日本浄土教の統合的理解のために ‒柳宗悦『 南無阿弥陀仏』の知識社会学‒

Abstract

This paper will focus on one of the Muneyoshi Yanagi’s master works, NAMU-AMIDABUTSU(南無阿弥陀仏), which was published after the World War II. When Yanagi was young, he devoted himself on Western religious thought. After the war, in the early 1950s, however, he started to change his interest to the study of the Japanese Buddhist thought. It was when Japan escaped from the occupation and began to be revived. What Yanagi was absorbed in at this time was not European-American culture or democratic thought, and was not even economic revitalization or promotion of the technology. He devoted to study of Buddhism, which seems to be opposed to European values. In this sense, his study may have had the same challenges that troubled many post-war intellectuals in Japan. The challenges were to create the thought for post-war people in the Japanese society instead of the before-war values which already collapsed. In the case of Yanagi, the base of thought was brought from Jodo thought (浄土思想). The nameless people were always forgotten in the national history; however, such people finally began to play the leading role in after-war era. According to Yanagi, what kind of people shall be the ideal? It shall be the person who is able to understand the essence of the word ‘NAMU-AMIDABUTSU’ instantly and move it to daily practice. The casual care and support are enough for the practice. There are really important things in such a trifling behavior. This is what Yanagi wanted to let the Japanese people who lived in the post-war era to understand through publication of that book.