Editing Uchiyama Gudo (section)

== Ideas ==

=== Buddhist Equality and Socialism ===

Uchiyama's earliest surviving explanation of his socialism was explicitly Buddhist. In a letter published in the ''Heimin Shinbun'' 平民新聞 on 17 January 1904, he recalled teaching, as a Buddhist missionary, that “all sentient beings possess buddha-nature,” that “within this Dharma there is equality, with neither superior nor inferior,” and that “all sentient beings are my children.” Taking these “golden words” as the basis of his faith, he wrote, he discovered that they were “in complete agreement with the principles of socialism.”<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, 「予は如何にして社会主義者となりし乎」, ''Heimin Shinbun'' 平民新聞, no. 10 (17 January 1904); [[UG04HSL-T|English translation]].</ref> Buddhism supplied Uchiyama not merely with a general ethic of compassion but with a religious language through which existing distinctions of status and wealth could be challenged. The argument is significant, however, precisely because Uchiyama's later anarchism did not simply reproduce it. His writings of 1908 increasingly analyzed inequality in terms of property, exploitation, government, taxation, militarism, and imperial authority rather than deriving a political program directly from buddha-nature or other Buddhist doctrines.<ref>Fabio Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism: The Egalitarian Dharma of Uchiyama Gudō'' (Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies and BDK America, 2013), 13; James Mark Shields, ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 160–61.</ref> The explicitly Buddhist socialism of 1904 should therefore be understood as an important point of departure rather than a complete statement of Uchiyama's mature political thought.

=== Institutional Buddhism and Buddhist Vocation ===

Uchiyama's growing radicalism was accompanied by an increasingly severe critique of institutional Buddhism, but not, at first, by an abandonment of Buddhist vocation. In a letter to Itō Shōshin 伊藤証信 in early November 1905, written shortly after Itō withdrew from institutional Shin Buddhism, Uchiyama denounced the teaching emanating from the Sōtō head temple as “false Dharma” (''gihō'' 偽法) issuing from a “den of demons” (''makutsu'' 魔窟). Yet he explained that he would remain at Rinsenji. Although the surrounding community had been affiliated with Sōtō Zen for some three hundred years, its people scarcely knew even the name of Dōgen; to abandon them, Uchiyama wrote, would make it impossible to “plant the Buddha-seed” (''busshu o ueru'' 仏種を植ゆる) there.<ref>Kashiwagi Ryūhō 柏木隆法, ''Taigyaku jiken to Uchiyama Gudō'' 大逆事件と内山愚童 (Tokyo: JCA Shuppan, 1979), 230.</ref> A memorandum addressed to Rinsenji parish representatives on 1 February 1906 gives this commitment an institutional dimension. Uchiyama criticized a temple system in which parishioners fulfilled customary financial obligations while priests supplied ritual services in return, and sought instead to make the relationship between priest and parishioners one of genuine Buddhist teaching and practice.<ref>Kashiwagi, ''Taigyaku jiken to Uchiyama Gudō'', 226–27.</ref> These writings reveal an important feature of Uchiyama's early radicalism: his rejection of Buddhist institutional authority could coexist with a strong sense of responsibility toward a local Buddhist community.

=== Religion and Revolution ===

By late 1907 and early 1908, Uchiyama was reconsidering the relationship between religious conviction and political transformation. In a postcard to the imprisoned socialist Ishikawa Sanshirō 石川三四郎 dated 6 December 1907, he imagined a future in which people would live according to their own “absolute faith” (''zettai no shinkō'' 絶対の信仰) without the need for politics, and described hastening the arrival of such a world as his own mission.<ref>Kashiwagi, ''Taigyaku jiken to Uchiyama Gudō'', 236–37; see also Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism'', 15–16.</ref>

Less than a month later, however, a New Year's postcard to Itō Shōshin records what Uchiyama himself called a change in his thinking. Dissatisfied with religionists who claimed to side with the weak and unconvinced by Tolstoyan individualism, he declared his desire to create a society in which no one stood above another and openly contemplated whether the necessary weapon would be “a bomb or a pistol.” Government itself, he argued, rested upon violence; religionists genuinely committed to creating the “Kingdom of Heaven” (''tengoku'' 天国) would therefore have to overthrow it. In one of his most striking formulations, “The hand that fingers the prayer beads must always carry a bomb as well.”<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, postcard to Itō Shōshin, 1 January 1908, [[UG08ISH-T|English translation]]; Kashiwagi, ''Taigyaku jiken to Uchiyama Gudō'', [page to verify].</ref> This turn did not amount simply to replacing religion with revolutionary politics. The postcard combines a rejection of conventional religious activism with explicitly religious imagery and concludes with Uchiyama wondering what he should take up in place of the sutras he was “casting aside.” His political radicalization is better understood as a crisis and transformation in his conception of religious action: religious conviction remained important even as he came to regard conventional religious practice as politically powerless.

=== Anarchist Communism, “Superstition,” and Violence ===

Uchiyama's most developed political program appears in Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei 無政府共産革命 (Anarchist Communist Revolution), a pamphlet clandestinely printed in late October 1908. Addressed particularly to tenant farmers, it advocates common ownership of land and wealth, abolition of taxation and military conscription, organization of workers, rejection of the emperor's divine ancestry, and ultimately the elimination of government. It identifies states as a principal cause of war and combines the gradual organization and awakening of workers with an explicit willingness to employ revolutionary violence.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, ''Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan kakumei—naze kosakunō no seikatsu wa konna ni kurushii ka'' 入獄記念・無政府共産革命――なぜ小作農の生活はこんなに苦しいか (1908), translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''; Shields, ''Against Harmony'', 156–60.</ref> The pamphlet also attacks the ideological mechanisms by which inequality is naturalized. Uchiyama dismisses as “superstition” (''meishin'' 迷信) the claim that tenant farmers suffer poverty because of karmic retribution from previous lives.<ref>Uchiyama, ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'', translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''.</ref> In his 1908 essay on a contemporary adultery scandal, he similarly identifies the belief that one's wife is one's possession as a ''meishin'', locating marital possession within a broader “system of private possession” (''shiyū seido'' 私有制度).<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, 「伊藤中將姦通觀」, ''Sekai Fujin'' 世界婦人, no. 21 (1 January 1908): 7; [[UG08ITO-T|English translation]].</ref> “Superstition” thus becomes a recurring term through which Uchiyama challenges beliefs that present contingent relations of property, hierarchy, and domination as natural or necessary.

This critique extended beyond particular “superstitions” to the ideological foundations of social and political authority. In his clandestine edition of ''Museifushugi dōtoku hininron'' 無政府主義道徳否認論 (Anarchism and the Repudiation of Morals), an adaptation of Ōishi Seinosuke's translation of a work by Max Baginski, declarations added to the covers proclaim that “property is theft” and that the state and law protect stolen property, followed by the striking assertion that “morality and religion serve as the head clerks of thieves.” Other declarations attack hierarchical education, submission to government, and representative government itself. Religion here appears not simply as false belief but as part of the social machinery through which property and authority are maintained.<ref>[Sanada citation here; perhaps Kashiwagi as well.]</ref>Yet ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' contains relatively little explicit Buddhist doctrine. Its arguments are primarily social, economic, anti-militarist, and anti-statist rather than an attempt to deduce anarchist communism directly from Buddhist teachings.<ref>Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism'', 13; Shields, ''Against Harmony'', 156–61.</ref> The distinction is important: the Buddhist language of equality prominent in Uchiyama's 1904 socialism remained part of his intellectual formation, but his mature anarchist program drew upon a wider and increasingly eclectic range of political and religious resources.

=== Self-Awakening and Principled Action ===

Not all of Uchiyama's surviving writings fit neatly into a progression toward increasingly militant anarchism. The unfinished ''Heibon no jikaku'' 平凡の自覚 (The Self-Awakening of the Ordinary Person), whose date of composition remains uncertain, makes ''jikaku'' 自覚 (self-awakening or self-awareness) the basis of social transformation. Awareness expands from the individual through family, work and agriculture, locality, nation, and ultimately the world. The manuscript also invokes an “inconceivable holy spirit” (''fukashigi no seirei'' 不可思議の聖霊), illustrating the eclectic religious vocabulary that increasingly characterized Uchiyama's thought.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, ''Heibon no jikaku'' 平凡の自覚, translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism'', 22–23 and translation; Shields, ''Against Harmony'', 160–63.</ref>

Its date remains unresolved. Morinaga Eizaburō places it before the Red Flag Incident of June 1908, whereas Yoshida Kyūichi regards it as the culminating expression of Uchiyama's thought; Rambelli likewise argues on internal grounds for a relatively late composition. Sanada Yoshiaki, however, traces its governing idea to Uchiyama's January 1904 writings and draws attention to the manuscript's absence of the explicitly anarchist terminology and advocacy of violence prominent in Uchiyama's writings of 1908.<ref>Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism'', [pages for dating discussion]; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲, 「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」, ''Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 中央学術研究所紀要 45 (2016): 2–61, [specific pages to verify].</ref> The surviving evidence therefore does not permit a secure date.

A securely dated prison manuscript, ''Gokuchū shuki'' 獄中手記 (Prison Notes), written on 26 October 1909, provides a clearer view of Uchiyama's later thought. Rather than concentrating on revolutionary violence, it returns to economic inequality, moral principle, self-sacrifice, and the conditions of a dignified life. Uchiyama calls for concrete improvements in workers' lives—including a ten-hour working day, a weekly day of rest, adequate clothing, medical care, leisure, and the opportunity to practice religion—and asks what it means to act according to one's principles even at the cost of imprisonment or death.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, ''Gokuchū shuki'' 獄中手記, 26 October 1909, translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''.</ref> His exemplars are strikingly heterogeneous: Śākyamuni, Diogenes, Jesus Christ, Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎, and Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎. What joins them is neither a single religious tradition nor a common political doctrine, but principled action and willingness to sacrifice personal security for a larger good. Uchiyama describes the ability to live in accordance with such principles, even in the face of the scaffold, crucifixion, or imprisonment, as “happiness in life” (''jinsei no kōfuku'' 人生の幸福). The surviving manuscript ends just as he asks what “method” (''hōhō'' 方法) might make such a life possible.<ref>Uchiyama, ''Gokuchū shuki'', translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''.</ref>

Taken together, Uchiyama's writings resist reduction to a single system of “Buddhist anarchism.” Buddhist equality provided an early foundation for his socialism; criticism of institutional Buddhism coexisted with a continuing Buddhist vocation; revolutionary anarchism led him to accept political violence; and his later surviving reflections returned to self-awakening, economic justice, religious practice, and principled self-sacrifice. His radicalism developed through the shifting relationship among these concerns rather than through the simple replacement of Buddhism by secular anarchism.