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Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the environmental aspect of modern Japanese Buddhist accounts of travel to India. Taking an ecocritical stance, it will argue for the reciprocal interaction of ideas and environment in conceptualizations of modernity, religion, and nature in a transnational context.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have recently pointed out the importance of travel to South Asia and interaction with South Asian intellectuals in the construction of modern Japanese Buddhism (Jaffe 2004 and 2019, Auerback 2016, Okuyama 2016, Licha 2021), contributing to the broader revaluation of intra-Asian networks in defining non-Eurocentric views of modernity (Van der Veer 2013, Duara 2014, Ho 2017). Building on this scholarship, this presentation will add a fourth essential component to the interaction among Japanese, South Asian, and European intellectuals: the role of the environment. Using postcolonial theory in the analysis of modern Japanese Buddhist accounts of travel to India, it will point out how these travelers mobilized their Buddhist textual imaginary to frame Indian landscape, and how they made India both exotic and familiar to the Japanese readership, strategically deploying religious and scientific language. However, the presentation will also take an ecocritical stance by considering the natural environment of India not simply as a passive canvas on which the Japanese projected their nostalgia for ancient Buddhism, but as an agent in the construction of modern views on religion, nature, and civilization.

Travel to India, framed both as scientific exploration and religious pilgrimage, became an important experience for many Japanese Buddhists during the Meiji period. These travelers visited Buddhist sites, following the alleged steps of the historical Buddha. They looked for unexplored Buddhist texts in Sanskrit to respond to the criticism of European Orientalism against East Asian canonical traditions, and established important collaborations with South Asian religious reformers. As their Indological knowledge and the length of their stays in India expanded, their interest did not stop at texts and images, but it also included the exploration of the Indian environment that surrounded them, including plants, animals, and the natural setting of Buddhist sites. Focusing on the environmental aspect in travel accounts of Buddhist priest-scholars such as Nanjō Bun’yū and Izumi Hōkei and in articles on India by various authors in religious periodicals, this presentation will show the reciprocal impact of ideas and nature in the construction of the modern concept of Buddhism in a transnational setting.