Stephen G. Covell, The Teaching and Teachings of Temple Buddhism in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. 188 pages. Hardcover, $75.00. ISBN 9780824897574.

Stephen G. Covell
The Teaching and Teachings of Temple Buddhism in Contemporary Japan
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. 188 pages. Hardcover, $75.00. ISBN 9780824897574.

Stephen Covell has focused his research on what he terms “Temple Buddhism” (Covell 2005) in contemporary Japan, namely the Buddhism that is manifest, practiced, and articulated by the living religious tradition of temples and priests and the institutions associated with them. This latest study builds on his previous work by examining how contemporary Japanese Buddhism seeks to get its messages across, both within the formal sphere of public education and through the writings of prominent Buddhist figures, and what is expressed in such teachings. While Covell focuses mainly on Tendai Buddhism, which he says broadly reflects the patterns, themes, and orientations of traditional sectarian Buddhism more generally, key to all his work is his argument that “Buddhism is what Buddhism does” (1, 134). He is rightly critical of much of Buddhist studies for its tendency to privilege the old, and the philological, textual, and elite monastic traditions, over the new, while dismissing contemporary Japanese Buddhism as not “authentic” Buddhism because it does not conform to a rarefied realm of ancient texts, doctrines, and elite monasticism. As Covell shows throughout this book, contemporary Buddhist priests and sectarian denominations have to operate in a real world and need to shape their teachings, practices, and approaches to address this. In the education sphere, this involves conforming to public, state, and legal policies that govern and regulate how education is carried out.

In focusing on what is taught in contemporary Buddhism today in Japan and how Japanese Buddhism seeks to interact with and convey teachings to the wider public, Covell enables us to more fully understand what those Buddhist institutions and the people who are its religious representatives—its priests—understand Buddhism to be; what they say and do is what Buddhism is, and is indicative of its nature as an authentic operative religious tradition. All of this is well argued and is to be highly commended as a way of showing not just what religious traditions do but how they need, especially in modern secular societies such as Japan, to adapt to the frameworks of the societies they seek to influence. This, Covell states, is the public, outward-facing nature of Buddhism, something he shows Buddhism needs in order to remain relevant in a secularizing and modernizing society no longer grounded in the sociocultural frameworks that were advantageous to Buddhist institutions in earlier times.

What is taught at multiple levels in Tendai Buddhism—from Buddhist-run kindergartens, schools, and higher education institutions to the writings of famed elite Tendai monk-practitioners—is a recurrent message centered around themes of gratitude, politeness, kindness, compassion, thankfulness (especially to ancestors and family), and reverential awe for higher spiritual powers. All these qualities are seen as quintessential to traditional Japan, but they have been eroded, according to Buddhist educators, by modernity (and notably Western-inspired individualism and materialism) in a Japan that has lost its moral compass. Strikingly, too, his discussion of the writings of three famous Tendai monks who have completed the arduous kaihōgyō practice of Tendai mountain asceticism shows that those at the seemingly elite monastic and ascetic levels of Buddhism articulate similar themes. There is also a recurrent undercurrent of criticism against new religious movements, which have eaten into the constituency of the older traditions but are repeatedly attacked (notably in the work of some of the elite ascetics) as new and hostile to other religions, even though, as Covell notes, they generally teach similar messages to those outlined in Buddhism.

Covell further demonstrates how the development of Buddhist education institutions, which have emerged in formal terms from the mid-nineteenth century onward alongside the modernization of Japan and its development of a formal state-regulated education system, has been shaped and affected by legal requirements and state regulations about how education and education establishments should be structured. As such, the chapters outlining how rules and regulations continued changing and impacting the operative frameworks of education institutions also provide a valuable study of the development of Japanese education in modern times. Covell also shows how Buddhist figures debated how best to teach about Buddhism and what messages to convey while seeking, in accord with state policies, to use education to nurture people and enhance their potential, while restoring Japan’s moral compass and counteracting what many in the tradition saw as the pernicious effects of individualization and materialism. These latter forces were portrayed by the Buddhist authorities Covell cites as the product of Western and Christian influences that they saw as damaging Japan’s traditional family, group, and community structures. As Covell notes, though, economic considerations played a part too in Buddhist educational activities, with many priests, for instance, setting up kindergartens in the postwar era, because their temples were struggling financially (due to losing land in postwar reforms) and needed new sources of income.

Covell also outlines how the demands of secular society have played a role in reorienting the Buddhist priesthood and Temple Buddhism in general, in a gradual shift away from religious training (such as meditation and ascetic practices) toward teaching and studying to acquire the qualifications necessary to serve as a priest in the modern context. This has led to a bifurcation between Buddhist temples centered on training priests as religious practitioners, and Buddhist colleges and universities, whose role is to provide them with the appropriate education they need. The chapter on Buddhist higher education institutions (chapter 3) shows some of the problems contemporary Buddhism faces. In order to be accredited, Buddhist universities have to teach more than just Buddhist studies and thus have instituted other discipline areas, faculties, study programs, and courses. They also need to expand enrolment in order to survive financially. Although trainees for the priesthood normally attend a Buddhist university as part of their training and qualification process, their numbers (especially nowadays) are not enough to sustain the universities, which therefore need to enroll more nonreligious students, who may not like having to take so many courses on Buddhism. The ways in which various Buddhist universities (notably the trans-sectarian Taisho University, where Covell studied) have struggled to adapt to these changing contexts, and how they have debated how to balance their commitment to Buddhist teachings with the demands of students, state regulations, and financial realities, provides us with clear indications of the problems that exist here.

Covell thus tells us much about the nature of Buddhism in Japan today. Indeed, one could say he shows us a picture of what “authentic” Buddhism actually looks like. We can certainly draw from his book the message that Buddhism in Japan is struggling to deal with modernity and with social, structural, and economic changes, and that it faces many problems in its attempts to find a sense of direction in a complex modern world and to put its teachings across in a society that is secularizing and not particularly empathetic to religion. Covell does not really tackle this matter, however, or examine the “religion allergy” (161) that one of the Tendai ascetics cites as a problem in contemporary Japan, and he does not look at the erosion of support for Buddhist institutions as they struggle with the disappearance of the frameworks (extended families, traditional associations between temples and households, reverence for ancestors) that have been Temple Buddhism’s mainstay in the past. Nor do the teachers, educators, and ascetics whose teachings he presents appear to do this. In lamenting the decline of traditional values that need to be restored to counter moral decay and individualism, they appear to be mired in nostalgia for a seemingly glorious past while exhibiting little awareness that the Japan of those traditional values and past eras might not have been so perfect and harmonious. There seems to be virtually no reflection among Buddhist educators and priests about how past eras of traditional values may have produced strife, or of Buddhist complicity with past problems from discrimination to war mongering. In bemoaning the moral decay, as they see it, of Japan, such educators appear always to externalize the blame while never reflecting on whether Buddhism as an institutional tradition might have contributed to this malaise and loss of traditional values. The lack of reflection among Buddhist educators on such matters in itself says a great deal about contemporary Buddhism in Japan. It is a pity that Covell does not look at such questions in this volume, and I hope he pays attention to them in his future work so as to further to enrich our understanding of Buddhism as it is in Japan, an area he has contributed so much to both in this book and previous work.

Ian Reader
University of Manchester