Pye/Japanese Buddhist Pilgrimage, 8. General Conclusions

This chapter looks at points which may be of interest to those who are studying other pilgrimages or who are interested in the methodology of the study of religions as a discipline. It argues that the three organizing concepts of route, transaction and meaning amount to a clear, inductively gained model of the phenomenology of pilgrimage which is particularly relevant to the cases studied but also potentially relevant to other cases of pilgrimage, whether circulatory or not.