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Paper short abstract

This paper aims to unpack the complicated web of concepts pertaining to modernity, Westernization, rationality, and militarization with regard to the modern Buddhist thinker Inoue Enryo's theory of the afterlife as it is developed in "Popular Lecture: On the Immortality of the Soul."

Paper long abstract

In “A Popular Lecture on the Immortality of the Soul (1899),” the Meiji-era Buddhist thinker Inoue Enryō laments the “nearsightedness” of the Japanese people, stating that Western studies has caused them to lose sight of spiritual truths, like the immortality of the soul. Enryō then borrows several Buddhist arguments related to causality, merit, and reincarnation to claim that not only is belief in life-after-death metaphysically parsimonious, but that it is necessary for establishing an ethical society and strong army. (Marti-Oroval 2019; Schulzer 2023)

This state-of-affairs seems to support the view that Enryō was a Buddhist-nationalist, who appealed to abstract rationality to argue that Buddhist philosophy could help bring about the centralized moral values needed to establish a modern Japanese society. (ex., Figal 1999; Snodgrass 2003) However, both this narrative and Enryō’s own preamble likely simplify the circumstances in which he makes his arguments about the afterlife, as well as the complexity of these arguments themselves. If nothing else, the idea that Enryō merely attempted to unilaterally expound upon the truth of Buddhism overlooks the fact that he was aware of Western “psychical researchers,” like William James and Henry Sidgwick, who explored scientific/philosophical explanations of the afterlife in the same period

This presentation will ask, then, how we should understand Enryō’s argument for the afterlife in relation to Westernization and Modernization in Japan, and answer by claiming that – rather than rebelling against the West – he is actually reproducing the same kind of debates held by his Western contemporaries against their materialist counterparts through the shared argument that scientific materialism is naught more than a metaphysically unmotivated dogma. The presentation will thus not only affirm previous research (e.g., Marti-Oroval, 2019) that claims Enryō developed these ideas in response to the Japanese materialists of his own day, but also note that this reformulation entailed a need to answer doubts about how the West would view an “irrational (i.e., non-materialistic)” society, as well as the practical benefits of his own view, thereby leading him to derive philosophically unsound – and, somehow, militaristic – consequences from his own argument.