Jodo Shinshu: Shin Buddhism in Medieval Japan

James C. Dobbins is a scholar of Japanese Buddhism, and this Indiana University Press book is his academic history of Jodo Shinshu, the Shin Buddhist school founded on Shinran's teaching, as it developed and institutionalized during the medieval period in Japan. Its strength is a focused historical account of the school's actual formation and early doctrinal development, grounded in the medieval Japanese source record, rather than a devotional retelling of Shinran's teaching from within the tradition. Its limit is chronological, it documents Jodo Shinshu's medieval history specifically, so a claim about the school's modern institutional structure or its contemporary practice needs a source addressing that later period, which this book, focused on origins, does not attempt to cover.