Editing SG31SBU-T (section)

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But can we really expect the established Buddhist sects to summon the courage and determination necessary to rise up for this great movement? I believe that would be as impossible a demand as insisting that a moneylender donate his entire fortune to charity—

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for a wisteria vine that has grown by entwining itself around a pine cannot leave the pine and stand independently.

New wine cannot be poured into old wineskins.<ref>An allusion to the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37–38). Seno’o repurposes the Christian image to argue that a revitalized Buddhism cannot be contained within inherited sectarian institutions.</ref> Unless all the filthy water and mud are first emptied from a putrid old pond, no fresh spring can well up. Indeed, the established Buddhist sects have become like stagnant, putrid water and mud, far too corrupted for a little filtration to satisfy the thirst and deprivation of the masses today. This is precisely why all the established Buddhist sects must be rejected. We must instead return directly to the original wellspring of the Buddha, draw once more upon the ever-flowing fountain of love and truth, and work toward the realization of a society founded upon mutual love among our fellow human beings, communal ownership, and shared prosperity.

The times move ceaselessly forward and culture gradually changes: such is the true character of the cosmos and human life. Buddhism is no exception. Only by continually transforming itself in accordance with the times can it possess eternal value. Consider even the scriptures upon which the present established sects base themselves—the ''Mahāvairocana Sūtra'', the ''Śūraṃgama Sūtra'', the ''Amitābha Sūtra'', the ''Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras'', the ''Lotus Sūtra'', and the other Mahāyāna scriptures. All were scriptures created in response to their respective ages over the course of human cultural development. Their purpose was to revive, within the lives of the masses of their own times, a Buddhism of the past that had already become rigid. It is surely no longer disputable that they were products of Buddhist revival movements. Likewise, the new Buddhist movements that appeared in Japan during the Kamakura period were, in the final analysis, Buddhist revival movements of precisely the same kind.

Today, six hundred and fifty years have already passed since Nichiren, the last of Japan’s Buddhist revivalists. During that time, scholarship has rewritten the history of Śākyamuni, moving him from three thousand years ago to twenty-five hundred years ago. It has corrected the tradition that he renounced household life at nineteen and attained awakening at thirty, replacing it with renunciation at twenty-nine and awakening at thirty-five. The theory that the Mahāyāna scriptures were not directly preached by the Buddha has, through abundant evidence, become an established scholarly position.<ref>The “Mahāyāna Is Not the Buddha’s Teaching” theory (daijō hibussetsuron 大乗非仏説論) holds that the Mahāyāna sutras were composed after the historical Buddha and thus are not direct records of his preaching. Anticipated in the Edo period by Tominaga Nakamoto 富永仲基 (1715–1746) in Shutsujō Kōgo (出定後語, 1745), the position became a major controversy in modern Japanese Buddhist studies through Murakami Senshō 村上専精 (1851–1929), especially his Daijō bussetsuron hihan 大乗仏説論批判, 1901. By Seno’o’s time, the historical development of Mahāyāna literature was widely accepted in academic Buddhist studies. Seno’o turns this historical-critical insight against sectarian orthodoxy: if Buddhist scriptures themselves arose through historical processes of adaptation, fidelity to Buddhism requires renewed adaptation to the conditions of the present.</ref>

Faith must not be blind faith. Living in such an age, we should learn from the spirit in which the founders of the various sects established their teachings. To imagine that loyalty to those founders requires us forever to preserve forms unsuited to the times is, I believe, actually to betray their fervent aspiration to respond to the needs of their own age. Ultimately, it disrupts the Buddha’s original purpose in appearing in this world and constitutes nothing less than an offense that causes Buddhism to lose its value in the world for generations.

Indeed, the entire Buddhist canon constitutes a vast cultural system differentiated from the Buddha’s love and insight—insight into emptiness.<ref>Seno’o here glosses ninshiki 認識 (“cognition,” “recognition,” or “understanding”) with kūkan 空観, the Buddhist “contemplation/insight into emptiness.” His pairing of ai 愛 (“love”) and ninshiki 認識 is characteristic: Buddhist awakening entails both an affective commitment to others and a correct apprehension of reality.</ref> For those who return to the Buddha’s love and insight, there is no longer any reason to cling to the forms of the various sects, whose differences are minor beside their fundamental similarities, or endlessly perpetuate sectarian prejudices of exclusion and self-exaltation.

Young Buddhists! What do the Buddha—and the modern age—expect

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of us?

'''Young Buddhists! Resolutely cast off the shackles of tradition. Return to the Buddha. Return together beneath the Buddha’s great banner! Join hands and spur one another onward; guided by burning love and clear-eyed insight, advance toward the transformation of capitalist society, the fundamental cause of the anxieties of our age! This is the Buddhist revival movement—in name and in reality—required for the salvation of our age, and it must be the one mission entrusted to us.'''

(Shōwa 6 [1931], inaugural April issue of ''Under the Banner of Revitalized Buddhism'')