Editing Japan (section)

=== 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>