It was in 1687 that the Neo-Confucian Yangmingist Banzan Kumazawa pointed out in his “Questions on the Great Learning” that “if the system of compulsory registration at temples (Tera-uke system 寺請制度) was abolished today and the people allowed to decide according to their faith, there would be many who would not register at any temple.” However, the Buddhist community in Japan has failed to seriously confront this important challenge over the ages. The present author believes that the long-standing failure to tackle this challenge has caused the collapse of the hierarchy of temples that we see in so-called Funeral Buddhism today. This paper examines concrete data on the background and present situations of this problem from the viewpoint of a funeral consultant.
