Buddhist Monks and Business Matters : Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India

This is the second in a series of collected essays by one of today’s most distinguished scholars of Indian Buddhism. (Publication of a third collection is planned in early 2005.) In these articles, all save one published in various places from 1994 through 2001, Gregory Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.

Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728) was one of the greatest philosophers of early modern Japan, often compared to Western thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorai's masterpieces. The Bendô (Distinguishing the Way) and Benmei (Distinguishing Names) are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorai's view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 (Genbun 5) woodblock edition, the first major edition of these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period.

John Tucker situates the Bendô and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as "philosophical lexicography." This genre is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi (The Meanings of Neo-Confucian Terms) by Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic of the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi (1130-1200), his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tucker's introduction also examines the reception of Sorai's two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorai's thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his "Chinese" approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Katô Hiroyuki (1836-1916).

As before, however, Sorai came under attack this time for his supposed irreverence toward the throne, the Japanese people, and the imperial nation-state. Though an unpopular philosophy in early twentieth-century Japan, in the postwar years Sorai's thought was interpreted (by Maruyama Masao and others) as an important modernizing force. While it critiques such ideologically grounded attempts to cast Sorai's Bendô and Benmei as theoretical contributions to political modernization, Tucker's study nevertheless acknowledges that Sorai's masterworks, in their concern for language analysis as the way to solve philosophical problems, share significant common ground with the analytic approach to philosophy pioneered by various twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers.

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS CHAPTER I .The Good Monk and His Money in a Buddhist Monasticism of “the Mahâyâna Period” CHAPTER II. Art, Beauty, and the Business of Running a Buddhist Monastery in Early Northwest India CHAPTER III. Doing Business for the Lord Lending on Interest and Written Loan Contracts in the Mûlasarvâstivâda-vinaya CHAPTER IV .Deaths, Funerals, and the Division of Property in a Monastic Code CHAPTER V .Dead Monks and Bad Debts Some Provisions of a Buddhist Monastic Inheritance Law CHAPTER VI. Monastic Law Meets the Real World A Monk’s Continuing Right to Inherit Family Property in Classical India CHAPTER VII .The Monastic Ownership of Servants or Slaves Local and Legal Factors in the Redactional History of Two Vinayas CHAPTER VIII .The Lay Ownership of Monasteries and the Role of the Monk in Mûlasarvâstivâdin Monasticism CHAPTER IX. Marking Time in Buddhist Monasteries On Calendars, Clocks, and Some Liturgical Practices CHAPTER X. Ritual Rights and Bones of Contention More on Monastic Funerals and Relics in the Mûlasarvâstivâda-vinaya CHAPTER XI. The Suppression of Nuns and the Ritual Murder of Their Special Dead in Two Buddhist Monastic Codes CHAPTER XII .Immigrant Monks and the Protohistorical Dead The Buddhist Occupation of Early Burial Sites in India CHAPTER XIII. What’s in a Name The Religious Function of the Early Donative Inscriptions CHAPTER XIV. If You Can’t Remember, How to Make It Up Some Monastic Rules for Redacting Canonical Texts INDEX OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES INDEX OF TEXTS INDEX OF SUBJECTS