debates discussed in this essay tend to be politicized. The legacy of European imperialism, which employed a rhetorical stance of hierarchy, was the argument that “they’re not like us,” meaning that because “they” have a different and inferior “mentality,” they are incapable of rational thought or true religion. The Romantic resistance to this employed an argument that “they’re just like us.” Because the latter appears more accepting, it often ends up concealing the imposition of a set of preconceived notions onto the thought of the other. My argument here attempts to move beyond these polarized and politicized positions toward something like “they’re just like us, only different” (see Lloyd 1990; Wardy 2000).
- 12.
As evidenced repeatedly in recent history, the morally deleterious effects of notions of ethnic and religious identity did not end with the destruction of the Third Reich.
- 13.
The notion of “rooted” is itself singularly vague. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have shown, for example, that “traditions” may be created for economic reasons with very short historical horizons yet be rhetorically manipulated so as to appear to have originated in antiquity (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
- 14.
One sees this kind of Romantic nostalgia running throughout the work of Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, for example, he distinguishes the authentic person from “das Man,” the herd of common humanity found in cities. Such ideas have also entered sociology through the work of Ferdinand Tönnies. For a nuanced review of different forms of Romanticism, see Löwy and Sayre (2001).
- 15.
“Ahistorical” is used here without intending any further claim, such as essences being eternal or transcendent. One should note that there have been attempts to define essences as something created within time, and hence neither ahistorical, nor metaphysically transcendent. These “refined” conceptions, however, seem to play little role outside of self-referential philosophical discourse.
- 16.
Compare, for example, the claims of transcendent authority made by those who engaged in the witch hunts of European and American history. For a critique regarding the concept of hierarchy as an authoritarian thought system, see Payne (2008: 201–02).
- 17.
This is why, for example, all claims regarding “authenticity” are covert ploys for the power that derives from being able to define what is authentic—part of the tradition—and what is not. One should note the ambiguity of “tradition” that allows for this use as part of a strategy for the power of authenticity. As a simple adjective, “traditional,” one can examine what is meant—a practice that has been done in much the same way for several generations, for example. When it is used as a nominal, such as “the Buddhist tradition,” it is ambiguous enough to be deployed as delimiting what can be included and what can be excluded, that is, what is authentic and what is not.
- 18.
We are also familiar with these kinds of issues in relation to the “museumification” of objects—what happens, for example, when a painting is removed from a ritual environment and placed on a wall in a museum. The context of the ritual environment, such as, a goma altar in a Shingon temple, communicates a very different significance from that of a museum, where for example a painting of Fudō Myō’ō 不動明王 might be juxtaposed to other deities having haloes or auras. The same issues of context can be raised regarding concepts and systems of thought. These concerns may be seen as intellectually rooted in the insight of Ferdinand deSaussure’s (1857–1930) linguistics, that the relation between meaning and symbol is essentially one constructed by the symbol’s use in the linguistic system as a whole, that is, its relation to other symbolic elements in the language. By extension, the same applies to social symbolic elements and also to religious and philosophic systems of thought.
- 19.
Or, alternatively, that all philosophy is of necessity comparative (see Masson-Oursel 1951: 6–9).
- 20.
The term “Western philosophy” is, of course, itself not unproblematic. It is employed here simply as a shorthand for the intellectual tradition that derives from the history described in this paragraph, and which continues to define itself in relation to that history, that is, by acknowledging the problems identified over the course of that history as the properly philosophical ones. My thanks to Gereon Kopf for sensitizing me to the need to clarify the usage of this term.
- 21.
Whether this focus on Confucian thought is a consequence of his conception of the proper role of philosophy, or conversely, his interest in Confucian thought is formative of his conception of the proper role of philosophy is not clear. However, given the primacy of character development in Confucian thought, the work risks a certain circularity—a circularity at variance with Halbfass’s exhortation for a self-reflexively critical comparative philosophy cited above.
- 22.
Koller, for his part, does go on to extend his definition of philosophy to include epistemology as a second order set of concerns.
- 23.
It is trivially true that the concern with morality and selfhood, and with their relationship, is not unique to modernity, despite Taylor’s assertion. However, what I am addressing here is the role of the modern concern in forming the presumptions of certain foundationalist approaches to comparative philosophy.
- 24.
This style of translation, perhaps based on an assumption that such Western philosophical terminology makes a work more easily accessible to a Western audience, continues into the present. This is found, for example, in the Tibetan work discussed below, The Crystal Mirror.
- 25.
The same is true when Yogācāra is treated as psychology or psychotherapy.
- 26.
This is not to say that there are not aspects of Yogācāra that have an idealistic character. This, however, is different from simply labeling Yogācāra “idealism.” My thanks to John Powers for helping me to clarify this issue.
- 27.
Consider, for example, the claim made by Noa Ronkin to the effect that her “study presupposes that the questions of philosophy and their treatments by various traditions transcend considerations of time and place, and hence that there is, indeed, a basis for a cross-cultural comparison of such traditions as Western scholarship and early Buddhism” (Ronkin 2005: 11). That this approach is in the service of Western philosophy is made explicit by Henry Rosemont, whom Ronkin quotes to the effect that “comparative philosophers can hope to revitalize philosophy in general by articulating alternative conceptual frameworks, showing how, why and that they make sense” (Ronkin 2005: 12). Only if one already presumes the notion of “philosophy in general” does such an approach itself make sense. That such an abstraction is itself a rhetorical device should in fact be evident, once one asks the questions of where such an entity as “philosophy in general” exists? Does it exist somewhere, only to be inadequately instantiated in particular instances of philosophizing? This is, then, itself a kind of Platonic idealization of philosophy, dependent upon an unexamined philosophic position. There are two further assumptions made by Rosemont. First, that contemporary Western philosophy is otiose and in need of revitalization. Whether he is serious about this or simply employing a common trope of crisis is unclear from the context. Second, that “philosophy in general” is itself understood as serving an extra-philosophic end, “assisting the ongoing work of human and biological scientists to solve the puzzles of what it is to be a human being” (Ronkin 2005: 12).
- 28.
These figures are so diverse that even a Wittgensteinian family resemblance might be hard to locate.
- 29.
Although it seems to me that the absolute relativism that Rosemont opposes does not necessarily follow from constructivism, many authors link the two (see Boghossian 2006).
- 30.
Attempts to create universal languages, such as Esperanto, have not escaped the problems consequent upon the cultural content of a language (see Eco 1995). Even if Rosemont’s bilinguals knew a universal language, they would also not overcome the initial problems of translating from their first, native language into their second, universal language (see Eco 2001).
- 31.
Rosemont’s argument might also be seen as fallaciously accepting the consequent of a counter-factual conditional: “If everyone spoke the same language, then all problems with cross-cultural interpretation would be solved.”
- 32.
I remain less than satisfied with the vagueness of this metaphoric formulation of understandings that move closer together.
- 33.
Even this empirically oriented model may be overly optimistic. Specifically concerned with the incommensurability of scientific theories, Xinli Wang notes that “substantial semantic and/or conceptual disparities between two comprehensive theories and their languages embedded in two co-existent, distinct, intellectual/cultural traditions can create serious impediments to mutual understanding and communication” (Wang 2007: 2–3). Wang is drawing specifically on the work of Kuhn and Feyerabend in the philosophy of science.
- 34.
The fact that some readers may reject my characterization of salvation from sin as solely an intersubjective object itself reveals a problem with Rosemont’s argument: even being members of the same speech community does not assure resolution of fundamental philosophic disagreements. The first of his two hypotheticals, which serve as the premises of his argument, is revealed as being a very weak foundation.
- 35.
There is a kind of anti-intellectual, populist appeal to Scharfstein’s argument. Indeed, it resonates with fundamentalist arguments for literal readings of the King James Bible—nuances of translation and history can be safely ignored by the ordinary, everyday reading of the text. But if Scharfstein’s argument is accepted, then what follows is that there would be no use for expert knowledge, and no purpose to education, the normal function of which is to move us to something better than ordinary, everyday ways of thinking.
- 36.
It is worth noting that, like Rosemont in the same volume, Scharfstein rhetorically distorts a constructivist view by, for example, talking hyperbolically about, “an extreme emphasis on context” (85), and engaging in an ad hominem abusive fallacy by characterizing those who are concerned with context as “too cautious” because they are fearful (90). He also absolutizes the contextualist position as “arguing that contextual differences [make] a comparison impossible” (88).
- 37.
For example, “A koan (sic) is a form of riddle that seems to have no logical answer. The point of the exercise is to use the koan (sic) to break through dualistic mundane logic and thus come to know the true nature of reality” (Hawkins and Smart 1998: 23). For an important critique of this representation, see Foulk (2000: 15).
- 38.
Both as a matter of fairness and as a claim to authority over this argument, I can say that this representation of the kōan is well-known to me, as admittedly I presented it for several years to undergraduate students in introductory classes on Asian philosophy and religion.
- 39.
At this point, one may well sit back and wonder why all of the authors who characterize the kōan as nonsensical or as paradoxical did not consider the possibility that it actually is a meaningful form of communication which they simply failed to understand—perhaps because they did not have the proper context.
- 40.
One strategy that neither Rosemont nor Scharfstein appear to use, though they could, is the claim that attention to context constitutes the genetic fallacy. In this case, it would involve interpreting the concern with context as an indication of the presumption that the original meaning of a term or concept is determinative of all later usage. Deploying an accusation of the genetic fallacy would then allow dismissing the information that “kōan is an abbreviation of kofu-no-antoku, which was a notice board on which a new law was announced in ancient China. So kōan expresses a law, or universal principle” (Nishijima and Cross 2007: I.41). Such historically contextualizing information, however, helps us to avoid uncritically presuming the universality of neo-Platonic spiritual dynamics and hierarchical metaphysics.
- 41.
It does not seem “unreasonable and intellectually expensive enough to be considered a fallacy” to think that this information might be relevant to us in understanding what Dōgen meant when he wrote the “Genjō-kōan” chapter as a matter of sound interpretation, and not as an “impossible fantasy” of living inside Dōgen’s head (Scharfstein 1988: 85).
- 42.
The inability to assert that differing interpretations are either better or worse would only follow from complete incommensurability. The constructivist view that I am suggesting does not hold to total incommensurability and hence does allow for judgments of adequacy (see Eco 1990). For a different line of argument regarding adequacy of interpretation, see Neville and Wildman (2001: 188–91).
- 43.
Wang makes this point, using his own terminology. “A presuppositional language is, roughly, an interpreted language whose core sentences share one or more absolute presuppositions. Those absolute presuppositions, which I call metaphysical presuppositions, are contingent factual presumptions about the world as perceived by the language community whose truth the community takes for granted” (Wang 2007: 14).
- 44.
This is a different understanding of the colonialist critique from that of Neville and Wildman. They summarize “Colonialist Theory” as holding that “comparison is a blatantly political move to conform other cultures or religions to the agenda and categories of the comparer’s own, eventually to get all the religions compared to think of themselves in the comparers’ terms” (Neville and Wildman 2001: 188). While some theorists may in fact reduce their analysis to accusations of repressive hegemony, the essential character of colonialism per se is the material exploitation of one society by another. Repression is in the service of exploitation (see Murphy 2007).
- 45.
Some scholars purposely conflate these (see Deutsch and Bontekoe 1997: xii–xiii).
- 46.
For a structurally identical argument regarding the universality of metaphysics see Payne (2009).
- 47.
Such selectivity is not effected upon Buddhist texts alone, of course. Consider the consequences of the almost universal silence attendant today upon the theological framing of Descartes’ Meditations.
- 48.
- 49.
As discussed by Elisabetta Porcu, this aestheticized version of Japanese religion is integrally related to the popular Western conception of Zen as the essence of Japanese Buddhism (Porcu 2008).
- 50.
Some Western authors have attempted to dehistoricize Buddhist thought, on the basis that Buddhist thinkers reject issues of historicity. Ngawang Zangpo (Hugh Leslie Thompson), for example, asserts that “Buddhists who have entered the bodhisattva path cannot restrict their faith to what is verifiable history” (Zangpo 2002: 30). Zangpo bases this on the hermeneutic distinction between definitive (S. nitartha) and provisional (S. neyartha), without any critical reflection on the fundamentally polemic character of this hermeneutic (“my sutra is definitive, yours is in need of interpretation”), and employing a neo-romantic religious rhetoric of timeless truths versus mundane conventionalities. While according to Zangpo, the “Buddha and his spiritual heirs…thumb their venerable noses at conventional history” (32), we find Nyima writing in such a fashion as to undermine this hermeneutic strategy proposed by Zangpo. Or perhaps Zangpo would choose to “thumb his venerable nose” at Nyima.
- 51.
It would be at least equally mistaken to take the Shambhala section as purposely anti-historical, but religiously inspirational, itself a distinction based in contemporary Western popular religious culture.
- 52.
Although more adequate in its treatment of Buddhism, Wainwright is also structured by the concerns of Christian theology (Wainwright 2005).
- 53.
- 54.
Note that “religion” is itself a problematic category for the Buddhisms of Japan.
- 55.
A similar rhetoric, also universalized, is the characterization of faith as “ultimate concern” put forth by Paul Tillich (1886–1965) (see Kaufman 1989). Again, this is not descriptive, but is in fact a theological claim, that when extended beyond the scope of what might appropriately be called “the theological religions” becomes prescriptive.
- 56.
Note that this language of “the religious quest” itself derives from Romanticism.
- 57.
Doctrine as the key to understanding Japanese Buddhisms is overdetermined. While doctrinal studies certainly long played an important part in the Buddhisms of Japan, since the Meiji, the modernizing of Buddhism has included an emphasis on doctrinal uniformity within any lineage. Similarly, doctrine is central to philosophy of religion, since it largely reflects the salvific role of proper belief in the Protestant tradition. Thus, both sides of the dialogue contribute their own emphasis on doctrine. One may at least speculate further that since it was during the Meiji that the very idea of “religion” was introduced to Japan, and extended from a descriptor for Christianity to a general category including the Buddhist traditions, the structuring of the Buddhist tradition in Japan has itself been influenced by Christian models of religion per se.
- 58.
For a very simplistic version of this model of religion see Smith and Rosemont (2005).
- 59.
Daniel Chandler has noted that “Perhaps the most basic narrative syntagm is a linear temporal model composed of three phases—equilibrium–disequilibrium–equilibrium—a ‘chain’ of events corresponding to the beginning, middle and end of a story” (Chandler 2002: 90). Protestant historiography of religion goes beyond this abstract framing syntagm, however, adding specific narrative elements that entail conceptions of motivation, and interpretations of the significance of particular events. For a more extended discussion of this religious narrative structure see Kirschner (1996).
- 60.
Here we can see a Perennialist interpretation that there is a fundamental unity underlying the “merely apparent” diversity of religions.
- 61.
This further evidences the fact that religious studies incorporates presumptions based on Protestant theology, which shifted authority from the priesthood to the text of the Bible.
- 62.
- 63.
One sees a similar homogenization in some approaches to mythology, such as that of Joseph Campbell.
- 64.
It is worth noting that Frost’s threefold marker of religion (belief, worship, and morals) echoes those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who used the same three to determine the existence, or non-existence, of religion among the peoples of southern Africa (see Chidester 1996).
- 65.
One might also expect that market forces played a role in attempting to create a saleable book.
- 66.
Note that the gender of the pronoun is not in this case simply an outdated vestige of traditional grammar. Despite having been produced in 1993, all of the contributors are men, leaving any feminist dimension completely absent.
- 67.
The “International Buddhist–Christian Theological Encounter” was directed by John Cobb and ABE Masao, hence the common referent “Cobb-Abe,” and met biannually for about 20 years.
- 68.
This privileging of Zen as the representative of the philosophic dimensions of the thought of the Buddhisms of Japan is also instantiated in Collins (1998). While Collins gives some mention to Saichō and Kūkai, and to the Kyoto School, Zen dominates his presentation of philosophy in Japan.
- 69.
On the Kyoto School, see Yusa (1997). A useful exposition of the Kyoto School, this essay demonstrates the way in which philosophy2 appropriates Buddhist thought into its own projects.
- 70.
Note that the treatment of kōan here is similar to Scharfstein’s, discussed above.
- 71.
Note that also implicit here is a metaphysics of essence and manifestation, the single unitary essence finding diversity of expression because of skillful means. This rhetoric both expresses and reinforces the notion that some specific form of Buddhism, in this case Zen, can be the best, highest expression of that unitary essence.
- 72.
Abe gives no sources for this definition of skillful means as a doctrine, despite crediting it as the key causal factor in the historical process that created the diversity of Buddhist traditions.
- 73.
Abe justifies this adaptability with a morally problematic argument that “one’s actions are to be judged by one’s intentions.” Note also that this is another instance of reification: as an abstract concept, Buddhism can have no “intentions,” and therefore does not need to find justification.
- 74.
The economist Paul Krugman distinguishes between “zombies,” which “remain part of what everyone…knows to be true no matter how many times they have been shown to be false,” (Krugman 2012), and “cockroaches,” which are ideas that “no matter how many times you flush them down the toilet, they keep coming back” (Krugman 2013). We could perhaps just as well call this section “cockroach metaphors,” or even perhaps “brain worms” (Smith 2014).
- 75.
It is important to note that this idea also contributed to the development of holism (see Harrington 1996). Holism in turn contributes to the constructivist notion, as I understand it, of the integrity of systems of thought. This is distinct, however, from the organic metaphor per se.
- 76.
The collection in which Suzuki’s essay appears is itself a classic example of essentializing, as evidenced in the title concept “the Japanese mind.” Moore’s own appendix to the collection is called “Editor’s Supplement: The Enigmatic Japanese Mind.” Rather than questioning the essentializing presumption that there is “a Japanese mind” in light of contradictory aspects discussed by different contributors, Moore seems to have found it easier to conclude that the essence of the Japanese mind is that it is “enigmatic.”
- 77.
Suzuki claims, for example, that “China failed to perfect the Hua-yen (Kegon) (or Avataṁsaka) or the T’ien-tai (Tendai) system of Mahāyāna thought” (Suzuki 1967: 122). This supposed failure would no doubt surprise countless Chinese Buddhists. Even though dating from the 1960s, Suzuki is here echoing the colonialist rhetoric of the Japanese Imperialist justifications for the invasion of China.
- 78.
Striking, also, is the echo of Frost in the emphasis on scripture, to which is now added an intellectualist emphasis “formulated theology,” as if not having “a formulated theology” was a weakness in this contest between Buddhism and Shintō.
- 79.
It is also important to note that this is a distinctly consumerist conception of religion as something that can be adapted to meet the demands of new markets.
- 80.
Note that this is a fallacy of composition: individual persons have needs, “whole peoples” do not.
- 81.
It also participates in the notion that religion is sui generis, and that therefore there are a distinct category of needs that are uniquely religious in character.
- 82.
When abstractions, that is social constructs, become themselves the object of study, reification seems to follow. Thus, Hegelian notions of history led Otto to hypostatize a unitary Spirit as the object of the history of religion—“There must be an ‘it’ which is the subject of the process of becoming, and this ‘it’ is that which gives the process of becoming identity, rather than being ‘mere aggregation’” (Murphy 2007: 11).
- 83.
Unfortunately, Guthrie does not adequately define the nature of the objection itself.
- 84.
Similarly, Wang locates incommensurability not in the terms employed in different languages, but rather in the sentences, which he identifies as bearing “factual meanings and truth-value status,” employed within a community with its own presuppositions (Wang 2007: 11).
- 85.
It is worth noting in this regard that Karl Mannheim, considered to be a founding figure of the constructivist perspective, defined the sociology of knowledge specifically in opposition to relativism (Mannheim 1936: 264).
- 86.
Comparative philosophy, adopting the notion that India and China are primary, also at times makes Japan invisible (see Baird and Heimbeck 2006).
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Payne, R.K. (2019). “Japanese Buddhism”: Constructions and Deconstructions. In: Kopf, G. (eds) The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2924-9_1
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