Series Editor's Preface

Series Editor’s Preface

Genshin has long been acknowledged as having played an impor­tant role in establishing Pure Land praxis in Japan. But scholars have treated him largely as a “forerunner” who, once acknowledged, can safely be ignored. Robert Rhodes’ study pres­ents a dif­fer­ent picture. In Japan prior to Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū only a few short works on Amida ­were composed, and ­these did not distinguish Amida from the other buddhas and bodhisat- tvas of the Tendai pantheon. The Ōjōyōshū was the first major work cre- ated in Japan to pres­ent a Pure Land praxis, and it did so by crystallizing a set of ideas and practices around the figure of Amida. As a Tendai monk Genshin naturally cast his work in the framework of Tendai praxis, and this made the Ōjōyōshū accessible to other Tendai monks such as Hōnen and Shinran two centuries ­later. In his introduction, Rhodes makes an impor­tant methodological point when he says that failing to recognize Genshin’s “involvement with the entire range of Buddhist thought and practice not only fails to do justice to the breadth of Genshin’s intellectual achievements but also makes us lose sight of the historical and intellectual milieu in which he developed his Pure Land system” (p. 9). To comprehend Genshin we need to view him in his own context. This means grasping the teachings with which he was familiar and to which he was responding: He was not writ- ing for us, so we need to take into account his own understanding of what was known and believed by ­those for whom he was writing. Rhodes carries out this essential task in the first part of his study, and it is key to the revisionist character of his work. As he points out, Hōnen’s interpretation of Genshin’s teachings on nenbutsu has become normative and accepted without examining Genshin’s thought. While Genshin did lay the foundation for ­later developments by Hōnen and Shinran, Rhodes argues that Genshin’s thinking was also reinterpreted to accord with a new set of doctrinal emphases. ­Because Hōnen’s under- standing of Genshin’s contribution to Pure Land has been accepted as adequate, the study of Genshin himself has appeared unnecessary. If we are to perceive Genshin’s own formulations of Pure Land praxis, we need to distinguish between Genshin per se and Hōnen’s interpretation of

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Genshin. Given the history of sectarian interpretation, this distinction is not as obvious as it may seem. The willingness to ask questions that supposedly have already been answered is what makes pro­gress in the historical study of the Bud- dhist traditions pos­si­ble: Rhodes shows us the value of questioning the conventional wisdom of our field. His study of Genshin is an impor­tant contribution to scholarship, and we are pleased to include it in the Pure Land Buddhist Studies Series.

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