SG31HSU-T

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Original Japanese: Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎) (1931). 「反宗教運動批判」 [A Critique of the Anti-Religious Movement]. 『新興佛教の旗の下に』, August 1931. Reprinted in 稲垣真美編『妹尾義郎宗教論集』 (Tokyo: 大蔵出版, 1975), 302–315.

English translation: Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎) (2026). “A Critique of the Anti-Religious 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), 302–315.

A Critique of the Anti-Religious Movement

I

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A critique of the anti-religious movement should proceed from two directions. On the one hand, we must consider its practical movement of negation directed against the existing religious organizations themselves; on the other, its theoretical attempt to negate religion itself.

Let us begin by considering the attack on existing religious organizations. As far as the attack on existing religious organizations is concerned, we have no objection whatsoever. Indeed, virtually every religious person who takes religion at all seriously, differences of degree notwithstanding, would probably have to express agreement on this point. For the existing religious organizations, one and all, are residual forms that have lost the original vitality of religion, and there is more than sufficient reason to recognize that attacking them can itself provide the impetus for the proper development of religion. The present form of the existing religious organizations is perfectly captured by Lenin’s famous critique. He writes:

“Religion is one form of spiritual oppression that everywhere weighs heavily upon the masses of the people, oppressed by perpetual labor for others, by hardship and isolation. The impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters inevitably gives rise to belief in a better life hereafter, just as the impotence of primitive people in their struggle against nature gives rise to gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Religion teaches those who labor and suffer throughout their lives submission and patience on earth, consoling them with the hope of a heavenly reward. But to those who live from the labor of others, religion offers an easy justification for their entire existence as exploiters, sells them tickets to heavenly bliss at a reasonable price, and thereby teaches them happiness on earth. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual intoxicant in which the slaves of capital drown their human…

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…dignity and even their most minimal desire for a human existence.”

The familiar charge of “opium” is hardly new anymore, but what a penetrating critique it is! The immediate target of these remarks was presumably Christianity, but needless to say, our own established Buddhist organizations cannot be regarded as exceptions. We need hardly turn now to Takatsu Seidō’s “Those Who Indulge in Exploitation,” or to Nishida Shigeji’s “The Class Character of Honganji” in Under the Banner of the Anti-Religious Struggle, and so forth. Whether Shingon, Nichiren, Zen, or any of the others, the larger and more prosperous their present temple organizations, the more enormous their opiate and exploitative character. It is an undeniable fact before our very eyes that they correspond almost exactly to Lenin’s harsh critique. Insofar as this is the case, there can be no reason whatsoever to oppose the anti-religious movement’s attack upon the existing religious organizations.

But is there really a necessary relationship between the present condition of the existing religious organizations and religion itself? For example, is Buddhist ideology necessarily an ideology that must result in the sort of ugly condition exhibited by the existing religions today? If so, then the anti-religious movement should be accepted completely. But is that really the case?

No!! The true essence of each religion is precisely what ought completely to negate and purify the utterly ugly forms of life represented by the existing religious organizations. Under no circumstances should it permit them.

The higher religions are described as ethical religions precisely because, whether Buddhism or Christianity, they possess a considerable ethical dimension. So long as that function has not been distorted, the present condition of the established religious organizations must be regarded as an evil that simply cannot be accepted. It follows that attacks upon such residual religious organizations ought already to have been initiated by serious and progressive religious people themselves, without waiting for the anti-religious activists to work themselves into a frenzy.

Thus, belated though it may be, when we Revitalized Buddhists recently declared in the second plank of our movement:

“We recognize all existing religious organizations as residual forms that have desecrated the Buddhist spirit; we reject them and seek the propagation of Buddhism appropriate to the new age,”

this declaration arose from precisely such an understanding.

II

At this point, the anti-religious activists will immediately retort—…

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…“All this fussing over things like ‘essence’ and ‘true nature’ is bourgeois formal logic. Where is there any essence apart from the history unfolding before our eyes?” But on this point, too, they need only reflect upon themselves to recognize their error immediately. Would they themselves permit all the various proletarian movements currently in vogue—the Social Democrats, the Masses Party, the Communists, and so forth—to be regarded as genuine Marxist movements and criticized as such? And as for the anti-religious movement itself, which represents the true mainstream of Marxism: Takatsu’s “Japan Anti-Religious League,” or Akita and his colleagues’ “Anti-Religious Struggle League”?

Surely any critical assessment of these movements must seek its criteria beyond their immediately existing forms, in the essential teachings of Marx and Engels, or perhaps Lenin. Once this is recognized, the same kind of consideration must be permitted when examining the relationship between the essence of Buddhism or Christianity and the existing religious organizations. To negate the greatness of Marxism on the basis of the turbid current swirling with the petty hacks springing up everywhere, excitable “Marx-boys,” and Marxist intellectuals who make their living churning out manuscripts would have to be called a serious misdiagnosis. And precisely for this reason, to negate religion itself on the basis of the existing religious organizations must likewise be a misdiagnosis.

Consider Christianity. Where in the life of Christ was there anything resembling the bourgeois way of life found in the churches today? Was he not a pioneer who sought to liberate the oppressed Jewish people from Roman tyranny? All those with whom he associated were propertyless; they were certainly not the wealthy and privileged. Of course, much in his ideology would have to be critically reassessed from a contemporary standpoint. But Christianity itself is not, from the outset, an ideology for the oppression of workers and peasants. Surely the movement for neighborly love and liberation expressed in “Love God and love your neighbor” was a precursor to the movement for the liberation of the propertyless. And coming much later, Lincoln’s movement for the emancipation of slaves in the name of God must likewise be regarded as living proof that Christianity is not necessarily opium or poisonous liquor.

Now let us turn our eyes to Buddhism. It is an all-too-familiar fact that the life of our Buddha, who left the royal family and began a mendicant life on the streets, was an exemplary life of great equality without so much as a trace of exploitation. The doctrine of non-self preached in the streets, and consequently such things as his movement to break down the class divisions of the four castes—even if these were not pursued actively and politically—how could any of this possibly be identified with the immensely complicated hierarchical organization of temples today, or with the capitalist—

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—temple Buddhism of the present day?

Consider the vision of dependent origination and emptiness that he consistently taught for forty-five years. This is “the true unity of the material and the spiritual—not a conceived or fabricated unity, but an actually existing unity”—a principle of non-self grounded in a pure experience comparable to Feuerbach’s “sensibility.” How could one possibly discover in this any necessity for affirming the sort of idealistic, opiate-like Buddhism we see today? Buddhism must be reexamined; anything less would be a lie.

Look, further, at the life of Nichiren. How he fought throughout his life against the ruling Hōjō clan of his day! He certainly did not “easily justify their entire existence” as exploiters and “sell them tickets to heavenly bliss at a reasonable price”; nor did he teach “submission and patience on earth.” His religious movement of struggle against the rulers—a movement virtually without parallel in world history—was utterly unlike either the nationalistic Nichirenism of the present day or the ridiculous, clamorous Lotus-style Nichiren Buddhism of today. And, closer to our own time, we can see the same thing in the anti-British independence movement of the religious leader Gandhi. Religion has certainly not always been something that makes the people fall asleep in the “dark chamber of peace of mind.”

So long as we possess, in addition to these, numerous concrete examples carried out in the name of religion that were progressive, active, and even revolutionary, I see nothing unreasonable in maintaining that existing religious organizations and religion itself—whether Buddhism or Christianity—can, and must, be considered separately.

Thus, while affirming the anti-religious movement’s attack upon existing religious organizations, we must now proceed to a critique of the theory by which the anti-religious movement negates religion itself.

III

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How do the Marxists of the anti-religious movement define religion? In the inaugural issue of their journal Anti-Religious Struggle, they write:

“Belief in the existence of a supernatural world is what is called religion. This is the most fundamental characteristic of religion.”

To elaborate: religion, according to this definition, consists in believing in the nonexistent “illusion” of a supernatural heaven such as Christianity teaches and in the superhuman God who inhabits that world. In his work on Feuerbach, Engels writes:

“If religion could exist without God, then alchemy could also…

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…exist without the philosopher’s stone.”

We must not overlook the fact that the “God” in question is the fundamental object of Marxist theories of religion. And since the philosophical foundation of such religion is naturally idealism, it goes without saying that Marxism, which stands in direct opposition to idealism, cannot affirm the existence of such a supernatural God.

How, then, did such religion—that is, belief in God—arise? Lenin says, “Fear created the gods.” Gorter calls it the work of “incomprehensible forces.” That is to say, primitive human beings, still ignorant and unenlightened, confronted natural phenomena that bore down upon their lives as “incomprehensible,” irresistible forces, and from their fear of these phenomena came to imagine them as the workings of gods. Thus arose primitive animism, which developed into clan religion and ethnic religion, and finally into Christianity as a world religion. Buddhism, too, is said to be one of these world religions.

On animism, Plekhanov writes:

“It is the savage’s attempt to explain natural phenomena. However impoverished this attempt may be, under the conditions of primitive life it was unavoidable.”

As for the origins of ethnic religion, Bogdanov writes:

“The tribal elder, as the guardian of accumulated experience in production, organizes and administers, issues commands, draws up plans for labor, and represents the active and creative principle; the others, meanwhile, obey, receive commands, submit to plans handed down from above, and act according to the will of others. These relations of production became the model for human beings’ own understanding.”

Thus Engels, in Anti-Dühring, writes:

“All religion is nothing more than the fantastic reflection in human minds of those external forces that dominate their everyday existence—a reflection in which earthly forces assume the form of supernatural ones. In the earliest period of history, it was first of all the forces of nature that were reflected in this way; and in the course of further development, they underwent the most varied and manifold personifications among different peoples. . . . But it was not long before, alongside the forces of nature, social forces also began to operate—forces that confronted human beings…”

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“…and which, at first, likewise appeared inexplicable, dominating human beings with the same apparent natural necessity as nature itself. In this way, the fantastic figures that initially reflected only the mysterious and incomprehensible forces of nature acquired social attributes and became representatives of historical forces.”

Engels explains it in these terms. Lenin, in a letter to Gorky, criticizes God as follows:

“‘God’ is (historically and in actual life), above all, a complex of ideas generated by the brutish oppression of human beings both by external nature and by class oppression—ideas that reinforce this oppression and lull the class struggle to sleep.”

In other words, religion is, as Marx says in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “an amalgam” (復合体) of all those ideas that seek to deceive human beings.

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: human beings make religion; religion does not make human beings. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-feeling of the human being who has either not yet won himself or has already lost himself again.”

Thus, God is something produced by human beings themselves. Therefore, once human beings have scientifically investigated and completely clarified those natural phenomena that confronted them as “incomprehensible forces,” thereby eliminating the causes of “fear,” and once, within the relations of social production, they have been liberated from their enslaved position and become free human beings who no longer need to pray for salvation—that is, once human beings have completely regained themselves—religion must necessarily disappear. Engels explains this directly in the following words:

“When society has taken possession of all the means of production and employs them according to plan, thereby freeing both itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by the means of production that they themselves have produced, but which confront them as an overwhelming external force; when human beings therefore not only propose but also dispose—only then will the last external force still reflected in religion disappear, and with it religious reflection itself will disappear as well, for the simple reason that there will then be nothing left to reflect.”

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That is what he says. The Marxist theory of the extinction of religion may be summarized roughly as follows.

“Religious suffering is at once an expression of real suffering and a protest against present suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature . . . the opium of the people.”

Thus Marx. To put a stop to religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The problem of religion, therefore, is to demonstrate the necessity of the negation of religion. At this point, let us conclude our presentation of anti-religious theory by summarizing the foregoing arguments in the words of Akizawa, a fighter in the anti-religious movement.

“So long as human beings do not become masters of themselves, their actual lives will continue to be dominated by external forces—at an undeveloped stage of productive power, by the forces of nature, and at a developed stage, by social forces—and religion will continue to exist.”

“Only in socialist society does the human being come to act with himself at the center; only through proletarian revolution is it possible . . . for all religion to disappear completely in the society of the future.”

IV

Now, if we are to criticize fundamentally the Marxist theory of the negation of religion outlined above, the question is whether religion must necessarily make a supernatural “God” an indispensable condition. Why, for example, must Buddhism necessarily posit a Christian-style supernatural “God”? Buddhism does not necessarily posit such a religion. Indeed, within Buddhism there even exists a “Buddhist atheism” that takes the standpoint of atheism. Buddhists may try to avoid the sharp edge of Marxist religious criticism by saying that Buddhism teaches that “there are innumerable supernatural beliefs,” but although relatively few contemporary temple Buddhists maintain theistic belief, Buddhism, if it is to claim the fundamentally atheistic standpoint proper to it, must reflect seriously upon the fact that its present forms of belief have in many cases been distorted.

If one investigates this matter carefully, it becomes clear that the original doctrine of Buddhism is plainly atheistic.

The Buddha denied the Brahmanical gods of creation—Brahmā, the creator of heaven and earth—and taught the doctrine of the twelve links of dependent origination, the law of cause and effect. At the time of his entering nirvāṇa, he left the instruction, “Be a lamp unto yourselves and rely upon yourselves; take the Dharma as your lamp and rely upon the Dharma; rely upon no other.” In this way, Buddhism is precisely a religion that demonstrates atheism at a higher level. While affirming Marx’s proposition that “the highest being for man is man,” we can go further and say that the Buddha is precisely the highest human being whom humanity can ideally imagine: he saw the ideal perfection of the human being in the Buddha’s attainment of nirvāṇa. In short, Buddhism is fundamentally an atheistic religion in which no supernatural “God” exists.

Recently, in the “Reader’s Forum” column, the problem was raised by Dr. Takakusu, an advocate of Buddhist atheism; and in issue no. 7 of Gendai Bukkyō, Katō Seishin also discussed the question under the title “On Buddhist Atheism.”

“To summarize: Buddhism is thoroughly and consistently atheistic; it is an atheistic doctrine. Nevertheless, among Buddhist scholars there are often those who maintain that ‘Mahāyāna Buddhism is a theistic doctrine,’ but this is a misunderstanding of Buddhism.”

So it is said.

Dr. Kimura Taiken, too, writes in his From True Emptiness to Wondrous Being:

“The Buddha relies upon nothing whatsoever; he became Buddha through himself alone. Moreover, what is called the relationship between ‘God and human beings’ is—unless God is understood simply as Dharma or principle—ultimately untenable. . . . Buddhism, then, is at last truly Buddhism when it is treated as one of the world’s three great religions and, moreover, when people have attained peace of mind and established their lives through it. The fact that it is a religion is beyond doubt. Theoretically, the reason that we must discuss whether Buddhism is or is not a religion lies in our taking personality to be the principal element of religion and then seeking, in addition, other religious requirements.”

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“The essence of the religious spirit lies where the demand for freedom and the demand for liberation intertwine; insofar as these demands can be satisfied, even without God it can still be religion.”

Thus he argues. In this way, Buddhism certainly stands upon atheism, and it does not stop at the Buddhist understanding of the Buddha, but continues even to the Zen school and the various other sects. Accordingly, so long as the anti-religious movement treats “God as the fundamental characteristic of religion” and, because of a deficient understanding of religion, takes such premises of religious negation and applies them indiscriminately to existing Buddhist organizations—or even to Christianity and other theistic forms of religion—it must be regarded as an improper movement, however “scientific” it may claim to be.

Thus the fundamental characteristic of religion should be sought elsewhere than in “God.”

V

What, then, is the characteristic of religion?

The word “religion” is often used synonymously with the word “faith,” but does this word “faith” most adequately explain the essential nature of religion? That is to say, religion is a life of believing. The object of belief may, depending upon the case, be “God,” truth, or may change into all manner of other things; but before the object believed in, one casts aside everything unconditionally and thereby feels the power of complete surrender, peace of mind, and satisfaction. Feuerbach said that “the root of religion is the feeling of dependence.” Schleiermacher called it “the feeling of absolute dependence.” And Ritschl said that “God is not a necessity of religion.”

In Buddhism, too, although the sects may differ over whether or not they possess a God, in the end “God” may be absent, but religion can nevertheless be established. Yet without the attitude of faith, religion is impossible. Therefore, we must recognize that the Christian denial of “God” does not amount to the denial of religion. Human beings are sentient beings who, through one means or another, seek to resolve the contradictions of life; and the negation of religion is at the same time a negation of the human being. To put it in Sinclair’s words:

“Religion, in its true meaning, is the most fundamental spiritual impulse, an ardent love of life, a sense of the preciousness of life, and a desire to nurture and assist life. In this sense, every human being who thinks is necessarily religious. In this sense, ‘religion’ is the eternal power of self-renewal—

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—indeed, the very essence of humankind. In this sense, I have not the slightest intention of attacking religion. No, I wish rather to make clear that religion, in this sense, is by no means something that ought to be attacked.”

Is not the absolute life of the Marxist of the present day itself something that comes very close to this? They advocate Marxism while denying the religion of “God.” Yet is their attitude really so entirely different from the attitude of faith found in religion? This is no mere sophistry. Why, for example, is the Nichiren school’s uncompromising adherence to the daimoku, or the Christian’s faith in God—each of them chanting its own object of faith—necessarily uncritical or blind faith, while the Marxist’s practical movement, grounded in the pure principle of human society that he believes in, is somehow a grasp of truth? Of course, ideologically speaking, the latter may possess an advantage in terms of truth. But just as countless religious sects and ideologies have been discarded as the times have changed, can anyone deny that a religion that ought to be discarded may someday arise even within Marxism?

VI

What, then, is Christian ideology?

Its theological worldview and conception of life already extend beyond the Renaissance. Next, Feuerbach’s statement that “the secret of theology is anthropology” opened the way for modern humanism, while the figure of “God” receded far beyond the horizon. Even within Buddhism, so-called other-power Buddhism has recently given rise to a succession of troubling questions, and many have raised objections to it; let us connect these developments with a critique of the principal points of Marxism.

There is, however, one point that requires explanation here. The emergence of the imagined “God” is not, as Marxism sees it, derived solely from nature or relations of production; it is also a product of human nature itself. Consider the statement recently made…

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…in court by Sano Manabu: “I wish to express my condolences for the late Watanabe Masanosuke and the others.” What, after all, does this statement—coming from a leading figure of the anti-religious movement—tell us? Even if his explanation of this “mourning” was that he was “merely praising [Watanabe’s] achievements,” does not the very consciousness expressed toward the individual personality of the deceased provide evidence that human beings possess an animistic impulse independent of such things as relations of production? We should therefore recognize that the idea of God cannot necessarily be regarded as something opposed in every respect to the “true happiness” sought by human beings.

Now, to say yet again that the fundamental philosophy underlying the Marxist view of society and human life is the materialist conception of history would be superfluous. Historical materialism distinguishes itself from a mechanical materialism that recognizes no spiritual values whatsoever. Engels writes:

“The development of political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, and other such things rests upon economic development. Yet all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and that everything else is merely a passive result. Rather, there is reciprocal interaction upon the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.”

If we read further in this same passage, Engels says, “In the final analysis . . . economic necessity ultimately asserts itself”; this means that economic relations do not stand on the same level as the other phenomena with which they interact, and this is Engels’s own…

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…view. Hence the wheel of development unfolds ceaselessly. And because contradiction is the cause of this development, some conceptual operation must be introduced here. They would surely argue that “the consciousness of freedom is an inevitable necessity of social revolution”; but if freedom is not something that can become a reality, then there is no need to make sacrifices for revolution. Why? Because every reality is necessary.

Yet the desire for freedom that human beings essentially seek can be resolved only through the transformation of the relations of production in which actual human beings, pregnant with contradictions and situated within society, find themselves. In other words, ideology cannot interpret the world in all its variety; what is needed is to change the world. But if a formal “change” is of no use unless human beings can truly enjoy “freedom” within it, then “change” for the sake of “change” must become a “change” for human beings. It cannot be the case that commodities are produced merely for the sake of capital.

Originally, historical materialism must recognize the reciprocal interaction between society’s economic substructure and its spiritual superstructure when it views society as a process of development. At a certain stage, the economic substructure must clearly receive some sort of reciprocal influence from the preceding spiritual superstructure. Therefore, their relationship must be understood through the Buddhist conception of dependent origination: an inseparable, organic interrelation in which neither can be explained as the subject independently of the other. Yet Marxism’s dialectical materialist conception, however much practical effectiveness it may demonstrate, ultimately flows in the opposite direction from idealism and into a material-centered understanding of human society; it cannot, therefore, be regarded as a genuinely developmental principle of unity.

VII

Thus humanity, having liberated itself from the fetters of idealism, must once again demand a correct ideology for the liberation of society and the liberation of the self from the fetters of materialism. If science is truly to see the human…

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…being as it truly is, then the true meaning of dialectics must lie in what is called “synthetic understanding,” as in Fingeruto and others; and the materialist conception of history must once again be overcome.

Buddhism must not remain forever a sleeping lion. Now is the time for Buddhism to smash the ivory tower. It must raise high the principles of emptiness and dependent origination, establish the truth of selflessness, and advance directly toward the realization of a true society of liberty and the abolition of privilege.

To summarize: although the anti-religious movement is itself a movement founded upon a self-contradictory theory, if it is nevertheless to produce results in practice, then for the established religious organizations it is the most effective antidote to their extreme degeneration and inertia. On the theoretical plane, Christianity has promoted a fantastical “God” in opposition to Buddhism; but Buddhism has no need to proclaim the atheism or doctrine of the nonexistence of the soul advocated by Katō Seishin and others as something extraordinary in Japan. From the standpoint of Buddhism, these are nothing more than a commonplace sort of denial of intrinsic existence that has already reached even the most remote rural households. Through this, the Buddhist perspectives of emptiness and dependent origination will be recognized anew, and should proudly assert themselves as the sole true materialist dialectic.

Accordingly, if the anti-religious movement—under the name of “anti-religion”—has as its fundamental objective the organization of the unorganized masses, particularly the peasantry, into the proletarian movement, then the issue is another matter; but if the result of this is to bring about the destruction of religion, then the movement’s very object of purification will disappear. Even if it possesses the authority of the Soviet government, the power of religion has yet to be extinguished.

Indeed, given our present circumstances, rather than merely attacking existing Buddhist organizations, should we not instead call upon the inherent mass character of religion and thereby provide the powerful proletarian movement arising from religion itself with room to develop? Would not this be far more effective in the present situation?

The heroic actions of official Marxism—pushing forward the “revolution” demanded by the masses—may be objectionable enough. But if it forgets its proper standpoint toward the anti-religious movement and lightly attempts an indiscriminate campaign of exclusion, then what will happen?

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Even if its standpoint is one of opposition, should it not be possible for there to exist organizations that, while steadily working toward the realization of an ideal society, stand in opposition precisely because they are such organizations?

Those who seek to poison religion—to poison Buddhism—are none other than religious believers themselves. Buddhists should withdraw and first reflect upon their own lives in light of the Buddha’s ideal. Then, decisively setting out anew, they should report themselves to the anti-religious movement and advance. Is this not the one and only path by which it can be overcome?

— August 6, 7, and 18, 1931.