Practicing the Afterlife: Perspectives from Japan (Beitrage Zur Kultur- Und Geistesgeschichte Asiens) - Softcover

How do people in Japan conceive of life after death? Although many Japanese today claim that on their archipelago there has never been much interest in this topic, the evidence presented here shows otherwise. Documenting a rich range of historical as well as contemporary scenarios that present life as going on after death, these essays also show individuals and whole communities acting on the belief that the line between the living and the dead is porous and that it makes sense even now to practice the "life" one will have after becoming dead. They thus not only bring forward aspects of Japan obscured until now, but also can contribute to our own current discussions of life, dying, and death.

William R. LaFleur received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Joseph Kitagawa and Mircea Eliade. Over the course of his career, LaFleur taught at Princeton University, UCLA, Sophia University, Tokyo, and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the E. Dale Saunders Professor of Japanese Studies. In addition to his work on Buddhist cosmology and the "mind" of medieval Japan, he was a gifted translator and interpreter of poetry and published two volumes on the medieval monk-poet Saigyo. He was deeply interested in Zen, especially as a resource for contemporary thought. He wrote and edited several books and essays, introducing to Western readers the work of the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, the Kyoto-school figure Masao Abe, and the twentieth-century philosopher and cultural historian Watsuji Tetsuro. In 1989, he became the first non-Japanese to win the Watsuji Tetsuro Cultural Prize. In his later career, while continuing to study medieval Japanese religion and literature, he produced pioneering studies of Japanese bioethics, highlighting contrasts with Western approaches to such issues as abortion, organ transplants, and medical definitions of death. Altogether, he wrote or edited nine books. He passed away in 2010.