Editing Japan (section)

== Radical Buddhism in Japan ==

The Radical Buddhism Project uses “radical Buddhism” in modern Japan primarily for attempts to bring Buddhist thought and practice into sustained engagement with projects for fundamental social, economic, or political transformation, particularly socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. Radical Buddhism was historically distinct from, although deeply indebted to, the broader currents of Buddhist reform and modernism described above, and its emergence cannot be traced to a single continuous tradition. Premodern revolts should therefore not be understood retrospectively as instances of “radical Buddhism.” They did, however, provide historical memories and symbolic models through which later activists could imagine religiously grounded resistance to established authority. The ''Ikkō-ikki'' 一向一揆 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, brought together religious communities, peasants, local warriors, and other groups associated with the Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū in episodes of armed resistance and regional self-government. Their aims and social composition varied considerably and cannot simply be assimilated to modern socialism or anarchism.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” ''Journal of Religion in Japan'' 5: 3–21, 6–7.</ref>

Of more demonstrable importance to modern radicals were Edo-period narratives of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (''gimin'' 義民), especially village representatives remembered for suffering or dying after petitioning authorities on behalf of oppressed peasants. The semi-legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎 (1605–1653) became an especially powerful exemplar, while Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎 (1793–1837), the Osaka samurai scholar and former official who led an 1837 rebellion during a period of severe famine, provided another model of principled resistance to corrupt authority.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 7–9.</ref> Their significance lies less in direct institutional or doctrinal continuity than in later appropriation. Such figures supplied what Shields describes as “root paradigms” of self-sacrificing resistance through which modern activists could interpret new conflicts involving poverty, capitalism, state authority, and social injustice. Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, for example, explicitly invoked earlier traditions of peasant resistance while articulating a thoroughly modern Buddhist anarchism.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 4–5, 11.</ref> These appropriations did not make the earlier rebels socialists or anarchists retrospectively; rather, they allowed modern radicals to understand their political commitments through indigenous historical resources as well as newly imported ideas.

=== The Eastern Socialist Party ===

One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist and other East Asian concepts was the short-lived Eastern Socialist Party (''Tōyō Shakaitō'' 東洋社会党), founded by Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉 (1850–1922) in May 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was prohibited by the government the following month. Tarui nevertheless continued his efforts to revive it and circulated revised party regulations in January 1883, activity for which he was sentenced to a year in prison.<ref>Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎, ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party] (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930); Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕, “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Ōsaka jiken kenkyū'' 大阪事件研究 5 (July 1986): 14–19; Shields, James Mark (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought in Modern Japan,” in Gereon Kopf, ed., ''The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy'', 255–85, 256–60.</ref>

Tarui's draft party regulations reveal an eclectic attempt to formulate socialism through concepts drawn from Asian religious and ethical traditions rather than simply reproduce contemporary European socialist theory. Its first three principles made “affection” (''shin'ai'' 親愛) the standard of words and actions, affirmed the “equality of self and other” (''jita byōdō'' 自他平等), and identified the “greatest welfare” (''saidai fukuri'' 最大福利) of society as the party's goal. Subsequent provisions proposed measures intended to overcome divisions between rich and poor, including forms of communal ownership.<ref>Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉, “Tōyō Shakaitō tōsoku sōan” 東洋社会党党則草案 [Draft Regulations of the Eastern Socialist Party], in Nihon shakai undō shisō shi 日本社会運動思想史, ed. Itoya Hisao 絲屋寿雄 and Kishimoto Eitarō 岸本英太郎, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1968), 125–29; Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 256–59.</ref>

Whether the Eastern Socialist Party should be regarded as “socialist” in the same sense as the socialist movements that developed in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century has long been debated. Some later commentators emphasized its distance from European socialist theory and situated it instead within the Freedom and People's Rights movement, agrarian demands for economic justice, and older East Asian ethical traditions.<ref>Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎, “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28, no. 3 (1991): 39–42.</ref> For the history of radical Buddhism, however, this ambiguity is itself significant. Tarui's experiment illustrates an enduring problem for later Buddhist socialists: whether socialism should be understood as a largely imported body of political and economic theory to which Buddhism might be added, or whether egalitarian and communal elements within Buddhist and other Asian traditions could themselves provide resources for constructing a distinctively local form of socialism.<ref>Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 255–60.</ref>

=== The New Buddhist Fellowship ===
{{Main|The New Buddhist Fellowship}}

The most sustained collective expression of Meiji Buddhist modernism emerged in the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship), established in 1899 as the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 and renamed in 1903. Its members included Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋, Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭, Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰, Sugimura Sojinkan 杉村楚人冠, and Katō Genchi 加藤玄智, many of whom had studied with figures such as Murakami Senshō and Inoue Enryō. Through their journal, ''Shin Bukkyō'' 新仏教 (New Buddhism), they attacked “old Buddhism” (''kyū Bukkyō'' 旧仏教) as sectarian, ritualistic, superstitious, and institutionally corrupt. Their 1900 declaration called for a “sound Buddhist faith,” free investigation of Buddhism and other religions, the eradication of superstition, freedom from traditional religious institutions and ceremonies, opposition to state interference in religion, and the fundamental reform of society.<ref>“Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration], ''Shin Bukkyō'' 1, no. 1 (July 1900): 3; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 91–100.</ref>

Central to New Buddhism was ''genseshugi'' 現世主義 (this-worldliness), which located the significance of Buddhist practice within present human and social existence rather than another world. Although most New Buddhists rejected revolutionary socialism and materialism, their insistence that Buddhism address contemporary society brought some members increasingly close to the emerging socialist movement. Watanabe developed forms of Buddhist social welfare and mutual aid, while Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 articulated an explicitly Buddhist critique of war, nationalism, and imperial aggression. The New Buddhist Fellowship thus occupied an important intermediate position between Meiji Buddhist modernism and radical Buddhism: it transformed the modernist reconstruction of Buddhist belief into a more explicitly social project without developing a common program for structural political and economic transformation.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 99–128; Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96.</ref>

=== Takagi Kenmyō ===
{{Main|Takagi Kenmyo}}

Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 (1864–1914), a priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in modern Japan to articulate an explicitly socialist Buddhism. In 1899 he became resident priest of Jōsenji 浄泉寺 in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, where encounters with poverty, discrimination against ''burakumin'' 部落民, and social inequality contributed to his involvement with the socialist and antiwar movements. In his 1904 essay “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism], Takagi explicitly distinguished his socialism from that of Marx and contemporary Japanese socialists, grounding it instead in his own Buddhist faith and practice. He understood socialism as a form of ''jissen'' 実践 (practice) beginning with personal spiritual transformation, while interpreting ''Namu Amida Butsu'' 南無阿弥陀仏 and the Pure Land tradition through the ideals of equality, peace, and compassion. Takagi declared Buddhism to be “the mother of the common people and the enemy of the nobility” and described the Pure Land as a realm in which socialism was already practiced. His Buddhist socialism thus joined social reform to the transformation of the practitioner, while providing a religious basis for his opposition to social inequality and the Russo-Japanese War.<ref>Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明, “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism] (1904); Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴 (2012), ''Gokuraku no ninzu: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu'' 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む (Tokyo: Hakutakusha); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 145–52.</ref>

=== Uchiyama Gudō ===
{{Main|Uchiyama Gudo}}

Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 (1874–1911), a Sōtō Zen priest and abbot of Rinsenji 林泉寺 near Hakone, developed one of the most explicitly anarchist forms of radical Buddhism in Meiji Japan. Explaining his embrace of socialism, Uchiyama recalled that as a Buddhist missionary he taught that all beings possess buddha-nature, that within the Dharma there is equality without high or low, and that all beings are children of the Buddha; he came to see these teachings as fundamentally compatible with socialism. His radicalism joined this Buddhist egalitarianism to a critique of private property, economic inequality, imperial authority, and militarism. Unlike Takagi Kenmyō, whose Buddhist socialism remained largely reformist, Uchiyama increasingly identified the social and political structures producing inequality as themselves objects of transformation. Using a clandestine printing press at Rinsenji, he produced and circulated socialist and anarchist writings calling upon ordinary people to free themselves from the political, economic, and religious beliefs sustaining the existing social order.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 153–62; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki: Zensō Gudō no teikō no shūkyōteki rinri to sekinin” 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 Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities: The Religious Ethics and Responsibility of Gudō's Resistance], ''Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 中央学術研究所紀要 45: 2–61, 20–21.</ref>

Uchiyama was arrested in May 1909 for violating publication laws after police discovered his clandestine printing operation at Rinsenji; during their search, police claimed to have found materials for making explosives. Already imprisoned, he was subsequently implicated in the High Treason Incident (''Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆事件), convicted of participating in the alleged conspiracy against Emperor Meiji, and executed on January 24, 1911. Although Uchiyama advocated revolutionary change and did not categorically reject violence, the extent of his involvement in an actual assassination plot remains disputed. The Sōtō establishment stripped him of his clerical status in 1910 and strongly repudiated his ideas; in 1993 the denomination reversed its earlier action and restored his status, acknowledging that its treatment of Uchiyama had reflected the sect's alignment with the emperor-centered political establishment.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 153–56; Sanada (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō,” 32–39; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2018), ''“Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō'' 〈大逆事件〉と禅僧内山愚童の抵抗 (Tokyo: Kōsei Shuppansha).</ref>

=== From the High Treason Incident to the YLRB ===

The High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 marked a severe rupture in the development of explicitly radical Buddhism in Japan. The execution of Uchiyama Gudō and imprisonment of Takagi Kenmyō formed part of a broader suppression of socialist and anarchist activity, making open attempts to combine Buddhism with revolutionary socialism or anarchism exceptionally difficult. Buddhist social experimentation nevertheless continued in less overtly political forms. Itō Shōshin 伊藤証信 (1876–1963), for example, developed the ideal of ''muga-ai'' 無我愛 (selfless love), combining religious and ethical transformation, pacifism, and communal social practice while deliberately distinguishing his movement from socialism. His Muga-ai movement, begun in 1905, survived the repression of the late Meiji period and reemerged during the Taishō era alongside other experiments in Buddhist, Tolstoyan, agrarian, and communal reform.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 163–80; Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books), 77–80.</ref>

The relative openness of the Taishō period (1912–1926) nevertheless transformed the context in which Buddhist social thought operated. Socialist ideas circulated more widely, while Buddhist thinkers confronted questions of poverty, capitalism, labor, and the social responsibilities of religion. There was no continuous “radical Buddhist” movement linking the Meiji radicals to their successors: responses ranged from anti-socialist apologetics to social welfare, utopian experiments, and selective engagement with socialism and Marxism. Seno'o Girō's emergence from the quite different world of reformist and nationalist Nichiren Buddhism illustrates both this discontinuity and the persistence of the underlying social questions. By 1926 he was criticizing nationalist readings of Nichiren, and by 1929 he was arguing that a revitalized Nichirenism must stand with the public and engage the socialist struggle against capitalism. These developments prepared the ground for the founding of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟) in 1931.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 181–205, 213–16.</ref>

=== Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism ===
{{Main|Senoo Giro}}
{{Main|Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism}}

Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) emerged from the reformist but strongly nationalist Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義 movement before moving increasingly toward socialism during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, his encounters with poverty and social conflict, criticism of established Buddhist institutions, and engagement with socialist and Marxist thought had led him to identify capitalism itself as a major source of suffering. On April 5, 1931, Seno'o and a small group of young activists founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Rejecting existing Buddhist sects as corrupt and capitalism as incompatible with the Buddhist spirit, the League sought to create a Buddha land in this world through the conjunction of individual ethical transformation and fundamental social reform.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2012), “A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 39, no. 2: 333–51; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 203–43.</ref>

The YLRB developed into a nationwide movement whose increasingly socialist and internationalist program joined Buddhist reform to labor, tenant, antiwar, and antifascist activism. Seno'o combined structural criticism of capitalism with an insistence upon ethical transformation, arguing that Buddhism must confront the material and institutional causes of suffering without reducing liberation to economic change alone. This combination made the YLRB the most sustained attempt in prewar Japan to construct an organized radical Buddhist movement. It also brought the League under increasing police scrutiny. Seno'o was arrested in December 1936 under the Peace Preservation Law and publicly recanted his former political position in 1937; a nationwide roundup later that year effectively destroyed the organization.<ref>Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎, “Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō” 社会変革途上の新興仏教 [Revitalized Buddhism on the Road to Social Transformation] (1933), repr. in ''Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū'' 妹尾義郎宗教論集 (1975), 325–88; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 203–43; [Matsune/state sources for repression].</ref>

=== Ichikawa Hakugen ===
{{Main|Ichikawa Hakugen}}

A different form of radical Buddhist critique emerged after Japan's defeat in 1945 in the work of the Rinzai Zen priest and scholar Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986). Having himself participated in the intellectual world of wartime Japanese Zen, Ichikawa devoted much of his postwar work to examining Buddhism's responsibility for Japanese militarism and imperialism. Rather than explaining Buddhist support for the war simply through state coercion or individual failure, he asked how Buddhist doctrines, institutions, and historical relations with political authority had facilitated accommodation with established power. His critique focused especially on “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅), while also recovering suppressed currents of Buddhist socialism represented by figures such as Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō.<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); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), [pages].</ref>

Ichikawa's critique was also reconstructive. Drawing upon socialism, Marxism, anarchism, and postwar peace activism, he sought forms of Buddhism capable of resisting rather than sanctifying established power and insisted that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny when they served to naturalize hierarchy or obscure injustice. This combination of social criticism and Buddhist self-criticism also anticipates important concerns of the later movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教), although the relationship is better understood as a critical affinity than as a direct intellectual succession.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen, “Nihon ni okeru Bukkyō shakaishugi no mondai” 日本における仏教社会主義の問題 [The Problem of Buddhist Socialism in Japan], repr. in ''Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū'' 市川白弦著作集, vol. 3, ''Bukkyō no sensō sekinin'' 仏教の戦争責任 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1993), [pages]; Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>

=== Critical Buddhism ===
{{Main|Critical Buddhism}}

A later form of radical Buddhist self-criticism emerged in the 1980s around the Sōtō scholars Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗. The movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教) subjected influential strands of East Asian Buddhist thought—particularly ''tathāgatagarbha'' (buddha-nature) and ''hongaku'' 本覚 (original enlightenment) thought—to sustained criticism. Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that doctrines positing an underlying, universal ground of enlightenment departed from the critical, relational, and non-substantialist dimensions of Buddhist teaching and might contribute to forms of social accommodation rather than resistance. Hakamaya captured the movement's provocative stance in the proposition that “Buddhism is criticism” (''Bukkyō wa hihan de aru'' 仏教は批判である). Critical Buddhism was neither a continuation of prewar Buddhist socialism and anarchism nor a reproduction of Ichikawa Hakugen's political project. Nevertheless, its insistence that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to criticism—and its concern that appeals to harmony, nonduality, and original enlightenment could obscure discrimination and social injustice—places it within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese Buddhist self-criticism.<ref>Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭, ''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教 [Critical Buddhism] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1990); Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗, ''Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan'' 縁起と空――如来蔵思想批判 [Dependent Origination and Emptiness: A Critique of Tathāgatagarbha Thought] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1989); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>

=== The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan ===

Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party disappeared almost immediately; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to state repression; and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was dismantled in 1937. Nor did these movements establish an enduring institutional lineage after 1945. Their historical significance lies instead in recurrent attempts to ask whether Buddhist teachings could provide resources not merely for individual ethical reform or social welfare but for fundamental criticism and transformation of existing political and economic structures.

One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma, arguing that Japanese socialism emerged from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents rather than from a widely shared Buddhist social idiom. Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement remained minority currents within the prewar left. Totten's comparison highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960), “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma,” ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2, no. 3: 293–304, 295–96, 302–3.</ref>

The forms that relationship took varied considerably. Tarui Tōkichi drew upon Buddhist and other Asian ethical concepts in formulating an indigenous socialism; Takagi derived socialism from Jōdo Shinshū faith; Uchiyama brought Buddhist equality into conversation with anarchist communism; and Seno'o combined Buddhist ethical transformation with increasingly Marxist social analysis. Ichikawa Hakugen subsequently turned radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself, while Critical Buddhism extended this self-critical impulse in a different, primarily doctrinal direction. These projects constitute neither a single tradition nor variations on a common political ideology. Rather, they represent historically distinct efforts to rethink the relationship between Buddhism, power, equality, and social transformation.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>