Editing Japan (section)

== Radical Buddhism in Japan ==

The Radical Buddhism Project treats twentieth-century Japanese "radical Buddhism," the deliberate fusion of Buddhist doctrine with anarchism, socialism, or Marxism, as historically distinct from, if indebted to, the broader current of Meiji Buddhist reform described above. Three overlapping sets of precedent are relevant to its emergence: older domestic traditions of religiously inflected peasant protest; an abortive but instructive early attempt to found an explicitly "Buddhist" socialist party in the 1880s; and the more immediate, self-consciously "modernist" Buddhist reform movements of the 1890s and early 1900s.

Among the peasant precedents, the ''ikkō-ikki'' (一向一揆) revolts of the Muromachi period (1336–1573), in which farmers, monks, and some nobles rose against samurai rule under the banner of Amida Buddha and Jōdo Shinshū teaching, provided an early template for collective, religiously legitimated resistance to secular authority.<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, pp. 6–7.</ref> Even more influential for later radicals was the Edo-period tradition of the martyred peasant representative (義民 ''gimin''), exemplified by the semi-legendary farmer Sakura Sōgorō (佐倉惣五郎, 1605–1653) and by the samurai scholar-rebel Ōshio Heihachirō (大塩平八郎, 1793–1837), whose 1837 uprising in Osaka, inspired by Wang Yangming Neo-Confucianism, combined an appeal to imperial and shogunal ideals of "benevolent government" with an explicit call to redistribute the wealth of merchants and officials to the poor.<ref>Shields (2016), "Peasant Revolts", pp. 7–9.</ref> Shields argues that these narratives, whatever their outcome, functioned as "root paradigms" that later Buddhist socialists and anarchists, including [[Uchiyama Gudo|Uchiyama Gudō]], consciously invoked as models of principled, self-sacrificing resistance to illegitimate authority.<ref>Shields (2016), "Peasant Revolts", pp. 4–5, 11.</ref>

=== The Eastern Socialist Party (1882) ===

The earliest attempt to fuse Buddhist vocabulary explicitly with a socialist political program, predating the New Buddhist Fellowship discussed below by nearly two decades, was the short-lived Eastern (or Oriental) Socialist Party (東洋社会党 ''Tōyō Shakaitō'', 1882), founded by the pan-Asianist activist Tarui Tōkichi (樽井藤吉, 1850–1922). Suppressed by the government within months of its founding, the party's draft regulations nonetheless framed its socialist principles, "sincere love," the "equality of self and other" (自他平等 ''jita byōdō''), and "the greatest welfare for the general public", in avowedly Buddhist and Daoist terms, invoking the Lotus Sutra's image of a single "rain" of the Dharma falling equally on all beings and describing party members as "children of the Buddha" (仏子 ''busshi'') with a special compassionate mandate toward the poor.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2014). "Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan". ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15.2: 205–223, pp. 206–208.</ref> As the historian Akamatsu Katsumaro (赤松克麿) later observed, the party "was not based on Western socialism [but rather] espoused a peculiar socialist blend of traditional Asian Buddhism and Taoism," and most subsequent socialists and scholars have judged Tarui's movement to fall short of "actual" socialism owing to its lack of sophisticated economic analysis and its heavy reliance on traditional religious idiom, an assessment that nonetheless established, at the very outset of the modern Japanese left, the recurring tension between indigenizing socialism in Buddhist terms and satisfying the doctrinal expectations of secular Marxists.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 208–209.</ref>

=== Meiji Buddhist modernism ===
{{Main|Meiji New Buddhism}}

The second, more moderate precedent current, Meiji Buddhist modernism proper, produced organizations considerably more cautious than later radical Buddhism but which nonetheless established a "this-worldly," socially engaged reading of the Dharma on which later figures would draw. The short-lived Warp and Woof Society (経緯会 ''Keiikai'', 1894–1899), founded by the young Buddhist reformer Furukawa Isamu (古河勇, also known by his art-name Rōsen 老川), and its successor, the New Buddhist Fellowship (新仏教同志会 ''Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai'', 1899–1915; known in its earliest years as the Buddhist Puritan Fellowship, 仏教清徒同志会), rejected both the "old Buddhism" of ritual and institutional privilege and any straightforward state sponsorship of religion, advocating instead the "free investigation" of Buddhism and other faiths, the destruction of superstition, and a "sound faith" grounded, in the words of co-founder Sakaino Kōyō (境野黄洋), in an explicitly "pantheistic" this-worldliness (現世主義 ''genseshugi'').<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017). "Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the 'Religious Secular'". ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96, pp. 6–10.</ref> The term itself is usually credited to fellow founding member Tanaka Jiroku (田中治六, 1869–?), who grounded it in Inoue Enryō's realist metaphysics.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, pp. 75–76.</ref> Fellow founding member Watanabe Kaikyoku (渡辺海旭, 1872–1933), a priest who had studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, and Pāli in Germany for a decade, extended this this-worldly orientation into an early social-democratic critique of the human costs of industrial capitalism, while the widely traveled Inoue Shūten (井上秀天, 1880–1945), the Fellowship's most radical member, emerged from encounters with Dharmapāla, [[Taixu]], and [[Uchiyama Gudo|Uchiyama Gudō]] as a committed pacifist opposed to Japanese imperial war.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 76–77.</ref> Although the New Buddhists' own political engagement rarely went beyond mild protest and journalism, and they explicitly distanced themselves from Marxist "materialism," their insistence that authentic Buddhist faith entailed active, this-worldly engagement with poverty and injustice, and their willingness to collaborate with contemporary socialists such as Sakai Toshihiko (堺利彦), mark them as important forerunners of the more thoroughgoing Buddhist socialism of the 1920s and 1930s.<ref>Shields (2017), "Immanent Frames", pp. 8–10.</ref>

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

The first sustained fusion of Buddhist doctrine with explicitly revolutionary politics, rather than reformist social engagement, emerged only in the final years of the Meiji period, in the person of the Ōtani-branch Shin Buddhist priest Takagi Kenmyō (高木顕明, 1864–1914). Appointed head priest of Jōsenji (浄泉寺) in Wakayama Prefecture in 1899, Takagi ministered to a parish composed largely of ''burakumin'' (部落民) parishioners, whose combined experience of caste discrimination and economic hardship drove his turn toward socialist activism.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 210–211.</ref> In his unpublished 1904 essay ''Yo ga shakaishugi'' (余が社会主義, "My Socialism"), Takagi grounded his politics not in Marxist materialism, which he explicitly disavowed alongside the more secular and anti-religious socialism of Kōtoku Shūsui (幸徳秋水) and Sakai Toshihiko, but in the Shin Buddhist doctrine of ''tariki'' (他力, Other-power) and the ''nembutsu'' (念仏) invocation of Amida Buddha, arguing that "the Land of Bliss is the place in which socialism is truly practiced" and that genuine faith required a "revolution of thought" (''shisō no kaiten'') expressed through concrete social welfare.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 211–215.</ref> On this basis he condemned Japan's war with Russia, denounced fellow clergy who blessed soldiers with promises of rebirth in the Pure Land, and declared Buddhism to be "the mother of the common people and the enemy of the nobility."<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 213–215.</ref> Charged with complicity in the fabricated conspiracy prosecution known as the High Treason Incident (大逆事件 ''Taigyaku jiken'', 1910–1911) alongside [[Uchiyama Gudo|Uchiyama Gudō]] and the Rinzai priest Mineo Setsudō (峰尾節堂), Takagi had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment; defrocked by his sect on the date of his sentencing, he died by apparent suicide in prison in 1914.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", p. 211.</ref> Higashi Honganji (東本願寺) formally rehabilitated him only in 1996, going so far as to credit him with a guiding role in the sect's subsequent social-reform efforts.

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

Uchiyama Gudō (内山愚童, 1874–1911), abbot of the small Sōtō Zen temple Rinsenji (林泉寺) near Hakone, ran a clandestine printing press beneath his temple's altar, through which he distributed Japanese translations of Western anarchist writings and his own tract ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' (無政府共産革命, ''Anarchist Communist Revolution'', 1908), grounding an anarchist-communist program directly in the Buddhist doctrines of universal Buddha-nature and the equality of the Dharma. Both this tract and his ''Heibon no jikaku'' (平凡の自覚, "Ordinary Self-Awakening") return repeatedly to the compound motto ''anraku jiyū'' (安楽自由), "comfort and freedom", which Uchiyama treats as both a Buddhist existential awakening and a Western-style political liberty, and he further modeled his anarcho-communism on what he took to be the simple, communal life of the early Chinese Chan sangha.<ref>Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill, pp. 40–41; Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 219–220.</ref> Convicted on publication and explosives charges in 1909, he was drawn into the High Treason Incident the following year and executed in 1911 at the age of thirty-six. He remains unusual among Buddhist radicals of his era for his open advocacy of revolutionary violence, and the Sōtō sect did not formally rehabilitate him until 1993.

In the immediate aftermath of the High Treason Incident, socialist and anarchist sympathies within Japanese Buddhism did not disappear, but they largely went underground, resurfacing, if at all, in depoliticized or euphemistic form. Itō Shōshin (伊藤証信, 1876–1963), a correspondent of Uchiyama's, abandoned the term "socialism" altogether in favor of ''muga-ai'' (無我愛), "selfless love," a doctrine blending Buddhism, pacifism, and a residual social concern that carefully avoided any open association with the revolutionary left.<ref>Shields, Against Harmony, 172–77, cited in Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, p. 80.</ref> A similar retreat into an apolitical, Tolstoyan agrarian utopianism characterizes the Nichiren-affiliated poet Miyazawa Kenji (宮沢賢治, 1896–1933), now remembered chiefly for his fiction and verse rather than for any social program.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 80–81.</ref> It was against this quiescent background that Seno'o Girō would reintroduce an explicitly political Buddhist socialism two decades later.

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

The most theoretically developed and organizationally sustained experiment in prewar Japanese Buddhist socialism was led by the lay Nichiren activist Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎, 1889–1961), who broke over the course of the 1920s with the nationalist Nichirenshugi movement of Tanaka Chigaku (田中智学) and Honda Nisshō (本多日生) and turned instead toward Marxism and anti-fascist internationalism. In April 1931 Seno'o founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei (新興仏教青年同盟, Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism), which argued that Buddhism, properly understood, was atheistic, materialist, and revolutionary, and which fused a reinterpreted Buddhist Three Refuges with an explicit commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-militarist politics.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 293–296.</ref> The League became one of the few explicitly Buddhist participants in the mid-1930s popular front movement, joining Katō Kanjū's (加藤勘十) Proletarian Party of Japan (日本無産党 ''Nihon Musantō'') in 1936, before its suppression by the state in 1936–1937, following Seno'o's arrest and forced political recantation (転向 ''tenkō'').<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 296–297.</ref> Seno'o's fusion of Buddhism and Marxism was distinctive in insisting that the two were not merely compatible but coextensive: "the process of liberating the oppressed from suffering is nothing other than Buddhist awakening."<ref>Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎, 『妹尾義郎宗教論集』[Seno'o Girō's Collected Writings on Religion] (Tokyo: Daizō 大蔵出版, 1975), p. 253, translated in Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", p. 298.</ref>

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

Writing in the postwar period, the Rinzai Zen priest and philosopher Ichikawa Hakugen (市川白弦, 1902–1986) became the foremost internal critic of what he termed "Imperial-Way Zen" (皇道禅 ''kōdō Zen''), the wartime alignment of Japanese Zen institutions, and of Nishida-school philosophy, with state militarism and emperor-centered ideology. A professor at Hanazono University in Kyoto, Ichikawa devoted much of his postwar career to documenting Buddhist institutional complicity in Japanese imperialism, including his own wartime compromises, while developing a systematic "Buddhist-Anarchist-Communism" that grounded anarchist politics and communist economics in the Prajñāpāramitā concept of emptiness (空 ''kū''). In his major study ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' (『仏教徒の戦争責任』, ''The War Responsibility of Buddhists'', 1970), Ichikawa isolated twelve specific doctrinal and cultural factors that he held responsible for hindering the emergence of a fully developed Japanese Buddhist socialism, including the traditionally close, mutually supportive relations between Buddhism and the state, the doctrine of karma as a rationalization of social inequality, Confucian-derived ethics of hierarchy and harmony, the doctrine of no-self as an obstacle to reflection on rights and justice, the Buddhist self-identification as the "Middle Way," which he held had fostered a conformist, compromising disposition ill-suited to political dissent, and the Zen and Pure Land privileging of "peace of mind" (安心 ''anshin'') over justice.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen (市川白弦) (1970). 『仏教徒の戦争責任』 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists]. Shunjūsha, pp. 150–154; see also Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 209–210; Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", p. 284; Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, p. 155.</ref> Shields groups these twelve factors into two broad categories, deeply embedded features of Japanese and East Asian culture more generally (such as institutional conservatism and ancestor worship), and specifically Mahāyāna doctrines subject to a wide range of interpretation, and argues, against a purely doctrinal reading of Buddhist wartime complicity, that the former category bears the greater share of responsibility, since doctrine always remains open to reinterpretation in a way that deeply ingrained cultural practice does not.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", p. 210.</ref> Ichikawa's work remains the central reference point for postwar Japanese Buddhist self-criticism and directly prefigures, both in method and in target, the "Critical Buddhism" movement discussed below.

=== Critical Buddhism ===

Although chronologically and institutionally distinct from the prewar radicals discussed above, "Critical Buddhism" (批判仏教 ''hihan Bukkyō'') represents the most theoretically ambitious postwar development of the same underlying project, an attempt to hold Buddhist doctrine accountable to standards of social justice, and is treated by the Radical Buddhism Project as a direct intellectual heir to this earlier tradition. The movement was launched in the late 1980s by two Sōtō Zen-affiliated scholars, Hakamaya Noriaki (袴谷憲昭) and Matsumoto Shirō (松本史朗), whose work was galvanized in part by a 1979 incident in which Machida Muneo (町田宗夫), then secretary-general of the Sōtō sect, publicly denied that any social discrimination existed in Japan, in direct response to a draft World Conference on Religion and Peace statement of concern for the ''burakumin''.<ref>Shields (2011). ''Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought''. Ashgate, p. 1.</ref> Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that authentic Buddhism was, at its core, ''critica'', a commitment to rational, discriminating analysis rooted in the doctrine of dependent origination (''pratītya-samutpāda''), and that this criticalism had been progressively displaced across the history of East Asian Buddhism, and above all within Zen, by ''topica'', an aesthetic monism of harmony, holism, and "original enlightenment" (本覚 ''hongaku'') thought that the Critical Buddhists trace to the controversial doctrine of the womb or matrix of Buddhahood (''tathāgatagarbha'').<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 283–285.</ref> On this basis, they mounted a sweeping and highly polemical attack on prominent modern Japanese thinkers, including D. T. Suzuki, Nishida Kitarō, and Nishitani Keiji (西谷啓治) of the Kyoto School, and even on their own Sōtō sect, arguing that Zen's ethical failures during the wartime period were less an aberration than the natural culmination of ''topica''s neglect of critical, discriminating ethics.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 282–283.</ref> Scholars including Paul Swanson have distinguished three levels at which the Critical Buddhist analysis of Zen operates: a Buddhological critique of the historical misuse of doctrines such as Buddha-nature; a sectarian critique of Sōtō Zen's own departure from the teachings of its founder, Dōgen (道元, 1200–1253); and a social critique linking both to Buddhist institutional apathy or collaboration under Japanese wartime nationalism.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", p. 283.</ref>

Although Critical Buddhism has no direct organizational lineage to the prewar Buddhist socialists and anarchists discussed above, Shields argues that it belongs to a recognizable genealogy of "critical" Japanese Buddhism stretching back through the New Buddhist Fellowship and, especially, Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, both of which anticipated the Critical Buddhists' rejection of "topicalist" harmony and quietism, if from an explicitly socialist rather than a primarily doctrinal or philosophical standpoint.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 286, 297–298.</ref> Critics have nonetheless noted the limitations of Critical Buddhism as a vehicle for radical social critique in its own right: unlike Seno'o or the New Buddhists, Hakamaya and Matsumoto offer little sustained analysis of political economy, and Shields has proposed supplementing their "criticalism" with the historical-materialist ideology critique of Karl Mannheim and Karl Marx, and with the Nichiren-derived utopian tradition running from Tarui Tōkichi through Seno'o Girō, in order to give Critical Buddhism's largely individualistic, liberal-humanist framework a more thoroughly structural or "materialist" account of Buddhist social praxis.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2014). "From Topos to Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, and Ideology Criticism". In: Kalmanson, Leah, & Shields, James Mark (Eds.), ''Buddhist Responses to Globalization'': 51–77. Lexington Books, pp. 63–72.</ref>

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

The comparative political scientist George O. Totten, writing in 1960, offered an early and still-instructive explanation for why prewar Japanese radical Buddhism remained comparatively marginal by contrast with, for instance, the avowedly Buddhist socialism of the Burmese Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League: whereas Burmese socialists were, in his formulation, "nationalists first and socialists second," reconciling an already unifying national faith with imported Marxist categories, Japanese socialists had been "socialists first and nationalists second" from the movement's 1890s origins, arriving at their social consciousness through a variety of competing and often mutually hostile paths (Christian, secular-Marxist, and Buddhist) that left the movement chronically fragmented by schism rather than unified around a shared religious idiom.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2.3: 293–304, pp. 295–296.</ref> Totten further notes that early Japanese Marxist theorists such as the Communist theoretician Sano Manabu (佐野学) explicitly regarded religion as a private affair to be dissolved rather than harnessed, while such attempts as were made to bridge Buddhism and Marxism, for instance by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi's (三木清) circle around the journal ''Shinkō Kagaku no Hata no Moto ni'' (新興科学の旗のもとに, "Under the Banner of the New Science") and by the Youth League itself, remained a minority position within the broader prewar Japanese left.<ref>Totten (1960), "Buddhism and Socialism", pp. 302–303.</ref> Together with Ichikawa Hakugen's later, structurally similar critique, this comparative account underscores a recurring theme of the Radical Buddhism Project's Japan entries: that Japanese radical Buddhism arose less from any inherent affinity between Buddhist doctrine and left-wing politics than from the deliberate, always contested, and frequently short-lived efforts of individual monastics and lay activists to force such an affinity into being against the weight of institutional conservatism and rival, secular currents on the Japanese left.

The broader legacy of prewar radical Buddhism in Japan is, in consequence, more often one of rupture than continuity: the High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 and the suppression of the Youth League in 1936–1937 together account for the near-total absence of any organized Buddhist political dissent in Japan between the early 1910s and 1945. Postwar developments, including Ichikawa's critique of wartime complicity, the participation of some Buddhist clergy in the antiwar Beheiren (ベ平連) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of Critical Buddhism, and the Marxist social-policy scholar [[Kohashi Shoichi|Kōhashi Shōichi]]'s (孝橋正一) 1968 attempt to rehabilitate the Youth League's Buddhist socialism from outside Buddhist institutions altogether, as an unrealized dialectical synthesis of Buddhist compassion and social-scientific method, are best understood as a delayed reckoning with, rather than a direct organizational continuation of, this earlier radical tradition.