Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity

H. Byron Earhart's Japanese Religion, Unity and Diversity, published by Wadsworth in 2004 in its fourth edition, is a widely used academic textbook surveying the full range of Japanese religious tradition, Shinto, Buddhism, folk religion and new religious movements together, organized around Earhart's own argument for an underlying unity beneath that visible diversity. Earhart was a specialist in Japanese religious studies whose textbook has been assigned across generations of students. Its strength is comprehensive, accessible coverage grounded in real specialist knowledge of the field. Its limit is that Earhart's own thesis of underlying unity is itself an interpretive argument rather than a neutral organizing principle, one some scholars of Japanese religion characterize differently, so a claim drawing heavily on that framing should be attributed to Earhart's particular reading of the tradition's coherence.