Precepts, Ordinations, and Practice in Medieval Japanese Tendai

Modern Japanese Buddhist monks of all denominations differ from those in other Asian countries because they frequently marry, drink alcohol, and eat meat. This has caused Buddhist scholars and practitioners generally to assume that early Japanese monastics had little interest in precepts and ordinations. Some medieval Japanese exegetes, however, were obsessively concerned with these topics as they strove to understand what it meant to be a Buddhist. This landmark collection of essays by Paul Groner, one of the leading authorities on Tendai Buddhism, examines the medieval Tendai School, which dominated Japanese Buddhism at that time, to uncover the differences in understanding and interpreting monastic precepts and ordinations. Rather than provide an unbroken narrative account―made virtually impossible due to the number of undated apocryphal texts and those lost in the numerous fires and warfare that beset Tendai temples as well as the difficulties of tracing how texts were used―Groner employs a multifaceted approach, focusing on individual monks, texts, ceremonies, exegetical problems, and institutional issues.

Early chapters look at a major source of Tendai precepts, the apocryphal
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