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Carol Richmond Tsang sets herself an ambitious goal in War and Faith: Ikko Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan. Tsang distinguishes her book from previous studies that focused, "from the top down," on single ikki or on certain aspects of these military uprisings by commoners and claims that her book "treats the whole, broad phenomenon of ikko ikki , and seeks to understand it on its own terms" (p. 7). Clearly, Tsang's intent is to give us a picture from the bottom up that will explain how a particular religious worldview translated, again and again for more than a century, into political and military action (or vice versa) in many different parts of Japan. Given the linguistic challenges of the field, especially those connected with the original documents, this is an extraordinarily ambitious project whose success will hinge on how well it describes and explains the mind-set of the Honganji believers that produced the phenomenon of the ikko ikki.
The failure to do so is where War and Faith most disappoints this reader. In the narrative of the events that led to the militarization of the Honganji variety of the Jodo Shinshu brand of Buddhism, what the believers themselves thought is only rarely explicated. The key to their worldview, it seems, is to be found in a collection of pastoral letters (ofumi ) written by Rennyo (1415-99), the eighth patriarch of the sect....