Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the knowledge of India in the works of Meiji to Taishō Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals, shifting the focus from ancient Buddhism to aspects of Indian religions and civilization whose reinterpretation intersected with debates on Japanese modern identity and society.

Paper long abstract:

Recent research on modern Japanese Buddhism has shed significant light on the role played by inter-Asian intellectual networks and cultural exchange in the formation of ideas and projects of modernity alternative to the dominant Western-centered model. While this research has shown the importance of India for modern Japanese Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals looking for the sources of Buddhism, less attention has been dedicated to what India meant for them beyond being the birthplace of Shakyamuni. This paper will analyze how new forms of knowledge of Indian religions, and more broadly Indian civilization, produced in Japan in the Meiji to Taishō periods intersected with debates on modernity, national identity, confrontation with the West, but also on moral and social issues.

The knowledge of India has been a central field in the development of modern European intellectual history, where the Romantic search for origins met the Enlightenment demands of scientific inquiry, providing the colonial basis for the establishment of comparative linguistics and the study of religion. When the first Japanese Buddhist priests and lay Buddhist intellectuals visited Europe in the Meiji period they also confronted with this knowledge, and new concerns added to the indigenous East-Asian imagination of India. In my paper, I will particularly focus on the scholarship and explorations of two under-studied priest-scholars, Fujii Sensho and Izumi Hōkei, and one historian of religion, Anesaki Masaharu, and what India meant to them.

While at first a major concern for Japanese Buddhists interested in India was to respond to both internal and external criticism of Mahāyāna Buddhism by retrieving a direct contact with Indic sources, the knowledge they produced was not limited to ancient Indian Buddhism, but also encompassed the broader history of Indian religions and civilization. This knowledge provided these Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals with an ancient and non-European model for a civilization with refined scientific knowledge unified in a spiritual purpose. While this interpretation was subsumed into nationalist and pan-Asianist ideology, I will also show how other elements became critical tools and sparked debate on issues such as sexuality, the family, and social equality.