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RELIGION RE-VISIONING 'KAMAKURA' BUDDHISM EDITED BY RICHARD K. PAYNE Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 11 Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998 280 pages. Cloth, $50; paper, $28.95
The introduction to this collection of essays discusses various misleading assumptions about medieval Japanese religion that have been fueled by a fixation on the founders of new movements such as Pure Land Buddhism and Zen. For one tiling, says Richard Payne, "the founding figures of the new Buddhisms of the Kamakura era tinderstood themselves not as. establishing a novel creation of their own era, but rather as continuing lines of teaching that reached back to [tlie established sects in] Heian Japan, to China and, ultimately, to India or to a foundational Buddha."
Moreover, Payne says, Western histories of Japanese Buddhism barely recognize the esoteric Shingon sect after its heyday in die Heian period, even though Kūkai (774-835), the founder of the sect, is one of Japan's best-known folk...