Lecture 2003-04-12
"Images of Buddhism in Modern Japan; The Role of Academia"  
Dr. Silvio Vita


The skies cleared and and the sun came out for our April meeting, though we had to battle blustery winds to get there. This time we were happy to have with us the New Zealand ambassador Mr. Phillip Gibson, Dr. George Akita, Professor Emeritus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who had addressed us way back in 1982, as well as the Vice Principal of Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen, Mrs. Itsuko Takagiwa, and some of the teaching staff.

Extra publicity for the meeting had been given by Vivienne Kenrick in her Personality Profile of the speaker,  Prof. Silvio Vita, in the Japan Times on the previous Saturday. Prof. Vita had taken as his subject "Images of Buddhism in Modern Japan; The Role of Academia", and in his prelude to his presentation he mentioned that unfortunately his book of the same title had not quite come out in time for the lecture.

The shaping of a modern society in Japan under Western influence that began in the Meiji period affected many intellectual fields, not least Buddhism.  During the Tokugawa period Buddhism had influenced many intellectuals, in formulating concepts regarding human life in this world and the next; Buddhist learning was not confined to the monasteries but issued forth in the form of tracts for the popular market. With the coming of the Meiji Restoration, the role that Buddhism had previously played in Japanese society was seriously affected. The exposure to Western ways of thinking forced the Buddhist establishment to reflect on the legitimacy of its own tradition; it became challenged not only by the "national faith" of Shinto, which was being ideologically constructed, but by Christian proselytizing.  To grasp the situation in the early days of Meiji we needed first to understand the historical background of Buddhist institutions under the Tokugawas.

These institutions had close links with the Tokugawa administrative system, but to differing degrees. The Jodo School, whose Zojoji was the family temple of the Tokugawas, obtained an institutional independence it had never previously enjoyed,  being allowed to establish its own network of temples. The Tendai sect, as the guardians of the Nikko sanctuary, also had a privileged position, and the monks of the Shingon sect were always needed for anything that had to do with the "magical" aspect of that tradition. The Jodoshinshu, on the other hand, was confined to Kyoto, far from the centre of power,  and the Nichirenshu also kept itself at a certain distance from the authorities.

Apart from their relations with the central government, the various Buddhist sects were part of the administrative system at the han level. Following the suppression of Christianity, the Bakufu forced the whole of the population to register at a temple. The temple became the centre of individual lives, with a focus on its function at the time of death, hence the image of "funeral Buddhism". Another feature of Tokugawa Buddhism was the creation of "academies" for doctrinal studies.

Tokugawa Buddhism was also given an ideological construct based on the time-honoured formula that the Law of Buddha and the Law of the Sovereign had to be in harmony. This harmony was threatened with breakdown under Meiji, when the new order reshaped the relationship between government and religion, but in time successive readjustments were made.

One of the first legislative acts of the Meiji government was a series of decrees for the  "separation of kami and Buddhas" (shinbutsu bunri), a policy which changed the whole panorama of religion in Japan. Within two years more than 40,000 temples were destroyed, and thousands of monks reduced to lay status, not to speak of the destruction of cultural treasures,  so that what the government termed "separation" the Buddhists referred to as "devastation". Eventually a different attitude was adopted, and Shinto and Buddhism were called upon to play a role together in the shaping of a "civil religion" suitable for the new age.  In their drastic measures the Meiji intellectuals were no doubt influenced by earlier exponents of kokugaku such as Hirata Atsutane, who had urged that a return to the ancient ways would wipe out the evils of jakyô, "deviant Buddhism", which had been accumulating through the centuries. Attacks on Buddhism also came from Christian quarters and from "modern" thinkers affected by Western criticisms of religion.

For the kokugaku scholars, Buddhism had originated in India, where primitive nature cult objects had been transformed into divinities such as Dainichi and Fudô Myôô. Also the Mahayana text on which Japanese Buddhism was based could not stand up to rational criticism;  they could not be the words of Buddha, and so could not be used as a source of authority.  Confucian scholars, on the other hand, saw Buddhism as of no social usefulness, and Buddhist institutions as a non-productive burden on society. Buddhism had basically become a funeral industry; the monks did not observe the rules regarding celibacy and diet, and the institutions had endless sources of income. This last factor had resulted from the Tokugawa reorganization of Buddhism, which required every citizen to belong to a temple, bringing in a constant flow of donations and leading to a secular affluence which was seen as a deviation from a supposed original purity.

These, then, were the problems with regard to Buddhism towards the middle of the 19th century, and most of the later developments in the intellectual history of Buddhism could be seen as attempts to answer these questions. The span of time covered by these answers Prof. Vita saw as coinciding with the period of about one hundred years, down to the end of World War II, during which time the Japanese state had adopted various ideological formulae vis-à-vis religion; the American postwar policy of getting rid of Shintoist ideology had also indirectly affected other religious establishments.

The 1880s saw the birth of Japan as a modern state; a reaction set in against the initial Westernization, and a need was felt for a national identity, defined on a cultural as well as on a political level. The Buddhist intellectual who was representative of this period was Inoue Enryô, and the core of Buddhist activism was a continuous attack on Christianity, as representing the West in religious terms. Inoue felt that a revitalized Buddhism could become a doctrine fit for the modern age, and constitute a system of thought representative of Japan also in nationalistic terms.  Another intellectual figure, who was also a prolific writer, was Murakami Senshô, who had the same aim of "renovating"  Buddhism, but acted more on a "scholarly" level. He was also caught up in the discussion on the authenticity of the Mahayana, but the climax of his writings was the monumental Bukkyô tôitsu ron (On the Unification of Buddhism). With these and other figures the boundary between monk and layman becomes almost indistinguishable, as Buddhism abandoned the temple as the place for the expression of intellectual discourse. Some of these figures were monks and some were not, and those who were had sometimes to undergo conflicts with the authorities of their own schools, as was the case with Murakami Senshô, who was defrocked. Others combined the status of a monk with that of an active writer for the media and of a university professor.  All of them, to some extent, broke with the tradition of intellectual debate within the Buddhist community; in fact they may be said to have created a new "Buddhist community". Some could perhaps be defined as "journalists", while others were scholars; but both categories were "intellectuals" in the modern sense of the term.

Unfortunately Prof. Vita did not have time to enlarge on the position of intellectuals in modern Japan, but it was fair to say that both those inside and outside academia had had an influence on the intellectual public.

There was still time for some questions, which were stimulated by Prof. Vita's exposition

The meeting was brought to a close with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Hubert Durt, who warmly praised  both Prof. Vita and the work of his Institute.