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Original Japanese: Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎) (1932). 「農村の窮迫と農村寺院の運動」 [The Crisis of the Countryside and the Rural Temple Movement]. 『新興佛教』, July 1932. Reprinted in 稲垣真美編『妹尾義郎宗教論集』 (Tokyo: 大蔵出版, 1975), 316–324.

English translation: Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎) (2026). “The Crisis of the Countryside and the Rural Temple Movement.” Trans. James Mark Shields. Radical Buddhism Project. Translated from the text reprinted in 稲垣真美編『妹尾義郎宗教論集』 (Tokyo: 大蔵出版, 1975), 316–324.

The Crisis of the Countryside and the Rural Temple Movement

The Awakening of the Countryside and the Construction of Agrarian Culture

Page 316

A: The rural problem has become an awfully pressing issue. There’s no question that it is something everyone must think about.

B: All kinds of measures have been studied, but nobody really seems to know what to do, do they? Labor disputes and tenant-farmer disputes have caused plenty of commotion before, but this rural problem feels different—as though society were being shaken up from the roots. Things like the recent peasant ×× are surely one manifestation of that.

A: After all, the rural problem is a matter of life and death for the farming households that make up more than half the country. And because it is also a problem involving the lifeline of the cities, it is really a problem of the stomach of society as a whole. So naturally it feels different. Lately I’ve been reading the Asahi Shimbun reports entitled “The Actual Conditions of the Distressed Countryside,” and they make the life of those fellows who don’t work at all and stuff themselves full of white rice seem almost sinful.

B: According to those reports, the average farm household in every prefecture carries a debt of eight or nine hundred yen. Across Japan as a whole, the countryside is shackled hand and foot by an enormous debt of five billion yen.

A: Eight or nine hundred yen per household may not sound like an enormous debt, but the price of rice has fallen terribly, and their sole source of income has dried up. Even now the channels of credit simply aren’t functioning, which makes the hardship all the worse. They are squeezed by the landlords and squeezed by the cities. There is this double exploitation, and on top of it they are burdened with public taxes and charges two or three times greater than those paid by commercial and industrial operators with the same income. Even in a good harvest year they have to endure the bitter irony of a “good-harvest hell”; and when the harvest fails, you get the misery we saw last year in Tōhoku. However you look at it, the countryside is hemmed in on every side. No wonder the farmer stands on the path between his fields, wondering what on earth he is supposed to do.

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B: That newspaper had an article called “The Dubious Blessing of Low-Interest Loans.” It told stories like this. In Kanagawa, a tenant farmer went to the village office to borrow low-interest funds, but the officials deducted his overdue payments from the loan and, instead of cash, handed him a statement showing that he was actually in the red. In Yamanashi, “in order for each person to borrow fifty yen, ten people made eight trips from their mountain village to the prefectural office and the Kangyō Bank branch. Their travel and meal expenses came to twenty yen apiece, so in the end they effectively borrowed thirty yen but had to repay fifty. It turned into a thoroughly high-interest loan.” Things like this leave you speechless. Money, money—everything comes down to money. Nobody today is as badly treated as the farmer.

A: Exactly. First of all, they sweat to grow rice, and then the rice never reaches their own mouths—they live on barley and millet instead. Some cannot even get enough of that. In Tōhoku there are farmers who sell their daughters in order to pay the interest on their debts or their tenant rents. Meanwhile, look at the upper classes in the cities: they live in all the luxury they please. Think about it and the whole thing is absurd beyond words. Anyone who has awakened even slightly to socialism can see that things simply cannot go on this way.

B: But looking at history, haven’t peasants always lived with a kind of fatalistic resignation?

A: Since the end of primitive communism, under class society, the peasantry has unfortunately appeared that way. But that does not mean it must remain a subordinate class forever. Such irrationality will sooner or later be liquidated. The day has come when the upside-down prehistory of humanity—in which those who work are despised while those who do not work swagger about—will finally be brought to an end.

B: But can the politicians of today carry out such a fundamental liquidation? They don’t even have a clear idea what to do in the immediate situation. Rebuilding the countryside is going to be difficult. Perhaps the countryside will simply be driven from poverty into extinction.

A: Don’t be ridiculous! The countryside is the lifeline of all humanity. The day the countryside disappears is the day humanity disappears. Do you really think humanity is simply going to die out? As long as humanity survives, the countryside cannot disappear. Nor can anyone make it disappear. The countryside is indestructible. Its present distress is precisely the birth pangs of its revival. At the same time, this is the moment in which we have been given the task of…

Page 318

…liquidating the one-sided civilization that privileges the cities and rebuilding a new agrarian culture. Needless to say, this reconstruction cannot be accomplished by the present politicians, whose hands have been corrupted by the pursuit of fame and profit. It can only be accomplished through the awakening and self-directed efforts of the farmers who stand upon the soil itself.

B: Speaking of the cities, urban life these days is nothing but a chain drama of deception and vanity, anxiety and frustration. You can hardly find a cheerful calm or warm human feeling anywhere. Marx, I think, once said that “the city is the graveyard of capitalism,” and indeed it seems like nothing but a procession of robots. It isn’t a life that an awakened human being could endure forever. As rural consciousness grows, the cities will presumably be limited and reorganized accordingly. But in the new society that emerges from this transformation, what position will the countryside occupy?

A: I believe that the society of the future must be a culturally regulated agrarian communal society.

B: By an “agrarian communal society,” do you mean a communal society organized around agriculture?

A: Exactly.

B: Does that mean rejecting machine civilization?

A: Quite the opposite. Machines should be put to popular, agrarian use. An agrarian society is not the same thing as primitive communist society. Machines themselves are not the problem. The problem arises when machines are stripped of their popular character and used for the benefit of a particular class, or when everything is mechanized to an extreme. In the future, machines will have to be applied much more extensively to agricultural technology.

B: Why does society have to be organized around agriculture?

A: Think of stacking building blocks. If the structure is going to remain stable, the bottom has to be broader than the top. It has to be arranged like a pyramid. Reverse it, narrowing the base while broadening the top, and the slightest disturbance will make it collapse. The peace and stability of society work according to exactly the same principle. When the agrarian class becomes too impoverished to support the classes above it, a great upheaval inevitably occurs, forcing society back into a pyramid form.

So what is the fundamental class of society? Obviously, the workers and farmers—and among them, above all, the farmers. Look around you. Nearly all the necessities of human life—food, clothing, and shelter—depend upon agriculture and forestry. Grain goes without saying. Lumber for buildings, textiles and tatami coverings, tea, coffee, liquor, soy sauce, miso, sugar—all of them originate in the sweat of the farmer. The countryside truly is the lifeline and foundation of human society, its nurturing, maternal presence.

Page 319

Yet since the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, commerce and industry have developed at tremendous speed, mutually reinforcing one another, until they produced today’s capitalist society. Bourgeois civilization reached maturity and ripened to excess, while in inverse proportion the peasant class—the social foundation—was gradually compressed. The result is the inverted pyramid we have today.

In Japan, too, since the Meiji Revolution, fewer than ten great financial combines have accumulated fortunes of five or six billion yen, while during precisely the same period the entire countryside has been forced to shoulder five or six billion yen in debt. No wonder such a society experiences constant turmoil and insecurity.

B: In that case, there’s hardly any need to destroy it—it will collapse naturally. That’s what you call historical necessity. And morally speaking, too, society has treated the farmer who sustains everyone as a contemptible “peasant,” like an ungrateful son who calls his own mother an old hag. A society like that is unjust and deserves to be brought to account.

A: Exactly. The countryside has finally reached the point where it can no longer endure the crushing weight of the great bourgeois class, and an unprecedented upheaval has begun. Society is now being compelled to undertake a fundamental reconstruction as a properly formed pyramid—that is, as an agrarian communal society.

Any attempt to deal with rural distress that fails to grasp this fact is ultimately only a temporary patch and cannot completely remove social instability and anxiety. That doesn’t mean that immediate measures such as moratoria and other policies are useless, but…

B: That makes sense. But how many people are actually carrying out reform movements with that degree of awareness? Most important of all, the farmers themselves mostly lack any awakened consciousness and continue to rely upon other-dependent salvation—a salvation that cannot actually be relied upon at all.

A: It isn’t true that nothing is happening. Strong currents of this kind are emerging in many places. Still, there is no denying that the farming population as a whole remains deeply asleep.

B: Why don’t they understand their own position and mission?

A: There are many reasons. One is the long history of oppression and battering extending from the feudal era into capitalist society. Another is the illusory sense of security produced by the temple Buddhism of “Other Power,” together with the conceptualized way of life instilled by the path of “Self Power,” and doctrines of obedience and submission…

Page 320

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

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

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

Just as a mother can discipline a spoiled child by withholding the breast, farmers who stand upon the land and firmly grasp humanity’s lifeline can, through autonomous awakening and nationwide organization, completely rectify society’s irrationalities and establish an agrarian communal society best suited to human life. Farmers are sleeping lions. Once they awaken and roar, they truly become kings among beasts. Yet while possessing that authority, they are also gentle, maternal beings who nurture everything. Like the story of Ivan, that is precisely where we find the value, permanence, and ultimate victory of agrarian society.

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

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

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

Page 321

…society, the essence of religion may disappear, but agrarian society cannot be constructed through a scientific understanding of society alone. An agrarian society is a cultural society in which scientific civilization and spiritual culture blend harmoniously together within the womb of great nature. Put another way, it is a cultural return to nature, rather than the mere scientific conquest of nature.

Do you know the “March Fifteenth Song” exalted by the communists?

B: Sure. They sing it with blood and tears.

A: A song is not a theory. It is the expression of a whole human life, and for that reason it is more genuine than theory. One line says, “We pledge ourselves to you, Comrade Watamasa, who fell for the Party.” But if you judged that scientifically, wouldn’t it be nonsense? “Watamasa” is dead and no longer exists. What could it mean to swear an oath to him, or to call out to “Yamasen”?

B: Surely they don’t believe in the posthumous spirits of “Watamasa” and “Yamasen.”

A: Of course there can be no individual soul surviving after death. Nevertheless, human beings cannot help crying out in that way. There is within us a spiritual demand that exceeds science.

The lyrics themselves show this. For their comrades, “Watamasa” and “Yamasen” possess immense personal value, and it is precisely within this world of value that religion puts down its roots. Of course this does not escape material determination; but at the same time we must recognize the spiritual activity through which material things are invested with value.

A worldview and conception of life that sublates and synthesizes matter and spirit is precisely Buddhism’s thought of the Middle Way. And the agrarian communal society is the revival of an agrarian society that attempts social reconstruction on the basis of this Middle Way. Put differently, it is the reconstruction of society according to a vision of harmonious integration (enyūkan 円融観).

B: What do you mean by a “vision of harmonious integration”?

A: A social vision in which nature and human life are brought into warm harmony.

B: Harmonious integration! Yes, that’s a good expression. So will rural temples simply continue to exist as they are?

A: A communal society is a society without exploitation, so temples based upon exploitative relationships such as those of today cannot possibly continue. The temple buildings may survive, but their contents will be completely liquidated, and they will be absorbed into Buddhist lay life. Temple compounds will be managed as communal facilities belonging to the entire village, opened not merely for funerals but for every…

Page 322

…sort of public enterprise.

B: We’ll have to hear more about that another time. But for now, how are rural temples supposed to survive?

A: First of all, they must fundamentally liquidate the bourgeois spirit. Temples and priests alike must throw themselves openly before the entire village, return to Buddhism’s original conviction of non-possession, and take the lead in practical action toward the realization of communal society.

If possible, priests should themselves begin farming, bring their lives completely into rhythm with those of the farmers, and vigorously plant in the soil of the village the ideal of agrarian society that we have been talking about.

B: But that’s impossible. Most temple lands are leased out to tenant farmers. If the temple takes them back, the tenants’ livelihood is threatened; yet the tenants often cannot even pay their rents properly. The temples themselves are now in an impossible position.

A: I know that. But it is precisely the karmic consequence of temples having forgotten the true purpose of Buddhism and spent so long living through exploitation. That is why I said “if possible.”

In practical terms, what an ordinary rural temple can do is what I mentioned earlier: offer the temple to the village, and for the priest to resolve to become, so to speak, the village’s hired hand. Having made that radical commitment, he should do whatever he can for the benefit of the villagers.

For example: daycare facilities; research and instruction in supplementary farm industries; leadership in various cooperatives; the establishment of Sunday schools and libraries; village schools aimed at educating young men and women; and, as work for the priest’s wife, instruction in sewing. Once you seriously start thinking about it, there is quite a lot that can be done.

B: A village school sounds interesting. But calling the priest a hired hand is a bit much.

A: Not at all. Anyone who seeks renewal must possess that kind of resolve. It is what the Bible means by “Whoever would be master must become a servant.” It is the natural attitude of selfless love (muga-ai).

B: Fine—but can you actually make a living that way?

A: You can hardly make a living now! In the present circumstances, this is the one path that might allow you to do so. Everyone has tried to occupy positions of domination, and the result is the dead end of capitalist society. A communal society permits no dominating existence…

Page 323

…it is a society in which everyone works together. And unless those who would lead us toward such a society themselves adopt this attitude of service, there is no possible way to transform our inherited tradition of selfish greed. If people act with genuine sincerity, I believe this way of life can move society as a whole and create the fundamental conviction necessary to break through the present crisis.

B: Ordinary determination won’t be enough.

A: Of course not. Even the incomparable Śākyamuni required six years of austerities, with blood practically seeping from him, before fulfilling his great vow. Do you imagine that something as immense as creating a new society can be accomplished by the fraudulent stroke of a pen or empty words? Everything depends upon effort paid for in blood and tears.

Lately I’ve been thinking that the position occupied by rural Buddhist priests is actually extraordinarily favorable for beginning this work, and I almost envy them. Far from standing around helplessly wondering what to do, now is the perfect opportunity to carry the Buddha on their backs, steel their courage, stand upon the impoverished soil, and embody the ideal of “worrying before others and enjoying only after them.”

Last month Inoue introduced the stories of the “Sweet Potato Magistrate” and the “Sweet Potato Jizō”—the righteous deeds of Ido Masatomo, magistrate at Ōmori in Iwami Province, who during the great Kyōhō famine devoted his life to the relief of the poor. Aren’t deeds like these precisely the kind of actions rural temples should now take the lead in carrying out?

B: Isn’t that just a rosy form of heroic idealism that ignores the actual severity of rural poverty?

A: You are free to criticize me. But I believe practical action is possible. Just recently, comrades in Hokkaidō offered me farmland. I investigated it and was preparing to move there with my entire family in early August, determined to plant the Buddhist spirit in the soil of that snowy land through my own body and life. Unfortunately, the plan was called off from their side and I was bitterly disappointed. But I’m still looking for land like that.

When we speak of negating temple Buddhism, what we mean is precisely the desire to regenerate it through this kind of correct way of life.

B: Some temples are afraid that Revitalized Buddhism is simply a movement to smash temples.

A: That is a misunderstanding. Our true intention is for all Buddhists, in the name of the Buddha, to join hands and work toward the realization of communal society.

The countryside will certainly revive through the awakening and solidarity of the farmers. And that very moment should also become an opportunity for the regeneration of Buddhism. Established Buddhism will perish together with the cities, but the regeneration of Buddhism is possible through the revitalized countryside.

No—what is required is not Buddhism for the sake of Buddhism. Buddhism’s mission lies in taking the lead as a guiding force in the revival of the countryside. If the rural temples spread throughout the country…

Page 324

…were themselves renewed and began to act in an organized fashion, it would be like giving an iron club to an ogre: the effect would be immense.

B: When you put it that way, there’s hardly a village without a temple. If they could coordinate with one another and begin acting as an organized movement, that really would amount to something. There must be plenty of priests who already understand this. If they tried, they could do it.

A: If they reflect upon the lives of the founders and patriarchs, they ought to be incapable of doing otherwise. If they refuse to act, then ultimately it means that genuine faith has withered within them.

The sutras speak of “thirsting reverence and ardent longing” (katsugō renbo 渇仰恋慕), but surely there can be no such longing without practice. I have always summed up the Buddhist spirit in a single phrase: “From Impermanence to Devotion” (mujō yori shin’ai e 無常より信愛へ).

When I think of the morning dew, whose fate tomorrow cannot be known, I want, in the memories of each day that I live, to taste an eternal joy even within a single day lived in devotion. How much more so when our efforts are pledged to the realization of communal society!

Even if we fail, a failure born of practice is one step closer to success. As the saying goes, “Nothing can be accomplished through cowardice.”

Come on—you have to start walking. Otherwise you’re living a lie.

Sighing is a disgrace.
Idle talk must end.
Spectatorship is a sin.

According to our respective positions and abilities, directly and indirectly, through education and through practice, shouldn’t we all work toward the realization of an agrarian communal society?

…What’s wrong with you? You’ve suddenly become terribly thoughtful…

B: Listening to you, the image of my own village, as lifeless as though its fire had gone out, suddenly appeared vividly before me.

Think about it: the farmer who grows the rice cannot eat rice himself.

What could be more irrational than that?!