Buddhism & history

Buddhism is a spiritual practice that leads to insight true nature of life It’s a practice of mind developing like the awareness , kindness and wisdom. The history of transformation of Japanese marriage and kinship over the course of Hein (794-1185) and Kamakura (1185-1333). The role of Buddhist funerary and memorial rituals in creation. Graveyards have been deserted and lonely places were known as such, yet there is something inappropriate in this. In the beginning of the eleventh century we find no evidence of such resident grave tenders.

In the later periods, the development of more permanent stone markers for graves, the burial became a site of worship. It became the place to define afamilygroup and strengthen the bond of kinship. The preservation of bones and the development of maintained, regularly visited grave are indicators of the signification of Japanese kinship practices that took place through the medium of Buddhist death ritual and memorial practice. The language of kinship and gender of the Chinese ritual has changed the Japanese family. The introduction of Chinese Buddhist ideas about the postmortem lives of families had ramifications for many generations of men and women to come.

Women in Japan were not always temporary members of the families of their birth. The women kept their family names after marriage. A daughter would leave their family to become a wife and a mother with the family which she would come to be identified. At death she would join the family lineage as the consort of father-cum-ancestor and genetrix link of the present link of the patrilineal link. It was Buddhist rituals that shape family links. The burial of daughters with their father’s represents the continuing indispensability of women in the avuncular politics.

They died as their father’s daughter’s and buried among partrilineal relatives, their bones revered ancestral relics by the children and grandchildren of their brother. In addition to age restrictions, Japan also prohibits close relatives from getting married. This is a very common marriage rule that is held by many modern nations. Close relatives include blood relatives, step relatives and adoptive relatives. However, the period of most intense preoccupation with. Keeping daughter’s’ bone’s ” in the family” ironically marked the initial entrenchment of agnatic, or partrilineal, principles of descent in Japan. The posthumousdivorcewas common in may areas in Japan.

This was the custom was that the most women commitsuicideor had failed to produced male children was sent back to her natal family. This act signifies severing of ties with the dead women and responsibilities for her funeral rite, burial and memorial services back onto her family that had raised her. The idea of married woman belongs to their husbands and sons comes as no surprises. The memorial practices gathered by the Japanese folklorist in the twentieth century reveal a great deal of regional variation. Japanese kinship system daughters leaves their families to live and die.

The idea that a daughter should stay with her father came to apply to final place as it had to marriage residence. By the end of the Murumachi period, the women lived by their husband’s people. Ancestor consciousness in Japan is very weak. Only with the importation of the concept of lineage from the Korean Peninsula does the history of ancestor worship begun.

Reference :

1. “ The Early Stages In The Development of Group Descent of Organization,” in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, ed. Patricia Ebrey and James Watson( Berkely University of California Press, 1986) 16-61