Editing Meiji Buddhist Modernism (section)

== The New Buddhist Fellowship ==

=== From the Keiikai to New Buddhism ===

The most sustained collective expression of Meiji Buddhist modernism emerged around the group eventually known as the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship). Its immediate precursor was the Keiikai 経緯会 (Warp and Woof Society), founded in 1894 by Furukawa Isamu 古河勇 (also known as Rōsen 老川). Following Furukawa's early death, several younger Buddhist intellectuals established the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 (Buddhist Puritan Fellowship) in February 1899; in 1903 the organization adopted the name Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai. The Fellowship consisted of a relatively small circle of young scholars, journalists, educators, and activists, many of whom had studied with prominent Buddhist modernists such as Murakami Senshō and Inoue Enryō. Leading members included Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋 (1871–1933), Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), Sugimura Jūō 杉村縦横 (1872–1945), Katō Genchi 加藤玄智 (1873–1965), and Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰 (1875–1949). Although several had received clerical training, the movement was strongly lay-oriented and deliberately distanced itself from the authority of the established Buddhist sects.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96, 81–83; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'', [pages].</ref>

The New Buddhists did not claim simply to recover an untouched or “original” Buddhism. The adjective “new” was important: Buddhism was understood as a living tradition capable of reconstruction in response to contemporary knowledge and social conditions. Their journal, ''Shin Bukkyō'' 新仏教 (New Buddhism), became the principal forum for this project, bringing Buddhist reform into conversation with philosophy, science, ethics, literature, and contemporary social thought. In this respect the Fellowship inherited central concerns of the preceding generation of Buddhist modernists while giving them a more explicitly collective and public form. Buddhism was neither to retreat into the monastery nor to become merely a private faith; it was to operate within the intellectual and social life of modern Japan.<ref>Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” 81–83.</ref>

=== Against “Old Buddhism” ===

The New Buddhists defined themselves polemically against what they called “old Buddhism” (''kyū Bukkyō'' 旧仏教). Their 1900 manifesto portrayed established Buddhism as corrupted by sectarian prejudice, ritualism, superstition, institutional privilege, and attachment to temples and clerical authority. Its rhetoric could be deliberately provocative: if Buddhism consisted merely in worshipping statues and scriptures, obeying priests, chanting, manipulating prayer beads, and defending one's sect, the manifesto suggested, it had ceased to constitute a living faith. This critique drew upon an older discourse of “degenerate Buddhism” (''daraku Bukkyō'' 堕落仏教), previously employed by Confucian and Shinto critics and increasingly internalized by Buddhist modernists such as Inoue Enryō. The New Buddhists, however, pushed the critique toward a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of what counted as Buddhist religious life.<ref>“Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration], ''Shin Bukkyō'' 1, no. 1 (July 1900): 3; Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” 83–84.</ref>

Their “Statement of General Principles” (''kōryō'' 綱領) condensed the reform program into six commitments: the cultivation of a “sound faith”; the fundamental reform of society; free investigation of Buddhism and other religions; the eradication of superstition; rejection of the necessity of traditional religious institutions and ceremonies; and opposition to government interference in or preferential treatment of religion. Taken together, these principles reveal why New Buddhism cannot be reduced either to rationalist Buddhist apologetics or to the privatization of religion. The Fellowship sought simultaneously to free Buddhism from sectarian and state authority and to make religious practice more fully relevant to social life. Its members rejected state-sponsored religion, but they did not conclude that religion should therefore be confined to an autonomous private sphere. Their alternative was a Buddhism at once rational, ethical, this-worldly, and social.<ref>“Sengen,” ''Shin Bukkyō'' 1, no. 1 (July 1900); Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” 83–84.</ref>

=== ''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 the foundation upon which the “Buddhism of the future” could be continuously reconstructed and purified, while Tanaka rendered 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 thus functioned less as a narrowly metaphysical doctrine than as a means of dissolving rigid boundaries between sacred and secular and locating religious value within the world itself.<ref>Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋, ''Shin Bukkyō'' 2, no. 9 (August 1901): 325; Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96, 85–86.</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 faith” (''kenzen naru shinkō'' 健全なる信仰), 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 supernaturalism, 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 figures such as Inoue Enryō and Murakami Senshō while directing them more explicitly toward lived social existence.<ref>Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” 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 vagueness and 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 unity or interaction of matter and mind (''busshin no ichinyo'' 物心の一如; ''busshin no ittai'' 物心の一体), 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 what they regarded as the “vulgar materialism” of the radical left. Later radical Buddhists would repeatedly confront this same problem: whether Buddhism and socialism could be joined without either subordinating Buddhist thought to materialism or retreating from structural criticism of the social world.<ref>Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” 85–87.</ref>

=== From Social Buddhism toward Radicalism ===

The social implications of New Buddhism varied considerably among members of the Fellowship. For Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), this-worldly Buddhism developed especially through engagement with poverty, social welfare, and the human consequences of industrialization. A Jōdo-shū priest and Buddhist scholar who spent roughly a decade studying Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies in Germany, Watanabe returned to Japan with an intensified interest in the “social question.” His subsequent activities brought Buddhist ethics into practical engagement with welfare and social reform and reflected an emerging conviction that the suffering addressed by Buddhism could not be understood exclusively as an individual or spiritual problem. Watanabe did not become a revolutionary socialist; his approach remained broadly reformist. Yet his work represents an important extension of ''genseshugi'': the “present world” to which Buddhism must respond was increasingly understood as a world structured by poverty, labor, and the disruptive effects of modern industrial capitalism.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'', [pages]; Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books), 76–77.</ref>

Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 (1880–1945) pushed New Buddhist social criticism considerably further. A Zen priest, traveler, and prolific contributor to ''Shin Bukkyō'', Inoue developed a Buddhist critique of war, nationalism, and restrictions upon freedom of thought. His transnational encounters with Buddhist reformers elsewhere in Asia reinforced a conception of Buddhism that exceeded the boundaries of both sect and nation, while his writings increasingly emphasized pacifism and resistance to nationalist ideology. These commitments became especially consequential around the High Treason Incident (''Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆事件) of 1910–1911, when Inoue himself came under suspicion in the widening state campaign against socialists and anarchists. Inoue's significance lies not in the construction of a systematic Buddhist socialism but in demonstrating how the New Buddhist critique of sectarianism and religious authority could develop into criticism of nationalism, militarism, and political repression.<ref>Moriya Tomoe 守屋友江 (2005), “Social Ethics of ‘New Buddhists’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Suzuki Daisetsu and Inoue Shūten,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 32, no. 2: 283–304; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref>

The Fellowship's proximity to the emerging socialist movement was nevertheless real. Its journal provided a forum in which Buddhist reformers and socialists could encounter one another, most notably through contributions and exchanges involving Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦. Yet the relationship remained uneasy. The New Buddhists shared with contemporary socialists dissatisfaction with existing social conditions and a conviction that religion could not remain indifferent to poverty and injustice, but most resisted socialism's materialist foundations and revolutionary implications. The disagreement over Sakai's “pantheistic materialism” therefore represented a broader political as well as philosophical divide: how far could a radically this-worldly Buddhism go before it ceased to be recognizably religious? The Fellowship never arrived at a common answer.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96, 85–87; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref>

The New Buddhist Fellowship thus occupies an intermediate position in the genealogy of radical Buddhism. It was neither a socialist organization nor simply another movement of Buddhist apologetics. Its members challenged sectarian privilege, rejected government control of religion, subjected inherited Buddhism to free investigation, and insisted that Buddhist faith be enacted within contemporary social life. Some moved further, confronting industrial poverty, nationalism, war, and political repression. In doing so, the New Buddhists helped establish a vocabulary and a field of debate within which later Buddhists could ask a more radical question: if suffering was produced not only by individual ignorance and craving but also by social, economic, and political structures, could Buddhist liberation require the transformation of those structures themselves? Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明, Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, and later Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 would answer that question more explicitly than the New Buddhist Fellowship ever did.