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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.2 (2025): 341–382; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.02.12
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History)
‘This-Worldly’ Pure Lands and East Asian Modernity
Jakub ZAMORSKI
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
jakub.zamorski@uj.edu.pl
Abstract: Between the late 1910s and the late 1920s, several Buddhist thinkers across East Asia published doctrinal manifestos that redefined the concept of the Pure Land as an ideal human community—one that could and should be realized in this world. The present study examines a selection of such essays representing three different local contexts—Republican China, Taishō-period Japan, and colonial Taiwan—identifying their shared themes and situating them within broader discussions of Buddhist modernism, particularly the discourse of demythologization. As the study demonstrates, visions of a ‘this-worldly Pure Land’ in modern East Asia were proposed as extensions of the Buddhist tradition of interpretation, which sought to determine the ultimate meaning of Pure Land scriptures in light of other Buddhist texts and doctrines. ‘This-worldly’ reinterpretations were, in various ways and degrees, distinguished from the premodern concept of the ‘Mind-Only Pure Land’ and refocused toward the ethical ideals of Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially those embodied by the altruistic bodhisattva. At the same time, this ‘ethical turn’ in the interpretation of the Pure Land appears to have been grounded in a new understanding of historical time and a distinctly modern notion of progress—conceived as a consciously directed historical process oriented toward a collective expectation of a better future.
Keywords:Taixu, Tang Dayuan, Watanabe Kaigyoku, Shiio Benkyō, Lin Qiuwu, demythologization, Pure Land Buddhism
About the Author: Jakub Zamorski is an assistant professor of East Asian Buddhism at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He researches and publishes on doctrinal and intellectual history of Pure Land Buddhism in early modern and modern China and Japan, on the reception of Buddhist logic and epistemology in East Asia and occasionally on other topics related to Chinese and Japanese Buddhist thought. He has contributed articles to, for example, Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens, chapters in edited volumes and essays in encyclopaedias (including Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, forthcoming).
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
