Editing SG32NNU-T (section)

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…all of these have had their effect. In any case, so long as farmers forget both the authority that properly rests in their own hands and the sacred joy that pervades the fields, and so long as their slave mentality and fascination with urban pleasures remain unliquidated, the salvation of the countryside will remain a distant prospect.

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'''B:''' The priests have lived sinful lives too. Think about it in ordinary common-sense terms: if the Buddha is supposed to save people, then whenever subordinate classes have struggled for liberation, religious figures should have been the first to lead the way. Instead, they have served as auxiliaries of oppression. That’s disgraceful.

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'''A:''' Up in Tōhoku, they say that when you want a dog to pull a sled you dangle a piece of salmon in front of its nose and make it run after it. Priests did the same thing: they dangled the Pure Land of the next world in front of the people and made them work and work. But now the time has come when deception must be liquidated before the truth. With the revival of the countryside, religious people must awaken as well. The day has come for religion to undertake its essential work.

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Just as a mother can discipline a spoiled child by withholding the breast, farmers who stand upon the land and firmly grasp humanity’s lifeline can, through autonomous awakening and nationwide organization, completely rectify society’s irrationalities and establish an agrarian communal society best suited to human life. Farmers are sleeping lions. Once they awaken and roar, they truly become kings among beasts. Yet while possessing that authority, they are also gentle, maternal beings who nurture everything. Like the story of Ivan, that is precisely where we find the value, permanence, and ultimate victory of agrarian society.<ref>Refers to Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 parable “The Tale of Ivan the Fool.” Tolstoy portrays the peasant farmer as the moral foundation of society, whose honest physical labor, non-violence, and detachment from wealth disarm military and state powers. Seno’o invokes Ivan to illustrate how an awakened agrarian peasantry possesses ultimate moral authority and social permanence through gentle, self-sustaining labor rather than violence.</ref>

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'''B:''' I understand the social position of the countryside now. And I can see that only when farmers are liberated from a condition of servitude and become masters of a fully autonomous communal society will the day arrive when true peace comes to all humanity.

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But let’s turn now to the rural temples. Standing as they do on the eve of destruction, what fate awaits them? Will they revive along with the countryside? Or will religion disappear completely, as Marxism says?

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'''A:''' That is the question. I cannot fully accept Marxism. I can certainly believe in the destruction of the bourgeois class, but I cannot believe in the disappearance of Buddhism itself. In a bourgeois…

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