Janine Sawada specializes in the religious and intellectual history of early modern Japan. She recently completed a study of the religious movement dedicated to Mt. Fuji (later called Fujikō) that emerged in Japan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Her current project is a translation of the great apologetical treatise, Zenkai ichiran [A Ripple in the Zen Sea], by the Rinzai master, Imakita Kōsen, teacher of Shaku Sōen and Suzuki Daisetsu.
Janine Sawada early work focused on the popularization of Zen Buddhist and Neo-Confucian ideas and practices among the working classes of early modern Japan, including various forms of personal cultivation that emerged in the early nineteenth century and the early Meiji period (Shinto-type new religions, Confucian-inspired revival movements, divination practitioners, lay Rinzai communities, etc.). More recently she investigated the transition from late medieval to early Tokugawa popular religious life, as documented in pilgrimage mandalas, talismans, sermon texts, and hagio-narratives generated by lay ascetics and pilgrims dedicated to Mount Fuji. She is now preparing an annotated translation of Zenkai ichiran, a nineteenth-century Zen interpretation of classical Confucian texts.
Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Translation Grantee in Buddhist Studies, 2023 and 2024
