Cultivating Spirituality

Four Shin Buddhist thinkers reflect on their tradition's encounter with modernity.Cultivating Spirituality is a seminal anthology of Shin Buddhist thought, one that reflects this tradition's encounter with modernity. Shin (or Jodo Shinshu) is a popular form of Pure Land Buddhism, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan, but is only now becoming well known in the West. The lives of the four thinkers included in the book spanned the years 1863-1982, from the Meiji opening to the West to Japan's establishment as an industrialized democracy and world economic power. Kiyozawa Manshi, Soga Ryojin, Kaneko Daiei, and Yasuda Rijin, all associated with Kyoto's Otani University, dealt with the spiritual concerns of a society undergoing great change. Their philosophical orientation known as Seishinshugi (cultivating spirituality) provides a set of principles that prioritized personal, subjective experience as the basis for religious understanding.>Mark L. Blum is Professor of Japanese at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism: A Study and Translation of Gyonen's Jodo Homon Genrusho and the coeditor (with Shin'ya Yasutomi) of Rennyo and the Roots of Modern Japanese Buddhism. Robert F. Rhodes is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Otani University.