Editing Uchiyama Gudo (section)

== Biography ==

Uchiyama Gudō was born Uchiyama Keikichi on May 17, 1874, in the village of Ojiya, Niigata Prefecture, the eldest of four children of Naokichi, a carpenter who built shrines and later carved wooden molds for confectionery, and who had earlier trained his son in the family craft of carving Buddhist images and altar fittings.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017). ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan''. Oxford University Press, p. 154.</ref><ref>Rambelli, Fabio (2013). ''Zen Anarchism: The Egalitarian Dharma of Uchiyama Gudō''. Institute of Buddhist Studies & BDK America, p. 3.</ref><ref>Sanada Yoshiaki (眞田芳憲) (2016). 「大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡―禅僧愚童の抵抗の宗教的倫理と責任―」[The High Treason Incident and the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's "Buddhist Socialism": The Religious Ethics and Responsibility of the Priest Gudō's Resistance]. 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 22–23.</ref> An able student, he received a commendation from the prefectural governor on completing elementary school in 1885, and lost his father at sixteen, in 1890, an event one biographer treats as a spur toward the priesthood.<ref>Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill, ch. 3.</ref> He left Ojiya around 1893 and spent roughly four years traveling before his ordination. According to Uchiyama's younger brother,<ref>Yoshida Kyūichi (吉田久一) (1987). 「明治後期の社会思想と哲学館」 [Social Thought in the Late Meiji Period and the Tetsugakukan (Philosophy Academy)], 『井上円了研究』第 5: 41–61.]</ref> he spent part of this time living in the household of the Buddhist reformer Inoue Enryō (井上円了, 1858–1919), who may have been a distant relative of Uchiyama's mother, and studying at Inoue's Philosophy Academy; no independent documentary record of this survives, and Sanada's chronology of Uchiyama's life likewise records the claim only as one of several unverifiable accounts of these years.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 3, reporting a claim originating with Yoshida Kyūichi (see previous note). Compare Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 22, whose year-by-year chronology lists the Inoue Enryō household and, alternatively, travel as far as Korea or China, as competing but equally unconfirmed traditions. The absence of documentation is not by itself strong counter-evidence, particularly given that, after the High Treason Incident, Inoue was among the establishment intellectuals who helped orchestrate a state propaganda campaign distancing Buddhist institutions from executed radicals such as Uchiyama (Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 81), making it highly likely that Inoue would also have destroyed any records of his association with Uchiyama.</ref>

In early 1897 Uchiyama visited a relative of his mother, the priest Aoyanagi Kendō, at the temple Seigen'in in Kanagawa Prefecture; Kendō in turn placed him with his own disciple, Sakazume Kōjū, abbot of the temple Hōzōji, under whom Uchiyama was ordained a Sōtō Zen monk on April 12, 1897.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 3.</ref><ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3.</ref> That October he entered further training at the certified monastic hall of the temple Kaizōji in Kanagawa Prefecture under the Zen master Satō Jitsuei, interrupting this only for roughly six months of coursework at the Sōtō sect's Second Middle School.<ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3.</ref><ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 23–24.</ref> He formally qualified to serve as a temple priest in 1900 and, on 10 October 1901, became the Dharma heir of Miyagi Jitsumyō (宮城実苗), abbot of Rinsenji, a small temple in the Ōhiradai district near the hot-spring resort of Hakone; the following July he received hereditary transmission of the abbot's robe (瑞世 ''zuise'') at the sect's head monastery Eiheiji and took the religious name Gudō.<ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3.</ref><ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 24.</ref> He nursed the ailing Miyagi and managed Rinsenji's affairs in his master's final years, and when Miyagi died in April 1903 Uchiyama succeeded him, being formally installed as abbot on February 9, 1904.<ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3.</ref>

Rinsenji's roughly forty parishioner households were mostly poor tenant farmers and lacquerware artisans working marginal mountain land, in a district that simultaneously attracted wealthy vacationers from Tokyo; Uchiyama, who grew his own vegetables and lived close to subsistence himself, was acutely affected by this disparity.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 3.</ref> From his arrival he ran informal evening classes for local children too poor to attend school regularly, later organizing local youths into a "youth association" (青年組合) built around communal reading of ''Heimin Shinbun'' and its affiliated pamphlet series.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 25, 39–40.</ref> Around 1903 he began reading ''Heimin Shinbun'' (平民新聞), the socialist newspaper founded that year by Kōtoku Shūsui (幸徳秋水, 1871–1911) and others, and in a short letter published in its tenth issue (17 January 1904) he declared that Buddhist teachings on universal Buddha-nature and the equality of the Dharma had led him to socialism; see [[UG04HSL-T|his letter]] and the fuller discussion under [[#Ideas|Ideas]], below.

That September, the Christian anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō (石川三四郎, 1876–1956) visited Rinsenji and on an evening addressed some thirty villagers on cooperative economics and socialism at Uchiyama's invitation, the beginning of what Uchiyama envisioned as a "summer commoners' club" (夏期平民倶楽部) for the district's youth.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 39–40.</ref> Ishikawa returned in May 1906 in the grip of a religious crisis brought on by his involvement in the Yanaka Village anti-pollution protests, and, at Uchiyama's suggestion, sat six days of zazen at Rinsenji; on the final day he experienced what he described as a sudden realization that "the cross was something I had been carrying on my back from the very beginning," to which Uchiyama reportedly responded, "Yes—that's exactly it!" Ishikawa later credited this episode, and Uchiyama's use of Chan verses from the ''Platform Sūtra'' attributed to the patriarchs Shenxiu and Huineng, as formative for the concept of a "numinous light of the void" (虚無の霊光) that he developed several years later while himself imprisoned for press offenses, a debt not registered in the existing English-language scholarship on Uchiyama.<ref>Motegi Keita (茂木恵太) (2016). 「石川三四郎の思想形成と仏教―内山愚童との関係を契機として―」[The Formation of Ishikawa Sanshirō's Thought and Buddhism: Occasioned by His Relationship with Uchiyama Gudō]. 『社学研論集』27: 54–61.</ref> 

Uchiyama met Kōtoku and other radicals from around 1905 and began contributing to their circle, and he carried on a correspondence with Itō Shōshin (伊藤証信, 1876–1963), founder of the devotional "Selfless Love" (無我の愛, Muga no Ai) movement, over the relative merits of religious and political action.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 14–15, 23–25.</ref> Already by New Year's Day 1908, several months before the events that are usually credited with his final radicalization, Uchiyama confided to Itō, in a postcard, his disillusionment with Tolstoyan nonviolent individualism and his emerging willingness to contemplate armed revolt; see [[UG08ISH-T|the full postcard]] and further discussion under [[#Ideas|Ideas]], below. He had struck a similar note a month earlier, in a postcard of December 6, 1907, to Ishikawa Sanshirō, then imprisoned in Sugamo Prison, urging that faith in an "absolute" spiritual truth, rather than politics, was the only durable foundation for social change; that this same conviction, within weeks, curdled into an open endorsement of violence to Itō suggests how quickly Uchiyama's position was hardening in this period.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 37–38, quoting a letter from Kashiwagi Ryūhō (柏木隆法) (1979). 『大逆事件と内山愚童〔資料編〕』. JCA Shuppan, pp. 236–37.</ref> The Red Flag Incident (赤旗事件, Akahata Jiken) of June 1908, in which anarchist demonstrators were arrested in Tokyo for waving red banners inscribed with slogans of anarchism and revolution, confirmed this shift decisively.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 4.</ref> That same year, he installed a small press hidden beneath Rinsenji's main altar and began printing illegal pamphlets, including Japanese translations of two Western anarchist texts and his own tract ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' (無政府共産革命, ''Anarchist Communist Revolution''), of which he distributed between one and two thousand copies to former Heimin Shinbun subscribers.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 4, 7–8.</ref>

In January 1909 Uchiyama left Rinsenji for over a month to tour impoverished villages elsewhere in Kanagawa Prefecture, an absence that scandalized his own parishioners; while visiting Kōtoku Shūsui in Yokohama that same month, in the presence of fellow radicals Sakamoto Seima and Kamikawa Matsu, he made a flippant remark to the effect that assassinating the crown prince, rather than the emperor himself, would be the easier and more shocking course, a jest he apparently repeated to laughter among socialists in Osaka in May; both occasions would later be treated by prosecutors as evidence of murderous intent.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 56–57.</ref> He was arrested at Kōzu Station on May 24, 1909, apparently on his way back from a spring training retreat at Eiheiji, for violating publication laws; police searching Rinsenji discovered the hidden press and a quantity of dynamite. Postwar Japanese scholarship generally treats this dynamite as industrial explosive connected with the nearby construction of the Hakone mountain railway rather than material acquired for revolutionary purposes, though the documentary basis for this account is limited and appears to rest mainly on later, unsubstantiated testimony rather than surviving court records.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 79, follows this account, as does the Sōtō sect's own 1993 rehabilitation statement; see Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3, quoting ''Sōtō Shūhō'', no. 696 (September 1993). Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 4n11, citing Kanzaki Kiyoshi, instead connects the find to construction of a dam in the nearby mountains, a claim not otherwise reflected in the literature consulted for this entry.</ref> Independently of this specific find, however, there is evidence that Uchiyama associated with anarchists who discussed the possible use of explosives, and it was these associations, together with the crown-prince remark, rather than the Rinsenji dynamite as such, that became central to the prosecution's case during the subsequent High Treason Incident. On July 6, 1909, before his conviction, the Sōtō sect ordered him to resign his abbotship. He was convicted on the publication and explosives charges on November 5, 1909, and sentenced to a combined twelve years' imprisonment; on appeal the explosives sentence was reduced, cutting the total to seven years. On June 21, 1910, he was formally stripped of his priestly status by the Sōtō sect.<ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3.</ref><ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 80.</ref>

While he was already serving this sentence, several other radicals, including two more Buddhist priests, Takagi Kenmyō (高木顕明) of the Ōtani branch of Shin Buddhism and Mineo Setsudō (峰尾節堂) of the Rinzai sect, were arrested in connection with a plot by Miyashita Takichi (宮下太吉, 1875–1911) to assassinate the emperor.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 4, 12–17. Some English-language accounts, following Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3, list a fourth priestly co-defendant, "Sasaki Dōgen," alongside Takagi and Mineo; Sanada's detailed, source-referenced treatment of all three priests implicated in the case identifies only Uchiyama, Takagi, and Mineo, and no independent corroboration of a fourth priestly defendant has been located for this entry. The point is flagged here as a probable error in the earlier English-language literature rather than resolved with certainty.</ref> There is no credible evidence that Uchiyama took part in the plot itself, but his pamphlet ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'', with its explicit denial of the emperor's divine descent, was treated by prosecutors as key evidence of his complicity, and in a trial now regarded as substantially rigged, he and twenty-three others were sentenced to death for high treason on January 18, 1911.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 5.</ref><ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 79–80.</ref> Twelve of the sentences, including those of the other two priests, were commuted to life imprisonment the following day; Uchiyama's was not.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 5.</ref> He was hanged at Ichigaya Prison on January 24, 1911, together with ten other defendants (Kanno Sugako was executed the next day). Asked by the attending chaplain, Numanami Seiken, whether he wished to hold a rosary at the end, Uchiyama is reported to have declined, remarking only, with a faint smile, that he was "the kind who won't be saved anyway"; other accounts, relayed through Ishikawa Sanshirō, instead describe him climbing the scaffold serenely and even cheerfully, to the point that the chaplain himself bowed as he passed—an apparent discrepancy that recent Japanese scholarship has left unresolved rather than adjudicated.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 40–41, citing Ishikawa Sanshirō (1956). ''Nami'' [Waves], p. 74. Compare Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3, quoting Yoshida Kyūichi's near-identical account of Uchiyama's composure on the scaffold.</ref>

The government used the Incident and its aftermath to round up and imprison or execute most of the era's prominent radicals, and, with the assistance of the established Buddhist sects and leading intellectuals, it mounted a propaganda campaign in favor of nationalism, militarism, and emperor worship; as a result, no major Buddhist or Christian leader in Japan again publicly opposed government policy until the end of the Pacific War.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 81.</ref> Uchiyama himself was not formally rehabilitated until April 13, 1993, when the Sōtō sect publicly rescinded his expulsion, acknowledged its own complicity in state repression during the early twentieth century, and restored his standing as a priest.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 5.</ref><ref>Victoria (1997), ''Zen at War'', ch. 3, quoting ''Sōtō Shūhō'', nos. 694 and 696 (1993).</ref> In 2005 the sect erected a memorial stele at Rinsenji inscribed with a passage from ''Heibon no Jikaku'' (see [[#Writings|Writings]], below) and pledging its ongoing commitment to human rights, peace, and environmental protection; a second memorial was dedicated in 2013 in his native Ojiya.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 42–43.</ref>