About the Author

Richard M. Jaffe, an associate professor of religious studies at Duke University, is the author of Neither Monk nor Layman and editor of the Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki.

Reviews

"Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhismis an expansive, ambitious, and absorbing book. . . . Jaffe's work here has the hallmarks of a superb history of modern Japanese Buddhism: it presents evidence gathered from a remarkably wide-ranging set of archives, engages with both individual thinkers and institutions as historical actors, and reveals a sure grasp of the economic and political contexts in which religious ideas were rearticulated without reducing the ideas to those contexts. At the same time, by reading Japanese Buddhist modernism in terms of flows taking place between Japan and South Asia, Seeking Śākyamuni pushes against the limits of modern Japanese Buddhist history as a category. Jaffe's work here represents a provocative challenge to one way that the field of Buddhist Studies has organized itself, and a model of how to do things differently."-- "Journal of Buddhist Ethics"

"Seeking Śākyamuni merits a wide readership, which should include scholars and practitioners of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia...This reviewer hopes that Seeking Śākyamuni will inaugurate new streams of research, and new ways of conceiving 'Buddhism in Japan, ' for decades to come."--Micah L. Auerback "Journal of Religion in Japan"

"In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism, Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism."--Samee Siddiqui "New Books Network"

"A fascinating account of Japanese visitors to India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Notably, these were seekers and pilgrims, rather than pleasure-seekers. Their stories have been rehabilitated in Richard Jaffe's recent book, Seeking Sakyamuni . . . In the political imagination of modern India, Japan is the land that gave succour to Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA). In the technological imagination of modern India, Japan is the land that will quickly and efficiently connect the trading centres of Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Seeking Sakyamuni takes us back to a time before the INA and the bullet train, when the two countries were brought together by the interest of spiritually inclined Japanese in the greatest of all Indians."-- "Hindustan Times"