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Ambitious Buddhism puts itself on the market
Kaimyo, the Buddhist names given to the deceased, usually come with titles such as in, koji and shinji. In explaining the differences, one temple uses the analogy of train tickets for Jodo, the paradise of the Pure Land: In is a first-class ticket, koji a reserved seat, and shinji a non-reserved one.
This certainly sounds to me like an effective psychological ploy to make people choose expensive kaimyo by suggesting that they might as well go first-class on their trip to the Pure Land.
“This is pure commercialization of Buddhism,” lamented Noriyuki Ueda, 47, a cultural anthropologist and associate professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. “It is despicable and far from Buddha’s teachings.”
According to Ueda, there are about 80,000 temples around the nation. But a shortage of priest successors to keep them in business has become an increasingly serious problem. A survey by one Buddhist sect found that 35 percent of its temples faced the possibility of being unable to secure a priest to operate Buddhist services.
Against this backdrop, Komyoji temple in Niigata city is attracting the attention of the Buddhist community by inviting the public to apply for the job of chief priest.
Candidate prerequisites include being 25 to 30 years of age, a university degree, some work experience, an eagerness to study Buddhism and a sincere interest in listening to people. A monthly stipend of 120,000 yen will be paid during the training period.
I visited Komyoji temple before the busy season of the higan vernal equinox, and found that it was anything but a rundown temple in a depopulated neighborhood.
The temple was among the first in the nation to build a shrine where the remains of deceased with no children or descendants are honored and remembered permanently–a service that has drawn many new out-of-town supporters to this temple and contributed to its financial stability.
The temple’s older parishioners are said to be active and committed, too. Why, then, seek a chief priest from the public?
“Running a temple doesn’t have to remain a family business,” said Eiji Ogawa, 53, the current chief priest.
Ogawa’s four grown children–all daughters–have chosen their own lives, and Ogawa has no intention of forcing them to marry and asking one of their husbands to succeed him. He has also decided that he wants to groom his successor before he turns 60, when he intends to retire.
The Buddhist community tends to remain in the shell of traditional sectarianism, but a growing bud of reform is certainly there. One of the favorite slogans of younger members of the clergy today is “Bozu (priests) be ambitious,” a pun on “Boys be ambitious,” the exhortation to Japanese youths by American educator William Smith Clark (1826-1886).
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