Editing SG31SBU-T (section)

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It hardly needs saying that the established Buddhist sects today are utterly empty, moribund institutions, completely disconnected from the lives of the masses. Indeed, they are not merely moribund institutions. Is it not an undeniable fact before our very eyes that they have actually become links in the chain of the exploiting classes, playing a one-hundred-percent opiate role and thereby compounding their guilt?<ref>Seno’o’s characterization of established religion as “opiate-like” (阿片的) deliberately invokes the socialist critique of religion as a means of reconciling the oppressed to existing social conditions. The expression recalls Marx’s famous characterization of religion as “the opium of the people,” though Seno’o’s immediate target is not religion or Buddhism as such, but institutional Buddhism functioning in support of class domination.</ref>

We remember reading in the ''Miyako Shimbun'' that an abbot of Zōjōji once proposed, as a fundamental solution to the increasingly acute conflict between labor and capital, that “workers should be made to understand the principle of karmic retribution and thereby attain peace of mind.”<ref>Zōjōji 増上寺 in Shiba, Tokyo, is a major Jōdo-shū (Pure Land) temple and historically served as a funerary temple of the Tokugawa shogunal family. According to a report in the Miyako Shimbun, one of its abbots advocated teaching workers the principle of “karmic retribution” (inga ōhō 因果応報) as a means of resolving worsening labor-capital conflict. Seno’o condemns such appeals to karma as a distortion of Buddhist teaching that encourages workers to understand poverty and inequality as consequences of individual karma rather than as social conditions subject to collective transformation.</ref> More recently, we heard of a certain religious figure in Osaka who donned beautiful priestly robes and spent a day making the rounds of a slum, admonishing the many poor people there who could scarcely obtain a piece of bread: “Free yourselves from material desire, and there you will find peace of mind.” Were we to go on, there would be no end to the examples confirming the mistaken diagnosis and topsy-turvy thinking of contemporary Buddhists.

But consider this: what was our teacher, the Buddha, actually like? How vastly different from the attitude of the established Buddhist sects was his call to break down class distinctions and establish equality among the four castes!<ref>Shisei 四姓 (“four castes/classes”) is the conventional East Asian Buddhist rendering of the four varṇa: brahmin, kṣatriya, vaiśya, and śūdra. Modern Japanese Buddhists frequently invoked the Buddha’s rejection of hereditary status distinctions as evidence of Buddhism’s fundamentally egalitarian character. Seno’o radicalizes this familiar claim by juxtaposing Buddhist equality with modern class hierarchy.</ref> Or consider the life of equality and self-governance in which all shared alike from a single alms bowl. What does such a life suggest to people today?

Consider, then, what inevitable fate awaits, now and into the future, the established Buddhist sects that have so completely betrayed and run counter to the true spirit of the Buddha. And consider how young Buddhists, whose defining characteristic should be their yearning for truth and love,

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ought to act toward such established sects. Yes, these are matters that should by now lie beyond debate. '''There is only one answer: “Their destruction as quickly as possible, and a movement toward that end.” Is this not the mission entrusted to serious young Buddhists who seek once again to bring Buddhism to life in the modern age?'''