Buddhism in Medieval Japanese Fiction: Personal Reflections

Iam one of those former English majors who loved college but never really wanted to work, which may be why the prospect of graduate school was so appealing when I was ejected into the post-baccalaureate world of financial obligations and responsibilities in 1990.Four years later, as a graduate student at Yale (where, ironically, I found myself working all the time), I had the privilege of taking classes with the late Stanley Weinstein, a specialist in Japanese and Chinese religions who trained many of today's leading scholars of Buddhism.I am not one of them.At the time, I was already studying Japanese literature under the supervision of Edward Kamens in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (though Ed was himself one of Stanley's students, finishing his PhD in 1982).Nevertheless, on Ed's advice, in the fall of 1994 I began auditing Stanley's three-semester undergraduate lecture course on Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism.I enjoyed it so much that in three years I audited it twice, much to Stanley's surprise.At the graduate level, I took Stanley's course on kanbun (Sino-Japanese), in which we read excerpts from Gynen's (1240-1321) thirteenth-century Hassh ky