Japan: Difference between revisions

From The Radical Buddhism Project
← Older edit

Lajos (talk | contribs)

3 user groups
996 edits
undo
James (talk | contribs)
311 edits
No edit summary
 
(9 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
Japan provides one of the richest historical settings for the study of radical Buddhism. From its establishment in Japan, Buddhist institutions developed complex and often mutually supportive relationships with political authority, including the imperial court, the powerful temple complexes (''kenmon'' 権門) of the medieval period, and the Tokugawa shogunate. These relationships never eliminated conflict or dissent, however, and Japanese history also supplied later Buddhist radicals with memories and models of religiously inflected resistance, including peasant uprisings and traditions of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (''gimin'' 義民).<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” in Hiroko Kawanami, ed., ''Buddhism and the Political Process'' (Palgrave Macmillan), 213–32, 214–15; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” ''Journal of Religion in Japan'' 5: 3–21.</ref>
Japan provides one of the richest historical settings for the study of radical Buddhism. From its early institutional development in Japan, Buddhism developed complex and often mutually supportive relationships with political authority, including the imperial court, the powerful religious institutions of the medieval period, and the Tokugawa shogunate. These relationships never eliminated conflict or dissent, however, and Japanese history also supplied later Buddhist radicals with memories and models of religiously inflected resistance, including peasant uprisings and traditions of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (''gimin'' 義民).<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” in Hiroko Kawanami, ed., ''Buddhism and the Political Process'' (Palgrave Macmillan), 213–32, 214–15; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” ''Journal of Religion in Japan'' 5: 3–21.</ref>


The political and intellectual upheavals accompanying the Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed this relationship. Following the brief but severe persecution of Buddhism known as ''haibutsu kishaku'' 廃仏毀釈, Buddhist clergy and lay intellectuals pursued a variety of projects to reconstruct Buddhism as compatible with a modernizing nation-state, modern science, new forms of scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion and ethics. Within and against this broader field of Buddhist reform there emerged, from the 1880s through the early Shōwa period, a much smaller and internally diverse current in which activists brought Buddhist ideas into constructive engagement with socialism, anarchism, and eventually Marxism. This entry uses “radical Buddhism” primarily for these attempts to connect Buddhist thought and practice with fundamental transformations of existing social, economic, and political relations.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15, no. 2: 205–23.</ref>
The political and intellectual upheavals accompanying the Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed this relationship. Following the brief but severe persecution of Buddhism known as ''haibutsu kishaku'' 廃仏毀釈, Buddhist clergy and lay intellectuals pursued a variety of projects to reconstruct Buddhism as compatible with a modernizing nation-state, modern science, new forms of scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion and ethics. Within and against this broader field of Buddhist reform there emerged, from the 1880s through the early Shōwa period, a much smaller and internally diverse current in which activists brought Buddhist ideas into constructive engagement with socialism, anarchism, and eventually Marxism. This entry uses “radical Buddhism” primarily for these attempts to connect Buddhist thought and practice with fundamental transformations of existing social, economic, and political relations.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15, no. 2: 205–23.</ref>
Line 7: Line 7:
== Buddhism in Japan ==
== Buddhism in Japan ==


Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and over the following centuries became deeply embedded in the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. By the medieval period, major monasteries and temple networks controlled substantial landholdings and exercised considerable political influence. Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄 famously analyzed these institutions as part of the system of powerful elite blocs (''kenmon'' 権門) through which court aristocrats, warriors, and religious institutions together constituted the medieval ruling order.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” in Hiroko Kawanami, ed., ''Buddhism and the Political Process'' (Palgrave Macmillan), 213–32, 215.</ref> The medieval period also witnessed the development of influential new Buddhist movements associated with figures such as Hōnen 法然, Shinran 親鸞, Dōgen 道元, and Nichiren 日蓮. Although some of these movements came into conflict with established religious and political authorities, Buddhist institutions generally developed through complex relationships of both autonomy and cooperation with political power rather than through sustained opposition to it.
Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and over the following centuries became deeply embedded in the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. By the medieval period, major monasteries and temple networks controlled substantial landholdings and exercised considerable political influence. Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄 famously analyzed religious institutions as one component of the system of powerful elite blocs (''kenmon'' 権門) through which court aristocrats, warriors, and major religious institutions constituted the medieval ruling order. The period also witnessed the development of influential Buddhist movements associated with figures such as Hōnen 法然, Shinran 親鸞, Dōgen 道元, and Nichiren 日蓮. Although some came into conflict with established religious and political authorities, Buddhist institutions generally developed through complex relationships of both autonomy and cooperation with political power rather than sustained opposition to it.<ref>Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄, “The Imperial Law and the Buddhist Law,” trans. Jacqueline I. Stone, ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 23, nos. 3–4 (1996): 271–85; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” 215.</ref> Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), these relationships acquired an extensive administrative form. Through temple registration (''terauke'' 寺請) and hereditary temple-parishioner relationships (''danka'' 檀家), Buddhist temples participated in the registration of households and regulation of religious affiliation while providing funerary and memorial services increasingly central to ordinary religious life.<ref>Tamamuro Fumio 圭室文雄 (2001), “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu's Governance Structure,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 28, nos. 3–4: 261–92.</ref>


Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), these relationships acquired a particularly extensive administrative form. Through the temple-registration system (''terauke seido'' 寺請制度) and parish relationships (''danka'' 檀家), Buddhist temples became deeply involved in the registration of households and the regulation of religious affiliation, while also providing funerary and memorial services that became central to ordinary religious life.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2012), “Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945,” in Roy Starrs, ed., ''Rethinking Japanese Modernism'' (Brill/Global Oriental), 105–24, 108.</ref> The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted this institutional settlement. The separation of Buddhism from Shinto and the anti-Buddhist violence and destruction conventionally known as ''haibutsu kishaku'' 廃仏毀釈 stripped Buddhist institutions of much of their former status and property and forced Buddhist leaders to reconsider the tradition's place within the new nation-state.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 108–9.</ref>
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted this institutional settlement. The government-mandated separation of Buddhism and Shinto (''shinbutsu bunri'' 神仏分離) was accompanied in many regions by anti-Buddhist violence and destruction conventionally known as ''haibutsu kishaku'' 廃仏毀釈, stripping Buddhist institutions of much of their former status and property and forcing Buddhist leaders to reconsider the tradition's place within the new nation-state.<ref>Ketelaar, James Edward (1990), ''Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution'' (Princeton University Press); Shields, James Mark (2012), “Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945,” in Roy Starrs, ed., ''Rethinking Japanese Modernism'' (Brill/Global Oriental), 105–24, 108–9.</ref> Responses ranged from renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (''kairitsu'' 戒律), associated with figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照, to participation in government-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (''Daikyō'' 大教) campaign. A subsequent generation of scholar-priests and lay intellectuals—including Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之—engaged modern science, philosophy, historical scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion. Historical-critical scholarship could pose particularly difficult questions for inherited authority: Murakami, for example, became associated with ''Daijō hibussetsuron'' 大乗非仏説論, the thesis that Mahāyāna scriptures were not directly taught by the historical Buddha. Modern Japanese Buddhist thought also intersected increasingly with academic philosophy, including the work of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and the later Kyoto School.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 108–21.</ref>


One early response was the movement for renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (''kairitsu'' 戒律), associated with figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照. Other Buddhist reformers participated in government-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (''Daikyō'' 大教) campaign, illustrating the complicated mixture of institutional self-preservation, religious reform, and accommodation to the emerging emperor-centered state.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 108–9.</ref> A subsequent generation of scholar-priests and lay intellectuals—including Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之—engaged more directly with modern science, philosophy, historical scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion. Their projects differed considerably, but collectively they contributed to the reconstruction of Buddhism as a modern intellectual and ethical tradition rather than simply an inherited complex of institutions and ritual practices.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 109–21.</ref>
By the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War, major Buddhist institutions accommodated themselves in varying degrees to the Japanese imperial state and its war effort. The extent and implications of this accommodation became an important subject of postwar Buddhist self-criticism, although sustained institutional reckoning developed only gradually. Ichikawa Hakugen's analysis of Buddhist war responsibility and “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅) became one of the most searching examples of this critique. He examined not only particular instances of wartime collaboration but also the doctrinal, ethical, and institutional tendencies that had facilitated Buddhist accommodation to political authority.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Ives, Christopher (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics'' (University of Hawai‘i Press); Shields (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” 282–84.</ref> These developments form an important counterpoint to the much smaller traditions of progressive and radical Buddhism discussed below.
 
Historical-critical Buddhist scholarship posed particularly difficult questions for inherited forms of authority. Murakami Senshō, for example, became associated with the controversial thesis known as ''Daijō hibussetsuron'' 大乗非仏説論 (the theory that Mahāyāna was not directly taught by the historical Buddha), challenging traditional assumptions about the origins and authority of Mahāyāna scriptures.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 111–13.</ref> At the same time, modern Japanese Buddhist thought increasingly intersected with academic philosophy. Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and later thinkers associated with the Kyoto School drew extensively upon Buddhist intellectual resources while developing philosophical projects concerned with such concepts as “pure experience” (''junsui keiken'' 純粋経験) and “place” (''basho'' 場所). The relationship of this philosophy to Japanese nationalism and imperialism would later become an important subject of postwar controversy and Buddhist self-criticism, particularly in the work of Ichikawa Hakugen.<ref>Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 117–21; Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>
 
By the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War, most major Buddhist institutions accommodated themselves in varying degrees to the Japanese imperial state and its war effort. This institutional record subsequently became a major object of postwar Buddhist criticism, although sustained internal reckoning developed only gradually. Ichikawa Hakugen's critique of “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅) and Buddhist war responsibility would eventually provide one of the most searching analyses of this history and an important point of reference for later Critical Buddhism. These developments form an important counterpoint to the much smaller traditions of progressive and radical Buddhism discussed below.<ref>Shields (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” 282–84.</ref>


== Radical Buddhism in Japan ==
== Radical Buddhism in Japan ==


The Radical Buddhism Project uses “radical Buddhism” in modern Japan primarily for attempts to bring Buddhist thought and practice into sustained engagement with projects for fundamental social, economic, or political transformation, particularly socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. In this sense, radical Buddhism was historically distinct from, although deeply indebted to, the broader currents of Buddhist reform and modernism described above. Its emergence cannot be traced to a single continuous tradition. Rather, modern Buddhist radicals drew selectively upon several different resources: inherited narratives of religiously inflected resistance and social protest; early attempts to articulate socialism through Buddhist concepts; and the more immediate intellectual and institutional innovations of Meiji Buddhist reform.
The Radical Buddhism Project uses “radical Buddhism” in modern Japan primarily for attempts to bring Buddhist thought and practice into sustained engagement with projects for fundamental social, economic, or political transformation, particularly socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. Radical Buddhism was historically distinct from, although deeply indebted to, the broader currents of Buddhist reform and modernism described above, and its emergence cannot be traced to a single continuous tradition. Premodern revolts should therefore not be understood retrospectively as instances of “radical Buddhism.” They did, however, provide historical memories and symbolic models through which later activists could imagine religiously grounded resistance to established authority. The ''Ikkō-ikki'' 一向一揆 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, brought together religious communities, peasants, local warriors, and other groups associated with the Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū in episodes of armed resistance and regional self-government. Their aims and social composition varied considerably and cannot simply be assimilated to modern socialism or anarchism.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” ''Journal of Religion in Japan'' 5: 3–21, 6–7.</ref>
 
Premodern revolts should therefore not be understood as instances of “radical Buddhism” in the modern political sense. They did, however, provide historical memories and symbolic models through which later activists could imagine Buddhist resistance to established authority. The ''Ikkō-ikki'' 一向一揆 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, brought together religious communities, peasants, local warriors, and other social groups associated with the Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū in episodes of armed resistance and regional self-government. Their aims and social composition varied considerably and cannot simply be assimilated to modern socialism or anarchism.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” ''Journal of Religion in Japan'' 5: 3–21, 6–7.</ref>
 
Of more demonstrable importance to modern radicals were Edo-period narratives of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (''gimin'' 義民), especially stories of village representatives who suffered or died after petitioning authorities on behalf of oppressed peasants. The semi-legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎 (1605–1653) became an especially powerful exemplar of this pattern. Another frequently invoked figure was Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎 (1793–1837), the Osaka samurai scholar and former official whose 1837 rebellion, shaped by Wang Yangming Confucianism, condemned corrupt government during a period of severe famine and attempted to redistribute confiscated wealth to the poor.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 7–9.</ref>
 
The importance of such figures for modern radical Buddhism lies less in direct institutional or doctrinal continuity than in their later appropriation. Narratives of righteous rebellion supplied what Shields describes as “root paradigms” of principled, self-sacrificing resistance: culturally available models through which modern activists could interpret new conflicts involving poverty, capitalism, state authority, and social injustice. Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, for example, explicitly invoked earlier traditions of peasant resistance while articulating a thoroughly modern Buddhist anarchism.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 4–5, 11.</ref> Such appropriations did not make the earlier rebels socialists or anarchists retrospectively; rather, they enabled modern radicals to present their own political commitments as having indigenous as well as newly imported intellectual resources.
 
=== The Eastern Socialist Party (1882) ===


One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist concepts was the short-lived Eastern Socialist Party (''Tōyō Shakaitō'' 東洋社会党), founded by Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉 (1850–1922) in 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was suppressed by the government within weeks of its formation, although Tarui continued his efforts to organize it and issued revised party regulations the following year.<ref>Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎, ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party] (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930); Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕, “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Ōsaka jiken kenkyū'' 大阪事件研究 5 (July 1986): 14–19; Shields, James Mark (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought in Modern Japan,” in Gereon Kopf, ed., ''The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy'', 255–85.</ref>
Of more demonstrable importance to modern radicals were Edo-period narratives of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (''gimin'' 義民), especially village representatives remembered for suffering or dying after petitioning authorities on behalf of oppressed peasants. The semi-legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎 (1605–1653) became an especially powerful exemplar, while Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎 (1793–1837), the Osaka samurai scholar and former official who led an 1837 rebellion during a period of severe famine, provided another model of principled resistance to corrupt authority.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 7–9.</ref> Their significance lies less in direct institutional or doctrinal continuity than in later appropriation. Such figures supplied what Shields describes as “root paradigms” of self-sacrificing resistance through which modern activists could interpret new conflicts involving poverty, capitalism, state authority, and social injustice. Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, for example, explicitly invoked earlier traditions of peasant resistance while articulating a thoroughly modern Buddhist anarchism.<ref>Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 4–5, 11.</ref> These appropriations did not make the earlier rebels socialists or anarchists retrospectively; rather, they allowed modern radicals to understand their political commitments through indigenous historical resources as well as newly imported ideas.


Tarui's draft party regulations reveal an eclectic attempt to formulate socialism through concepts drawn from Asian religious and ethical traditions rather than simply reproduce contemporary European socialist theory. Its first three principles made “love and trust” (''shin’ai'' 親愛) the standard of words and actions, affirmed the “equality of self and other” (''jita byōdō'' 自他平等), and identified the “greatest welfare” (''saidai fukuri'' 最大福利) of society as the party's goal. Subsequent provisions proposed measures intended to overcome divisions between rich and poor, including forms of communal ownership. Tarui also invoked recognizably Buddhist imagery, including the Lotus Sutra's image of the Dharma raining equally upon all beings and the obligation of “children of the Buddha” (''busshi'' 仏子) to respond compassionately to poverty and suffering.<ref>Tarui Tōkichi, “Tōyō Shakaitō tōsoku sōan” 東洋社会党党則草案 [Draft Regulations of the Eastern Socialist Party], cited and translated in Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 256–59.</ref>
=== The Eastern Socialist Party ===


Whether the Eastern Socialist Party should be regarded as “socialist” in the same sense as the socialist movements that developed in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century has long been debated. Some later commentators emphasized its distance from European socialist theory and situated it instead within the Freedom and People's Rights movement, agrarian demands for economic justice, and older East Asian ethical traditions.<ref>Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎, “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28, no. 3 (1991): [pages to verify].</ref> For the history of radical Buddhism, however, this ambiguity is itself significant. Tarui's experiment illustrates an enduring problem for later Buddhist socialists: whether socialism should be understood as a largely imported body of political and economic theory to which Buddhism might be added, or whether egalitarian and communal elements within Buddhist and other Asian traditions could themselves provide resources for constructing a distinctively local form of socialism.<ref>Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 255–60.</ref>
One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist and other East Asian concepts was the short-lived Eastern Socialist Party (''Tōyō Shakaitō'' 東洋社会党), founded by Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉 (1850–1922) in May 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was prohibited by the government the following month. Tarui nevertheless continued his efforts to revive it and circulated revised party regulations in January 1883, activity for which he was sentenced to a year in prison.<ref>Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎, ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party] (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930); Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕, “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Ōsaka jiken kenkyū'' 大阪事件研究 5 (July 1986): 14–19; Shields, James Mark (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought in Modern Japan,” in Gereon Kopf, ed., ''The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy'', 255–85, 256–60.</ref>


=== Meiji Buddhist modernism ===
Tarui's draft party regulations reveal an eclectic attempt to formulate socialism through concepts drawn from Asian religious and ethical traditions rather than simply reproduce contemporary European socialist theory. Its first three principles made “affection” (''shin'ai'' 親愛) the standard of words and actions, affirmed the “equality of self and other” (''jita byōdō'' 自他平等), and identified the “greatest welfare” (''saidai fukuri'' 最大福利) of society as the party's goal. Subsequent provisions proposed measures intended to overcome divisions between rich and poor, including forms of communal ownership.<ref>Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉, “Tōyō Shakaitō tōsoku sōan” 東洋社会党党則草案 [Draft Regulations of the Eastern Socialist Party], in Nihon shakai undō shisō shi 日本社会運動思想史, ed. Itoya Hisao 絲屋寿雄 and Kishimoto Eitarō 岸本英太郎, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1968), 125–29; Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 256–59.</ref>
{{Main|Meiji New Buddhism}}


A more immediate context for the emergence of radical Buddhism was the Buddhist reform movement of the late Meiji period. These reformers were generally neither socialists nor political radicals, but they challenged established Buddhist institutions and helped develop a this-worldly, rationalized, and socially engaged conception of Buddhism that later radicals could push in more explicitly political directions. Particularly important were the short-lived Keiikai 経緯会 (Warp and Woof Society, 1894–1899), founded by the young Buddhist reformer Furukawa Isamu 古河勇 (also known as Rōsen 老川), and its successor, the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship, 1899–1915), initially known as the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 (Buddhist Puritan Fellowship).<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'', [pages].</ref>
Whether the Eastern Socialist Party should be regarded as “socialist” in the same sense as the socialist movements that developed in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century has long been debated. Some later commentators emphasized its distance from European socialist theory and situated it instead within the Freedom and People's Rights movement, agrarian demands for economic justice, and older East Asian ethical traditions.<ref>Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎, “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28, no. 3 (1991): 39–42.</ref> For the history of radical Buddhism, however, this ambiguity is itself significant. Tarui's experiment illustrates an enduring problem for later Buddhist socialists: whether socialism should be understood as a largely imported body of political and economic theory to which Buddhism might be added, or whether egalitarian and communal elements within Buddhist and other Asian traditions could themselves provide resources for constructing a distinctively local form of socialism.<ref>Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 255–60.</ref>


The New Buddhists rejected what they regarded as the superstition, ritualism, and institutional privilege of “old Buddhism” while insisting upon the free investigation of Buddhist doctrine and religion more generally. Their reform program emphasized intellectual independence, ethical conduct, and the application of Buddhism to life in the present world. Particularly significant was their advocacy of ''genseshugi'' 現世主義 (this-worldliness), associated especially with Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋 and Tanaka Jiroku 田中治六. Rather than locating the goal of Buddhism primarily in another world, this orientation sought the significance of Buddhist teaching within the conditions of present human existence and society.<ref>Shields (2017), “Immanent Frames,” [pages]; Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books), 75–76.</ref>
=== The New Buddhist Fellowship ===
{{Main|The New Buddhist Fellowship}}


For some members, this this-worldly orientation acquired increasingly explicit social implications. Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), who studied Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies in Germany, became deeply involved in social welfare and brought Buddhist ethics into engagement with the social problems generated by industrialization. Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 (1880–1945), one of the Fellowship's more politically outspoken figures, developed a strong commitment to peace and international Buddhist cooperation and criticized Japanese militarism and imperial expansion. Members of the New Buddhist movement also interacted with contemporary socialists, including Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦, even while the movement as a whole remained wary of socialism and especially of materialism.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', 76–77; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref>
The most sustained collective expression of Meiji Buddhist modernism emerged in the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship), established in 1899 as the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 and renamed in 1903. Its members included Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋, Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭, Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰, Sugimura Sojinkan 杉村楚人冠, and Katō Genchi 加藤玄智, many of whom had studied with figures such as Murakami Senshō and Inoue Enryō. Through their journal, ''Shin Bukkyō'' 新仏教 (New Buddhism), they attacked “old Buddhism” (''kyū Bukkyō'' 旧仏教) as sectarian, ritualistic, superstitious, and institutionally corrupt. Their 1900 declaration called for a “sound Buddhist faith,” free investigation of Buddhism and other religions, the eradication of superstition, freedom from traditional religious institutions and ceremonies, opposition to state interference in religion, and the fundamental reform of society.<ref>“Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration], ''Shin Bukkyō'' 1, no. 1 (July 1900): 3; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 91–100.</ref>


The significance of Meiji New Buddhism for radical Buddhism therefore lies less in a direct political or organizational lineage than in the conceptual space it helped create. By questioning sectarian authority, subjecting Buddhist doctrine to rational and historical criticism, emphasizing this-worldly ethical practice, and insisting that Buddhism respond to contemporary social conditions, the New Buddhists helped loosen the identification of Buddhism with inherited institutions and established forms of authority. Later figures such as Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama Gudō, and especially Seno'o Girō would move considerably beyond this reformist position by bringing Buddhist ideas into direct engagement with socialism, anarchism, and Marxism.
Central to New Buddhism was ''genseshugi'' 現世主義 (this-worldliness), which located the significance of Buddhist practice within present human and social existence rather than another world. Although most New Buddhists rejected revolutionary socialism and materialism, their insistence that Buddhism address contemporary society brought some members increasingly close to the emerging socialist movement. Watanabe developed forms of Buddhist social welfare and mutual aid, while Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 articulated an explicitly Buddhist critique of war, nationalism, and imperial aggression. The New Buddhist Fellowship thus occupied an important intermediate position between Meiji Buddhist modernism and radical Buddhism: it transformed the modernist reconstruction of Buddhist belief into a more explicitly social project without developing a common program for structural political and economic transformation.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 99–128; Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” ''Japan Review'' 30: 79–96.</ref>


=== Takagi Kenmyō ===
=== Takagi Kenmyō ===
{{Main|Takagi Kenmyō}}
{{Main|Takagi Kenmyo}}
 
Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 (1864–1914), a priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in modern Japan to articulate an explicitly socialist Buddhism. In 1899 Takagi became resident priest of Jōsenji 浄泉寺 in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, where his encounters with poverty, discrimination against ''burakumin'' 部落民, and the social inequalities of the surrounding community contributed to his growing involvement with the socialist and antiwar movements.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15, no. 2: 205–23, 210–15; Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴 (2012), ''Gokuraku no ninju: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu'' 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む [The People of the Pure Land: Reading Takagi Kenmyō's “My Socialism”] (Tokyo: Hakutakusha).</ref>


Takagi set out his distinctive understanding of Buddhist socialism most clearly in “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 (My Socialism), written around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. Rather than deriving his socialism primarily from Marxist theory, Takagi grounded it in his understanding of Jōdo Shinshū. The universal working of Amida Buddha's compassion undermined distinctions of status and worth among human beings, while the ''nenbutsu'' 念仏 became for Takagi inseparable from a commitment to equality and solidarity in this world. “The Land of Bliss,” he declared, “is the place in which socialism is truly practiced.” Those who recited the ''nenbutsu'' belonged to what he called the “people of the Pure Land” (''gokuraku no ninju'' 極楽の人数), a religious community whose faith demanded opposition to the inequalities and violence of existing society.<ref>Takagi Kenmyō, “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism], [edition/pages to establish]; Hishiki (2012), ''Gokuraku no ninju''; Shields (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason,” 211–15.</ref> This religious socialism also informed Takagi's opposition to the Russo-Japanese War. He criticized Buddhist clergy who supported the war and rejected attempts to reconcile killing with Buddhist teaching or to console soldiers with promises of postmortem salvation. His socialism was therefore simultaneously egalitarian, antiwar, and explicitly Buddhist: rather than treating Buddhism as a spiritual supplement to an independently derived socialist politics, Takagi understood the implications of Shin Buddhist faith itself as requiring a transformation of social relations.<ref>Takagi, “Yo ga shakaishugi,” [pages]; Shields (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason,” 213–15.</ref>
Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 (1864–1914), a priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in modern Japan to articulate an explicitly socialist Buddhism. In 1899 he became resident priest of Jōsenji 浄泉寺 in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, where encounters with poverty, discrimination against ''burakumin'' 部落民, and social inequality contributed to his involvement with the socialist and antiwar movements. In his 1904 essay “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism], Takagi explicitly distinguished his socialism from that of Marx and contemporary Japanese socialists, grounding it instead in his own Buddhist faith and practice. He understood socialism as a form of ''jissen'' 実践 (practice) beginning with personal spiritual transformation, while interpreting ''Namu Amida Butsu'' 南無阿弥陀仏 and the Pure Land tradition through the ideals of equality, peace, and compassion. Takagi declared Buddhism to be “the mother of the common people and the enemy of the nobility” and described the Pure Land as a realm in which socialism was already practiced. His Buddhist socialism thus joined social reform to the transformation of the practitioner, while providing a religious basis for his opposition to social inequality and the Russo-Japanese War.<ref>Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明, “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism] (1904); Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴 (2012), ''Gokuraku no ninzu: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu'' 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む (Tokyo: Hakutakusha); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 145–52.</ref>
 
Takagi's political activities eventually brought him into the orbit of the High Treason Incident (''Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆事件) of 1910–1911, in which the Japanese government prosecuted twenty-six socialists and anarchists for an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Meiji. Takagi was among those convicted and sentenced to death, although his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The evidence connecting him to the assassination plot was tenuous, and subsequent scholarship has treated his prosecution as part of the state's much broader suppression of the socialist movement rather than as evidence of substantial participation in the conspiracy itself.<ref>[High Treason Incident/Takagi source]; Izumi Keiki 泉惠機, “Takagi Kenmyō ni kansuru kenkyū: Shiryō oyobi ryakunenpu ni tsuite” 高木顕明に関する研究――資料及び略年譜について [Research on Takagi Kenmyō: Sources and a Brief Chronology], ''Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo kenkyū kiyō'' 真宗総合研究所研究紀要 14 (1997); Shields (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason,” 210–11.</ref> The Ōtani-ha expelled Takagi from the priesthood following his conviction. He died in prison in 1914, apparently by suicide. In 1996, the sect posthumously restored his clerical status, acknowledging the injustice of its earlier treatment of him.<ref>Kunba Hiroshi 訓覇浩 (2010), “Takagi Kenmyō o fukken, kenshō suru to wa” 高木顕明を復権、顕彰するとは [What Does It Mean to Rehabilitate and Commemorate Takagi Kenmyō?], ''Shoki shakaishugi kenkyū'' 初期社会主義研究 22: 126–37.</ref>


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


Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 (1874–1911), a Sōtō Zen priest and abbot of Rinsenji 林泉寺 in Hakone, developed one of the most explicitly anarchist forms of radical Buddhism in Meiji Japan. Like Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama understood Buddhist teaching on the fundamental equality of human beings as converging with socialism. In a surviving statement explaining his political commitments, he recalled that as a Buddhist missionary he had encountered teachings that all beings possess buddha-nature, that the Dharma is equal and without high or low, and that all beings are children of the Buddha; discovering these principles to be in accord with socialism, he wrote, led him to become a socialist.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, [statement/source to establish]; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲, ''“Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō'' 〈大逆事件〉と禅僧内山愚童の抵抗 [The High Treason Incident and the Resistance of the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō] (Tokyo: Kōsei Shuppansha, 2018), [pages]; Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15, no. 2: 205–23, [pages].</ref>
Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 (1874–1911), a Sōtō Zen priest and abbot of Rinsenji 林泉寺 near Hakone, developed one of the most explicitly anarchist forms of radical Buddhism in Meiji Japan. Explaining his embrace of socialism, Uchiyama recalled that as a Buddhist missionary he taught that all beings possess buddha-nature, that within the Dharma there is equality without high or low, and that all beings are children of the Buddha; he came to see these teachings as fundamentally compatible with socialism. His radicalism joined this Buddhist egalitarianism to a critique of private property, economic inequality, imperial authority, and militarism. Unlike Takagi Kenmyō, whose Buddhist socialism remained largely reformist, Uchiyama increasingly identified the social and political structures producing inequality as themselves objects of transformation. Using a clandestine printing press at Rinsenji, he produced and circulated socialist and anarchist writings calling upon ordinary people to free themselves from the political, economic, and religious beliefs sustaining the existing social order.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 153–62; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki: Zensō Gudō no teikō no shūkyōteki rinri to sekinin” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡――禅僧愚童の抵抗の宗教的倫理と責任 [The High Treason Incident and Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities: The Religious Ethics and Responsibility of Gudō's Resistance], ''Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 中央学術研究所紀要 45: 2–61, 20–21.</ref>


Uchiyama's radicalism soon extended well beyond an affirmation of spiritual equality. Influenced by the emerging socialist and anarchist movements, and associated with figures including Kōtoku Shūsui 幸徳秋水, he came to identify private property, economic inequality, imperial authority, and militarism as interconnected forms of domination. In writings such as ''Heibon no jikaku'' 平凡の自覚 (The Awakening of an Ordinary Person) and the clandestinely printed ''Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan—kakumei'' 入獄紀念・無政府共産・革命 (Commemorating Imprisonment: Anarcho-Communism—Revolution), he called upon ordinary people to free themselves from the political and religious beliefs that sustained the existing social order.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, ''Heibon no jikaku'' 平凡の自覚 [The Awakening of an Ordinary Person], [edition/pages]; Uchiyama Gudō, ''Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan—kakumei'' 入獄紀念・無政府共産・革命 [Commemorating Imprisonment: Anarcho-Communism—Revolution], [edition/pages]; Sanada, ''“Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō'', [pages].</ref> Particularly striking was Uchiyama's attack on the ideological foundations of the Meiji state. His clandestine writings criticized emperor worship, conscription, militarism, and the concentration of wealth and land, while envisioning a society organized around economic equality and communal ownership. Buddhism did not disappear from this increasingly anarchist critique. Rather, Uchiyama interpreted Buddhist equality in radically this-worldly terms: if distinctions of high and low possessed no ultimate religious justification, inherited structures of political and economic hierarchy could themselves become objects of Buddhist criticism.<ref>Uchiyama, ''Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan—kakumei'', [pages]; Shields (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason,” [pages].</ref>
Uchiyama was arrested in May 1909 for violating publication laws after police discovered his clandestine printing operation at Rinsenji; during their search, police claimed to have found materials for making explosives. Already imprisoned, he was subsequently implicated in the High Treason Incident (''Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆事件), convicted of participating in the alleged conspiracy against Emperor Meiji, and executed on January 24, 1911. Although Uchiyama advocated revolutionary change and did not categorically reject violence, the extent of his involvement in an actual assassination plot remains disputed. The Sōtō establishment stripped him of his clerical status in 1910 and strongly repudiated his ideas; in 1993 the denomination reversed its earlier action and restored his status, acknowledging that its treatment of Uchiyama had reflected the sect's alignment with the emperor-centered political establishment.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 153–56; Sanada (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō,” 32–39; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2018), ''“Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō'' 〈大逆事件〉と禅僧内山愚童の抵抗 (Tokyo: Kōsei Shuppansha).</ref>
 
Uchiyama was arrested in 1909 after the authorities discovered his clandestine printing operation and a quantity of dynamite at Rinsenji. He was convicted under the Publication Law and explosives regulations and was already imprisoned when the investigation that became the High Treason Incident (''Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆事件) expanded to include him. Prosecutors treated statements he had made concerning revolutionary violence and the imperial family as evidence of participation in the alleged conspiracy against Emperor Meiji. He was convicted of high treason and executed on January 24, 1911.<ref>Sanada, ''“Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō'', [pages]; Shields (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason,” [pages].</ref> The Sōtō establishment had already expelled Uchiyama from the priesthood in 1910, before his conviction in the High Treason trial. In 1993, however, the sect rescinded the expulsion and formally restored his clerical status, acknowledging the injustice of its earlier treatment of him. A century after his execution, the head of the Sōtō administration again publicly acknowledged the sect's responsibility and presented Uchiyama's commitment to peace, opposition to discrimination, and concern for suffering as a challenge to contemporary Buddhists.<ref>Sōtōshū Shūmuchō 曹洞宗宗務総長, “Zange to heiwa jitsugen e mukete no seigan” 懺悔と平和実現へ向けての誓願 [Repentance and a Vow toward the Realization of Peace], January 24, 2011.</ref>


=== From the High Treason Incident to the YLRB ===
=== From the High Treason Incident to the YLRB ===


The High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 marked a severe rupture in the development of explicitly radical Buddhism in Japan. The execution of Uchiyama Gudō and the imprisonment and subsequent death of Takagi Kenmyō formed part of a much wider state assault on the socialist and anarchist movements. In the political climate that followed, open attempts to combine Buddhism with revolutionary socialism or anarchism became exceptionally difficult. No Buddhist organization comparable to the later Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism emerged during the 1910s, and the explicitly Buddhist radicalism represented by Takagi and Uchiyama largely disappeared from public view.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” ''Politics, Religion & Ideology'' 15, no. 2: 205–23, [pages]; [additional source on post-High Treason repression].</ref>
The High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 marked a severe rupture in the development of explicitly radical Buddhism in Japan. The execution of Uchiyama Gudō and imprisonment of Takagi Kenmyō formed part of a broader suppression of socialist and anarchist activity, making open attempts to combine Buddhism with revolutionary socialism or anarchism exceptionally difficult. Buddhist social experimentation nevertheless continued in less overtly political forms. Itō Shōshin 伊藤証信 (1876–1963), for example, developed the ideal of ''muga-ai'' 無我愛 (selfless love), combining religious and ethical transformation, pacifism, and communal social practice while deliberately distinguishing his movement from socialism. His Muga-ai movement, begun in 1905, survived the repression of the late Meiji period and reemerged during the Taishō era alongside other experiments in Buddhist, Tolstoyan, agrarian, and communal reform.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 163–80; Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books), 77–80.</ref>
 
This interval should not, however, be understood as an intellectual vacuum or as a simple break between two otherwise disconnected generations of Buddhist radicals. During the 1910s and 1920s, Buddhist reformers continued to debate the social responsibilities of Buddhism, while new forms of labor activism, tenant protest, socialist thought, and social-welfare activity transformed the political environment in which Buddhist activists operated. The period also witnessed the rapid circulation of socialist and, increasingly after the Russian Revolution, Marxist ideas. Buddhist responses ranged from hostility and apologetic defense to attempts at dialogue and selective appropriation. The result was not a continuous “radical Buddhist” movement but a changing field in which the relationship between Buddhism and the social question became increasingly difficult to ignore.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'', [pages]; [additional Japanese sources].</ref>


Seno'o Girō's own trajectory illustrates this more complicated continuity particularly well. His radicalism did not originate in the Buddhist socialism of Takagi or Uchiyama, nor is there evidence that he initially understood himself as inheriting their projects. Seno'o emerged instead from the reformist and strongly nationalist world of modern Nichiren Buddhism. During the 1920s, however, encounters with poverty and labor conflict, growing dissatisfaction with established Buddhist institutions, and increasingly extensive reading in socialist, Marxist, and anarchist thought led him toward a fundamentally different conception of Buddhism and social transformation. The Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, founded in 1931, therefore represented neither a straightforward revival of Meiji Buddhist socialism nor an entirely new departure. It arose from a different Buddhist milieu and under different political conditions while reopening, in a much more organizationally sustained form, the problem that Takagi and Uchiyama had confronted before 1911: what might follow if Buddhist commitments to liberation, equality, and the overcoming of attachment were applied to the structures of modern society?<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages]; Seno'o Girō, ''Seno'o Girō nikki'' 妹尾義郎日記, 7 vols., ed. Seno'o Tetsutarō and Inagaki Masami (Kokusho Kankōkai, 1974–75); [TBS citation when published].</ref>
The relative openness of the Taishō period (1912–1926) nevertheless transformed the context in which Buddhist social thought operated. Socialist ideas circulated more widely, while Buddhist thinkers confronted questions of poverty, capitalism, labor, and the social responsibilities of religion. There was no continuous “radical Buddhist” movement linking the Meiji radicals to their successors: responses ranged from anti-socialist apologetics to social welfare, utopian experiments, and selective engagement with socialism and Marxism. Seno'o Girō's emergence from the quite different world of reformist and nationalist Nichiren Buddhism illustrates both this discontinuity and the persistence of the underlying social questions. By 1926 he was criticizing nationalist readings of Nichiren, and by 1929 he was arguing that a revitalized Nichirenism must stand with the public and engage the socialist struggle against capitalism. These developments prepared the ground for the founding of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟) in 1931.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 181–205, 213–16.</ref>


=== Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism ===
=== Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism ===
{{Main|Seno'o Girō}}
{{Main|Senoo Giro}}
{{Main|Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism}}
{{Main|Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism}}


The most sustained attempt to develop an explicitly radical Buddhist movement in prewar Japan emerged around Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) and the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Seno'o began his Buddhist career within the modern Nichirenist movement associated especially with Honda Nisshō 本多日生 and initially combined Buddhist reform with strong patriotic and nationalist commitments. During the 1920s, however, encounters with poverty and labor conflict, growing dissatisfaction with established Buddhist institutions, and extensive reading in socialist, Marxist, and anarchist thought gradually transformed his understanding of both Buddhism and society.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), [pages]; Seno'o Girō, ''Seno'o Girō nikki'' 妹尾義郎日記, 7 vols., ed. Seno'o Tetsutarō and Inagaki Masami (Kokusho Kankōkai, 1974–75).</ref>
Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) emerged from the reformist but strongly nationalist Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義 movement before moving increasingly toward socialism during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, his encounters with poverty and social conflict, criticism of established Buddhist institutions, and engagement with socialist and Marxist thought had led him to identify capitalism itself as a major source of suffering. On April 5, 1931, Seno'o and a small group of young activists founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Rejecting existing Buddhist sects as corrupt and capitalism as incompatible with the Buddhist spirit, the League sought to create a Buddha land in this world through the conjunction of individual ethical transformation and fundamental social reform.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2012), “A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 39, no. 2: 333–51; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 203–43.</ref>
 
In April 1931, Seno'o founded the YLRB as an explicitly anti-sectarian Buddhist reform movement committed to the reconstruction of both Buddhism and society. Its declaration and program rejected capitalism and economic exploitation, opposed discrimination and war, and called for a Buddhism capable of responding directly to contemporary social conditions. During the following years Seno'o developed an increasingly materialist interpretation of Buddhism in constructive engagement with Marxist social analysis. He accepted much of the Marxist critique of religion—including the charge that religion could function as an “opiate”—while arguing that “original Buddhism,” properly understood, rejected dependence upon supernatural powers and directed attention toward suffering and its causes within the conditions of human existence.<ref>Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, “Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration] and “Kōryō” 綱領 [Program] (1931), reprinted in Inagaki Masami, ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', 3–6; Seno'o Girō, ''Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō'' 社会変革途上の新興仏教 [Revitalized Buddhism on the Road to Social Reform] (1933), reprinted in Inagaki Masami, ed., ''Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū'' (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1975), 325–88.</ref>


Central to Seno'o's radical Buddhism was a reinterpretation of the Three Jewels. Buddha referred above all to the historical Śākyamuni, revered as the fullest realization of human possibility rather than a supernatural source of salvation. Dharma was interpreted through interdependence, nonattachment, and no-self, the latter developing into an ethic of “selfless love” (''muga-ai'' 無我愛) realized through practice. Sangha became a model for a communal society (''kyōdō shakai'' 共同社会) organized around equality, cooperation, and freedom from exploitation. Social transformation and personal transformation were therefore mutually necessary: capitalism and other structures of domination had to be overcome, but structural change alone could not eliminate the egoism and attachment that reproduced exploitation.<ref>Seno'o, ''Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō'', 363–67; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 217–20.</ref> The YLRB attempted to put these ideas into practice through publications, lectures, conferences, and local activism. Surviving records indicate that it established as many as twenty-six branches across twenty prefectures, although contemporary government agencies produced somewhat lower estimates. During the mid-1930s Seno'o and other members became increasingly involved in labor, socialist, antifascist, and Popular Front activities, while Seno'o's writings connected capitalism ever more explicitly with war, fascism, and imperialism.<ref>[source for branch reconstruction and contemporary estimates]; Seno'o Girō, “Jinmin sensen to Bukkyōto” 人民戦線と仏教徒 [The Popular Front and Buddhists], ''Kyōgaku Shinbun'', July 7, 1936.</ref>
The YLRB developed into a nationwide movement whose increasingly socialist and internationalist program joined Buddhist reform to labor, tenant, antiwar, and antifascist activism. Seno'o combined structural criticism of capitalism with an insistence upon ethical transformation, arguing that Buddhism must confront the material and institutional causes of suffering without reducing liberation to economic change alone. This combination made the YLRB the most sustained attempt in prewar Japan to construct an organized radical Buddhist movement. It also brought the League under increasing police scrutiny. Seno'o was arrested in December 1936 under the Peace Preservation Law and publicly recanted his former political position in 1937; a nationwide roundup later that year effectively destroyed the organization.<ref>Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎, “Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō” 社会変革途上の新興仏教 [Revitalized Buddhism on the Road to Social Transformation] (1933), repr. in ''Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū'' 妹尾義郎宗教論集 (1975), 325–88; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 203–43; [Matsune/state sources for repression].</ref>
 
This experiment was destroyed by state repression. Seno'o was arrested on December 7, 1936, under the Peace Preservation Law. After five months of detention and interrogation, he confessed and in May 1937 underwent ''tenkō'' 転向 (political recantation), publicly repudiating his former political commitments and affirming loyalty to the emperor. The League nevertheless attempted to continue without him, reorganizing its leadership and holding a seventh national congress in May 1937. In October, more than two hundred people associated with the YLRB were detained in a nationwide roundup; the organization was effectively destroyed, and twenty-seven members were eventually prosecuted.<ref>Matsune Takashi (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 93–108; ''Tokkō gaiji geppō'' 特高外事月報, October 1937; Ogata Hiroshi, ''Bukkyō to shakai undō: Shu to shite Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei ni tsuite'', 380–86.</ref>


=== Ichikawa Hakugen ===
=== Ichikawa Hakugen ===
{{Main|Ichikawa Hakugen}}
{{Main|Ichikawa Hakugen}}


A different form of radical Buddhist critique emerged after Japan's defeat in 1945 in the work of the Rinzai Zen priest and scholar Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986). Ichikawa had himself participated in the intellectual world of wartime Japanese Zen, and his postwar thought developed through an increasingly searching confrontation with Buddhism's responsibility for Japanese militarism and imperialism. Rather than treating Buddhist support for the war simply as an aberration produced by state coercion or the failures of individual priests, he asked what features of Buddhist doctrine, institutional organization, and historical relations with political authority had made such accommodation possible.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), [pages].</ref>
A different form of radical Buddhist critique emerged after Japan's defeat in 1945 in the work of the Rinzai Zen priest and scholar Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986). Having himself participated in the intellectual world of wartime Japanese Zen, Ichikawa devoted much of his postwar work to examining Buddhism's responsibility for Japanese militarism and imperialism. Rather than explaining Buddhist support for the war simply through state coercion or individual failure, he asked how Buddhist doctrines, institutions, and historical relations with political authority had facilitated accommodation with established power. His critique focused especially on “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅), while also recovering suppressed currents of Buddhist socialism represented by figures such as Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), [pages].</ref>


Ichikawa's critique was particularly directed toward Zen. He argued that Japanese Zen had developed within a long history of accommodation to political authority and social hierarchy and had frequently interpreted concepts such as no-self, nonduality, and the transcendence of discrimination in ways that weakened resistance to concrete forms of domination. In modern Japan these tendencies had converged with nationalism and emperor-centered ideology in what Ichikawa characterized as “Imperial-Way Zen” (''kōdō Zen'' 皇道禅). His analysis thus turned familiar Buddhist virtues into objects of critical examination: harmony could suppress conflict, nonattachment could become political passivity, and the overcoming of distinctions could obscure actual inequalities.<ref>Ichikawa, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin''; Ichikawa Hakugen, [principal text on ''kōdō Zen'' to identify]; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref> This self-criticism was inseparable from Ichikawa's postwar political commitments. His engagement with socialism, Marxism, peace activism, and opposition to the Vietnam War led him to seek what he sometimes described as a Buddhism capable of resisting rather than sanctifying established power. Yet his project differed from a simple attempt to subordinate Buddhism to Marxism. Marxist social analysis could expose class domination, exploitation, and ideology, but Buddhism itself also required reconstruction if it was to contribute to human liberation. Ichikawa therefore subjected both inherited Buddhism and modern Buddhist philosophy—including the thought of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎—to sustained criticism.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen, ''Zen to gendai shisō'' 禅と現代思想 [Zen and Contemporary Thought] (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1967); Ichikawa, ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin''; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref>
Ichikawa's critique was also reconstructive. Drawing upon socialism, Marxism, anarchism, and postwar peace activism, he sought forms of Buddhism capable of resisting rather than sanctifying established power and insisted that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny when they served to naturalize hierarchy or obscure injustice. This combination of social criticism and Buddhist self-criticism also anticipates important concerns of the later movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教), although the relationship is better understood as a critical affinity than as a direct intellectual succession.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen, “Nihon ni okeru Bukkyō shakaishugi no mondai” 日本における仏教社会主義の問題 [The Problem of Buddhist Socialism in Japan], repr. in ''Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū'' 市川白弦著作集, vol. 3, ''Bukkyō no sensō sekinin'' 仏教の戦争責任 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1993), [pages]; Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>
 
Ichikawa also explicitly recovered the suppressed history of Japanese Buddhist socialism, including figures such as Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō, and reflected on the possibilities and limitations of Buddhist socialism itself. His importance to the history of radical Buddhism therefore lies partly in this act of historical recovery, but still more in his insistence that a genuinely critical Buddhism must direct its critique inward as well as outward. Social structures of domination had to be confronted, but so too did Buddhist doctrines, habits, and institutions when they helped reproduce those structures.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen, “Nihon ni okeru Bukkyō shakaishugi no mondai” 日本における仏教社会主義の問題 [The Problem of Buddhist Socialism in Japan], [original publication details to establish], reprinted in ''Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū'' 市川白弦著作集, vol. 3, ''Bukkyō no sensō sekinin'' 仏教の戦争責任 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1993); Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', [pages].</ref>
 
In this respect, Ichikawa forms an important bridge between the socialist and anarchist Buddhist movements of the prewar period and the later movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教). Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗 did not simply inherit Ichikawa's political program, and Critical Buddhism arose from different institutional and doctrinal controversies. Nevertheless, Ichikawa's demand that Buddhism submit its own doctrines and historical formations to critical scrutiny anticipates an important feature of their project. The relationship is therefore better understood as one of critical affinity and genealogy than of direct intellectual succession.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>


=== Critical Buddhism ===
=== Critical Buddhism ===
{{Main|Critical Buddhism}}
{{Main|Critical Buddhism}}


A later development in Japanese Buddhist criticism emerged in the 1980s around the Sōtō scholars Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗. The movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教) subjected influential strands of East Asian Buddhist thought—particularly ''tathāgatagarbha'' (buddha-nature) and ''hongaku'' 本覚 (original enlightenment) thought—to sustained criticism. Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that doctrines emphasizing an underlying, universal ground of enlightenment risked obscuring the critical, relational, and non-substantialist dimensions of Buddhist teaching. Hakamaya captured the movement's provocative stance in the proposition that “Buddhism is criticism” (''Bukkyō wa hihan de aru'' 仏教は批判である).<ref>Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭, ''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教 [Critical Buddhism] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1990); Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗, ''Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan'' 縁起と空――如来蔵思想批判 [Dependent Origination and Emptiness: A Critique of Tathāgatagarbha Thought] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1989).</ref> Critical Buddhism was not a continuation of the socialist and anarchist Buddhist movements of the prewar period, nor did it reproduce Ichikawa Hakugen's political program. Its primary interventions were doctrinal and institutional. Nevertheless, its insistence that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny—and its concern that appeals to harmony, nonduality, or original enlightenment could obscure discrimination and social injustice—places it within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese Buddhist self-criticism. In this limited but important sense, it extended the question posed especially forcefully by Ichikawa: whether Buddhism could criticize structures of domination without also critically examining its own inherited concepts and institutions.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>
A later form of radical Buddhist self-criticism emerged in the 1980s around the Sōtō scholars Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗. The movement known as Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教) subjected influential strands of East Asian Buddhist thought—particularly ''tathāgatagarbha'' (buddha-nature) and ''hongaku'' 本覚 (original enlightenment) thought—to sustained criticism. Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that doctrines positing an underlying, universal ground of enlightenment departed from the critical, relational, and non-substantialist dimensions of Buddhist teaching and might contribute to forms of social accommodation rather than resistance. Hakamaya captured the movement's provocative stance in the proposition that “Buddhism is criticism” (''Bukkyō wa hihan de aru'' 仏教は批判である). Critical Buddhism was neither a continuation of prewar Buddhist socialism and anarchism nor a reproduction of Ichikawa Hakugen's political project. Nevertheless, its insistence that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to criticism—and its concern that appeals to harmony, nonduality, and original enlightenment could obscure discrimination and social injustice—places it within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese Buddhist self-criticism.<ref>Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭, ''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教 [Critical Buddhism] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1990); Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗, ''Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan'' 縁起と空――如来蔵思想批判 [Dependent Origination and Emptiness: A Critique of Tathāgatagarbha Thought] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1989); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>


=== The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan ===
=== The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan ===


Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party was quickly suppressed; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to the repression surrounding the High Treason Incident; and Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was destroyed by the state in 1937. Nor did these figures form a single intellectual lineage: their various forms of Buddhist socialism, anarchism, and Marxism emerged from different religious and political contexts. What connects them instead is a recurring attempt to apply Buddhist ideas of suffering, equality, compassion, non-attachment, and liberation to structures of poverty, exploitation, discrimination, war, and political domination—and, increasingly, to subject Buddhism's own institutions and doctrines to the same critical scrutiny.
Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party disappeared almost immediately; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to state repression; and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was dismantled in 1937. Nor did these movements establish an enduring institutional lineage after 1945. Their historical significance lies instead in recurrent attempts to ask whether Buddhist teachings could provide resources not merely for individual ethical reform or social welfare but for fundamental criticism and transformation of existing political and economic structures.


One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma's Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League. Whereas Burmese socialists were, in his formulation, “nationalists first and socialists second,” and could therefore draw upon a widely shared Buddhist idiom, Japanese socialists had been “socialists first and nationalists second,” emerging from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960). “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma”. ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2.3: 293–304, pp. 295–296.</ref> Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement—including discussions associated with Miki Kiyoshi 三木清 and ''Shinkō Kagaku no Hata no Moto ni'' 新興科学の旗のもとに (''Under the Banner of the New Science''), as well as Seno'o's YLRB—remained minority currents within the prewar left.<ref>Totten (1960), “Buddhism and Socialism,” 302–3.</ref> Totten's comparison thus highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.
One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma, arguing that Japanese socialism emerged from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents rather than from a widely shared Buddhist social idiom. Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement remained minority currents within the prewar left. Totten's comparison highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960), “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma,” ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2, no. 3: 293–304, 295–96, 302–3.</ref>


After 1945, many of the same questions reappeared in different forms. Ichikawa Hakugen recovered the suppressed history of Buddhist socialism while turning radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself through his analysis of Buddhist war responsibility and accommodation to political authority. Critical Buddhism (''Hihan Bukkyō'' 批判仏教) later extended this reflexive tendency into doctrinal criticism, although it was neither socialist nor a direct continuation of prewar radical Buddhism. The significance of radical Buddhism in Japan therefore lies less in an unbroken succession of movements than in repeated attempts to reconstruct Buddhism as a resource for—and sometimes an object of—fundamental social, political, and ethical critique.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>
The forms that relationship took varied considerably. Tarui Tōkichi drew upon Buddhist and other Asian ethical concepts in formulating an indigenous socialism; Takagi derived socialism from Jōdo Shinshū faith; Uchiyama brought Buddhist equality into conversation with anarchist communism; and Seno'o combined Buddhist ethical transformation with increasingly Marxist social analysis. Ichikawa Hakugen subsequently turned radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself, while Critical Buddhism extended this self-critical impulse in a different, primarily doctrinal direction. These projects constitute neither a single tradition nor variations on a common political ideology. Rather, they represent historically distinct efforts to rethink the relationship between Buddhism, power, equality, and social transformation.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>


== Selected Literature in English ==
== Selected Literature in English ==
Line 114: Line 86:
* Ives, Christopher (2009). ''Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics''. University of Hawai'i Press. {{annotation|The principal English-language study of Ichikawa Hakugen and his critique of Zen's accommodation to Japanese nationalism and militarism.}}
* Ives, Christopher (2009). ''Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics''. University of Hawai'i Press. {{annotation|The principal English-language study of Ichikawa Hakugen and his critique of Zen's accommodation to Japanese nationalism and militarism.}}


* Ketelaar, James Edward (1990). ''Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution''. Princeton University Press. {{annotation|A major study of the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism and the subsequent reconstruction of Buddhist identity and institutions.}}
* Ketelaar, James Edward (1990). ''Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution''. Princeton University Press. {{annotation|A major study of the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism and the subsequent reconstruction of Buddhist identity and institutions, providing essential background for the emergence of Buddhist modernism and reform.}}


* Large, Stephen S. (1987). “Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō”. ''Modern Asian Studies'' 21.1: 153–171. {{annotation|An important early English-language political biography of Seno'o Girō, based substantially on his published diary.}}
* Large, Stephen S. (1987). “Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō”. ''Modern Asian Studies'' 21.1: 153–171. {{annotation|An influential early English-language study of Seno'o Girō and his political development, based substantially on his published diary.}}


* Shields, James Mark (2011). ''Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought''. Ashgate. {{annotation|A book-length study of Critical Buddhism, particularly the thought of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō and its relationship to modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy.}}
* Shields, James Mark (2011). ''Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought''. Ashgate. {{annotation|A book-length study of Critical Buddhism, particularly the thought of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō and its relationship to modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy.}}
Line 137: Line 109:


* Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill. {{annotation|An influential and controversial study of Japanese Zen and militarism that also helped draw English-language attention to Uchiyama Gudō.}}
* Victoria, Brian (1997). ''Zen at War''. Weatherhill. {{annotation|An influential and controversial study of Japanese Zen and militarism that also helped draw English-language attention to Uchiyama Gudō.}}


== Selected Literature in Japanese ==
== Selected Literature in Japanese ==


* Daitō Jin 大東仁. ''Taigyaku no sō Takagi Kenmyō no shinjitsu: Shinshū sōryo to Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆の僧高木顕明の真実――真宗僧侶と大逆事件 [The Truth about Takagi Kenmyō, the High-Treason Priest: Shin Buddhist Priests and the High Treason Incident]. [original edition details to verify; new edition 2024]. {{annotation|A substantial study of Takagi Kenmyō and his involvement in the High Treason Incident.}}
* Daitō Satoshi 大東仁. ''Taigyaku no sō Takagi Kenmyō no shinjitsu: Shinshū sōryo to Taigyaku jiken'' 大逆の僧高木顕明の真実――真宗僧侶と大逆事件 [The Truth about Takagi Kenmyō, the High-Treason Priest: Shin Buddhist Priests and the High Treason Incident]. Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 2011. {{annotation|A substantial study of Takagi Kenmyō and his involvement in the High Treason Incident.}}


* Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴. ''Gokuraku no ninju: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu'' 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む [The People of the Pure Land: Reading Takagi Kenmyō's “My Socialism”]. Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2012. {{annotation|A sustained interpretation of Takagi's Buddhist socialism centered on “My Socialism,” the key primary text for his thought.}}
* Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴. ''Gokuraku no ninju: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu'' 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む [The People of the Pure Land: Reading Takagi Kenmyō's “My Socialism”]. Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2012. {{annotation|A sustained interpretation of Takagi's Buddhist socialism centered on “My Socialism,” the key primary text for his thought.}}
Line 148: Line 121:
* Inagaki Masami 稲垣真美. ''Budda o seoite gaitō e: Seno'o Girō to Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei'' 仏陀を背負いて街頭へ――妹尾義郎と新興仏教青年同盟 [Carrying the Buddha on His Back into the Streets: Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974. {{annotation|The foundational Japanese-language biography of Seno'o and history of the YLRB, based extensively on Seno'o's diary and papers.}}
* Inagaki Masami 稲垣真美. ''Budda o seoite gaitō e: Seno'o Girō to Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei'' 仏陀を背負いて街頭へ――妹尾義郎と新興仏教青年同盟 [Carrying the Buddha on His Back into the Streets: Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974. {{annotation|The foundational Japanese-language biography of Seno'o and history of the YLRB, based extensively on Seno'o's diary and papers.}}


* Izumi Keiki 泉惠機. “Takagi Kenmyō ni kansuru kenkyū: Shiryō oyobi ryakunenpu ni tsuite” 高木顕明に関する研究――資料及び略年譜について [Research on Takagi Kenmyō: Sources and a Brief Chronology]. ''Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo kenkyū kiyō'' 真宗総合研究所研究紀要 14 (1997): [pages to verify]. {{annotation|An important archival and chronological study of Takagi incorporating previously neglected Ōtani-ha materials.}}
* Izumi Keiki 泉惠機. “Takagi Kenmyō ni kansuru kenkyū: Shiryō oyobi ryakunenpu ni tsuite” 高木顕明に関する研究――資料及び略年譜について [Research on Takagi Kenmyō: Sources and a Brief Chronology]. ''Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo kenkyū kiyō'' 真宗総合研究所研究紀要 14 (1997): 103–36. {{annotation|An important archival and chronological study of Takagi incorporating previously neglected Ōtani-ha materials.}}


* Kashiwahara Yūsen 柏原祐泉. ''Nihon Bukkyōshi: Kindai'' 日本仏教史――近代 [A History of Japanese Buddhism: The Modern Period]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1990. {{annotation|A standard scholarly history of Japanese Buddhism from the Meiji Restoration through the modern period.}}
* Kashiwahara Yūsen 柏原祐泉. ''Nihon Bukkyōshi: Kindai'' 日本仏教史――近代 [A History of Japanese Buddhism: The Modern Period]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1990. {{annotation|A standard scholarly history of Japanese Buddhism from the Meiji Restoration through the modern period.}}
Line 156: Line 129:
* Kunba Hiroshi 訓覇浩. “Takagi Kenmyō o fukken, kenshō suru to wa” 高木顕明を復権、顕彰するとは [What Does It Mean to Rehabilitate and Commemorate Takagi Kenmyō?]. ''Shoki shakaishugi kenkyū'' 初期社会主義研究 22 (2010): 126–37. {{annotation|Examines Takagi's postwar rehabilitation and the contemporary significance of his commemoration.}}
* Kunba Hiroshi 訓覇浩. “Takagi Kenmyō o fukken, kenshō suru to wa” 高木顕明を復権、顕彰するとは [What Does It Mean to Rehabilitate and Commemorate Takagi Kenmyō?]. ''Shoki shakaishugi kenkyū'' 初期社会主義研究 22 (2010): 126–37. {{annotation|Examines Takagi's postwar rehabilitation and the contemporary significance of his commemoration.}}


* Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎. “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party]. ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28.3 (1991): [pages to verify]. {{annotation|Reconsiders the political and ideological character of Tarui Tōkichi's Eastern Socialist Party and its relationship to early Japanese socialism.}}
* Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎. “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party]. ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28.3 (1991): 39–42. {{annotation|Reconsiders the political and ideological character of Tarui Tōkichi's Eastern Socialist Party and its relationship to early Japanese socialism.}}


* Matsune Takashi 松根鷹. ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'' 妹尾義郎と「新興仏教青年同盟」 [Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. [1975 publication details to verify]. {{annotation|An important early reconstruction of Seno'o and the YLRB, especially valuable for the League's organization, repression, and final years.}}
* Matsune Takashi 松根鷹. ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'' 妹尾義郎と「新興仏教青年同盟」 [Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1975. {{annotation|An important early reconstruction of Seno'o and the YLRB, especially valuable for the League's organization, repression, and final years.}}


* Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲. “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡 [The High Treason Incident and the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities]. ''Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 中央学術研究所紀要 45 (2016): 2–68. {{annotation|A detailed study of Uchiyama's Buddhist socialism, political activity, and prosecution in the High Treason Incident.}}
* Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲. “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡 [The High Treason Incident and the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities]. ''Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 中央学術研究所紀要 45 (2016): 2–61. {{annotation|A detailed study of Uchiyama's Buddhist socialism, political activity, and prosecution in the High Treason Incident.}}


* Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎. ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party]. Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930. {{annotation|The foundational study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.}}
* Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎. ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party]. Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930. {{annotation|The foundational study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.}}
Line 169: Line 142:
<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
First version, 4 August 2026. Main: Brons, Lajos. Other: (none).
First version, 4 August 2026. Main: Brons, Lajos. Other: (none).
Substantially revised and expanded, September 2026. Main: Brons, Lajos; Shields, James Mark.
Substantially revised and expanded, September 2026. Main: Shields, James Mark. Other: Brons, Lajos.
-->
-->
Brons, Lajos, and James Mark Shields ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "Japan". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Japan</nowiki>.
Shields, James Mark, and Lajos Brons ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). “Japan”. ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Japan</nowiki>.


== Notes ==
== Notes ==

Latest revision as of 01:05, 27 October 2026

Japan provides one of the richest historical settings for the study of radical Buddhism. From its early institutional development in Japan, Buddhism developed complex and often mutually supportive relationships with political authority, including the imperial court, the powerful religious institutions of the medieval period, and the Tokugawa shogunate. These relationships never eliminated conflict or dissent, however, and Japanese history also supplied later Buddhist radicals with memories and models of religiously inflected resistance, including peasant uprisings and traditions of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (gimin 義民).[1]

The political and intellectual upheavals accompanying the Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed this relationship. Following the brief but severe persecution of Buddhism known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈, Buddhist clergy and lay intellectuals pursued a variety of projects to reconstruct Buddhism as compatible with a modernizing nation-state, modern science, new forms of scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion and ethics. Within and against this broader field of Buddhist reform there emerged, from the 1880s through the early Shōwa period, a much smaller and internally diverse current in which activists brought Buddhist ideas into constructive engagement with socialism, anarchism, and eventually Marxism. This entry uses “radical Buddhism” primarily for these attempts to connect Buddhist thought and practice with fundamental transformations of existing social, economic, and political relations.[2]

Radical Buddhism in this narrower sense never became a dominant current within modern Japanese Buddhism. Its most explicitly left-wing prewar expressions were repeatedly subjected to state repression, most dramatically in the High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 and the destruction of Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism in 1936–1937. Yet the questions these movements raised—about Buddhism's relationship to social inequality, capitalism, nationalism, war, and political authority—reappeared in different forms after 1945. The postwar critique of Buddhist complicity in Japanese militarism associated especially with Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, and the later Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教) movement, are therefore treated here not as straightforward organizational continuations of prewar radical Buddhism but as later forms of Buddhist social and doctrinal criticism that can be situated within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese critical Buddhism.[3]

Buddhism in Japan

[edit]

Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and over the following centuries became deeply embedded in the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. By the medieval period, major monasteries and temple networks controlled substantial landholdings and exercised considerable political influence. Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄 famously analyzed religious institutions as one component of the system of powerful elite blocs (kenmon 権門) through which court aristocrats, warriors, and major religious institutions constituted the medieval ruling order. The period also witnessed the development of influential Buddhist movements associated with figures such as Hōnen 法然, Shinran 親鸞, Dōgen 道元, and Nichiren 日蓮. Although some came into conflict with established religious and political authorities, Buddhist institutions generally developed through complex relationships of both autonomy and cooperation with political power rather than sustained opposition to it.[4] Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), these relationships acquired an extensive administrative form. Through temple registration (terauke 寺請) and hereditary temple-parishioner relationships (danka 檀家), Buddhist temples participated in the registration of households and regulation of religious affiliation while providing funerary and memorial services increasingly central to ordinary religious life.[5]

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted this institutional settlement. The government-mandated separation of Buddhism and Shinto (shinbutsu bunri 神仏分離) was accompanied in many regions by anti-Buddhist violence and destruction conventionally known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈, stripping Buddhist institutions of much of their former status and property and forcing Buddhist leaders to reconsider the tradition's place within the new nation-state.[6] Responses ranged from renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (kairitsu 戒律), associated with figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照, to participation in government-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (Daikyō 大教) campaign. A subsequent generation of scholar-priests and lay intellectuals—including Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之—engaged modern science, philosophy, historical scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion. Historical-critical scholarship could pose particularly difficult questions for inherited authority: Murakami, for example, became associated with Daijō hibussetsuron 大乗非仏説論, the thesis that Mahāyāna scriptures were not directly taught by the historical Buddha. Modern Japanese Buddhist thought also intersected increasingly with academic philosophy, including the work of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and the later Kyoto School.[7]

By the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War, major Buddhist institutions accommodated themselves in varying degrees to the Japanese imperial state and its war effort. The extent and implications of this accommodation became an important subject of postwar Buddhist self-criticism, although sustained institutional reckoning developed only gradually. Ichikawa Hakugen's analysis of Buddhist war responsibility and “Imperial-Way Zen” (kōdō Zen 皇道禅) became one of the most searching examples of this critique. He examined not only particular instances of wartime collaboration but also the doctrinal, ethical, and institutional tendencies that had facilitated Buddhist accommodation to political authority.[8] These developments form an important counterpoint to the much smaller traditions of progressive and radical Buddhism discussed below.

Radical Buddhism in Japan

[edit]

The Radical Buddhism Project uses “radical Buddhism” in modern Japan primarily for attempts to bring Buddhist thought and practice into sustained engagement with projects for fundamental social, economic, or political transformation, particularly socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. Radical Buddhism was historically distinct from, although deeply indebted to, the broader currents of Buddhist reform and modernism described above, and its emergence cannot be traced to a single continuous tradition. Premodern revolts should therefore not be understood retrospectively as instances of “radical Buddhism.” They did, however, provide historical memories and symbolic models through which later activists could imagine religiously grounded resistance to established authority. The Ikkō-ikki 一向一揆 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, brought together religious communities, peasants, local warriors, and other groups associated with the Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū in episodes of armed resistance and regional self-government. Their aims and social composition varied considerably and cannot simply be assimilated to modern socialism or anarchism.[9]

Of more demonstrable importance to modern radicals were Edo-period narratives of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (gimin 義民), especially village representatives remembered for suffering or dying after petitioning authorities on behalf of oppressed peasants. The semi-legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎 (1605–1653) became an especially powerful exemplar, while Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎 (1793–1837), the Osaka samurai scholar and former official who led an 1837 rebellion during a period of severe famine, provided another model of principled resistance to corrupt authority.[10] Their significance lies less in direct institutional or doctrinal continuity than in later appropriation. Such figures supplied what Shields describes as “root paradigms” of self-sacrificing resistance through which modern activists could interpret new conflicts involving poverty, capitalism, state authority, and social injustice. Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, for example, explicitly invoked earlier traditions of peasant resistance while articulating a thoroughly modern Buddhist anarchism.[11] These appropriations did not make the earlier rebels socialists or anarchists retrospectively; rather, they allowed modern radicals to understand their political commitments through indigenous historical resources as well as newly imported ideas.

The Eastern Socialist Party

[edit]

One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist and other East Asian concepts was the short-lived Eastern Socialist Party (Tōyō Shakaitō 東洋社会党), founded by Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉 (1850–1922) in May 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was prohibited by the government the following month. Tarui nevertheless continued his efforts to revive it and circulated revised party regulations in January 1883, activity for which he was sentenced to a year in prison.[12]

Tarui's draft party regulations reveal an eclectic attempt to formulate socialism through concepts drawn from Asian religious and ethical traditions rather than simply reproduce contemporary European socialist theory. Its first three principles made “affection” (shin'ai 親愛) the standard of words and actions, affirmed the “equality of self and other” (jita byōdō 自他平等), and identified the “greatest welfare” (saidai fukuri 最大福利) of society as the party's goal. Subsequent provisions proposed measures intended to overcome divisions between rich and poor, including forms of communal ownership.[13]

Whether the Eastern Socialist Party should be regarded as “socialist” in the same sense as the socialist movements that developed in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century has long been debated. Some later commentators emphasized its distance from European socialist theory and situated it instead within the Freedom and People's Rights movement, agrarian demands for economic justice, and older East Asian ethical traditions.[14] For the history of radical Buddhism, however, this ambiguity is itself significant. Tarui's experiment illustrates an enduring problem for later Buddhist socialists: whether socialism should be understood as a largely imported body of political and economic theory to which Buddhism might be added, or whether egalitarian and communal elements within Buddhist and other Asian traditions could themselves provide resources for constructing a distinctively local form of socialism.[15]

The New Buddhist Fellowship

[edit]
➣ Main article: The New Buddhist Fellowship

The most sustained collective expression of Meiji Buddhist modernism emerged in the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship), established in 1899 as the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 and renamed in 1903. Its members included Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋, Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭, Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰, Sugimura Sojinkan 杉村楚人冠, and Katō Genchi 加藤玄智, many of whom had studied with figures such as Murakami Senshō and Inoue Enryō. Through their journal, Shin Bukkyō 新仏教 (New Buddhism), they attacked “old Buddhism” (kyū Bukkyō 旧仏教) as sectarian, ritualistic, superstitious, and institutionally corrupt. Their 1900 declaration called for a “sound Buddhist faith,” free investigation of Buddhism and other religions, the eradication of superstition, freedom from traditional religious institutions and ceremonies, opposition to state interference in religion, and the fundamental reform of society.[16]

Central to New Buddhism was genseshugi 現世主義 (this-worldliness), which located the significance of Buddhist practice within present human and social existence rather than another world. Although most New Buddhists rejected revolutionary socialism and materialism, their insistence that Buddhism address contemporary society brought some members increasingly close to the emerging socialist movement. Watanabe developed forms of Buddhist social welfare and mutual aid, while Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 articulated an explicitly Buddhist critique of war, nationalism, and imperial aggression. The New Buddhist Fellowship thus occupied an important intermediate position between Meiji Buddhist modernism and radical Buddhism: it transformed the modernist reconstruction of Buddhist belief into a more explicitly social project without developing a common program for structural political and economic transformation.[17]

Takagi Kenmyō

[edit]
➣ Main article: Takagi Kenmyo

Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 (1864–1914), a priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in modern Japan to articulate an explicitly socialist Buddhism. In 1899 he became resident priest of Jōsenji 浄泉寺 in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, where encounters with poverty, discrimination against burakumin 部落民, and social inequality contributed to his involvement with the socialist and antiwar movements. In his 1904 essay “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism], Takagi explicitly distinguished his socialism from that of Marx and contemporary Japanese socialists, grounding it instead in his own Buddhist faith and practice. He understood socialism as a form of jissen 実践 (practice) beginning with personal spiritual transformation, while interpreting Namu Amida Butsu 南無阿弥陀仏 and the Pure Land tradition through the ideals of equality, peace, and compassion. Takagi declared Buddhism to be “the mother of the common people and the enemy of the nobility” and described the Pure Land as a realm in which socialism was already practiced. His Buddhist socialism thus joined social reform to the transformation of the practitioner, while providing a religious basis for his opposition to social inequality and the Russo-Japanese War.[18]

Uchiyama Gudō

[edit]
➣ Main article: Uchiyama Gudo

Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 (1874–1911), a Sōtō Zen priest and abbot of Rinsenji 林泉寺 near Hakone, developed one of the most explicitly anarchist forms of radical Buddhism in Meiji Japan. Explaining his embrace of socialism, Uchiyama recalled that as a Buddhist missionary he taught that all beings possess buddha-nature, that within the Dharma there is equality without high or low, and that all beings are children of the Buddha; he came to see these teachings as fundamentally compatible with socialism. His radicalism joined this Buddhist egalitarianism to a critique of private property, economic inequality, imperial authority, and militarism. Unlike Takagi Kenmyō, whose Buddhist socialism remained largely reformist, Uchiyama increasingly identified the social and political structures producing inequality as themselves objects of transformation. Using a clandestine printing press at Rinsenji, he produced and circulated socialist and anarchist writings calling upon ordinary people to free themselves from the political, economic, and religious beliefs sustaining the existing social order.[19]

Uchiyama was arrested in May 1909 for violating publication laws after police discovered his clandestine printing operation at Rinsenji; during their search, police claimed to have found materials for making explosives. Already imprisoned, he was subsequently implicated in the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken 大逆事件), convicted of participating in the alleged conspiracy against Emperor Meiji, and executed on January 24, 1911. Although Uchiyama advocated revolutionary change and did not categorically reject violence, the extent of his involvement in an actual assassination plot remains disputed. The Sōtō establishment stripped him of his clerical status in 1910 and strongly repudiated his ideas; in 1993 the denomination reversed its earlier action and restored his status, acknowledging that its treatment of Uchiyama had reflected the sect's alignment with the emperor-centered political establishment.[20]

From the High Treason Incident to the YLRB

[edit]

The High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 marked a severe rupture in the development of explicitly radical Buddhism in Japan. The execution of Uchiyama Gudō and imprisonment of Takagi Kenmyō formed part of a broader suppression of socialist and anarchist activity, making open attempts to combine Buddhism with revolutionary socialism or anarchism exceptionally difficult. Buddhist social experimentation nevertheless continued in less overtly political forms. Itō Shōshin 伊藤証信 (1876–1963), for example, developed the ideal of muga-ai 無我愛 (selfless love), combining religious and ethical transformation, pacifism, and communal social practice while deliberately distinguishing his movement from socialism. His Muga-ai movement, begun in 1905, survived the repression of the late Meiji period and reemerged during the Taishō era alongside other experiments in Buddhist, Tolstoyan, agrarian, and communal reform.[21]

The relative openness of the Taishō period (1912–1926) nevertheless transformed the context in which Buddhist social thought operated. Socialist ideas circulated more widely, while Buddhist thinkers confronted questions of poverty, capitalism, labor, and the social responsibilities of religion. There was no continuous “radical Buddhist” movement linking the Meiji radicals to their successors: responses ranged from anti-socialist apologetics to social welfare, utopian experiments, and selective engagement with socialism and Marxism. Seno'o Girō's emergence from the quite different world of reformist and nationalist Nichiren Buddhism illustrates both this discontinuity and the persistence of the underlying social questions. By 1926 he was criticizing nationalist readings of Nichiren, and by 1929 he was arguing that a revitalized Nichirenism must stand with the public and engage the socialist struggle against capitalism. These developments prepared the ground for the founding of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟) in 1931.[22]

Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism

[edit]
➣ Main article: Senoo Giro

Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) emerged from the reformist but strongly nationalist Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義 movement before moving increasingly toward socialism during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, his encounters with poverty and social conflict, criticism of established Buddhist institutions, and engagement with socialist and Marxist thought had led him to identify capitalism itself as a major source of suffering. On April 5, 1931, Seno'o and a small group of young activists founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Rejecting existing Buddhist sects as corrupt and capitalism as incompatible with the Buddhist spirit, the League sought to create a Buddha land in this world through the conjunction of individual ethical transformation and fundamental social reform.[23]

The YLRB developed into a nationwide movement whose increasingly socialist and internationalist program joined Buddhist reform to labor, tenant, antiwar, and antifascist activism. Seno'o combined structural criticism of capitalism with an insistence upon ethical transformation, arguing that Buddhism must confront the material and institutional causes of suffering without reducing liberation to economic change alone. This combination made the YLRB the most sustained attempt in prewar Japan to construct an organized radical Buddhist movement. It also brought the League under increasing police scrutiny. Seno'o was arrested in December 1936 under the Peace Preservation Law and publicly recanted his former political position in 1937; a nationwide roundup later that year effectively destroyed the organization.[24]

Ichikawa Hakugen

[edit]
➣ Main article: Ichikawa Hakugen

A different form of radical Buddhist critique emerged after Japan's defeat in 1945 in the work of the Rinzai Zen priest and scholar Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986). Having himself participated in the intellectual world of wartime Japanese Zen, Ichikawa devoted much of his postwar work to examining Buddhism's responsibility for Japanese militarism and imperialism. Rather than explaining Buddhist support for the war simply through state coercion or individual failure, he asked how Buddhist doctrines, institutions, and historical relations with political authority had facilitated accommodation with established power. His critique focused especially on “Imperial-Way Zen” (kōdō Zen 皇道禅), while also recovering suppressed currents of Buddhist socialism represented by figures such as Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō.[25]

Ichikawa's critique was also reconstructive. Drawing upon socialism, Marxism, anarchism, and postwar peace activism, he sought forms of Buddhism capable of resisting rather than sanctifying established power and insisted that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny when they served to naturalize hierarchy or obscure injustice. This combination of social criticism and Buddhist self-criticism also anticipates important concerns of the later movement known as Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教), although the relationship is better understood as a critical affinity than as a direct intellectual succession.[26]

Critical Buddhism

[edit]
➣ Main article: Critical Buddhism

A later form of radical Buddhist self-criticism emerged in the 1980s around the Sōtō scholars Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗. The movement known as Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教) subjected influential strands of East Asian Buddhist thought—particularly tathāgatagarbha (buddha-nature) and hongaku 本覚 (original enlightenment) thought—to sustained criticism. Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that doctrines positing an underlying, universal ground of enlightenment departed from the critical, relational, and non-substantialist dimensions of Buddhist teaching and might contribute to forms of social accommodation rather than resistance. Hakamaya captured the movement's provocative stance in the proposition that “Buddhism is criticism” (Bukkyō wa hihan de aru 仏教は批判である). Critical Buddhism was neither a continuation of prewar Buddhist socialism and anarchism nor a reproduction of Ichikawa Hakugen's political project. Nevertheless, its insistence that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to criticism—and its concern that appeals to harmony, nonduality, and original enlightenment could obscure discrimination and social injustice—places it within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese Buddhist self-criticism.[27]

The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan

[edit]

Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party disappeared almost immediately; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to state repression; and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was dismantled in 1937. Nor did these movements establish an enduring institutional lineage after 1945. Their historical significance lies instead in recurrent attempts to ask whether Buddhist teachings could provide resources not merely for individual ethical reform or social welfare but for fundamental criticism and transformation of existing political and economic structures.

One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma, arguing that Japanese socialism emerged from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents rather than from a widely shared Buddhist social idiom. Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement remained minority currents within the prewar left. Totten's comparison highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.[28]

The forms that relationship took varied considerably. Tarui Tōkichi drew upon Buddhist and other Asian ethical concepts in formulating an indigenous socialism; Takagi derived socialism from Jōdo Shinshū faith; Uchiyama brought Buddhist equality into conversation with anarchist communism; and Seno'o combined Buddhist ethical transformation with increasingly Marxist social analysis. Ichikawa Hakugen subsequently turned radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself, while Critical Buddhism extended this self-critical impulse in a different, primarily doctrinal direction. These projects constitute neither a single tradition nor variations on a common political ideology. Rather, they represent historically distinct efforts to rethink the relationship between Buddhism, power, equality, and social transformation.[29]

Selected Literature in English

[edit]
  • Brons, Lajos (2022). A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism. punctum books. [A wide-ranging philosophical history of Buddhist utopianism, with substantial treatment of Meiji and Taishō Buddhist reform and radicalism, including several figures and currents less prominent in the existing English-language literature.]
  • Ives, Christopher (2009). Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. University of Hawai'i Press. [The principal English-language study of Ichikawa Hakugen and his critique of Zen's accommodation to Japanese nationalism and militarism.]
  • Ketelaar, James Edward (1990). Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution. Princeton University Press. [A major study of the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism and the subsequent reconstruction of Buddhist identity and institutions, providing essential background for the emergence of Buddhist modernism and reform.]
  • Large, Stephen S. (1987). “Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō”. Modern Asian Studies 21.1: 153–171. [An influential early English-language study of Seno'o Girō and his political development, based substantially on his published diary.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2011). Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought. Ashgate. [A book-length study of Critical Buddhism, particularly the thought of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō and its relationship to modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2014). “From Topos to Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, and Ideology Criticism”. In: Kalmanson, Leah, & Shields, James Mark (Eds.), Buddhist Responses to Globalization: 51–77. Lexington Books. [Examines Critical Buddhism through ideology criticism and explores its relationship to materialist and utopian forms of Buddhist praxis.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2014). “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan”. Politics, Religion & Ideology 15.2: 205–223. [Examines Tarui Tōkichi, Takagi Kenmyō, and Uchiyama Gudō as distinct experiments in Meiji radical Buddhism.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2016). “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics”. In: Kawanami, Hiroko (Ed.), Buddhism and the Political Process: 213–232. Palgrave Macmillan. [Places modern Japanese radical Buddhism in a broader history of Buddhist relations with political authority and compares Seno'o Girō with B. R. Ambedkar.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2016). “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan”. Journal of Religion in Japan 5: 3–21. [Examines the later appropriation of peasant revolts and gimin narratives as historical models of Buddhist and religiously inflected resistance.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2017). Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan. Oxford University Press. [A synthetic history of progressive and radical Buddhism in modern Japan, with extensive treatment of Meiji Buddhist reform, Tarui Tōkichi, Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno'o Girō, and Ichikawa Hakugen.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2017). “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’”. Japan Review 30: 79–96. [Examines the New Buddhist Fellowship's genseshugi (this-worldliness) and the philosophical and religious background to later progressive and radical Buddhism.]
  • Shields, James Mark (2023). “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan”. In: Scott, Robert H., & McRae, James (Eds.), Introduction to Buddhist East Asia: 281–304. State University of New York Press. [Places contemporary Critical Buddhism within a longer genealogy of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhist criticism.]
  • Totten, George O. (1960). “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.3: 293–304. [An early comparative analysis of the differing relationships among Buddhism, socialism, and nationalism in Japan and Burma.]
  • Victoria, Brian (1997). Zen at War. Weatherhill. [An influential and controversial study of Japanese Zen and militarism that also helped draw English-language attention to Uchiyama Gudō.]


Selected Literature in Japanese

[edit]
  • Daitō Satoshi 大東仁. Taigyaku no sō Takagi Kenmyō no shinjitsu: Shinshū sōryo to Taigyaku jiken 大逆の僧高木顕明の真実――真宗僧侶と大逆事件 [The Truth about Takagi Kenmyō, the High-Treason Priest: Shin Buddhist Priests and the High Treason Incident]. Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 2011. [A substantial study of Takagi Kenmyō and his involvement in the High Treason Incident.]
  • Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴. Gokuraku no ninju: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む [The People of the Pure Land: Reading Takagi Kenmyō's “My Socialism”]. Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2012. [A sustained interpretation of Takagi's Buddhist socialism centered on “My Socialism,” the key primary text for his thought.]
  • Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦. Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists]. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970. [Ichikawa's foundational postwar critique of Buddhist complicity in Japanese militarism and the structural conditions that made it possible.]
  • Inagaki Masami 稲垣真美. Budda o seoite gaitō e: Seno'o Girō to Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 仏陀を背負いて街頭へ――妹尾義郎と新興仏教青年同盟 [Carrying the Buddha on His Back into the Streets: Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974. [The foundational Japanese-language biography of Seno'o and history of the YLRB, based extensively on Seno'o's diary and papers.]
  • Izumi Keiki 泉惠機. “Takagi Kenmyō ni kansuru kenkyū: Shiryō oyobi ryakunenpu ni tsuite” 高木顕明に関する研究――資料及び略年譜について [Research on Takagi Kenmyō: Sources and a Brief Chronology]. Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo kenkyū kiyō 真宗総合研究所研究紀要 14 (1997): 103–36. [An important archival and chronological study of Takagi incorporating previously neglected Ōtani-ha materials.]
  • Kashiwahara Yūsen 柏原祐泉. Nihon Bukkyōshi: Kindai 日本仏教史――近代 [A History of Japanese Buddhism: The Modern Period]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1990. [A standard scholarly history of Japanese Buddhism from the Meiji Restoration through the modern period.]
  • Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕. “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party]. Ōsaka jiken kenkyū 大阪事件研究 5 (1986): 14–19. [A focused study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.]
  • Kunba Hiroshi 訓覇浩. “Takagi Kenmyō o fukken, kenshō suru to wa” 高木顕明を復権、顕彰するとは [What Does It Mean to Rehabilitate and Commemorate Takagi Kenmyō?]. Shoki shakaishugi kenkyū 初期社会主義研究 22 (2010): 126–37. [Examines Takagi's postwar rehabilitation and the contemporary significance of his commemoration.]
  • Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎. “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party]. Seikei kenkyū 政経研究 28.3 (1991): 39–42. [Reconsiders the political and ideological character of Tarui Tōkichi's Eastern Socialist Party and its relationship to early Japanese socialism.]
  • Matsune Takashi 松根鷹. Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei” 妹尾義郎と「新興仏教青年同盟」 [Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1975. [An important early reconstruction of Seno'o and the YLRB, especially valuable for the League's organization, repression, and final years.]
  • Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲. “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡 [The High Treason Incident and the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities]. Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō 中央学術研究所紀要 45 (2016): 2–61. [A detailed study of Uchiyama's Buddhist socialism, political activity, and prosecution in the High Treason Incident.]
  • Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎. Tōyō Shakaitō kō 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party]. Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930. [The foundational study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.]
  • Yoshida Kyūichi 吉田久一. Nihon kindai Bukkyōshi kenkyū 日本近代仏教史研究 [Studies in the History of Modern Japanese Buddhism]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1992. [A major synthetic study of modern Japanese Buddhism, including Buddhist reform and socially engaged currents.]

How to Cite This Article

[edit]

Shields, James Mark, and Lajos Brons (2026). “Japan”. The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Japan.

Notes

[edit]
  1. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” in Hiroko Kawanami, ed., Buddhism and the Political Process (Palgrave Macmillan), 213–32, 214–15; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” Journal of Religion in Japan 5: 3–21.
  2. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2014), “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 15, no. 2: 205–23.
  3. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., Introduction to Buddhist East Asia (State University of New York Press), 281–304.
  4. ↑ Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄, “The Imperial Law and the Buddhist Law,” trans. Jacqueline I. Stone, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23, nos. 3–4 (1996): 271–85; Shields, James Mark (2016), “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics,” 215.
  5. ↑ Tamamuro Fumio 圭室文雄 (2001), “Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu's Governance Structure,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 28, nos. 3–4: 261–92.
  6. ↑ Ketelaar, James Edward (1990), Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton University Press); Shields, James Mark (2012), “Awakening between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations on Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945,” in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (Brill/Global Oriental), 105–24, 108–9.
  7. ↑ Shields (2012), “Awakening between Science,” 108–21.
  8. ↑ Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Ives, Christopher (2009), Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics (University of Hawai‘i Press); Shields (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” 282–84.
  9. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2016), “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan,” Journal of Religion in Japan 5: 3–21, 6–7.
  10. ↑ Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 7–9.
  11. ↑ Shields (2016), “Peasant Revolts,” 4–5, 11.
  12. ↑ Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎, Tōyō Shakaitō kō 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party] (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930); Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕, “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party], Ōsaka jiken kenkyū 大阪事件研究 5 (July 1986): 14–19; Shields, James Mark (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought in Modern Japan,” in Gereon Kopf, ed., The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy, 255–85, 256–60.
  13. ↑ Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉, “Tōyō Shakaitō tōsoku sōan” 東洋社会党党則草案 [Draft Regulations of the Eastern Socialist Party], in Nihon shakai undō shisō shi 日本社会運動思想史, ed. Itoya Hisao 絲屋寿雄 and Kishimoto Eitarō 岸本英太郎, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1968), 125–29; Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 256–59.
  14. ↑ Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎, “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party], Seikei kenkyū 政経研究 28, no. 3 (1991): 39–42.
  15. ↑ Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 255–60.
  16. ↑ “Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration], Shin Bukkyō 1, no. 1 (July 1900): 3; Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), 91–100.
  17. ↑ Shields (2017), Against Harmony, 99–128; Shields, James Mark (2017), “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’,” Japan Review 30: 79–96.
  18. ↑ Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明, “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 [My Socialism] (1904); Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴 (2012), Gokuraku no ninzu: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む (Tokyo: Hakutakusha); Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), 145–52.
  19. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), 153–62; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki: Zensō Gudō no teikō no shūkyōteki rinri to sekinin” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡――禅僧愚童の抵抗の宗教的倫理と責任 [The High Treason Incident and Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities: The Religious Ethics and Responsibility of Gudō's Resistance], Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō 中央学術研究所紀要 45: 2–61, 20–21.
  20. ↑ Shields (2017), Against Harmony, 153–56; Sanada (2016), “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō,” 32–39; Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲 (2018), “Taigyaku jiken” to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no teikō 〈大逆事件〉と禅僧内山愚童の抵抗 (Tokyo: Kōsei Shuppansha).
  21. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), 163–80; Brons, Lajos (2022), A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism (punctum books), 77–80.
  22. ↑ Shields (2017), Against Harmony, 181–205, 213–16.
  23. ↑ Shields, James Mark (2012), “A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39, no. 2: 333–51; Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), 203–43.
  24. ↑ Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎, “Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō” 社会変革途上の新興仏教 [Revitalized Buddhism on the Road to Social Transformation] (1933), repr. in Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū 妹尾義郎宗教論集 (1975), 325–88; Shields (2017), Against Harmony, 203–43; [Matsune/state sources for repression].
  25. ↑ Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970); Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press), [pages].
  26. ↑ Ichikawa Hakugen, “Nihon ni okeru Bukkyō shakaishugi no mondai” 日本における仏教社会主義の問題 [The Problem of Buddhist Socialism in Japan], repr. in Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū 市川白弦著作集, vol. 3, Bukkyō no sensō sekinin 仏教の戦争責任 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1993), [pages]; Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., Introduction to Buddhist East Asia (State University of New York Press), 281–304.
  27. ↑ Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭, Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教 [Critical Buddhism] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1990); Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗, Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan 縁起と空――如来蔵思想批判 [Dependent Origination and Emptiness: A Critique of Tathāgatagarbha Thought] (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1989); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., Introduction to Buddhist East Asia (State University of New York Press), 281–304.
  28. ↑ Totten, George O. (1960), “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 3: 293–304, 295–96, 302–3.
  29. ↑ Brons, Lajos (2022), A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism (punctum books); Shields, James Mark (2017), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., Introduction to Buddhist East Asia (State University of New York Press), 281–304.
Retrieved from "https://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/index.php?title=Japan&oldid=1311"