Paper short abstract:

Imakita Kōsen (1816-1892) defended Zen Buddhism against its Confucian critics in the Bakumatsu era by interpreting classical Chinese texts from a Buddhist perspective in his Zenkai ichiran. His commentaries suggest that this type of "gohōron" 護法論 reinterprets the Dharma even as it justifies it.

Paper long abstract:

As the Tokugawa period drew to a close, an up-and-coming Rinzai Zen master, Imakita Kōsen 今北洪川 (1816-1892), took advantage of a long tradition of preaching Buddhist ideas by "translating" them into the dominant intellectual discourse of the time. In the face of the increasingly intense Confucian polemics against Buddhism that circulated in Japan in the Bakumatsu era, he composed a book-length treatise in which he creatively reinterpreted thirty classical Confucian passages from a Zen Buddhist perspective. Imakita drew inspiration for this work, titled Zenkai ichiran 禅海一瀾 (A Ripple in the Sea of Zen), from a trove of "defense of the Dharma" literature (gohōron 護法論) that dated back to the golden age of Confucian-Buddhist intellectual exchange in Northern Song China (960-1127).

The notion of apologetics, which was originally informed by ancient Mediterranean and especially Christian conceptions of a formal defense of one's views in writing (apologia), is often used to characterize this genre of Buddhist literature. Zenkai ichiran was in fact directed at the Confucian scholars and government officials of Iwakuni domain, where he lived at the time of the writing (1862). However, lectures on Imakita's masterpiece later became a component of Rinzai Zen outreach in his lineage (represented most notably by Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, 1860-1919). In my presentation, after reviewing the idea of apologetics I will highlight representative selections from Zenkai ichiran with an eye to determining how the book may have anticipated the interests of its changing readership during the nineteenth century, evolving in function from a formal defense of Buddhist ideas to a call to members of the Zen community to reassess their understanding of their religious mission in modern Japan. The example of Zenkai ichiran suggests that "gohōron" reinterprets the Dharma even as it justifies it.