Meiji Buddhist Modernism

Meiji Buddhist modernism refers to the diverse attempts by Japanese Buddhist thinkers and reformers during the Meiji period (1868–1912) to reconstruct Buddhism in response to rapid political, intellectual, and social change. Confronted by the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism, Christianity, modern science and philosophy, historical-critical scholarship, and new conceptions of “religion,” reformers sought to present Buddhism as rational, ethical, socially relevant, and compatible with modern knowledge. Their projects differed considerably: some were apologetic or nationalist, others critical of inherited sectarian institutions, and still others increasingly concerned with Buddhism's responsibilities in the present world.

These movements were not themselves necessarily forms of radical Buddhism. Nevertheless, they transformed the intellectual possibilities available to later Buddhist radicals. Historical criticism weakened inherited claims to scriptural and sectarian authority; philosophical reconstruction presented Buddhism as compatible with reason and modern knowledge; nonsectarianism opened the possibility of distinguishing Buddhism itself from its established institutions; and an increasingly this-worldly orientation directed attention toward social and ethical life in the present. Figures such as Inoue Enryō 井上円了, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之 approached these problems in markedly different ways, while the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) brought several of these tendencies together in a self-consciously modern reform movement. In this sense, Meiji Buddhist modernism provided an important intellectual context from which more explicitly progressive and radical Buddhist projects could emerge.

Buddhism and the Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted the institutional position Buddhism had occupied under the Tokugawa shogunate. The new government's policy of separating Buddhism and Shinto (shinbutsu bunri 神仏分離) helped unleash the anti-Buddhist destruction conventionally known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈, during which temples were closed or destroyed, property confiscated, and clergy forced to return to lay life. Although the most intense persecution was relatively brief, it exposed the vulnerability of Buddhist institutions within the emerging emperor-centered nation-state. Early Buddhist responses therefore combined institutional survival with reform. Figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照 sought renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (kairitsu 戒律), while Buddhist leaders also participated in state-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (Daikyō 大教) campaign. Buddhist reconstruction from the beginning thus involved an uneasy combination of religious reform, institutional self-preservation, and accommodation to the modern state.

By the 1880s and 1890s, however, a younger generation increasingly addressed the intellectual as well as institutional challenges of modernity. Reformers such as Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Inoue Enryō, Murakami Senshō, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi engaged modern science, Western philosophy, historical scholarship, Christianity, and newly imported categories of religion and ethics. They did not share a single program, and “Buddhist modernism” should not be understood as a unified movement. What linked their projects was the conviction that inherited forms of Buddhism could no longer simply be taken for granted: Buddhism had to be explained, defended, criticized, and reconstructed within the intellectual and institutional conditions of modern Japan.

Inoue Enryō and the Rationalization of Buddhism

Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919) was among the most influential architects of Buddhist intellectual reform in Meiji Japan. A Jōdo Shinshū priest by background and a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, Enryō responded to the challenges of Western philosophy, modern science, Christianity, and the transformed religious environment of the Meiji state by presenting Buddhism as a rational and philosophical tradition compatible with modern knowledge. His investigations of supernatural phenomena (yōkaigaku 妖怪学, “mystery studies”) formed part of this larger project: rational criticism could distinguish legitimate religious truth from superstition without requiring the abandonment of religion itself. Enryō was not a political radical; indeed, his Buddhist rationalism coexisted with nationalism and a strong anti-Christian orientation. His importance for later progressive Buddhism was therefore not primarily political but conceptual. By distinguishing a rational or philosophical core of Buddhism from historically contingent beliefs and practices, he helped establish a characteristic strategy of Buddhist modernism: inherited Buddhism could be criticized and reconstructed in the name of a deeper Buddhist truth adequate to modern conditions. Enryō's philosophical realism also influenced younger reformers, including Tanaka Jiroku 田中治六 of the New Buddhist Fellowship, who drew upon it in developing the this-worldly orientation known as genseshugi 現世主義.

Murakami Senshō and Historical Criticism

Murakami Senshō 村上専精 (1851–1929), a scholar-priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, played a central role in establishing modern academic Buddhist studies in Japan. Drawing upon historical and comparative methods, he challenged the assumption that the authority of Buddhist doctrine depended upon the traditional attribution of Mahāyāna scriptures to the historical Buddha. His multivolume Bukkyō tōitsuron 仏教統一論 [On the Unification of Buddhism], begun in 1901, combined historical criticism with a constructive project of Buddhist reform and unification. Murakami accepted that Mahāyāna scriptures were historically later developments rather than direct records of Śākyamuni's preaching, but he did not therefore dismiss Mahāyāna as religiously illegitimate. Instead, he argued that later Buddhist teachings could embody the Buddha's intention and represent historically developing expressions of Buddhist truth. The controversy surrounding Daijō hibussetsuron 大乗非仏説論 (the theory that Mahāyāna was not taught by the Buddha) nevertheless challenged inherited conceptions of scriptural and sectarian authority. Murakami's project was thus both critical and constructive: historical scholarship could expose the contingency of inherited Buddhist forms while contributing to the reconstruction of Buddhism under modern conditions.

Murakami's historical criticism had implications extending well beyond academic Buddhist studies. If Buddhist scriptures and doctrines were products of historical development, inherited sectarian formulations could no longer claim unquestioned authority simply on the basis of their supposed antiquity. This did not make Murakami a socialist or political radical, but it opened intellectual possibilities that later Buddhist reformers would pursue in more explicitly social and political directions. Seno'o Girō, for example, would later invoke the historical development of Mahāyāna scripture to argue that Buddhism itself had always changed in response to changing social and cultural conditions and must continue to do so in the modern age. Murakami's significance for radical Buddhism therefore lies less in his own political commitments than in helping establish a historical-critical approach through which Buddhist tradition itself could become an object of reconstruction.

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Kiyozawa Manshi and Seishinshugi

Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之 (1863–1903), a Jōdo Shinshū Ōtani-ha priest, developed another influential response to the crisis of Meiji Buddhism. Educated in Western philosophy as well as Buddhist thought, Kiyozawa initially sought to formulate Buddhism in philosophical terms but increasingly turned toward the problem of lived religious experience. At the same time, he became a prominent critic of the institutional condition of the Ōtani-ha and participated in efforts to reform the sect. His mature thought, known as seishinshugi 精神主義 (“Spiritual Activism”), emphasized the transformation of the individual through recognition of the limits of the self and reliance upon a power beyond the calculating ego. Drawing especially upon Shinran 親鸞 while engaging modern philosophy, Kiyozawa relocated Buddhist authority away from institutional status, ritual observance, and abstract doctrine toward the existential experience of the religious subject.

Kiyozawa was not a socialist, and seishinshugi did not offer a program for structural political or economic transformation. Its significance for later progressive Buddhism was nevertheless considerable. By insisting that genuine Buddhism could be distinguished from the authority and interests of established Buddhist institutions, Kiyozawa opened another route toward the reconstruction of Buddhism outside conventional sectarian structures. Yet his emphasis on inward transformation also exposed a problem that would recur throughout modern Buddhist social thought: whether changing the self was sufficient to address forms of suffering produced by social and economic institutions. Later progressive and radical Buddhists would answer that question in different ways, often insisting that personal transformation had to be joined to transformation of the social world. In this respect, seishinshugi represents both an important resource for and a revealing limit of Meiji Buddhist modernism.

The New Buddhist Fellowship

From the Keiikai to New Buddhism

The most sustained collective expression of Meiji Buddhist modernism emerged around the group eventually known as the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship). Its immediate precursor was the Keiikai 経緯会 (Warp and Woof Society), founded in 1894 by Furukawa Isamu 古河勇 (also known as Rōsen 老川). Following Furukawa's early death, several younger Buddhist intellectuals established the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 (Buddhist Puritan Fellowship) in February 1899; in 1903 the organization adopted the name Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai. The Fellowship consisted of a relatively small circle of young scholars, journalists, educators, and activists, many of whom had studied with prominent Buddhist modernists such as Murakami Senshō and Inoue Enryō. Leading members included Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋 (1871–1933), Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), Sugimura Jūō 杉村縦横 (1872–1945), Katō Genchi 加藤玄智 (1873–1965), and Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰 (1875–1949). Although several had received clerical training, the movement was strongly lay-oriented and deliberately distanced itself from the authority of the established Buddhist sects.

The New Buddhists did not claim simply to recover an untouched or “original” Buddhism. The adjective “new” was important: Buddhism was understood as a living tradition capable of reconstruction in response to contemporary knowledge and social conditions. Their journal, Shin Bukkyō 新仏教 (New Buddhism), became the principal forum for this project, bringing Buddhist reform into conversation with philosophy, science, ethics, literature, and contemporary social thought. In this respect the Fellowship inherited central concerns of the preceding generation of Buddhist modernists while giving them a more explicitly collective and public form. Buddhism was neither to retreat into the monastery nor to become merely a private faith; it was to operate within the intellectual and social life of modern Japan.

Against “Old Buddhism”

The New Buddhists defined themselves polemically against what they called “old Buddhism” (kyū Bukkyō 旧仏教). Their 1900 manifesto portrayed established Buddhism as corrupted by sectarian prejudice, ritualism, superstition, institutional privilege, and attachment to temples and clerical authority. Its rhetoric could be deliberately provocative: if Buddhism consisted merely in worshipping statues and scriptures, obeying priests, chanting, manipulating prayer beads, and defending one's sect, the manifesto suggested, it had ceased to constitute a living faith. This critique drew upon an older discourse of “degenerate Buddhism” (daraku Bukkyō 堕落仏教), previously employed by Confucian and Shinto critics and increasingly internalized by Buddhist modernists such as Inoue Enryō. The New Buddhists, however, pushed the critique toward a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of what counted as Buddhist religious life.

Their “Statement of General Principles” (kōryō 綱領) condensed the reform program into six commitments: the cultivation of a “sound faith”; the fundamental reform of society; free investigation of Buddhism and other religions; the eradication of superstition; rejection of the necessity of traditional religious institutions and ceremonies; and opposition to government interference in or preferential treatment of religion. Taken together, these principles reveal why New Buddhism cannot be reduced either to rationalist Buddhist apologetics or to the privatization of religion. The Fellowship sought simultaneously to free Buddhism from sectarian and state authority and to make religious practice more fully relevant to social life. Its members rejected state-sponsored religion, but they did not conclude that religion should therefore be confined to an autonomous private sphere. Their alternative was a Buddhism at once rational, ethical, this-worldly, and social.

Genseshugi, Pantheism, and “Sound Faith”

At the center of the New Buddhists' attempt to reconstruct Buddhism was genseshugi 現世主義 (this-worldliness), an insistence that the significance of religion be sought within the conditions of present existence rather than in another world. Associated particularly with Sakaino Kōyō and Tanaka Jiroku 田中治六 (1869–?), genseshugi did not simply reject traditional Buddhist cosmology in favor of secular materialism. Rather, it relocated Buddhist religious meaning within the world of ordinary human life, ethical relations, and society. This orientation was closely connected with the New Buddhists' attraction to “pantheism” (hanshinron 汎神論). Sakaino proposed a pantheistic worldview as the foundation upon which the “Buddhism of the future” could be continuously reconstructed and purified, while Tanaka rendered its immanent logic through a deliberate adaptation of the Heart Sutra: “everything is divine and divinity is everything” (issai soku kami, kami soku issai 一切即神、神即一切). Pantheism thus functioned less as a narrowly metaphysical doctrine than as a means of dissolving rigid boundaries between sacred and secular and locating religious value within the world itself.

This this-worldliness did not entail the abandonment of religion. On the contrary, the first of the Fellowship's general principles called for a “sound faith” (kenzen naru shinkō 健全なる信仰), and New Buddhist writers repeatedly resisted the assumption that rational criticism must culminate in unbelief. Their project instead joined religious commitment to free inquiry, modern science, and ethics. The resulting Buddhism was “secular” only in a qualified sense: the New Buddhists rejected supernaturalism, clerical privilege, and the confinement of religious truth within inherited institutions, but they also resisted the privatization of religion. Religious life was to be realized within the same social world investigated by science, ethics, and political thought. In this respect, genseshugi carried forward the rationalizing and critical impulses of figures such as Inoue Enryō and Murakami Senshō while directing them more explicitly toward lived social existence.

The limits of this synthesis became particularly visible in the New Buddhists' exchanges with the socialist Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦 (1871–1933), an occasional contributor to Shin Bukkyō. Sakai pressed their pantheism toward what he called “pantheistic materialism” (yuibutsuteki hanshinron 唯物的汎神論), questioning what he regarded as the vagueness and inconsistency of their refusal to adopt a more thoroughgoing materialist position. The New Buddhists resisted this move. They sought instead to account for what they described as the mysterious unity or interaction of matter and mind (busshin no ichinyo 物心の一如; busshin no ittai 物心の一体), preserving a religious dimension that could not be reduced to materialism. The exchange marks an important boundary within Meiji Buddhist modernism. The New Buddhists could embrace this-worldliness, rational inquiry, social reform, and dialogue with socialism while rejecting what they regarded as the “vulgar materialism” of the radical left. Later radical Buddhists would repeatedly confront this same problem: whether Buddhism and socialism could be joined without either subordinating Buddhist thought to materialism or retreating from structural criticism of the social world.

From Social Buddhism toward Radicalism

The social implications of New Buddhism varied considerably among members of the Fellowship. For Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), this-worldly Buddhism developed especially through engagement with poverty, social welfare, and the human consequences of industrialization. A Jōdo-shū priest and Buddhist scholar who spent roughly a decade studying Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies in Germany, Watanabe returned to Japan with an intensified interest in the “social question.” His subsequent activities brought Buddhist ethics into practical engagement with welfare and social reform and reflected an emerging conviction that the suffering addressed by Buddhism could not be understood exclusively as an individual or spiritual problem. Watanabe did not become a revolutionary socialist; his approach remained broadly reformist. Yet his work represents an important extension of genseshugi: the “present world” to which Buddhism must respond was increasingly understood as a world structured by poverty, labor, and the disruptive effects of modern industrial capitalism.

Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 (1880–1945) pushed New Buddhist social criticism considerably further. A Zen priest, traveler, and prolific contributor to Shin Bukkyō, Inoue developed a Buddhist critique of war, nationalism, and restrictions upon freedom of thought. His transnational encounters with Buddhist reformers elsewhere in Asia reinforced a conception of Buddhism that exceeded the boundaries of both sect and nation, while his writings increasingly emphasized pacifism and resistance to nationalist ideology. These commitments became especially consequential around the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken 大逆事件) of 1910–1911, when Inoue himself came under suspicion in the widening state campaign against socialists and anarchists. Inoue's significance lies not in the construction of a systematic Buddhist socialism but in demonstrating how the New Buddhist critique of sectarianism and religious authority could develop into criticism of nationalism, militarism, and political repression.

The Fellowship's proximity to the emerging socialist movement was nevertheless real. Its journal provided a forum in which Buddhist reformers and socialists could encounter one another, most notably through contributions and exchanges involving Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦. Yet the relationship remained uneasy. The New Buddhists shared with contemporary socialists dissatisfaction with existing social conditions and a conviction that religion could not remain indifferent to poverty and injustice, but most resisted socialism's materialist foundations and revolutionary implications. The disagreement over Sakai's “pantheistic materialism” therefore represented a broader political as well as philosophical divide: how far could a radically this-worldly Buddhism go before it ceased to be recognizably religious? The Fellowship never arrived at a common answer.

The New Buddhist Fellowship thus occupies an intermediate position in the genealogy of radical Buddhism. It was neither a socialist organization nor simply another movement of Buddhist apologetics. Its members challenged sectarian privilege, rejected government control of religion, subjected inherited Buddhism to free investigation, and insisted that Buddhist faith be enacted within contemporary social life. Some moved further, confronting industrial poverty, nationalism, war, and political repression. In doing so, the New Buddhists helped establish a vocabulary and a field of debate within which later Buddhists could ask a more radical question: if suffering was produced not only by individual ignorance and craving but also by social, economic, and political structures, could Buddhist liberation require the transformation of those structures themselves? Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明, Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, and later Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 would answer that question more explicitly than the New Buddhist Fellowship ever did.

Tanaka Chigaku and Nichirenism

The political possibilities of Buddhist modernism were by no means exclusively progressive. Tanaka Chigaku 田中智学 (1861–1939), founder of the modern Nichirenist movement (Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義), shared several characteristics with other Meiji Buddhist reformers: criticism of established clerical institutions, an emphasis on lay religious activity, rejection of Buddhist passivity, and the conviction that Buddhism must directly address the conditions of modern life. Having abandoned the priesthood, Tanaka created a succession of lay organizations dedicated to reconstructing Nichiren Buddhism, culminating in the Kokuchūkai 国柱会 (Pillar of the Nation Society) in 1914. Yet his this-worldly activism developed in a markedly different political direction from that of progressive New Buddhists. Particularly from the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Tanaka increasingly fused the Lotus Sutra with the ideology of kokutai 国体 (national polity), interpreting Japan as possessing a distinctive religious mission within Asia and ultimately the world. Nichirenism thus illustrates the political ambiguity of Buddhist modernism: the same rejection of clerical conventionalism and demand for an active, socially consequential Buddhism that could contribute to progressive or radical reform could also be joined to nationalism and imperial ideology.

From Buddhist Modernism to Radical Buddhism

Meiji Buddhist modernism did not constitute a single movement, nor did it lead inevitably toward progressive or radical politics. Its significance lay instead in the range of possibilities it opened for reconstructing Buddhism under modern conditions. Inoue Enryō helped establish the legitimacy of criticizing inherited beliefs in the name of reason and modern knowledge; Murakami Senshō subjected Buddhist scripture and doctrine to historical criticism; Kiyozawa Manshi relocated religious authority toward the experience of the individual practitioner; and the New Buddhist Fellowship challenged sectarian privilege while insisting upon free inquiry, this-worldly ethical practice, and the social significance of religion. Tanaka Chigaku's Nichirenism demonstrates the political indeterminacy of these developments: anti-clericalism, lay activism, and an insistence upon Buddhism's relevance to contemporary life could be joined to nationalism and imperial ideology just as they could support criticism of established social and political authority.

Radical Buddhism emerged when some Buddhists carried these modernist critiques beyond the reconstruction of Buddhist belief and practice toward a critique of the structures of society itself. The crucial shift was not simply from “traditional” to “modern” Buddhism, or even from other-worldliness to genseshugi 現世主義 (this-worldliness), but toward the claim that suffering could be produced and reproduced through social, economic, and political institutions. Once that possibility was admitted, Buddhist practice could encompass not only individual ethical or spiritual transformation but also resistance to poverty, inequality, war, imperialism, and other forms of structural domination. Figures such as Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 and Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 began making this move during the late Meiji period, while Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟) would develop it much more systematically in the 1930s. Radical Buddhism thus emerged not through the rejection of Buddhist modernism but through the politicization of possibilities that Buddhist modernism had helped to create.

Selected Literature in English

• Jaffe, Richard M. (2001). Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Moriya Tomoe 守屋友江 (2005). “Social Ethics of ‘New Buddhists’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Suzuki Daisetsu and Inoue Shūten.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 32, no. 2: 283–304.

• Shields, James Mark (2012). “Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945.” In Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism, 105–24. Leiden: Brill/Global Oriental.

• Shields, James Mark (2017). Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Shields, James Mark (2017). “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’.” Japan Review 30: 79–96.

• Stone, Jacqueline I. (2000). “Japanese Lotus Millennialism: From Militant Nationalism to Contemporary Peace Movements.” In Catherine Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases, 261–80. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

• Stone, Jacqueline I. (2003). “‘By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree’: Politics and the Issue of the Ordination Platform in Modern Lay Nichiren.” In Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish, eds., Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, 193–219. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Sueki Fumihiko 末木文美士 (2005). “Building a Platform for Academic Buddhist Studies: Murakami Senshō.” Translated by James Mark Shields. The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 37, nos. 1–2: 8–27.

Selected Literature in Japanese

• Akamatsu Tesshin 赤松徹真 (1989). 「井上秀天の思想――その生涯と平和論及び禅思想」 [The Thought of Inoue Shūten: His Life, Peace Thought, and Zen Thought]. 『龍谷大学論集』 434–35: 517–53.

• Fujita Masakatsu 藤田正勝 and Yasutomi Shin’ya 安富信哉, eds. (2002). 『清沢満之――その人と思想』 [Kiyozawa Manshi: The Man and His Thought]. Kyoto: Hōzōkan.

• Fukushima Eiju 福島栄寿 (2003). 『思想史としての「精神主義」』 [“Seishinshugi” in the History of Thought]. Kyoto: Hōzōkan.

• Moriya Tomoe 守屋友江 (1996). 「近代日本における仏教の自己改革――清沢満之の教団改革運動」 [The Self-Reformation of Buddhism in Modern Japan: Kiyozawa Manshi’s Movement for Institutional Reform]. 『宗教研究』 310: 71–93.

• Ōtani Eiichi 大谷栄一 (2001). 『近代日本の日蓮主義運動』 [The Nichirenist Movement in Modern Japan]. Kyoto: Hōzōkan.

• Yoshinaga Shin’ichi 吉永進一 (2011). 「『新仏教』とは何者か？――『自由討究』と『健全なる信仰』」 [What Is New Buddhism? “Free Investigation” and “Sound Faith”]. In 『近代日本における知識人宗教運動の言説空間――『新佛教』の思想史・文化史的研究』 [The Discursive Space of an Intellectual Religious Movement in Modern Japan: A Study of Shin Bukkyō from the Viewpoint of Intellectual and Cultural History], 27–43. Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, no. 20320016.

How to Cite This Article

Shields, James Mark. “Meiji Buddhist Modernism.” Radical Buddhism Project. Bucknell University. Accessed October 29, 2026.