Author: Buddhist Churches of America

Publisher:

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13:

Japan’s largest Buddhist denomination, the Jodo Shinshu Honpa Honganji sect of Pure Land Buddhism, began to conduct fact-finding missions, and missionaries argued that greater religious observance among the Japanese would curb undesirable behavior and make them better workers. The result was the founding of the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii and first Jodo Shinshu temple in Hilo in 1889, the first Jodo Shinshu temple in San Francisco in 1898, and the Buddhist Mission of North America (also in San Francisco) in 1899. The Japanese temples and their umbrella organizations persisted, by contrast, in part owing to the greater cohesion resulting from Japanese Buddhism’s higher degree of sectarianism; their reliance on trained missionary ministers; their support by large, relatively wealthy parent denominations in Japan; and their fundamentally religious nature. Founded and run as temples, the member congregations of the Buddhist Mission of North America and similar organizations drew the greater Japanese American community together while allowing cultural activities to take place at the temples, rather than having religion be merely one of numerous sponsored activities.