YouTube video by BDG: Buddhistdoor Global

> This essay focuses on Albert J. Edmunds, a British-American Buddhist sympathizer, and it considers the ways that Western occult traditions, especially Swedenborgianism, moved back and forth across the Pacific and shaped the work of D. T. Suzuki.

> In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories 'superstition' and 'religion.' Superstition was deemed 'not really Buddhism' and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized ideas of 'religion.'

> Shinnyo-en's founders and their successors envisioned a particular strategy for being Buddhist in modernity, one which aligns with some, but not all, scholarly characterizations of Buddhist modernism. > As a result, Shinnyo-en and other lay organizations have largely remained on the margins of Buddhist studies despite their apparent popularity and proliferation. > This article offers a new category for theorizing and positioning such organizations as contramodern—connected with, but divergent from mainstream forms of Buddhist modernism.

Senior Buddhologist Richard Jaffe engages in a systematic and comprehensive study of Japanese Buddhism’s most remarkable phenomenon

> The *Konjaku monogatari shu* (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

> Buddhist temples were meant to be halls of truth, places where the Buddha’s teachings are imparted and practiced and centers where those whose lives are sustained by that truth can gather. But in the Edo period, temples came to be supported not by individual believers but by the parish, or *danka*, system. Temples became places where memorial services for parishioners’ ancestors were held...

> We explore how Japanese Buddhists of varying contexts drew upon Buddhist ideas and practices to make sense of their lives, to solve problems, and to create a meaningful world – a cosmos – out of chaos.

Colorado’s La Jara Buddhist Temple, built in 1936–37 for Japanese American farmers, has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places

YouTube video by BDG: Buddhistdoor Global

> Of course, one who dies while sitting in zazen will never be unhappy. But it is nearly impossible to die in this manner if your body is suffering the pain of sickness. My own master (Gudō Kokushi) said, 'Your zazen for one sitting is a lifetime of zazen.' How edifying these words of his are.

YouTube video by BDG: Buddhistdoor Global

> the ritual texts and proselytizing efforts of Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213), a prominent monk in the Hossō 法相 school of the early medieval era in Japan. I will seek to interpret his personal devotion and evangelism in the context of broader ideological clashes taking place. More specifically, this study will ask how we should make sense of Jōkei’s gradually evolving devotional allegiance to Kan-non 観音 in the last ten or so years of his life. I will contend that Kannon served as the perfect symbolic foil for Jōkei to counter the popular senju nenbutsu 専修 念仏 (exclusive practice of the nenbutsu) teachings expounded by Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) and the threat it represented to established Buddhism in Japan.

The Japanese Nipponzan Myohoji monk continues his anti-nuclear activism despite frail health and an uncertain future for his order

YouTube video by BDG: Buddhistdoor Global