Short Abstract:

By focusing on both political and doctrinal aspects, this panel discusses different ways that Shōtoku Taishi (574-622), a key character for a number of Buddhist, Shinto —and even Christian— traditions in Japan, was reinvented in the modernizing context that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Long Abstract:

There is no controversy about the fact that Shōtoku Taishi (a.k.a. Prince Shōtoku, 574-622) plays a crucial role in the context of Japanese religious history. Praised as a key character in many different religious traditions — besides his pivotal place in Buddhist traditions as different as Sōto Zen and Jōdo Shinshū, the Prince is also highly regarded in Shinto, Shugendo, and, after the twentieth-century, even Christian groups in Japan. However, despite a thousand-year long history of (re-)inventions, the Meiji era did bring new elements that contributed to transformations theretofore never witnessed. For instance, the introduction of modern historiographical methods led scholars to question some of the Prince's most famous enterprises, and modern printed media certainly helped make certain depictions more pervasive than ever before. This panel session will concentrate on three different dimensions of the reinvention of Shōtoku's image in the modern period. By focusing on an early Edo-period (1600-1868) apocryphal text titled Shōtoku Taishi's Five Constitutions, the first presenter will discuss issues of continuity and change. Attributed to the Prince from the time of its conception in the early seventeenth century, this text gained new life in the Meiji campaigns aimed at elevating certain Shinto(-inspired) ideas to the level of national doctrine. The second presenter focuses on the image of the Prince in the influential Nichirenist movement of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Although Shōtoku had been deeply respected in most Japanese Buddhist schools, the Nichiren sect remained as an exception, a reality that would, however, eventually change as the Imperial system became further established throughout the Meiji years. The last presentation focuses on modern connections between the Prince and his Seventeen-article Constitution, especially how the constitution changed from being regarded as no more than a collection of "moral admonishments" in the late nineteenth-century, to being considered, in the 1930s, as one of the highest expressions of the kokutai itself. Together, these presentations will clarify heretofore unfamiliar aspects of the modernization of Japanese Buddhist —and to an extent, also Shinto— tradition.