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Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates that the encounter with South and Southeast Asian Buddhism since the 1870s was integral to the formation of modern Japanese Buddhist identity through the discovery of the "Hīnayāna" as part of a politically charged yet academically legitimized taxonomy of Buddhism.

Paper long abstract:

When the first Japanese Buddhist delegation in modern times set foot on Sri Lankan soil in 1872, they convinced themselves that their hosts were fellow devotees of the Mahāyāna Pure Land, and resolved to promote “Indian Studies” in Japan with the express intention of furthering the glory of the “Indian Amida”. Conversely, when Ōnishi Ryōkei 大西良慶 (1875 – 1983), at the time head priest of the Hossō 法相 school, sought to stiffen Korean monastics' colonial spine at the cusp of war in 1940, he reproached them for their renunciant Hīnayāna spirit when what was needed was the populist activism of the Japanese Mahāyāna.

As these two episodes show, the sorting of the Buddhist world was no mere academic exercise but deeply connected to how Japanese Buddhists sought to make sense of, manipulate, and communicate their own, and their nation’s, place in the context of Asian colonial politics. Crucial to this endeavor was the re-deployment of the “Hīnayāna” from a primarily textual and doctrinal category to a pejorative slur. In this new role, it came to signify little but competing Asian Buddhist traditions’ lack of progressive modernity. At the same time, it served to legitimize such claims by gesticulating towards the construction of “Buddhism” as a world religion in the modern academy.

Previous scholarship has argued that the use of “Hīnayāna” to denote the Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia emerged from the activities of Japanese Buddhist delegates at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. In contrast, I demonstrate that Japanese efforts at the Parliament were but part of a strategy of manipulating the representation of Southeast Asian Buddhism that surfaced in the 1880s and was integral to the formation of modern Japanese Buddhist identity and politics. This strategy was contingent on three factors: First, the encounter of East Asian scholastic and Western scholarly traditions; second, the encounter of Japanese Buddhists with the Pāli tradition of Sri Lanka as a “Buddhism”, and the discovery of this Sri Lankan Buddhism as “Hīnayāna”; and finally, the nationalist and colonial context within which these encounters took place.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how missionaries with the Japanese Congregational Church working in colonial Korea deployed to satisfy two, complementary ends: demonstrate the integral role of Japanese Christians for the Japanese empire, and prove their superiority over American missionaries.

Paper long abstract:

From 1911 to 1919, the Japanese Kumiai Kyokai, or Congregational Church, devoted considerable staff and resources towards establishing and sustaining a mission in colonial Korea. The only Japanese denomination to attempt an organized mission that targeted Koreans—as opposed to Japanese settlers—in this period, the Kumiai Kyokai and its leadership attempted, through this missionary effort, to demonstrate not only the compatibility of Christianity to the Japanese empire, but also the superiority of a specifically Japanese Christianity over American Christianity. This paper examines the theological arguments, political rhetoric, and structural strategies the leaders and missionaries with the Kumiai Kyokai deployed to satisfy two, complementary ends: demonstrate the integral role of Japanese Christians for uniting Japanese and Korean subjects, and prove the irrelevance and unsuitability of American Christianity for a modern empire. Far from mimicking western missionaries, these Japanese Christians sought to assert a unique role for themselves that took into account a diverse range of theological positions and ecclesiastical structures. While this particular effort proved to be ineffective, it nonetheless illustrates the complex way that European and American thought and theology were understood and adapted in Japan, and how these ideas were further transformed in a new colonial setting.

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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the work of Sakaino Kōyō (1871-1933), this paper explores the development of "Chinese Buddhism" as a historiographical category during the early twentieth-century, examining a heretofore rather understudied aspect of the reimagination of China in the context of modern Japanese Empire.

Paper long abstract:

As pointed out in the now classic monograph by Stefan Tanaka (Japan's Orient, 1993), in the context of the modern Japanese Empire, China was constructed as an "other" to serve as a foil for Japanese self-representations. That is, China was reimagined as Japan's "past" and referred to as Shina, a term which is now seen as derogatory by many both in the archipelago and elsewhere. While there are already a number of studies exploring this process of reimagination between the Meiji and Showa eras, most of them focus on the development of "oriental studies" (tōyōgaku) as a discipline and the scholars involved in it. Very few shed light on another very important aspect, namely the role of Buddhists in the making of Shina. This paper explores how Buddhists discussed China in their historiography of "Chinese Buddhism" (Shina Bukkyō), a category set up through a global lens in order to distinguish in essentialist terms East Asian continental Buddhism from that of other geographical locations such as India and Japan. In more concrete terms, the paper focuses on Sakaino Kōyō (1871-1933), a Buddhist scholar and Jōdo Shin priest who played a central role in depicting for Japanese audiences the general aspects of the Chinese Buddhist past. Besides being a somewhat popular historian, Sakaino was also known as one of the main leaders of the New Buddhist Movement (shinbukkyō undō), which lasted from 1899 to 1915. It is therefore worth noting that his criticism of "old Buddhism" (kyūbukkyō) —especially its supposed lack of a "sound faith" (kenzen naru shinkō) —is also present in his depiction of China, as the latter becomes the very embodiment of such critiques. That is, while "philosophically" sound, Buddhism in China was found to be lacking in terms of "faith," a key term very positively connoted for late-Meiji Buddhist scholars. With overlapping depictions of an ideal Japan-centered Buddhist future and an antiquated Chinese Buddhist past, Sakaino's work represents an important chapter in the larger issue of the repositioning of China in Imperial Japan intellectual space.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will trace the development of Chengguan's "fourfold dharma world" from the symbolism of Indra's net to Nishida Kitarō's concept of the "historical world" and Mutai Risaku's humanism. In a second step, this paper proposes an innovative theory of cosmopolitanism based on these ideas.

Paper long abstract:

The Mahāyāna Buddhist vision of Indra's net envisions a cosmos in which individuals are not only non-dualistically connected to Mahavairochana Buddha, but also to an infinite amount of other individuals. The Huayan philosopher Chengguan (738-839) expresses these vertical and horizontal dimensions of the human existence in his famous teaching of the "fourfold dharma world." Chengguan worked to clarify the relationship between self and the world as well as the connections among the various selves. What is interesting is that he expanded the notion of the non-dualistic relationship between self and cosmos, that was common to the Mahāyāna Buddhism of his time and introduced the notion of multiplicity into his system. This philosophical vision served not only Buddhist thinkers such as Dōgen (1200-1253) as the philosophical foundation of systems but also modern philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Mutai Risaku (1890-1974) as the foundation of their political philosophies. Nishida was fascinated with the relationship between the oneness of the cosmos and the multiplicity of individuality and appropriated the Buddhist phrases "one-and-yet-many" to conceive of the "historical world." While Nishida's notion of the "historical world" remained woefully abstract, Mutai actually developed his teacher's paradigm into a philosophical humanism and, one could argue, a cosmopolitanism based on a modified version of Chengguan's fourfold dharma world. Mutai's social philosophy, while about 50 years old, strikes a surprisingly fresh and contemporary note in Nishida's analysis of the historical world, the moral self, and the role the constructed sense of national identity plays therein. This paper will trace the development of this concept from the symbolism of Indra's net to Mutai's humanism and, in a second step, propose a unique theory of cosmopolitanism based on these ideas. Using a non-essential metaphysics as envisioned by Chengguan and articulated by Nishida and Mutai, I will propose a new theory of identity formation and cosmopolitan ethics. At the heart of this philosophy lies a de-essentialist conception of the self who engages with the world and, most of all, a multiplicity of selves that not only have windows but stand in a continuous relationship with each other.