He teaches Buddhist Studies and religion in the cultures of Japan and East Asia at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[3] Fabio Rambelli, who reviewed the book in 1994 for The Journal of Asian Studies, writes that the author delivers an alternative to the "traditional dichotomy between 'pure' Zen and 'popular' religion".
[5] Christopher Ives writes in the Journal of Japanese Studies that the book is the "most important English work on Sōtō Zen to date".
[6] He presented his paper on the birth of Ise Shinto at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in a session organized by Rambelli.
[7] In 2009, Bodiford participated with Shoji Yamada of International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Japan and William R. Lafleur of the University of Pennsylvania in a panel at the AAS annual meeting.