Richard M. Jaffe, an associate professor of religious studies at Duke University, is the author of Neither Monk nor Layman and editor of the Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki.
"Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese
Buddhismis an expansive, ambitious, and absorbing book. . . .
Jaffe's work here has the hallmarks of a superb history of modern
Japanese Buddhism: it presents evidence gathered from a remarkably
wide-ranging set of archives, engages with both individual thinkers
and institutions as historical actors, and reveals a sure grasp of
the economic and political contexts in which religious ideas were
rearticulated without reducing the ideas to those contexts. At the
same time, by reading Japanese Buddhist modernism in terms of flows
taking place between Japan and South Asia, Seeking Śākyamuni pushes
against the limits of modern Japanese Buddhist history as a
category. Jaffe's work here represents a provocative challenge to
one way that the field of Buddhist Studies has organized itself,
and a model of how to do things differently."-- "Journal of
Buddhist Ethics"
"Seeking Śākyamuni merits a wide readership, which should include
scholars and practitioners of Buddhism in South and Southeast
Asia...This reviewer hopes that Seeking Śākyamuni will inaugurate
new streams of research, and new ways of conceiving 'Buddhism in
Japan, ' for decades to come."--Micah L. Auerback "Journal of
Religion in Japan"
"In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the
Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the
experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South
Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing
the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he
argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the
development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism."--Samee
Siddiqui "New Books Network"
"A fascinating account of Japanese visitors to India in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. Notably, these were seekers and pilgrims,
rather than pleasure-seekers. Their stories have been rehabilitated
in Richard Jaffe's recent book, Seeking Sakyamuni . . . In the
political imagination of modern India, Japan is the land that gave
succour to Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA).
In the technological imagination of modern India, Japan is the land
that will quickly and efficiently connect the trading centres of
Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Seeking Sakyamuni takes us back to a time
before the INA and the bullet train, when the two countries were
brought together by the interest of spiritually inclined Japanese
in the greatest of all Indians."-- "Hindustan Times"
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