Part 2 of 2
The Question of Access
The need to compete with Western philosophy and Christianity also directed Buddhist reform to produce an introductory literature. Western philosophy and Christianity were readily accessible through books written in the vernacular. Although Buddhism possessed a vast literature, it was intended for specialists and was written in an archaic form of language densely scattered with technical terms that required doctrinal elucidation. The target audience for Buddhist revival was precisely the Western-educated generation who found it "easier to read the novels of Scott than to read the Genji Monogatari."42 Consequently, even when this generation felt the need to assert a distinctive national character in indigenous cultural terms, it found Buddhism largely inaccessible. Shin bukkyo addressed this problem by presenting selected Buddhist teachings in the contemporary vernacular. One of the first and most successful of these was Inoue Enryo's Bukkyo katsuron joron (1887), an introduction to Buddhist philosophy directed to "young men of talent and education,"43 which will be discussed in the following chapter. Inoue's slogan gokoku airi (defend the nation and love the truth) called for a redirection of the patriotic spirit and international vision that had inspired Christian conversion to the revival of Buddhism. Inoue invited "these talented young men" who had fallen "victim to this untruth" to seek the truth in Buddhism: "[I]f they know that the clergy's ignorance and lack of intelligence make them unfit to map out the revival of Buddhism, why do they not plan for the revival of the religion without the clergy?"44 Inoue himself provided the model of active lay support and lay promotion of Buddhist philosophy by severing his institutional ties. His work is the subject of the following chapter.
Buddhism in Society
The encouragement of lay supporters, koji Buddhists, and the promotion of noninstitutional lay practice, zaike bukkyo, was a distinctive feature of Meiji Buddhist reform. Advocates of zaike bukkyo, like Inoue, publicly described institutional Buddhism as "feudalistic, anti-social and impractical,"45 but because they included such eminent institutional priests as Hara Tanzan, Fukuda Gyokai, Shaku Unsho, Shimaji Mokurai, and Chicago delegate Ashitsu Jitsuzen, the thrust of the movement should be understood as providing lay access to Buddhism parallel to the continuing institutional forms rather than replacing them. Zaike bukkyo offered a variety of paths. The temples were open to intellectuals. Chicago delegates Hirai Kinzo and Noguchi Zenshir6 took a lay initiation. Hirai studied at the Rinzai Zen temple Kenninji in Kyoto with an ordained master. D. T. Suzuki and novelist Soseki Natsume studied with Shaku Soen at Engakuji. Alternative paths were offered to other sections of the community by zaike bukkyo activists such as Ouchi Seiran, who gave public lectures, wrote tracts, and designed daily observances suitable for domestic practice. Taking the tonsure was still a noble path but it was no longer the only one. Intellectuals needed a philosophical Buddhism. Ordinary people needed ordinary people's Buddhism, Buddhism that had been socialized.46
Buddhism was also given social relevance through the promotion of philanthropic works. This was in part a response to the charges that Buddhism was otherworldly, its support a drain on society. Christian social activities were both a model and a stimulus for this. Reform leaders, aware of the importance of establishing a broad base of support in the community, urged the Buddhist community to observe the growing goodwill that Christian missions were establishing among the general population through such efforts as their hospitals, charities, and famine relief and to emulate their model.47
The Christian model also inspired other innovations directed toward increasing lay community involvement with Buddhism. A network of youth organizations in the style of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was established and formalized by the founding of the Dainihon bukkyo seinenkai in 1894.48 Buddhist marriage ceremonies were created from 1887;49 Shimaji Mokurai performed a marriage ceremony in Tokyo in June 1892. A short description of the new ritual in the Japan Weekly Mail (July 1892) remarks on the similarity with the Christian form. Although the model was Christian, a possible domestic precedent for this was the early Meiji government's experiment in creating and installing Shinto funerals. Both cases were attempts to establish binding ties with the community through control of the rights of passage.50
Many of the most prominent Meiji Buddhists and supporters of the delegation remained laymen, practicing a nonsectarian and socially oriented Buddhism. One of particular relevance to this study was Ouchi Seiran, whose Buddhist promotional activities ranged through such diverse projects as education for the blind and mute, printing, publishing newspapers, forming a society for the protection of animals, and establishing a life insurance company. He worked with Inoue Enryo to forge links between progressive leaders of the Buddhist and secular worlds, actively campaigned for government support of Buddhism, and stood as a candidate for election to bring Buddhist representation into the Diet.51 In Ouchi's writings Shotoku Taishi, the sixth-century regent credited with establishing Buddhism in the Yamato state, provided the Buddhist paradigm of lay participation and government support.
Strengthening Imperial Rule
The Meiji government policy of shinbutsu bunri severed the relationship between Buddhism and the ruling powers that had existed in various forms since Buddhism had been first introduced to Japan. Throughout Japanese history religious institutions had shared in the exercise of political authority through a coalition of the major temples with the court and the military. Buddhism had been protector of the state since the emperor Shomu had established Todaiji at Nara as the head temple in a network of state-sponsored provincial temples (kokubunji) in the eighth century. In these temples sutras were to be read for the prosperity and protection of the state. Tendai and Shingon, the oldest of the sects active in the Meiji period, had both been founded with imperial support, and both declared pacification and protection of the state (chingo kokka) to be their primary duty. In the Kamakura period, as Collcutt has shown, the military rulers established networks of Zen temples to parallel the Tendai and Shingon temple-based power systems of the courts.52 In the Tokugawa, the use of temples to register and control local populations established Buddhism as a de facto state religion. Ooms's account of the use of religion by Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu in the legitimation of their rule attests strongly to the importance of the relationship between the state and religious institutions.53
The ideal of the mutually supporting and reinforcing relationship between the state and Buddhism was formalized in the expression obo-buppo, the Japanese formulation of the Buddhist polity of the interdependence of the sangha -- the community of Buddhist specialists -- and the state. Though usually translated as "imperial law -- Buddhist law," as McMullin explains, buppo must be understood to designate the Buddhist-Shinto and even Confucian composite of the living Japanese religion.54 Obo (imperial law) is not simply "secular law" but raja dharma, the duty of the righteous king, which implies a reciprocal relation with religious specialists and, in Japan, the sanction of the Shinto kami. Although the balance of the relationship between obo and buppo was in constant tension and regularly reinterpreted, the various sects of Japanese Buddhism, amalgamated doctrinally, ritually, and institutionally with Shinto and incorporating Confucianism, enjoyed the prerogatives of the de facto state religion of Japan until the Meiji period.
Consequently, renegotiating a relationship between Buddhism and the state was an overriding concern of Meiji reform. The first three "topics for study" the Association of Buddhist Sects listed in 1869 as areas for reform action were "The indivisibility of Imperial and Buddhist law; The study and refutation of Christianity; The co-operation between and perfection of the three Japanese faiths: Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism."55 The juxtaposition is significant. The three issues were explicitly linked by the Shingon Buddhist leader, Shaku Unsho, in a formal petition to the government calling for a reversal of the policy of separation, to "save the people from the foreign barbarians." He argued that the emperor could not continue omnipotent unless the three faiths-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto -- were united. "Haibutsu kishaku will estrange the people from Buddhism, they will doubt Shinto, and Christianity will try to exploit this doubt."56 The security of the nation depended on restoring the relationship between Buddhism, in its long-established fusion with other aspects of Japanese religiosity, and the state.
As Shaku Unsho's petition shows, regardless of the actual extent of the Christian threat to Japan in the early years of the Meiji, it was most useful as the specter of disruption in reform rhetoric. It was the religious specialists' focus of Western incursion, and their reference to it might be compared with the Meiji Restoration activists' use of the Western threat in the sonno joi campaign (revere the emperor, expel the barbarian). The Nishi Honganji, the institution most active in post- Restoration reform, had supported the Restoration movement under the slogan sanno goho (revere the emperor, preserve the dharma).57 The symmetry of the slogans associated expelling the barbarian with the protection of the dharma. Evidence of Christianity's disruptive influence was ready to hand in the national memory of the Iberian Christian incursion of the early seventeenth century and the consequent disruptions that led to the proscription of Christianity for over two hundred years. The memory, kept alive by Tokugawa rhetoric of the "evil religion," was evoked at Chicago by Hirai Kinzo, who explained to his audience at the Parliament that this early contact had convinced the Japanese that "Christianity is the instrument of depredation." As he described it, "Christian missionaries, combined with the local converts, caused a tragic and bloody rebellion against the country, and it is understood that those missionaries intended to subjugate Japan to their own mother country .... it took the government of the Shogun a year to suppress this terrible and intrusive commotion."58 History, or rather the national "memory" of events two hundred years earlier, justified Buddhist rejection of Christianity as part of its role as protector of the nation. The rhetoric of Christian aggression was part of the Meiji Buddhist attempt to reclaim a position as defender of the nation.
In the early Meiji years of Buddhist persecution, restoring links with the state was vital for the defense of the religion. The campaign remained a crucial issue in 1893,and consequently in the representation of Buddhism at Chicago, but by this time the emphasis in the rhetoric had shifted. The change in Buddhist priorities as the Meiji period progressed is indicated by the change of name of the Buddhist journal Dampo (Defender of the faith), which became Gakaku (Protector of the nation) in 1892.59 Buddhist reformers promoted Buddhism as the spirit of the nation and called for support not to protect the religion but to strengthen the nation against Western aggression.
Buddhism and Japanese Identity
By the 1880s the radical reforms enforced on the institutions had produced new interpretations of Buddhism intended to answer the needs of the transforming society and to provide a role for Buddhism under the new regime. Following the lead and methods of Western Orientalist scholarship, a Buddhist philosophy was isolated from the ritual, mythology, and folk belief of actual practice. This New Buddhism was a noninstitutional lay practice accessible through the vernacular language. It was nonsectarian, "progressive, democratic, spiritual, social and rational," an indigenous alternative to the Western materialist philosophy and Protestant Christianity to which many Western-educated Japanese of this generation had turned. It was available when events of the late 1880s focused a growing reaction against the previous indiscriminate adoption of things Western and ushered in a search for an ideological basis for modern Japan. Buddhist reform leaders seized the opportunity to propagate shin bukkyo by linking it to the search for Japanese national identity.
The change in attitude to the West culminated in the failure of the 1887 attempt to revise the Ansei Treaties. The Japanese had been confident, given the progress of reforms and the degree of Westernization in Meiji Japan, that the treaties would be revised. The attempts at this time ultimately failed not because of Western rejection but because of internal reaction against what were perceived as humiliating concessions demanded by Western powers. Because the treaties symbolized the asymmetry of the relationship that had existed between Japan and Western powers three decades earlier when they were originally signed, revision on terms of equality would equally strongly symbolize Western recognition of Japan's sovereign status. Western intransigence on revision was interpreted as a threat to' national independence. Failure to revise the treaties in spite of the progress that had been made in social and institutional reform discredited the previously widespread belief in Westernization as a path to revision. New strategies were required, and one proposal came from the Seikyosha, a society formed in 1888 "for the preservation of Japan's cultural autonomy."60 The Seikyosha was not a specifically Buddhist organization -- its membership encompassed a wide range of religious and nonreligious positions -- but its founding members included the familiar reform leaders Ouchi Seiran, Shimaji Mokurai, Inoue Enryo, and Ashitsu Jitsuzen.
The Seikyosha argued that Japan's defense against Western imperialism depended on developing a strong national spirit. As Inoue wrote, imitation was poor political strategy because it would lead the West to despise the Japanese as lacking energy, strength, and independent spirit. Imitation was the behavior of slaves and flatterers. If the Japanese continued to adopt customs and ideas from those in the West indiscriminately, "they will consider us as simple and despicable, and they may regard us as a vassal state ... but never, by any stretch of the imagination, look upon us as equals."61 The Seikyosha argued instead that Japan should follow the model of the smaller European states such as Hungary and Italy, which were at that time at a similar stage of development. These countries took pride in preserving their individual languages and cultures and coexisted with the more powerful and better developed nations in mutual respect. Only by maintaining an independent national identity could Japan expect to deal with world powers as equals. The Seikyosha therefore looked within its own tradition for something uniquely Japanese that would be internationally esteemed and which Japan could contribute to the modern world. Buddhism, which had been the basis of Japanese civilization for fifteen hundred years, seemed a logical candidate.62
In the increasingly nationalistic atmosphere of the 1880s,the Seikyosha search for the basis of national identity meshed with Buddhist reform initiatives, providing a platform and impetus for the propagation of shin bukkyo in the wider community. Inoue Enryo propagated the message of Buddhist nationalism through the journal Nihonjin, arguing that "the best way Japanese can be made Japanese and Japan can remain independent" was to preserve and propagate Buddhism.63 He argued that Buddhism was the means by which Japan could gain the respect of the world and contribute to international welfare. Buddhism was Japan's "special product," its "strong point," a source of national identity and international recognition, a source of international prestige. It was a means of gaining recognition as a "civilized" nation and thereby affecting treaty revision: "Everyone knows that we must look to the West to supply models not only for all kinds of commodities and utensils, but also for models of government, law, the military system, education, the physical sciences and technology. However, there is one thing that Japan can transmit to foreign countries and win fame; that thing is Buddhism."64
Prestige did not require a mass contribution but one of quality, a point of strength and distinction. For Okakura Kakuzo, organizer of the Japanese Pavilion and the exhibition of Japanese art at the Chicago exposition -- and author of the classic The Book of Tea -- it was the Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Inoue and the Japanese delegates offered Buddhism: "Buddhism is now our so-called strong point. If we merely nurture it in our own country and do not export it abroad what else can we transmit to other countries? Material commodities are an advantage of the West. Scholarship is also one of their strong points. The only advantage we have is religion. This fine product of ours excels those of other countries."65
In 1889, shortly after the founding of the Seikyosha, Inoue Enryo, Ouchi Seiran, Shimaji Mokurai, Ashitsu Jitsuzen, and others concerned about the impact of the constitutional government on Buddhism formed the more specifically Buddhist organization Sonno hobutsu daidodan (The Great Society for Revering the Emperor and Worshiping the Buddha). The society was "a union of all those who wish to protect our land and our religion from the contempt of the foreigner," principally by excluding Christians from public office and installing Buddhists in positions of influence. Its policy statement declared that by "selecting our representatives to the national parliament, to provincial assemblies, to town councils, or local offices, in the distribution of honors, in appointing school teachers, officials of societies and business companies etc., we pledge ourselves to carefully exclude all those who are disloyal to our Emperor or untrue to Buddhism."66
The society not only was specifically Buddhist but was overtly political, concerned to seize the opportunity of the promised representational government to gain a voice for Buddhism in governing the nation.67 This was one of its strategies for reestablishing ties between Buddhism and the state. Inoue and Guchi also formally petitioned the government to this end. The organization's journal, Daido shinpo, explained that the perpetuation of the Japanese race depended on a state religion that advocated "revering the Emperor," who represented the blood lineage, and "worshipping the Buddha," the spiritual lineage of the nation.68 Adapting the ideal of Buddhist polity to the processes of representational government in a secular state, the organization attempted to mobilize the considerable voting power of the community of Buddhist priests to political action, fielded candidates for election, and campaigned against Christian candidates. Guchi himself stood for election and urged Buddhist priests to do likewise, arguing that more could be achieved for Buddhism at this time by leaving the priesthood to enter politics.69
The Discourse of the Meiji Twenties
Inoue Enryo's Bukkyo katsuron joron was published in 1887, Meiji 20, the start of a decade of intense activity in Buddhist revival. The formation of the Seikyosha in 1888, the Sonno hobutsu daidodan in early 1889, and the promotion of their political positions through their respective journals were indicative of the growing importance of Buddhism in the Meiji sociopolitical arena. Apart from the factors already mentioned-the changed attitude to the West and growing nationalist sentiment that caused interest in Buddhism as a repository of national identity-certain political events, such as the introduction of constitutional government in 1889, had a direct bearing on religion in Japan. Article 28 of the Constitution granted Japanese citizens a rather conditional "freedom of religion" and placed Christianity on the same legal status as Buddhism.70 The boost of confidence the Christian community received from this was dampened by the Imperial Rescript on Education, issued November 3, 1890, and its subsequent interpretation, which raised doubts about the possibility of being both Christian and a loyal Japanese citizen.?1 Another major factor in increased activity among Buddhist leaders at this time was the successive failure of the attempt to install first State Shinto and then the Daikyo as the binding ideology and social ethic of the nation. These failures had created a national ideological space for possession of which Buddhism and Christianity were principal contenders. The battle, however, was not a simple confrontation. Buddhism and Christianity together contended against the perceived threat of Western imperialism, religious indifference, and "the forces of materialism." Their relationship was further complicated by government attempts to form a "civil religion." As Christian delegate to Chicago Kishimoto Nobuta described the situation in his paper "Future of Religion in Japan";72 "Japan at present is the battlefield between religion and no religion, and also between Christianity and other systems of religion .... The prevailing attitude of our educated classes toward any system of religion is one of co-indifference if not strong antagonism. Among them the agnosticism of Spencer, the materialism of Comte, and the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann are the most influential. To them, God is either the product of our own imagination or, at most, unknowable .... The religions of Japan, whatever they may be, have to contend with these no-god and no-religion doctrines."73
Christianity had been favored among the intellectual elite during the period of the early 1880s when Westernization had been actively encouraged, but the change in attitude toward the end of the decade brought with it a search for an indigenous ideological basis for modern Japan. Interest in Buddhism was no longer confined to the religious institutions. For their part Japanese Christians -- equally opposed to foreign domination -- responded to the changed environment by distancing themselves from Western missions financially, institutionally, and doctrinally, creating and promoting an indigenous interpretation of Christianity. The victor in this contest would be whoever succeeded in attracting the support of the young, Western-educated elite, the future leaders of the nation. The discourse on religion of the Meiji Twenties was a contest for the allegiance of this audience. The nature of the discourse -- particularly the political and social relevance of religion -- and the sense of crisis within it during the months preceding the Parliament are apparent in an editorial in the Japan Weekly Mail, March 4, 1893: "If we are to judge from the intellectual vigour and variety displayed in the periodicals of the month, we should be sure that religion is fast becoming one of the most active concerns of the Japanese people. Especially noticeable is the attempt now being made on all sides to settle the problem of religion in its political and social bearings. The stake at issue is of vital importance-possession and guidance of social development in the empire."
The diversity of opinion and the importance of the discourse in the early 1890S are reflected in the profusion of new publications. Although many of them were short-lived, 2,767 journals and periodicals appeared between 1889 and 1894.74 In October 1891, in recognition of the extraordinary activity in religious publications in the recent past, the Yokohama-based English-language newspaper, Japan Weekly Mail, introduced as a regular feature its "Monthly Summary of the Religious Press." There were at that time more than 400 Buddhist journals alone, as well as numerous Christian journals, and journals such as the Daido soshi, which represented a union of Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism, proposed as the basis of a new religion.75 Although the "Summary" was conceived in the recognition that religious groups of this time were vitally concerned with political and social issues, the intensity of this involvement seems to have surprised the editor, who wrote in July 1892: "It is a noticeable feature of the Japanese religious journals, Buddhist as well as Christian, that much less space is devoted in this country to doctrinal exposition than in the West.... There are a few conservative magazines of [the Buddhists] in which one finds from time to time a lecture on the mystifying doctrines of the sacred books; but as a rule, the entire press devotes itself to news, and to the discussion of the topics of the day. Speculative and technical disquisitions do not seem to meet the needs of the people, if the contents of the press are any index of those wants."
The space that progressive journals did devote to doctrinal matters was, however, crucial. It was the forum for the formation, presentation, and propagation of the new interpretations of Christianity and reform Buddhism. Doctrinal disputation between sects was not only irrelevant at this time of intense social concern but counterproductive. The important issues of the discourse were what each religion could offer the nation and the compatibility of each with modern science, Western philosophy, and Japanese identity, "settling the problem of religion in its political and social bearings" for the "possession and guidance of social development in the empire."
Although for the editor of the Mail doctrinal disputation may have been an essential characteristic of religious journals, it was actively discouraged by both reform Buddhists and the Doshisha Christians76 (the Buddhist and Christian delegates to Chicago respectively), who were intent on strengthening their positions by uniting the various sects and denominations, not in emphasizing their differences. The Buddhist All Sects Council commissioned a "bible," a text that would encapsulate nonsectarian belief. Japanese Christians, while not all in agreement on what exactly they believed, preferred to consider themselves as members of the Church of Christ in Japan than as members of different denominations. "In essentials unity; in non-essentials liberty; in all things charity."77 Although Buddhists and Christians each attempted to form a united front against the other, they united as "men of religion" (shukyosha) against the forces of materialism and especially of foreign encroachment. On September 2, 1893, the Mail commented that "the religious papers say nothing of politics; but what they say of religion is coloured through and through with that spirit of independence of foreign control which is so manifest in the political world."
The intensity of debate these articles aroused contradicts the Mail's suggestion that the Japanese were less interested than their Western counterparts in "speculative or technical disquisitions." Such interests were simply of less immediate concern. The Mail's surprise at the content of the journals of religious associations arose from an inappropriate stereotyping of "religious" journals. Unlike the Christian journalists of England and America, the Japanese journalists, particularly those I am concerned with, were not writing for a committed audience, but attempting to form one.78 Religious journals such as these promoted modernization and social change by educating their readers. Conversely, the Seikyosha journal Nihonjin, which was not Buddhist but contained articles by Buddhist writers such as Inoue Enryo, Ouchi Seiran, and Ashitsu Jitsuzen, became an important channel for presenting Buddhist views on social and political issues to the wider public precisely because it reached a different audience from the religious journals.
The delegates to the World's Parliament of Religions were all active in reform movements and contributors to religious journals. The journals these delegates and their respective associates published, their books, the lectures and meetings they held, and their attendance at the Parliament were directed toward influencing the opinions of the contemporary intellectual elite, the active and influential Western-educated minority group of Meiji society concerned with social and political issues involved in the formation of the modern nation. The delegation to Chicago was an extension of this project, a strategy in this discourse contesting the religious basis of modern Japan. The leaders of Buddhist revival believed that the best way to convince pro-Western Japanese of their claim that Buddhism was superior to Christianity, that it was the answer to the religious problems of the modern world, was to win the support of Western intellectuals and religious leaders. They were confident that Japanese Buddhism, formed out of the contests of nineteenth-century skepticism, as alive in Japan as in the West, was a stronger candidate than Christianity to be the universal world religion. They were well rehearsed in defense against the standard Christian criticisms. Shin bukkyo, though the product of domestic imperatives to reform, had been shaped by the religious debates that informed the World's Parliament of Religions. Taking it to Chicago would show that it was the most suitable religion for the modern scientific world.
The anti-Buddhist movements of mid-nineteenth-century Japan gave rise to an interpretation of Buddhism prepared to meet its Christian critics. Domestic criticism included the charges leveled by various anti-Buddhist factions that the Mahayana was not taught by the Buddha, that Buddhism was irrational and incompatible with the age of science, that Buddhism was otherworldly and irrelevant to modern society, that Buddhism was un-Japanese -- criticisms that clearly overlap with principal issues of the Western discourse on Buddhism. The charge that Buddhism was a foreign religion gave rise to its claim for universality.
Shin bukkyo was also prepared for Chicago by Meiji Japan's resort to the West as measure and model of the modern. In the Meiji spirit of seeking knowledge throughout the world to strengthen imperial rule, Buddhist reform leaders were among the first to travel to Europe and America, observing the condition and function of religion in Western societies, studying the methods of Orientalist scholarship and biblical criticism, and observing the European debates between religion, science, and materialist philosophy. Consequently, proponents of shin bukkyo knew of Buddhism's function in Western discourse, particularly the approval the Theravada construct enjoyed among certain intellectuals at this time because of the perceived similarities between the teachings of the Buddha and contemporary European thought. Japanese Buddhism, they believed, offered even more than this, as we will see in the following chapter. It contained all the truth of German idealism, held in great esteem in Japan at the time, and, moreover, transcended the conflict between religion, the scientific world view, and philosophy. It was therefore better suited than Christianity to be the future world religion. This belief was vital in making Buddhism acceptable to the Western-educated elite of Japan, the future leaders of the nation.