Editing Uchiyama Gudo (section)

== Ideas ==

Uchiyama was an activist and pamphleteer rather than a systematic theologian; as Brian Victoria observes, he neither claimed nor possessed "special expertise in either Buddhist doctrine or social, political, or economic theory."<ref>Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill, p. 39.</ref> He never wrote a sustained, discursive account of how he reconciled Buddhism with anarchist communism, and his most explicit statement of the link remains his 1904 letter to Heimin Shinbun, in which he cited three canonical Mahāyāna formulas, on universal Buddha-nature (from the ''Nirvana Sūtra''), the non-hierarchical equality of the Dharma (from the ''Diamond Sūtra''), and the Buddha's address to all beings as his children (from the ''Lotus Sūtra''), as the "golden words" on which his socialist convictions rested.<ref>See [[UG04HSL-T]] for the original text, translation, and detailed translation notes.</ref> As the RBP's translation notes to this letter detail, Uchiyama's citation of the ''Nirvana Sūtra'' passage takes a doctrine of universal soteriological equality, developed in response to earlier Buddhist theories that some beings were permanently barred from enlightenment, and applies it directly to material social hierarchy: if every person shares the same ultimate spiritual worth as the emperor, then material hierarchy becomes, on this reading, a kind of spiritual falsehood.<ref>[[UG04HSL-T]], translation notes.</ref> His citation of the ''Lotus Sūtra'' passage is also revealing for what it omits: the source passage begins with the Buddha declaring the "threefold world" to be entirely his own domain, casting himself as a kind of cosmic monarch whose "children" are also his subjects, whereas Uchiyama's version drops this framing entirely, converting a hierarchical image of paternal rule into a flatter image of solidarity among equals.<ref>[[UG04HSL-T]], translation notes.</ref> Fabio Rambelli and James Mark Shields both note that these readings decontextualize passages that, in their original doctrinal settings, concern soteriology and ontology rather than social organization; Rambelli remarks that Uchiyama appears to have chosen these passages "out of context" and re-signified them in a socialist register.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 13.</ref><ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 160–61.</ref> Beyond this letter, Uchiyama's subsequent writings, above all ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' and the unfinished manuscript ''Heibon no Jikaku'' (平凡の自覚, ''The Self-Awareness of the Ordinary Person''), contain very few explicitly Buddhist references and instead develop a this-worldly critique of landlordism, taxation, conscription, and the imperial institution.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 13.</ref>

A partial exception is his short 1908 essay on a contemporary adultery scandal,<ref>[[UG08ITO|「伊藤中將姦通觀」]] <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[UG08ITO-T|A View on Lieutenant General Itō's Adultery]]], 『世界婦人』, no. 21 (1 January 1908): 7. </ref> in which he diagnoses the suffering of all three parties as flowing from a "system of private possession" (私有制度, ''shiyū seido'') that leads people to treat spouses, property, and reputation alike as things to be owned and defended.<ref>Sanada (2016), 『中央学術研究所紀要』45: 31–33, discussing Uchiyama's 「伊藤中將姦通觀」, 『世界婦人』, no. 21 (1 January 1908).</ref> This framing folds directly into the "superstition" (迷信, ''meishin'') analysis discussed below: Uchiyama diagnoses the husband's belief that "a wife is one's own possession" as itself a ''meishin'', the identical term he elsewhere applies to tenant farmers' belief that rent and tax are owed to landlords and the state, or that a country requires a standing army, suggesting he regarded the ideology of marital ownership as continuous with, rather than distinct from, his broader theory of ideological delusion. The essay's own religious vocabulary complicates the secondary-literature reading of it as an extension of specifically Buddhist doctrinal concepts such as attachment (執着) or Dōgen's "grasping, acquisitive mind" (有所得心); neither term appears in the text itself. Instead, Uchiyama frames the deluding "net" of private property using the general Buddhist term for delusion (迷) also central to his "superstition" discussions, while casting liberation from it in explicitly Christian terms — "faith" (信仰), the "Kingdom of Heaven" (天國), and a "gospel" (福音) to be encountered on an evening walk through a graveyard — rather than any standard Buddhist soteriological vocabulary, a further instance of the Buddhist–Christian syncretism that recurs throughout his writing. The essay further articulates, in its counsel to the wronged husband, a version of the "free love" position current among Uchiyama's anarchist and socialist contemporaries: a marriage should last only so long as the partners' mutual affection endures, with any change of affection to be treated as a natural parting rather than grounds for private moral or legal claim. This is a rare instance in which Uchiyama's social criticism is explicitly, rather than merely structurally, keyed to religious vocabulary beyond the 1904 letter's three Buddhist "golden words" — even if that vocabulary turns out to be considerably more eclectic than a purely Buddhist framing would suggest.

A recurring model for Uchiyama's ideal society was the traditional Buddhist monastic saṅgha, whose historical lack of private property he took, partly on the basis of accounts of contemporary Chinese monastic communities, as a real-world precedent for communal living.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 158.</ref><ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 20–21.</ref><ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 79.</ref> ''Heibon no Jikaku'' further posits an immortal "mysterious holy spirit" (fukashigi no seirei 不可思議の聖霊), inherited through the generations, that drives humankind toward an ultimate condition of freedom; while phrased in quasi-religious terms, this "spirit" plausibly functions in the text less as a supernatural entity than as a figure for a shared human longing for liberty and progress.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 80n107.</ref><ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 22–23.</ref>

Worth noting, without overstating its importance, is Uchiyama's treatment of "superstition" (meishin 迷信) in ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei''. Alongside the fatalistic belief that tenant farmers' poverty is karmic retribution for past misdeeds, he grouped two ostensibly secular convictions, that farmers owe rent to landlords and tax to the state, and that a country requires a standing army, treating all three as ideas that serve the interests of a ruling elite. Lajos Brons has suggested that this functions in much the same way as Marx's notion of ideology or Gramsci's notion of hegemony, while noting one point of difference: Uchiyama presents the reinforcement of these ideas as requiring deliberate, continuing effort, by, in his words, "everyone from university professors down to elementary schoolteachers," rather than as the largely spontaneous by-product of elite social dominance that accounts of hegemony typically describe.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 78–80.</ref> Brons further observes that Uchiyama's rejection of karmic fatalism seems to have rested on its ideological function rather than on any explicit commitment to a scientific or naturalist worldview as such.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', p. 80.</ref>

Unlike most of his religiously motivated socialist contemporaries, Uchiyama did not insist on nonviolent means, a point already evident in his December 1907 and January 1908 letters to Ishikawa Sanshirō and Itō Shōshin and repeated in ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'', where he urges readers to be ready to use bombs for the anarchist-communist cause and again denounces the emperor as descended, in his account, not from a god but from a lineage of "murderers and thieves."<ref>See [[UG08ISH-T]] for the postcard to Itō Shōshin.</ref><ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', p. 18.</ref><ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 78, 135.</ref> Shields notes that Uchiyama is, among the modern Japanese Buddhist thinkers most closely associated with radical politics, virtually alone in his open advocacy of revolutionary violence.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 161.</ref> A comparison developed by the Sōtō scholar Ishikawa Rikizan (石川力山) sharpens this point: Uchiyama's near-exact contemporary Takeda Hanshi (武田範之, 1863–1911), also a Sōtō priest, spent the same decades promoting Japanese expansion into Korea, reportedly assisting the 1895 assassination of Korea's Queen Min and later working to merge Korean Wŏnjong Buddhism into the Japanese Sōtō sect in support of annexation; the two men died within months of each other in 1911, one executed as a traitor to the throne and the other mourned as a patriot, and Ishikawa uses the pairing to argue that Japanese Zen's frequently claimed "absolute pacifism" was, on the evidence of its own modern clergy, never more than an untested and largely unexamined ideal.<ref>Ishikawa Rikizan (石川力山) (2019). 「禅の社会性について―― 内山愚童・高木顕明・藤井草宣の生涯を通して」 [On the Social Consciousness of Zen Priests: The Positioning of Takeda Hanshi and Uchiyama Gudō in Modern Buddhist History], 『宗学研究』 61: 173–83.</ref>

Scholars differ on how to weigh the relative contributions of Buddhism, Western anarchism, and indigenous traditions of peasant protest, such as the early Edo-period martyr Sakura Sōgorō, with whom Uchiyama identified from his youth, to his thought.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 154.</ref><ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 29–34.</ref> Rambelli characterizes Uchiyama's outlook as an eclectic, largely unsystematic intellectual "bricolage" combining Buddhist soteriology, Western socialist and anarchist theory transmitted mainly through Kōtoku Shūsui and Peter Kropotkin, Christian eschatological imagery, and the Japanese tradition of righteous, self-sacrificing revolt.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. 29–34.</ref> Sallie B. King, comparing Uchiyama to later twentieth-century Engaged Buddhism, notes that he shared with figures such as the Dalai Lama and A.T. Ariyaratne an emphasis on human equality, poverty alleviation, and a broadly socialist reading of Buddhist doctrine, but that, unlike most Engaged Buddhists, he treated the state itself, rather than merely a particular regime, as the fundamental enemy, and that he never explicitly connected his anarchism to Buddhist doctrine in his own writing.<ref>Rambelli (2013), ''Zen Anarchism'', pp. xxvi–xxvii (King, introduction).</ref>