Editing Japan (section)

== Buddhism in Japan ==

Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and, over the following centuries, became closely interwoven with both the imperial court and successive ruling elites. By the Heian and Kamakura periods (794–1333), major temple complexes had evolved into powerful landholding institutions, functioning, in the analysis of Kuroda Toshio (黒田俊雄), as one of several elite factions (''kenmon'') that jointly constituted the ruling order alongside the court aristocracy and the warrior class.<ref>Shields (2016), "Opium Eaters", p. 215.</ref> The Kamakura period also saw the emergence of the great popular sectarian movements, Pure Land (浄土 ''Jōdo''), True Pure Land (浄土真宗 ''Jōdo Shinshū''), Zen, and Nichiren (日蓮) Buddhism, several of which would later furnish vocabularies and precedents for socially engaged and even insurrectionary forms of Buddhist practice discussed below. Despite a handful of dramatic exceptions, such as Oda Nobunaga's (織田信長) 1571 destruction of the Enryakuji (延暦寺) temple complex on Mount Hiei, the dominant historical relationship between the sangha and the Japanese state was one of symbiosis rather than either fusion (as in [[Tibet]]) or sustained antagonism: temples retained considerable autonomy over their own internal affairs while providing ritual and ideological support, including funerary and family-registry services, for the ruling authorities.<ref>Shields (2016), "Opium Eaters", pp. 215–216.</ref>

This symbiosis reached its most administratively complete form under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), when, despite the regime's own sympathies with Neo-Confucianism, the parish (檀家 ''danka'') temple registration system made Buddhist institutions into a de facto arm of state surveillance and, in effect, established Buddhism as the country's civil religion.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2012). "Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945". In: Starrs, Roy (Ed.), ''Rethinking Japanese Modernism'': 105–124. Brill/Global Oriental, p. 108.</ref> The Meiji Restoration of 1868 shattered this arrangement almost overnight. Framed by its architects less as a "restoration" than as a wholesale invention of a modern nation-state centered on the emperor, the new government briefly promoted a policy of "throw away the Buddha and abolish Śākyamuni" (''haibutsu kishaku''), under which the number of Buddhist temples fell from roughly 450,000 to some 70,000 and the number of ordained priests from about 75,000 to under 20,000 within a few years.<ref>Shields (2012), "Awakening between Science", p. 108, citing Davis, Winston (1992). ''Japanese Religion and Society: Paradigms of Structure and Change''. SUNY Press, p. 161.</ref> Persecution proper ended by 1873, but Buddhist leaders remained under sustained pressure to prove the tradition's compatibility with a nationalist, modernizing Japan, prompting Buddhist priests such as Fukuda Gyōkai (福田行誡) and Shaku Unshō (釈雲照) to launch the ''kairitsu'' (戒律, precepts) reform movement, an attempt to rehabilitate Buddhism's public image through a renewed emphasis on monastic discipline and, more ambivalently, through active participation in state-sponsored nationalist campaigns such as the Great Teaching (大教 ''Daikyō'') movement of the 1870s.<ref>Shields (2012), "Awakening between Science", pp. 108–109.</ref>

A subsequent generation of scholar-priests, 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), modeled their reformist efforts less on the ''kairitsu'' movement than on the secular "Civilization and Enlightenment" movement (文明開化 ''bunmei kaika'') associated with Fukuzawa Yukichi (福沢諭吉), seeking to "modernize" Buddhist doctrine and apologetics along scientific, historicist, and ethical lines without going so far as to abandon the tradition outright.<ref>Shields (2012), "Awakening between Science", pp. 109–111.</ref> One influential strand of this so-called "Buddhist Enlightenment," associated above all with Murakami Senshō and known pejoratively as ''Daijō hibussetsuron'' (大乗非仏説論, "the theory that Mahāyāna is not the true teaching of the Buddha"), applied historical-critical method to argue that much of Mahāyāna doctrine represented a later accretion rather than the Buddha's original teaching, provoking sustained controversy within the established sects.<ref>Shields (2012), "Awakening between Science", pp. 111–113.</ref> A related but philosophically distinct modernist current emerged from Nishida Kitarō's (西田幾多郎) Kyoto School, which grounded a specifically aesthetic and existentialist interpretation of Zen in the concept of "pure experience" (純粋経験 ''junsui keiken'') and, in Nishida's later writings on ''basho'' (場所, "place"), came to furnish, however unintentionally, a philosophical vocabulary that was mobilized in support of wartime Japanese ultranationalism.<ref>Shields (2012), "Awakening between Science", pp. 117–121.</ref>

Institutional Buddhism's accommodation with Japanese imperialism deepened through the Fifteen Years' War (1931–1945). D. T. Suzuki (鈴木大拙) himself would later argue that Zen had "sustained" the wartime military classes both morally, through its injunction never to look back once a course of action is decided, and philosophically, through its indifference to life and death.<ref>Suzuki, Daisetsu (1970). ''Zen and Japanese Culture''. Princeton University Press, p. 61; cited in Shields, James Mark (2023). "A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan". In: Scott, Robert H., & McRae, James (Eds.), ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'': 281–304. State University of New York Press, p. 282.</ref> In the immediate postwar period, the major sects faced little internal reckoning with this record, and it was this silence, more than any single doctrinal dispute, that would provide the immediate context both for the postwar critique associated with [[Ichikawa Hakugen]] and, a generation later, for the "Critical Buddhism" movement (see below). Since 1945, Buddhist institutions in Japan have continued to combine widespread ritual and funerary functions with a much-diminished public role, alongside the continued growth of lay new religious movements with roots in Nichiren Buddhism, such as Sōka Gakkai (創価学会) and Risshō Kōseikai (立正佼成会).