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.