Editing The New Buddhist Fellowship (section)

== ''Genseshugi'', Pantheism, and “Sound Faith” ==

At the center of the New Buddhists' attempt to reconstruct Buddhism was ''genseshugi'' 現世主義 (this-worldliness), an insistence that the significance of religion be sought within the conditions of present existence rather than in another world. Associated particularly with Sakaino Kōyō and Tanaka Jiroku 田中治六 (1869–?), ''genseshugi'' did not simply reject traditional Buddhist cosmology in favor of secular materialism. Rather, it relocated Buddhist religious meaning within the world of ordinary human life, ethical relations, and society. This orientation was closely connected with the New Buddhists' attraction to “pantheism” (''hanshinron'' 汎神論). Sakaino proposed a pantheistic worldview as a foundation for New Buddhism, while Tanaka expressed its immanent logic through a deliberate adaptation of the ''Heart Sutra'': “everything is divine and divinity is everything” (''issai soku kami, kami soku issai'' 一切即神、神即一切). Pantheism offered the New Buddhists a way to affirm religious significance within the present world without appealing to a transcendent realm separate from ordinary existence.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 103–107; Sakaino Kōyō (境野黄洋) (1901). 『新仏教』 2.9 (August 1901): 325. <!-- article title needed --></ref>

This this-worldliness did not entail the abandonment of religion. On the contrary, the first of the Fellowship's general principles called for a “sound Buddhist faith,” and New Buddhist writers repeatedly resisted the assumption that rational criticism must culminate in unbelief. Their project instead joined religious commitment to free inquiry, modern science, and ethics. The resulting Buddhism was “secular” only in a qualified sense: the New Buddhists rejected superstition, clerical privilege, and the confinement of religious truth within inherited institutions, but they also resisted the privatization of religion. Religious life was to be realized within the same social world investigated by science, ethics, and political thought. In this respect, ''genseshugi'' carried forward the rationalizing and critical impulses of Meiji Buddhist modernism while directing them more explicitly toward lived social existence.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 99–111; Shields, James Mark (2017). “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’”. ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96.</ref>

The limits of this synthesis became particularly visible in the New Buddhists' exchanges with the socialist Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦 (1871–1933), an occasional contributor to ''Shin Bukkyō''. Sakai pressed their pantheism toward what he called “pantheistic materialism” (''yuibutsuteki hanshinron'' 唯物的汎神論), questioning what he regarded as the inconsistency of their refusal to adopt a more thoroughgoing materialist position. The New Buddhists resisted this move. They sought instead to account for what they described as the mysterious workings of matter and mind (''busshin no myōyō'' 物心の妙用), preserving a religious dimension that could not be reduced to materialism. The exchange marks an important boundary within Meiji Buddhist modernism. The New Buddhists could embrace this-worldliness, rational inquiry, social reform, and dialogue with socialism while rejecting the materialism they associated with the radical left. Later radical Buddhists would confront the boundary differently, attempting to combine Buddhist ethical and religious commitments with increasingly structural analyses of society.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 105–107.</ref>