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=== The Economy Is the Foundation of Life ===
'''B:''' You promised me last month that you would explain the relationship between the Revitalized Buddhist movement and the transformation of the economic system.

'''A:''' Yes. Since launching this new movement, I have become painfully aware that the reason nearly all the comrades who initially joined me but later withdrew did so was the third item in our program: “opposition to capitalism.” This has made me realize all the more clearly that economic problems are the very foundation of human life, and that our thoughts and actions are therefore inevitably conditioned by them. Generally speaking, an edification movement that ignores economic problems is nothing more than a conceptual game. Indeed, I have become even more firmly convinced that any edification movement that does not contribute, directly or indirectly, to advancing the transformation of the present capitalist economic system is nothing less than an opiate-like form of wrongdoing. And surely there is no longer any need to explain that capitalism is a mechanism of selfishness and self-interest that runs counter to the Buddhist spirit.

'''B:''' From the enthusiastic response of the audience at the April 5 inaugural commemorative lecture meeting of the Revitalized Buddhist movement, I too could clearly sense how thoroughly society has become disillusioned with capitalism and with the established Buddhist institutions.

But what about organizations such as the Hope Society and the Cultivation Society, which have recently been conducting very active edification movements? Don’t you think they possess some contemporary value?<ref>Kibōsha 希望社 (“Hope Society”), founded by Gotō Seikō 後藤静香 (1884–1969) in 1918, and Shūyōdan 修養団 (“Self-Cultivation Association”), founded by Hasunuma Monzō 蓮沼門三 (1882–1980) in 1906, were prominent organizations in Japan’s modern moral-edification (kyōka 教化) and self-cultivation (shūyō 修養) movements. Both emphasized personal discipline, service, and social harmony. Seno’o rejects such movements as inadequate responses to structural economic problems, arguing that their emphasis on individual moral cultivation ultimately leaves capitalist relations intact.</ref>

'''A:''' They are both organizations for officially sanctioned edification, and in the end the result is the same. Precisely because they are novel edification movements, they may temporarily attract young men and women and, for that very reason, function all the more effectively as an opiate. Recently, however, I hear that even within the Cultivation Society an anti-capitalist consciousness has gradually begun to emerge. And didn’t the Hope Society recently fall several months behind in paying its employees’ salaries, leading to an employees’ strike and even a lawsuit? As the saying goes, “A hundred days of preaching are undone by a single fart.”<ref>A traditional Japanese proverb: Hyakunichi no seppō, he hitotsu 百日の説法、屁一つ (literally, “A hundred days of preaching, one fart”), meaning that prolonged preaching or painstaking effort can be undone by a single act that renders it ridiculous or ineffective. Seno’o invokes the deliberately coarse expression to suggest that moral edification is rendered futile when the social conditions produced by capitalism remain unchanged.</ref> There is also that amusing saying, “Faith, too, comes from an excess of ''toku''.” Here ''toku'' means “profit.” That one saying alone explains rather well the relationship between economic problems and established edification organizations.<ref>“Faith, too, comes from an excess of toku” plays on the proverb shinjin mo toku no amari 信心も徳の余り, meaning that religious devotion becomes possible only when one has sufficient material ease. Seno’o pointedly interprets toku here in the material sense of profit or economic gain, reinforcing his argument that religious and moral life cannot be separated from economic conditions.</ref>

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