Editing SG31SBU-T (section)

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It goes without saying that the Pure Land of Tranquil Light sought by people today is not something to be found after death, but here in this actual life.<ref>Jakkōdo 寂光土, more fully jōjakkōdo 常寂光土 (“Land of Eternally Tranquil Light”), is the highest Buddha-land in Tiantai/Tendai cosmology and became especially important in the Nichiren tradition. Seno’o characteristically relocates the Buddha-land from a transcendent or postmortem realm to the material conditions of present human life.</ref> And peace in our present lives is impossible if economic life is ignored. Nor does it need further explanation that the oppression and anxiety of our present society, now visibly at an impasse, are clearly rooted in the capitalist economic system.

Just look at the results of idealistic campaigns for moral edification that ignore this problem. Day after day: tightening public discipline; day after day: “guiding” thought; day after day: total mobilization for moral instruction. How enormous the efforts the ruling classes have poured into such campaigns over the past several years! Some years ago they were even graced with the so-called Imperial Rescript on the Promotion of the National Spirit, and with educators in the vanguard they launched a furious campaign resembling a coordinated barrage.<ref>The Imperial Rescript on the Promotion of the National Spirit (Kokumin Seishin Sakkō ni Kansuru Chōsho 国民精神作興ニ関スル詔書) was issued on November 10, 1923, in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Calling for frugality, moral discipline, and loyalty to the imperial state amid mounting social unrest, it became an important reference point for official campaigns of moral edification (kyōka undō 教化運動) during the 1920s. Seno’o invokes the Rescript as an example of state-sponsored “spiritual” reform that sought to address social disorder through moral discipline rather than structural economic change.</ref> But look at the results! Is it not a fact that decadence—“''ero, guro, nansensu''” [erotic, grotesque, nonsense]—and the leftist thought they so fear have instead spread with the force of a tsunami?<ref>Ero, guro, nansensu (“erotic, grotesque, nonsense”) was a popular early-Shōwa expression for forms of mass culture associated with sexuality, sensationalism, absurdity, and urban decadence. Conservative critics frequently treated such phenomena as symptoms of moral and social disorder.</ref>

At this, religious figures seized their opportunity and began shouting triumphantly that the fundamental reason these efforts had failed was an education that ignored religion. And so the call for religion has come to be loudly proclaimed throughout official and private circles alike. But look again! What must not be overlooked is the inner reality of the religious world itself. A vulgarity surpassing even the vulgar! Given the reality of these utterly corrupt established Buddhist sects, what shamelessness!

And yet they would presume to peddle the authority and supposed efficacy of religious movements just as they are—

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What, after all, does temple Buddhism bow its head before? The Buddha? No, no! In truth, does it not bow before its wealthy parishioners?

Money! Money—yes, money! While fully aware that they themselves cannot live or preach without bowing down before money and material things—that is, before a capitalism centered on profit and the omnipotence of material wealth—they nevertheless seek to force upon others a “spiritual life” that despises material things, together with some dubious state of religious bliss. If this is not brazen hypocrisy, where today could one possibly find a more perfect specimen of it?

That said, of course, we do not intend simply to condemn religious figures for their dependence on material things. Precisely here we must acknowledge one inescapable fact of human life. That is not the point of our criticism. What we condemn is their unjust attitude: despite this reality, they ignore and despise the suffering of the masses who struggle for material necessities; they seek, through purely idealistic preaching, to lead the masses away from material concerns; they compel them to endure their immediate deprivation; and all the while they smugly expound an opiate-like, establishment religion convenient for the small ruling class that suffers no material want.

It was twenty-seven years after the Buddha’s awakening. One day, one of his leading disciples tried to raise the spirits of a young man suffering from hunger by preaching to him about the greatness of spiritual strength. Seeing this, the Buddha admonished the disciple and had him quickly bring the young man a bowl of food.<ref>Seno’o alludes to a story preserved in the Dhammapada-aṭṭhakathā (commentary on Dhammapada 203; cf. the Chinese Chuyao jing 出曜経, Taishō vol. 4, no. 212). Twenty-seven years after his awakening, the Buddha encounters a hungry farmer who has spent the day searching for a lost ox and refuses to preach to him until he has been fed. The episode is associated with the verse Jighacchā paramā rogā (“Hunger is the greatest illness”; Dhammapada 203). Seno’o adapts the story—his version makes the hungry man a “young man” and has a senior disciple exhort him on the power of the spirit—to ground his materialist argument in Buddhist tradition: immediate physical needs cannot simply be subordinated to moral or spiritual exhortation.</ref>

The Buddha’s teaching was never meant to remain a merely idealistic movement. Food for the hungry, clothing for the cold: beginning from the recognition of life’s impermanence, did he not perceive the eternal precisely within a life of mutual love and trust, of coexistence and shared prosperity? “Truth is concrete.”<ref>The dictum “truth is concrete” echoes a formulation prominent in Marxist and Leninist dialectical thought. Its appearance here encapsulates Seno’o’s insistence that Buddhist truth must be realized in material and social practice rather than abstract doctrine.</ref> The spirit of the Buddha could never have resided in some empty palace of abstractions.

When we turn, then, to the present capitalist economic system, do we not find an utterly antisocial system that forces our fellow human beings into a struggle for private gain and consequently subjects the lives of the masses to constant insecurity? In the end, it is a system that betrays and runs counter to the spirit of the Buddha. Its transformation is therefore an urgent problem before our very eyes—one in which sincere seekers of the Way must take the lead.