opment and differentiation of time periods. Yet the
idea of reincarnation and the reappearance of bodh-
isattvas, such as Avalokites ́vara in the person of the
DALAILAMA, extend the sense of historical time far be-
yond the scope of merely human activity.
Visionary history, critical history, and history
as the field of emptiness
Japanese historical writing includes both works that
mix eschatological history with indigenous motifs, and
others that criticize the scheme of decline and the sec-
tarian biases of Buddhist comprehensive histories. The
monk Jien’s Gukansho(Miscellany of Ignorant Views)
of 1219 attempts to explain the tumultuous present by
the karmic influences of previous times, leading to this
age of the final dharma. The emperors, who are of di-
vine origin and occasionally are incarnations of the
Buddha, can still wield the dharma and gain the gods’
blessings to arrest the decline and establish peace and
order. This work envisions a single course of events
that shape the nation, have human as well as divine
causes, and lead to a variable future depending upon
the actions of the rulers. It exemplifies visionary his-
tory, a supernatural interpretation of why the present
is as it is and how the future can be better. A hundred
years later the Pure Land monk GYONEN(1240–1321)
wrote an account titled the Sangoku buppodenzuengi
(Circumstances of the Transmission of the Buddha-
dharma in the Three Countries of India, China, and
Japan) that disputes the prevailing philosophy of final
dharma and explains Japanese Buddhism in terms of
Indian and Chinese Buddhism. The transhistorical,
unconditioned dharma is mediated by geographical
and cultural factors. Gyonen’s work counts as inter-
national, if idealized, religious history.
TOMINAGA NAKAMOTO’s more realistic work of
1745, Shutsujo kogo(Emerging from Meditation) ar-
gues that Buddhism develops by reforming what came
before and then appealing to the authority of the
founder in order to justify the reforms as a return to
original teachings—as if no essential change had taken
place. His work articulates several criteria of textual
criticism to uncover this process, and concludes that
S ́akyamuni Buddha could not have taught Mahayana
Buddhism. His writing represents a rare instance of
critical history in the service of Buddhism. Yet as late
as 1935 the Pure Land thinker Soga Ryojin, rejecting
naturalist as well as nationalist and Marxist explana-
tions, proposed that Buddhist history is the time-
transcendent dharma being realized in time by those
who experience and practice it.
Twentieth-century Japanese Buddhist philosophers
offer some of the very few attempts to formulate a
specifically Buddhist interpretation of what makes his-
tory possible. Nishitani Keiji argues that s ́unyatais
what enables history to be free of predetermination
and thus to be real. For the future to remain open and
historical existence to be meaningful, emptiness must
underlie each and every moment thus ensuring its ab-
solute newness. Nishitani’s history as the field of
emptiness does not consider the discrimination re-
quired by historians to select events of primary signif-
icance. But it does envision the task, common to the
Buddhist senses of history sketched here, that the pre-
sent must be accounted for not only in terms of the
past with an eye to the future, but also as a moment
in a cosmos that is beginningless, endless, and condi-
tioned by timeless truth.Bibliography
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17–43.HISTORY