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For close to a thousand years Amida's 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 Saburo-left-leaning thinkers with no
special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to
any Buddhist institution-seized upon modernized images of Shinran
in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise to resist the demands
of a state that was bearing down on its citizens with increasing
force. Pure Land, Real World treats the religious thought of these
three major figures in English for the first time. Kawakami turned
to religion after being imprisoned for his involvement with the
Japanese Communist Party, borrowing the Shinshu image of the two
truths to assert that Buddhist law and Marxist social science
should reinforce each other, like the two wings of a bird. Miki, a
member of the Kyoto School who went from prison to the crown
prince's think tank and back again, identified Shinran's religion
as belonging to the proletariat: For him, following Shinran and
working toward building a buddha land on earth were akin to
realizing social revolution. And Ienaga's understanding of the Pure
Land-as the crystallization of a logic of negation that undermined
every real power structure-fueled his battle against the state
censorship system, just as he believed it had enabled Shinran to
confront the world's suffering head on. Such readings of the Pure
Land tradition are idiosyncratic-perhaps even heretical-but they
hum with the same vibrancy that characterized medieval Pure Land
belief. Innovative and refreshingly accessible, Pure Land, Real
World shows that the Pure Land tradition informed twentieth-century
Japanese thought in profound and surprising ways and suggests that
it might do the same for twenty-first-century thinkers. The
critical power of Pure Land utopianism has yet to be exhausted.
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