out opposition from the established churches. These
initiatives prompted favorable responses from several
quarters of the Buddhist world of Asia.
While all of this was taking place, the continued role
of Christianity in the colonizing of Asia was provok-
ing a backlash from Buddhists. In Sri Lanka, now un-
der British rule, Methodist missionaries had begun to
study Buddhism in the 1840s as a tool for conversion.
In the following decades the Buddhists fought back,
supported by European Theosophists who helped
them to organize along Western lines. The outbreak of
riots, followed by a nationalistic fervor that spilled over
into the twentieth century, exacerbated tensions. It was
not until the 1960s that steps toward dialogue and co-
operation could be made.
Similar confrontations were taking place in Japan.
When the country opened its doors to the outside world
in 1854 after two hundred years of seclusion, Japan’s
Buddhist establishment began to fear its own demise
and took steps to oppress the Christian missions dur-
ing the 1890s. Subsequent generations abandoned this
approach and began the long journey to a more cre-
ative coexistence and dialogue with Christianity.
The world missionary conference at Edinburgh in
1910 was the first public forum in the Christian world
to recommend a constructive approach to the reli-
gions of Asia. Formal declarations at the Second Vat-
ican Council in Rome (1965) and at the Uppsala
assembly of the World Council of Churches (1968)
paved the way for more direct rapprochement. Con-
certed efforts to organize Buddhist–Christian dialogue
through worldwide associations and journals began in
earnest and reached a groundswell in the 1980s. The
Society for Buddhist–Christian Studies, based in the
United States and with active membership both in
Asia and throughout Europe, lent academic re-
spectability to the dialogue. Christian institutes de-
voted to dialogue at the scholarly level already existed
in several lands of East Asia and in 1981 organized
themselves into a network based in Japan and known
as Inter-Religio. An exchange of Buddhist and Chris-
tian monastics, initiated in 1979, continues in the
twenty-first century. Christian theological centers
throughout the West, and increasingly in Asia, are
deepening their commitment to the encounter with
Buddhism, and there are clear signs that the Buddhist
world has begun to respond in kind.
See also:Entries on specific countries; Colonialism and
Buddhism
Bibliography
de Lubac, Henri. Recontre du bouddhisme et de l’occident.Paris:
Éditions Montaigne, 1952.
Thelle, Notto R. Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Con-
flict to Dialogue, 1854–1899.Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1987.
von Brück, Michael, and Lai, Whalen. Christianity and Bud-
dhism: A Multicultural History of Their Dialogue, tr. Phyllis
Jestice. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.
Zago, Marcello. Buddhismo e cristianesimo in dialogo: Situazione,
rapporti, convergenze.Rome: Città Nuova, 1985.JAMESW. HEISIGCLERICAL MARRIAGE IN JAPANTemple wives and families have existed covertly for
much of Japanese Buddhist history. Since at least the
time of SHINRAN(1173–1262), the founder of the True
Pure Land denomination (Jodo Shinshu), clerical fol-
lowers of Shinran have openly married and, frequently,
passed on their temples from father to son. Shin tem-
ple wives, known as bomori(temple caretakers), tradi-
tionally have played an important role in ministering
to parishioners, caring for the temple, and raising the
temple children. The ambiguous term jizoku,referring
to both the wife and the children of a temple abbot,
was officially coined in a 1919 Pure Land (Jodo) de-
nomination regulation guaranteeing the right of suc-
cession to the registered child of the abbot (jushoku)
in the case of his death.
Clerical marriage became open and temple families
general among all denominations of Japanese Bud-
dhism following the state’s decriminalization of cleri-
cal marriage in 1872. Although bitterly resisted for
decades by the leaders of many non-Shin denomina-
tions, proponents of the practice advocated allowing
clerical marriage and temple families as the best way
to create a vigorous Buddhism capable of competing
with the family-centered Protestantism, with its mar-
ried ministers, that was making headway in Japan in
the late nineteenth century. Despite opposition from
many Buddhist leaders, clerical marriage proved pop-
ular, spreading to the majority of clerics in most de-
nominations of monastic Buddhism by the late 1930s.
Today, all denominations of Japanese Buddhism
have granted de facto legitimacy to clerical marriage
and temple families. Most temples are inherited by ei-
ther the biological or adoptive son of the abbot, andCLERICALMARRIAGE INJAPAN