Meiji Buddhist Modernism

Meiji Buddhist Modernism

Meiji Buddhist modernism refers to the diverse attempts by Japanese Buddhist thinkers and reformers during the Meiji period (1868–1912) to reconstruct Buddhism in response to rapid political, intellectual, and social change. Confronted by the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism, Christianity, modern science and philosophy, historical-critical scholarship, and new conceptions of “religion,” reformers sought to present Buddhism as rational, ethical, socially relevant, and compatible with modern knowledge. Their projects differed considerably: some were apologetic or nationalist, others critical of inherited sectarian institutions, and still others increasingly concerned with Buddhism's responsibilities in the present world.

These movements were not themselves necessarily forms of radical Buddhism. Nevertheless, they transformed the intellectual possibilities available to later Buddhist radicals. Historical criticism weakened inherited claims to scriptural and sectarian authority; philosophical reconstruction presented Buddhism as compatible with reason and modern knowledge; nonsectarianism opened the possibility of distinguishing Buddhism itself from its established institutions; and an increasingly this-worldly orientation directed attention toward social and ethical life in the present. Figures such as Inoue Enryō 井上円了, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之 approached these problems in markedly different ways, while the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) brought several of these tendencies together in a self-consciously modern reform movement. In this sense, Meiji Buddhist modernism provided an important intellectual context from which more explicitly progressive and radical Buddhist projects could emerge.

Buddhism and the Meiji Transformation

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted the institutional position Buddhism had occupied under the Tokugawa shogunate. The new government's policy of separating Buddhism and Shinto (shinbutsu bunri 神仏分離) helped unleash the anti-Buddhist destruction conventionally known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈, during which temples were closed or destroyed, property confiscated, and clergy forced to return to lay life. Although the most intense persecution was relatively brief, it exposed the vulnerability of Buddhist institutions within the emerging emperor-centered nation-state. Early Buddhist responses therefore combined institutional survival with reform. Figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照 sought renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (kairitsu 戒律), while Buddhist leaders also participated in state-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (Daikyō 大教) campaign. Buddhist reconstruction from the beginning thus involved an uneasy combination of religious reform, institutional self-preservation, and accommodation to the modern state.

By the 1880s and 1890s, however, a younger generation increasingly addressed the intellectual as well as institutional challenges of modernity. Reformers such as Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Inoue Enryō, Murakami Senshō, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi engaged modern science, Western philosophy, historical scholarship, Christianity, and newly imported categories of religion and ethics. They did not share a single program, and “Buddhist modernism” should not be understood as a unified movement. What linked their projects was the conviction that inherited forms of Buddhism could no longer simply be taken for granted: Buddhism had to be explained, defended, criticized, and reconstructed within the intellectual and institutional conditions of modern Japan.