Editing Japan (section)

=== Uchiyama Gudo ===
{{Main|Uchiyama Gudo}}

Uchiyama Gudō (内山愚童, 1874–1911), abbot of the small Sōtō Zen temple Rinsenji (林泉寺) near Hakone, ran a clandestine printing press beneath his temple's altar, through which he distributed Japanese translations of Western anarchist writings and his own tract ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' (無政府共産革命, ''Anarchist Communist Revolution'', 1908), grounding an anarchist-communist program directly in the Buddhist doctrines of universal Buddha-nature and the equality of the Dharma. Both this tract and his ''Heibon no jikaku'' (平凡の自覚, "Ordinary Self-Awakening") return repeatedly to the compound motto ''anraku jiyū'' (安楽自由), "comfort and freedom", which Uchiyama treats as both a Buddhist existential awakening and a Western-style political liberty, and he further modeled his anarcho-communism on what he took to be the simple, communal life of the early Chinese Chan sangha.<ref>Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill, pp. 40–41; Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 219–220.</ref> Convicted on publication and explosives charges in 1909, he was drawn into the High Treason Incident the following year and executed in 1911 at the age of thirty-six. He remains unusual among Buddhist radicals of his era for his open advocacy of revolutionary violence, and the Sōtō sect did not formally rehabilitate him until 1993.

In the immediate aftermath of the High Treason Incident, socialist and anarchist sympathies within Japanese Buddhism did not disappear, but they largely went underground, resurfacing, if at all, in depoliticized or euphemistic form. Itō Shōshin (伊藤証信, 1876–1963), a correspondent of Uchiyama's, abandoned the term "socialism" altogether in favor of ''muga-ai'' (無我愛), "selfless love," a doctrine blending Buddhism, pacifism, and a residual social concern that carefully avoided any open association with the revolutionary left.<ref>Shields, Against Harmony, 172–77, cited in Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, p. 80.</ref> A similar retreat into an apolitical, Tolstoyan agrarian utopianism characterizes the Nichiren-affiliated poet Miyazawa Kenji (宮沢賢治, 1896–1933), now remembered chiefly for his fiction and verse rather than for any social program.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land'', pp. 80–81.</ref> It was against this quiescent background that Seno'o Girō would reintroduce an explicitly political Buddhist socialism two decades later.