One could, of course, dismiss this as a misunderstanding of what real Buddhism is, but then one would probably have to jettison most of the history of Buddhism in Japan as wrongheaded delusion as well. The cost is considerable.

The piece is organized into three sections, in which I comment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on “silences” in the history of morality, or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history; and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.