Source: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 507-510 Published by: Sophia University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2385439 . Accessed: 20/02/2011 22:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sophia. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sophia University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Monumenta Nipponica. http://www.jstor.org BOOK REVIEWS 507 movement in the sixteenth century; it was one of the primary cultural phenomena of the Tokugawa period; it was a central aspect of traditional Japanese education and so- cial morality; it has been one of the crucial intellectual influences on twentieth-century Japan; and it has remained the source of much liberal political and social thinking even in the postwar period. Shin studies, even those oriented to Christian encounter in the broad sense, must begin to move also toward these institutional facts in the future. Thus, although Keel did not set out to write history, the central problematic embedded in this book, which concerns the actual meaning of Shinran's language, cannot be resolved until scholars adopt a radically holistic theoretical approach, one that will in particular attempt to account for Pure Land society. In any case, Keel and the few other Christian thinkers who have paid attention to Japan's major Buddhist tradition have correctly identified that something about Shin- ran's thought has become, in the twentieth-century intellectual context, perhaps the most challenging body of historical religious material that Christian thinkers face any- where. To properly meet the challenge, however, Keel and other Christian thinkers are going to have to work with more complete accounts of Shin tradition. For their part, Shin scholars are also deeply responsible for the current inadequacy of communication (see the note by Jan Van Bragt on p. ix). They themselves are going to have to recast the interpretation of Shin in ways that allow it to escape from its current monopolistic capture by a theologized semantic field, a capture that limits the possibilities for wider encounter with a greater variety of Western inquiries. Dogen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community: A Translation of 'Eihei Shingi'. Translated by Taigen Daniel Leighton and Shohaku Okumura. State University of New York Press, 1996. xxii + 272 pages. $19.95 T. GRIFFITH FOULK Sarah Lawrence College THE present volume is an annotated translation of a set of Buddhist monastic rules known as Eihei Shingi, rendered here into English for the first time. Dogen, 1200- 1253, of course, is widely known as the patriarch of the Soto Zen lineage in Japan and the founder of Eiheiji, the largest of the approximately twenty-five Soto training monasteries in Japan today. Eihei Shingi as we have it now has gone through a number of changes and redactions since Dogen's time, but it does accurately reflect his under- standing of the Buddhist monastic institutions and procedures he encountered in Sung China and his own approach to replicating them in Japan. Since the seventeenth cen- tury, moreover, Eihei Shingi has played a key role in the Soto school's understanding of itself as a distinct tradition deriving from Dogen. The work thus has great value as a historical document, and it continues to be used within the Soto school as a source of inspiration and authority in matters of monastic discipline. The translators, as Taigen Daniel Leighton's Introduction makes clear, are them- selves practitioners and teachers of Soto Zen in the U.S., and they view Eihei Shingi as a spiritual guide and model for monastic practice that is (potentially, at least) as relevant today as it was in the thirteenth century. There is a tendency in academic cir- cles in the West these days to denigrate such attitudes and motivations as unseemingly 508 Monumenta Nipponica, 51:4 pious and to assume that they must necessarily impede the professional exercise of cold-eyed, critical scholarship. I do not believe that the position the translators take, standing as they do within the normative tradition of Soto Zen, necessarily entails any loss of scholarly judgment or critical acumen. On the contrary, as a profession- al academic who has long worked on ancient Buddhist monastic rules, I am delighted to see that there are Zen practitioners in the West today who care enough to study them, and who set their sights on producing accurate translations. The criticisms that follow are not intended to put down the 'amateurs' who have dared to tread on my 'professional' turf, but rather to encourage greater cooperation between trained scho- lars of Buddhism and scholarly minded practitioners and teachers of Buddhism in the West who wish to study the basic texts of their respective traditions in the original languages and make them available in translations. An unfortunate consequence of the translators' otherwise admirable belief in the relevance of Eihei Shingi for the modern world is their tendency to discuss bygone fea- tures of Buddhist monastic discipline as if they were still being practiced, with no sig- nificance changes, in Japan today. Indeed, they present Eihei Shingi in such a way that the average reader might well take it to be a set of rules written by Dogen at Eiheiji and implemented at that monastery more or less continuously from the thirteenth century down to the present. The translation, for one thing, is illustrated by photographs of buildings now standing at Eiheiji and by contemporary ground plans of the monks' hall and the monastery as a whole. The translators' notes, moreover, often discuss in the present tense procedures detailed in the text, as though they could still be observed being practiced today at Eiheiji just as they were in Dogen's time. It would take a care- ful scrutiny of the Introduction, and some additional historical information not con- tained therein, for the reader to realize that Eihei Shingi as such has never been used to regulate training at Eiheiji. This is because (a) it was not compiled as a single text until 1667, more than four centuries after Dogen's death, and (b) following that compila- tion, although it was much studied and greatly revered within Soto circles, it was never deemed suitable for day-to-day use in regulating Eiheiji or any other monastery. As Leighton notes in the Introduction, Eihei Shingi is in fact a collection of six texts on different aspects of Buddhist monastic discipline that Dogen prepared for his followers at three monasteries between the years 1237 and 1249. The six are: (1) 'Ad- monitions for the Cook' (Tenzo Kyokun), (2) 'Procedures for Practicing the Way' (Bendoho), (3) 'Procedures for Taking Meals' (Fushukuhanpo), (4) 'Regulations for the Common Quarters' (Shuryo Shingi), (5) 'Procedures for Relating to Monks Five Retreats Senior to Oneself' (Tai Taikogogejari Ho), and (6) 'Rules of Purity for Monastery Officers' (Chiji Shingi). Dogen based all of these texts on his own ex- periences in the great public monasteries of Sung China and on written monastic rules that were in use there. Writing in classical Chinese, he incorporated many direct quota- tions from 'Rules of Purity for Ch'an Monasteries' (Ch'an-yuan ch'ing-kuei), 1103, and from Chinese translations of Hinayana Vinaya texts. In two of the works, 'Admo- nitions for the Cook' and 'Rules of Purity for Monastery Officers', Dogen also cited numerous anecdotes pertaining to the monastic offices in question that he had gleaned from koan collections and biographies of famous patriarchs. The six texts were first brought together to make a single monastic code, Eihei Shingi, in 1667. The text on which the present translation is based, however, is one that was reedited in 1794 by the fiftieth abbot of Eiheiji, Gento Sokuchui. Leighton makes no mention of it, but in 1805 Gento also published a smaller monastic code, Eihei BOOK REVIEWS 509 Shoshingi, that was based in part on Eihei Shingi and was a practical manual intended for use at Eiheiji. About the same time, efforts began to rebuild Eiheiji along the lines of the Sung-style monastery that Dogen had originally founded. The fact that Eihei Shingi contained procedures for practice in a Sung-style monks hall and common quarters, for example, led to a reconstruction of those two facilities, which had long since ceased to exist at Eiheiji. Historical facts such as these do nothing to diminish the religious authority and relevance of texts such as Eihei Shingi. On the contrary, the fact that the text and the modes of communal practice it recommends were all but for- gotten in Japan for several centuries before being revived bears witness to its potential for inspiring other such reconstructions of Zen tradition in the West. The translation is, for the most part, sufficiently accurate and intelligible to be serv- iceable. It suffers, however, from numerous minor and not-so-minor errors. The key term shingi, for example, does not mean 'pure standards', as if the rules themselves were pure, but rather 'standards of [maintaining] purity [of the monastic com- munity]'. The titles Bendoho, Fushukuhanpo, and Tai Taikogogejari Ho are mis- translated as 'The Model for Engaging the Way', 'The Dharma for Taking Food', and 'The Dharma when Meeting Senior Instructors for Five Summer Practice Periods', re- spectively. The word ho & in all of these titles simply means 'procedures' or 'method', not 'model' and not 'Dharma' in the sense of 'teachings' or 'truth' (for correct trans- lations, see above). The technical term hosshin, which refers to giving rise to the bodhi- citta, or 'thought of enlightenment', is mistranslated as 'awakening their hearts' (p. 33). The expression busso is incorrectly rendered as 'Buddha ancestors' (p. 150 and else- where): it should be 'buddhas and ancestors'. The word for merit, fuku, is miscon- strued as meaning 'fortune' or 'blessings' (pp. 104, 160 & 162); the standard Buddhist trope of a 'field of merit' (fukuden) is rendered as 'blessing field' and misinterpreted in the notes (pp. 770, 162 & 196); and a reference to dedicating merit, eko, to protect- ing deities is misinterpreted (p. 100). Mistakes such as these betray a lack of familiarity with the traditions of East Asian Buddhism that Dogen knew so well. Some other errors in the translation stem directly from the unwarranted assumption that current practices at Eiheiji are a reliable guide to determining the meaning of terms appearing in Eihei Shingi. In Dogen's day, for instance, anja referred to lay postulants (candidates for novice ordination) who lived in monasteries and functioned as servants for the monks. When these laymen served meals they were called jonin, or 'pure men' (a translation of the Sanskrit upasaka), and when they announced the name of the dishes to be served they were called kasshiki. But the translators mistaken- ly assume that all of these positions were filled by monks since that is presently the case at Eiheiji. Most of the above mistakes will probably go unrecognized by general readers, but there is another aspect of the book that will be a bother to those readers: the frequent use of Japanese words without translating them, as if they were already widely known and accepted in English. The names of the following monastic officers, for example, are used as English throughout: tenzo, jisha, anja, shuso, ino. The rationale, perhaps, is that these terms are currently in use in American Zen centers, but readers not familiar with Zen will be forced on nearly every page to consult the glossary at the end of the volume. Another problem with the translation (or non-translation) of technical terms is inconsistency. The names of many other monastic officers ('abbot', 'guest manager', 'bath attendant', 'infirmary manager'), for example, are simply rendered into English 510 Monumenta Nipponica, 51:4 without any indication of the original Sino-Japanese, and without being included in the glossary. In a few cases, the same Sino-Japanese terms (for example, anja, shuso) appear as anglicized words (anja, shuso) on one page, and as translated words (atten- dant monk, head monk) on another. Finally, it is difficult to know who is speaking-Dogen, or some Chinese text he is quoting-at different places in the text. The translators do an inadequate job of mark- ing such transitions, and the editorial devices they employ (indentations, quotation marks, notes) are inconsistent and confusing. In the translation of Chiji Shingi, for example, Dogen's comments sometimes appear in indented blocks of text that look like quotations of other writings, while passages that actually are his quotations of other Chan records go unmarked as such. It is a shame that this volume is marred by so many small mistakes and glitches, for most of the translation is sound and useful. If the translators and editors had only enlisted the aid of academic specialists in the field at the end of the process,it would not have taken much to turn this into a first-rate piece of work. As it stands, the book will still be useful for anyone wishing to learn more about the history and ideals of Zen monastic practice. Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth. Edited by P. F. Kornicki & I. J. McMullen. Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxv + 312 pages. ?40.00. JANET R. GOODWIN Los Angeles AT first glance the collection of essays in this volume seems a bit unusual for a book ti- tled Religion in Japan. Neither the major schools of Buddhism nor mainstream Shinto receive much attention; instead, we find essays on offbeat topics such as spells and fox spirits. Upon careful consideration, however, this book may be just what the professor ordered to provide a full picture of a religious tradition that emphasizes ritual and prac- tice over doctrine, and to which magic and occult practices are even now not strangers. This seems appropriate for a volume dedicated to the distinguished scholar of Japa- nese religion, Carmen Blacker, a pioneer in taking seriously phenomena that others might shrug off as 'superstition'. The coverage in this volume is historically and geographically broad. Essays cover periods from classical to contemporary times and embrace Okinawa and the Ainu in Hokkaido. This breadth plus a diversity of topics call for a standard introduction in ad- dition to the opening essay on Blacker's life and career. Unfortunately the editors did not provide one. Had they done so, they might have pinpointed several issues that link some of the essays together-issues such as the relationship between the religions of two different cultures, continuity with the past, and the role of ritual in the Japanese community. The book opens with an article by David Waterhouse on the kuji, a nine-syllable Taoist spell used by shugendo and martial-arts practitioners. Waterhouse has tackled a difficult problem, since the history of kuji is poorly documented. His evidence is some- times too sparse for his arguments to be persuasive; for instance, his conclusion that the kuji 'probably became known in Japan first via Pure Land Buddhism' (p. 37) is