Japanese Research on Buddhism Since the Meiji Period (Part 2)A. Hirakawa and E. B. Ceadel

The value of Japanese academic work upon Buddhism came to be realised by the Western world at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the present century, when the European-language writings of such scholars as Nanjō Bunyū 南條文雄 and Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 were published; and in more recent years the writings of Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治 and Suzuki Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 have attracted much attention outside Japan. But these European-language books represent only a minute proportion of the truly vast amount of systematic and scholarly research that has been completed in Japan on all branches of Buddhism in the last eighty years. Very little of this work is known to the outer world, and it is difficult even for those who can use material written in Japanese to determine which books are the most reliable and authoritative. In a recent article ‘Post-war Japanese Research on the Far East (excluding Japan)’, Asia Major, N.S. IV I (1954), pp. 103-148, Mr Honda Minobu 本田實信 and I devoted a section (pp. 141-44) to noteworthy Japanese publications on Buddhism since the war; since then it has occurred tous that it might be of use to Western students to have available a carefully selected and annotated list of the main contributions of Japanese scholarship to Buddhist studies since the beginning of the Meiji period.

We therefore asked Professor Hirakawa Akira 平川彰, Professor in the Department of Indian Philosophy in the University of Tokyo, whether he would bewilling to prepare such a survey, planned on the lines of our earlier article: he very kindly agreed, and sent to us a manuscript, of which the present article is a translation made by myself in consultation with Mr Honda. Mr Honda and I have added a number of notes and explanations, and have taken considerable trouble in ensuring as far as possible the accuracy of the bibliographical details given; we have also added a list of Japanese Buddhist periodicals on the basis of information provided by Professor Hirakawa.