Bryan Lowe is an associate professor in the Department of Religion. His book, “How Buddhism Spread in Japan, 650–850” was published in September 2026 by University of Hawai’i Press.
How did you get the idea for this project?
As a graduate student, I read a somewhat obscure 1994 Japanese article by a scholar named Suzuki Keiji about a set of liturgical notes used by a Buddhist preacher active in the provinces in ninth-century Japan. I had no idea such a source existed, so I started studying and translating it back in 2012, soon after I defended my dissertation on the transcription of Buddhist scripture. More generally, I’ve always been curious about how Buddhism existed in the lives of everyday people. Once I dug into the archaeological record, I discovered that between texts tied to provincial preaching and excavated objects, we can actually uncover quite a bit of information about the religious beliefs and practices of villagers in the countryside in seventh through ninth century Japan. Most scholars to date have focused exclusively on the Buddhism of capital elites at this time; it seemed to me that these materials allowed for an entirely new perspective of Buddhist history, one that centered the supposed margins of Japanese society.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
I originally focused on the preaching notes and thought that a bit of archaeological data might help supplement my findings. I figured I’d have one background chapter on archaeology. As I started researching and writing, archaeology became much more central to the book, and the work is now around 50% archaeological and 50% textual. Japan boasts a remarkably large number of archaeological objects, due in part to laws that lead to thousands of rescue excavations every year, mostly away from the traditional centers of power. As such, we have hundreds of thousands of objects from the period I study, many of which speak to the spread of Buddhism to the provinces. This project required me to learn about new sources and methods for studying them, skills facilitated by conversations with my Japanese colleagues and the impressive work they have done over the last few decades. Looking back, I now realize that it would be both impossible and irresponsible to try to tell the story of Buddhism’s spread through textual scholarship alone. I hope that the sources I introduced in the book, which have been mostly ignored in Anglophone scholarship to date, can be utilized by other researchers to help us further refine our understanding of the period.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
There are two topics that I hope future scholars will look at. The first is regional diversity. I attend to this a bit in my book by employing both macro and micro analyses, but we need more case studies that shed light on regional differences across Japan. The second is more robust quantitative analysis. There are problems with the data sets that make this type of work difficult, and I lack the quantitative skills to carry out this work. But I suspect more sophisticated quantitative methods could help us further understand the precise ways that Buddhism spread in Japan.
Why should people read this book?
Buddhism has arguably been the most important religion for most of Japanese history. This book shows how Japan became a Buddhist country for the first time. It’s the first book to tell the story of how Buddhism spread in Japan. I also hope that the book will be of comparative interest by proposing methods and models to help us better understand how other religions spread. As such, I hope anyone interested in Japanese history or religion more generally will buy this book. I tried to write it in engaging and accessible prose, so I hope it can gain a wide readership.
Learn more about other publications by Princeton University faculty in the humanities by exploring our Faculty Bookshelf.
