Todaiji, where he later became abbot and remained for
the rest of his life.
With an eclectic approach to scholarship and prac-
tice, Gyonen dedicated himself to exhaustive studies of
nearly every school of Buddhism, writing monographs
on Buddhist thought and history from the age of
twenty-eight, beginning with his Hasshukoyo(Essen-
tials of the Eight Doctrines), a survey of the core doc-
trines of the eight established schools of Buddhism in
Japan in his time. Lucid and extremely informative,
this work has served as a textbook for students of Bud-
dhist thought from the thirteenth century into the
modern period. Writing in Chinese, Gyonen went on
to compose more than 125 learned works, exploring
sutra exegesis, biography, ritual music, and so on. He
also wrote the first detailed histories of individual
schools in Japan and survey histories of Buddhism as
a whole, carefully tracing the lineage, authoritative
scriptures, and doctrinal evolution of all major tradi-
tions from their origins in India or China to Japan.
Gyonen has had a profound impact upon Japanese
BUDDHIST STUDIES, not only through the wealth of in-
formation his writings contain (modern Buddhist dic-
tionaries in East Asia frequently use Gyonen’s works
as source material), but also because his historical view
defining Buddhism as a collection of schools identified
by a doctrinal and transmission lineage became the
normative Japanese approach to the study of religion,
an approach that began to be challenged only at the
end of the twentieth century.See also:Huayan School; JapanBibliography
Blum, Mark. The Origins and Development of Pure Land Bud-
dhism: A Study and Translation of Gyonen’sJodo Homon
Genrusho. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2002.
Ketelaar, James. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Bud-
dhism and Its Persecution.Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990.
MARKL. BLUMGYONEN