Jacqueline Stone

Jacqueline Ilyse Stone is an emeritus professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is known for her groundbreaking and rigorous research in Japanese Buddhism. She made important contributions to the study of Kamakura Buddhism, Nichiren movements from medieval to modern times, deathbed practices in Japan, as well as other topics.

Stone earned a B.A. in Japanese and English from San Francisco State University in 1974. She then received an M.A. (1986) and a Ph.D. (1990) from UCLA, where she studied under William LaFleur. Her unpublished dissertation is masterful, more than six-hundred-page study of problematic texts attributed to Nichiren.

In 1990, Stone joined the faculty of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her first monograph, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), received the 2001 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Historical Studies category. It is a "sophisticated and complex study" of one of Japan’s most important and controversial intellectual developments: the notion that all beings are “originally enlightened” and simply need to realize their own Buddha nature. Rather than seeing the new Kamakura schools as reacting against a moribund Tendai establishment as much previous scholarship had done, Stone offers an interactive model that show how both Tendai and Nichiren movements simultaneously worked through the problems and promise of original enlightenment or hongaku discourse in highly vibrant and creative ways. While original enlightenment thought is often seen as denying the need for practice, Stone demonstrates that medieval authors promoted a variety of practices. Practice was not ignored; it was instead reconceptualized, often as an expression rather than a cause of awakening. The book introduces a new four-part paradigm for enlightenment in medieval Japan based on notions of non-linearity (liberation occurs in a moment), single condition (one practice leads to liberation), all-inclusiveness (the practice contains all of enlightenment within it), and a denial of the need to make merit or remove sin..

Her second monograph, Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), won the 2017 Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism. This book exhaustively documents a common religious culture centered on deathbed practices that often transcend social and sectarian distinctions. The book overcomes divisions in Buddhist Studies between social history and doctrinal research by showing how teachings and practice relate to one another. Stone uncovers competing logics that help define deathbed ritual including notions of karmic causality and individual responsibility, highly social discourses of merit transfer, and the idea that the deathbed moment is so powerful that it can override a lifetime of wrongdoings. It introduces a range of sources including ritual manuals, Buddhist narratives, and hagiographies, many discussed in English for the first time.

In addition to these two award-winning monographs, Stone has written and edited widely in English and Japanese on topics including the Lotus Sutra, medieval and modern movements in Nichiren Buddhism, historiography, death, and ideas of time and space in Japanese religions.

Beyond her publications, Stone is known as an exceptionally skilled teacher and mentor. She received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities (jointly with Stephen F. Teiser) in 2014 and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2018. Her graduate students have risen to prominent positions in the field and now teach at a host of institutions in North America and Japan including McMaster University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, and University of Southern California. She demonstrated remarkable breadth in her teaching, as her students work on periods ranging from the seventh century to the twenty-first and have published widely on Buddhism, Shinto, and new religious movements. Through both her publications and her teaching, she is likely the most influential figure in shaping the study of Japanese Buddhism in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Stone has served as president of the Society for the Study of Japanese Religions and co-chair of the Buddhism section of the American Academy of Religion. She is vice president and chief financial officer of the editorial board of the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism. She is also a member of the advisory board of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected Publications

Stone, Jacqueline (1999). Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN: 9780824827717

--- (1999). Revisiting Nichiren. Special issue of Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (vol. 26/3–4). Co-edited with Ruben L.F. Habito.

--- (2007). The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations. Co-edited with Bryan J. Cuevas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN: 9780824835996

--- (2008). Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism. Co-edited with Mariko N. Walter. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN: 9780824832049

--- (2009). Readings of the Lotus Sutra. Co-edited with Stephen F. Teiser. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231142885.

--- (2014) The Lotus Sutra in Japan. Special issue of Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (vol. 41/1). Co-edited with ‘Paul Groner.

--- (2016). Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN: 9780824856434

--- (2019). Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side: A Guide to the Lotus Sūtra. Co-authored with Donald S. Lopez Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691174204