Butsudan

A butsudan is a cabinet with double doors, and what it holds is arranged like a small temple. At the center stands the honzon, the main object of reverence, whose identity depends on the family's sect: Amida Buddha for Pure Land households, a calligraphic mandala for Nichiren lineages, Shakyamuni for Zen. Around it stand the ihai, lacquered memorial tablets bearing the posthumous names of the family dead, together with a bell, candle holders, an incense burner and small vessels for rice, water and tea. The altar is used in an everyday register as much as a liturgical one. Offerings of rice from the meal, a cup of tea, seasonal fruit or a deceased parent's favorite sweets are placed there in the morning; incense is lit, the bell struck, and a short recitation or a simple greeting offered.

Families report news at the butsudan, weddings and births and examinations passed, because the ancestors enshrined there remain interested parties in the household. The cabinet itself ranges from austere plain wood in some Zen households to the gilded splendor of Pure Land styles, and regional workshops built reputations on particular finishes. During Obon in midsummer, when the dead are welcomed back, the butsudan becomes the center of the household observance, cleaned and provisioned for the visit. Scholars of Japanese religion treat it, with the Shinto kamidana, as one of the two anchors of domestic practice in Japan.

The butsudan's presence in nearly every traditional Japanese home is partly the residue of a policy. From the seventeenth century the Tokugawa shogunate required every household to register with a Buddhist temple, a system aimed at rooting out hidden Christians that turned Buddhist affiliation into an instrument of civil administration. Registered families took on funerary and memorial obligations, and the home altar spread with them, making ancestor memorial the everyday face of Japanese Buddhism. That history gave the butsudan its double character: it is at once an altar to the Buddha of the family's sect and the seat of the family's own dead, and in practice the second role often leads. Rites at the altar mark the cycle of memorial anniversaries that can run for decades after a death, and the transfer of tablets into a new household's butsudan is part of how a family line is understood to continue.

Contemporary life has pressed on the institution. Urban apartments favor compact modern designs over the great gilded cabinets of rural houses; some households keep none at all, and temples now receive aging butsudan for ritual disposal when a family line ends or a house is cleared. Scholars such as Ian Reader and George Tanabe nonetheless describe the home altar as central to the practical religion of benefits and memorial that most Japanese actually live, whatever they profess when asked about belief.