Editing Japan (section)

== Buddhism in Japan ==

Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and over the following centuries became deeply embedded in the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. By the medieval period, major monasteries and temple networks controlled substantial landholdings and exercised considerable political influence. Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄 famously analyzed religious institutions as one component of the system of powerful elite blocs (''kenmon'' 権門) through which court aristocrats, warriors, and major religious institutions constituted the medieval ruling order. The period also witnessed the development of influential Buddhist movements associated with figures such as Hōnen 法然, Shinran 親鸞, Dōgen 道元, and Nichiren 日蓮. Although some came into conflict with established religious and political authorities, Buddhist institutions generally developed through complex relationships of both autonomy and cooperation with political power rather than sustained opposition to it.<ref>Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄, “The Imperial Law and the Buddhist Law,” trans. Jacqueline I. Stone, ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 23, nos. 3–4 (1996): 271–85; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” 215.</ref> Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), these relationships acquired an extensive administrative form. Through temple registration (''terauke'' 寺請) and hereditary temple-parishioner relationships (''danka'' 檀家), Buddhist temples participated in the registration of households and regulation of religious affiliation while providing funerary and memorial services increasingly central to ordinary religious life.<ref>Tamamuro Fumio 圭室文雄 (2001), “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu's Governance Structure,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 28, nos. 3–4: 261–92.</ref>

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted this institutional settlement. The government-mandated separation of Buddhism and Shinto (''shinbutsu bunri'' 神仏分離) was accompanied in many regions by anti-Buddhist violence and destruction conventionally known as ''haibutsu kishaku'' 廃仏毀釈, stripping Buddhist institutions of much of their former status and property and forcing Buddhist leaders to reconsider the tradition's place within the new nation-state.<ref>Ketelaar, James Edward (1990), ''Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution'' (Princeton University Press); Shields, James Mark (2012), “Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945,” in Roy Starrs, ed., ''Rethinking Japanese Modernism'' (Brill/Global Oriental), 105–24, 108–9.</ref> Responses ranged from renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (''kairitsu'' 戒律), associated with figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照, to participation in government-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (''Daikyō'' 大教) campaign. A subsequent generation of scholar-priests and lay intellectuals—including Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之—engaged modern science, philosophy, historical scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion. Historical-critical scholarship could pose particularly difficult questions for inherited authority: Murakami, for example, became associated with ''Daijō hibussetsuron'' 大乗非仏説論, the thesis that Mahāyāna scriptures were not directly taught by the historical Buddha. Modern Japanese Buddhist thought also intersected increasingly with academic philosophy, including the work of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and the later Kyoto School.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 108–21.</ref>

By the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War, major Buddhist institutions accommodated themselves in varying degrees to the Japanese imperial state and its war effort. The extent and implications of this accommodation became an important subject of postwar Buddhist self-criticism, although sustained institutional reckoning developed only gradually. Ichikawa Hakugen's analysis of Buddhist war responsibility and “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅) became one of the most searching examples of this critique. He examined not only particular instances of wartime collaboration but also the doctrinal, ethical, and institutional tendencies that had facilitated Buddhist accommodation to political authority.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Ives, Christopher (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics'' (University of Hawai‘i Press); Shields (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” 282–84.</ref> These developments form an important counterpoint to the much smaller traditions of progressive and radical Buddhism discussed below.