Saints, Sects, and (Holy) Sites: The Jesuit Mapping of Japanese Buddhism (Sixteenth Century)

This essay explores the way in which Jesuit missionaries in Japan created and handled knowledge about Buddhism in the second half of the sixteenth-century. Missionaries collected information on Buddhism for several decades and these efforts resulted in the compilation of an ample corpus of documents consisting of letters and reports. By creating accounts on different aspects of Japanese practice and belief, Jesuits repeatedly tried to understand and organise the diversity of Japanese Buddhism, with the hope of providing an explanation of its nature to their Western audiences