爱豆传媒

The central question I explore in this book is: What kind of "happiness" can the Buddha's teachings create today? In Japan, Buddhism is often associated with funerals, art, and tradition that attract tourists. In Southeast Asia, however, the Buddha’s teachings remain part of everyday life. They guide how people live, shape society and the state. To understand this reality, I conducted research on Buddhism in Myanmar, where I temporally lived as a monk. More recently, I became involved in establishing and managing a new Buddhist temple in Japan. This book is an anthropological record based on my combined experiences with research, practice, and institution-building.
 
All existing forms of Buddhism trace their roots back to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, who lived in northern India more than 2,500 years ago. However, these teachings have never been fixed or singular in meaning. Questions such as "What is happiness?" "Why do we suffer?" and "How should we live to find peace?" have always required new answers. Each era and community have reinterpreted the Buddha’s teachings to make sense of their own time and place. This process is not only about interpreting doctrine, but also about envisioning a vision of the world. Those imagined visions, in turn, inspire and direct real human actions, creating the world they live in.
 
In this book, I refer to this ongoing process as " Managing Buddhism." By this term, I mean the way Buddhist communities reinterpret the Buddha’s teachings to imagine and create new worlds. To illustrate this concept, I present three case studies: two in Myanmar and one in Japan. Each of these is an "experimental temple," a community actively rethinking the meaning of Buddhism and testing new ways of practicing it.
 
The first case is the Tharthana WunSaung Monastery, famous for its strict observance of the Vinaya, the monastic disciplinary rules. Here, the monks keep their distance from laypeople, and their disciplined way of life becomes a message in itself, showing that another kind of "Buddhist happiness" is possible. The second case is the Thabarwa Meditation Center, which has grown to become Myanmar’s largest Buddhist welfare center. Thousands of people gather there, including monks, laypeople, the elderly, children, the sick, volunteers, and foreigners. Guided by the idea of "good deeds," they live and practice together in a setting where social distinctions are blurred. The third case is Hōdō-Ji in Kyoto that I established. Unlike traditional Japanese Temples, it does not depend on the household parishioner system. Instead, it reinterprets the concept of "becoming a Buddha in this very life" to address the realities of contemporary Japanese society.
 
While philology usually focuses on doctrines and scriptures, anthropology emphasizes fieldwork and the study of lived practices. From an anthropological perspective, scholars do not answer the question, "What is Buddhism?" Buddhists themselves answer it through their daily actions. My own research asks instead: "What does Buddhism do?" As these case studies show, temples are not merely relics of the past; they continue to serve as experimental spaces for creating new forms of society today. I hope this book allows readers to sense that reality.
 

(Written by KURAMOTO Ryosuke, Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia / 2025)