When Buddhism Became A Religion
When Buddhism Became a 'Religion: Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryō.
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This article examines the process by which Buddhism became a “religion”
in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). As part of the climate of modernization, foreigners,
government officials, and the press increasingly identified Buddhism as
superstitious and backward. In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional
Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories
“superstition” and “religion.” Superstition was deemed “not really Buddhism”
and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized
ideas of religion. Buddhist philosopher Inoue Enryō was crucial to
this process. This paper explores “superstition” and “religion” in his writings,
and it discusses the aspects of Buddhism that were invented and sublimated
under the influence of this distinction. This paper argues that not only did
Buddhism became a religion in Meiji Japan but also that in order to do so it
had to eliminate superstitions, which included numerous practices and beliefs
that had previously been central. (less)
in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). As part of the climate of modernization, foreigners,
government officials, and the press increasingly identified Buddhism as
superstitious and backward. In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional
Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories
“superstition” and “religion.” Superstition was deemed “not really Buddhism”
and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized
ideas of religion. Buddhist philosopher Inoue Enryō was crucial to
this process. This paper explores “superstition” and “religion” in his writings,
and it discusses the aspects of Buddhism that were invented and sublimated
under the influence of this distinction. This paper argues that not only did
Buddhism became a religion in Meiji Japan but also that in order to do so it
had to eliminate superstitions, which included numerous practices and beliefs
that had previously been central. (less)
Paperback, 25 pages
Published 2006 by Journal of Japanese Religious Studies
Another in my breaking of Goodreads’s conventions—again with a review of a single essay.
Josephson examines the changes that occurred to Japanese Buddhism when Japan was forcefully opened by American and European colonialists, and underwent its own modernization.
Modernity, modernism, modernization, these are contested terms but, for the case at hand we can go along with a variation on Woolf’s gloss: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” More clearly, in the nineteenth century, the combined forces of globalization, science and technology, and industrial capitalism forced a re-evaluation of many everyday practices in societies around the world, a reinterpretation that occurred at an unprecedented pace, so that history seemed to speed up.
Josephson points out in the introduction that the Japanese did not have a word for religion equivalent to the American one—a universalizing term that tried to encompass, as James would call them, the “varieties” of experience or get at what the French sociologist Durkheim called the “elementary forms.” As Japanese scholars first thought about it, religion was a subset of Buddhism, the subset that dealt with ethical restrain. Buddhism, though, was not a religion.
This view changed over the second-half of the nineteenth century and the essay is concerned, somewhat with the why and the how, but mostly with the who: Inoue Enryö, the so-called Dr. Monster. He was intent on sorting out Buddhism into two new categories, the supernatural—which was to be discarded in the wake of modern science—and religion—which were beliefs, rather than the past practices, that, in the manner of Western thinking about religion, transcended rationalism—belonged to its own realm of the spiritual (what Geertz would call “the really real.”)
This essay was published in 2006; so it came after Gerald Figal’s interesting “Civilization and Monsters,” which covers some of the same ground, arguing that even though the fantastic and supernatural seem opposed to modernity—Weber had famously had it that the modern world is disenchanted—the fantastic consumed a great deal of thought by the early modernists. Dr. Monster sent years cataloguing the various monsters of Japanese folklore, legend, and myth, some of them from long before, others—as Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade shows—continuing to be created even in the face of modernity.
The classifying of Buddhism as a religion depended upon understanding of religion that was rooted in Christianity (which is how you get what are later called Protestant Buddhists, also not referenced here.) One wonders if it is the comparison to Christianity or something else that made definitions of Japanese Buddhism hew closely to reformations of Christianity in the 19th century. In particular, Josephson notes that there ‘supernatural’ tended to include all the devils and demons and evil-doers—just as American Christianity, in particular, was purged of these same elements in the 19th century. (Victoria Nelson, in her two books “The Secret Life foe Puppets” and “Gothika” argues that these less wholesome religious impulses were redirected into popular culture, particularly gothic writing; is it possible to make a similar case for Japanese popular culture?).
Inoue sharply divided the material from the spiritual, in the process dismissing belief in miracles and luck. Science was given pride of place as an interpreter of the material world. as a result, Buddhist cosmology was dismantled, with references to the working of the world were reinterpreted metaphorically or ignored. Increasingly, Buddhism was internalized—psychologized. The emphasis was no longer on ritual and practice but belief in an absolute—the realm that exists beyond reason.
The changes here were happening in a peculiarly Japanese context—there are many modernities, not just one. In particular, Buddhism had been under siege by political elites just prior to the Meiji period and this reformation of Buddhism was a response to those local conditions. Nonetheless, parallels can be drawn, and there seems to be a similarity to this process and the one that John Lardas Modern documents in antebellum America. (NB: I have yet to read Modern—I know!—himself, only about him.) He argued that secularism was a religious movement of sorts, a religious adaptation to new cultural conditions. The transformation of Buddhism into a religion seems to be doing some of the same cultural work.
The essay is not without its faults. It makes a lot of claims about the changes Buddhism underwent without providing many specific examples. There is no reference to Figal’s work and some other key work on the subject. There’s a needlessly long tangent on the theoretical substructure of the article. Nor does he consider how much effective Dr. Monster was in his attempts—how much his ideas changed Buddhism on the ground, in the everyday life of everyday citizens. And there’s not much consideration of feedback loops, as opposed to one way transfers: that Buddhism was influenced by colonizing powers, but not how it affected those colonizing powers in turn.
Perhaps that would be just too much. But it’ a rich story, investigated well by David L. McMahan, who shows that Buddhism’s transformation was more complex than Josephson allows. Buddhism can be seen, in Romantic terms, as opposed to science, speaking toward a realm of experience beyond the reach of reason. But Buddhism has also ben taken up as the scientific religion, mindfulness practice given the stamp of approval of psychologists; Buddhisms attendance to the everyday is seen as pragmatic and scientific, fitting with a secular American culture. But even here McMahan—possibly overstating the case some—argues that Buddhism has been cut off from its roots, mindfulness and associated practices turned into tools for self-actualization and the improvement of individual Western lives, minimizing social relationships and community—another in a long list of practices, then, that have come to isolate the American individual further and further.
Nothing is permanent, the Buddha says, and that goes for Buddhism, too.
(less)
Josephson examines the changes that occurred to Japanese Buddhism when Japan was forcefully opened by American and European colonialists, and underwent its own modernization.
Modernity, modernism, modernization, these are contested terms but, for the case at hand we can go along with a variation on Woolf’s gloss: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” More clearly, in the nineteenth century, the combined forces of globalization, science and technology, and industrial capitalism forced a re-evaluation of many everyday practices in societies around the world, a reinterpretation that occurred at an unprecedented pace, so that history seemed to speed up.
Josephson points out in the introduction that the Japanese did not have a word for religion equivalent to the American one—a universalizing term that tried to encompass, as James would call them, the “varieties” of experience or get at what the French sociologist Durkheim called the “elementary forms.” As Japanese scholars first thought about it, religion was a subset of Buddhism, the subset that dealt with ethical restrain. Buddhism, though, was not a religion.
This view changed over the second-half of the nineteenth century and the essay is concerned, somewhat with the why and the how, but mostly with the who: Inoue Enryö, the so-called Dr. Monster. He was intent on sorting out Buddhism into two new categories, the supernatural—which was to be discarded in the wake of modern science—and religion—which were beliefs, rather than the past practices, that, in the manner of Western thinking about religion, transcended rationalism—belonged to its own realm of the spiritual (what Geertz would call “the really real.”)
This essay was published in 2006; so it came after Gerald Figal’s interesting “Civilization and Monsters,” which covers some of the same ground, arguing that even though the fantastic and supernatural seem opposed to modernity—Weber had famously had it that the modern world is disenchanted—the fantastic consumed a great deal of thought by the early modernists. Dr. Monster sent years cataloguing the various monsters of Japanese folklore, legend, and myth, some of them from long before, others—as Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade shows—continuing to be created even in the face of modernity.
The classifying of Buddhism as a religion depended upon understanding of religion that was rooted in Christianity (which is how you get what are later called Protestant Buddhists, also not referenced here.) One wonders if it is the comparison to Christianity or something else that made definitions of Japanese Buddhism hew closely to reformations of Christianity in the 19th century. In particular, Josephson notes that there ‘supernatural’ tended to include all the devils and demons and evil-doers—just as American Christianity, in particular, was purged of these same elements in the 19th century. (Victoria Nelson, in her two books “The Secret Life foe Puppets” and “Gothika” argues that these less wholesome religious impulses were redirected into popular culture, particularly gothic writing; is it possible to make a similar case for Japanese popular culture?).
Inoue sharply divided the material from the spiritual, in the process dismissing belief in miracles and luck. Science was given pride of place as an interpreter of the material world. as a result, Buddhist cosmology was dismantled, with references to the working of the world were reinterpreted metaphorically or ignored. Increasingly, Buddhism was internalized—psychologized. The emphasis was no longer on ritual and practice but belief in an absolute—the realm that exists beyond reason.
The changes here were happening in a peculiarly Japanese context—there are many modernities, not just one. In particular, Buddhism had been under siege by political elites just prior to the Meiji period and this reformation of Buddhism was a response to those local conditions. Nonetheless, parallels can be drawn, and there seems to be a similarity to this process and the one that John Lardas Modern documents in antebellum America. (NB: I have yet to read Modern—I know!—himself, only about him.) He argued that secularism was a religious movement of sorts, a religious adaptation to new cultural conditions. The transformation of Buddhism into a religion seems to be doing some of the same cultural work.
The essay is not without its faults. It makes a lot of claims about the changes Buddhism underwent without providing many specific examples. There is no reference to Figal’s work and some other key work on the subject. There’s a needlessly long tangent on the theoretical substructure of the article. Nor does he consider how much effective Dr. Monster was in his attempts—how much his ideas changed Buddhism on the ground, in the everyday life of everyday citizens. And there’s not much consideration of feedback loops, as opposed to one way transfers: that Buddhism was influenced by colonizing powers, but not how it affected those colonizing powers in turn.
Perhaps that would be just too much. But it’ a rich story, investigated well by David L. McMahan, who shows that Buddhism’s transformation was more complex than Josephson allows. Buddhism can be seen, in Romantic terms, as opposed to science, speaking toward a realm of experience beyond the reach of reason. But Buddhism has also ben taken up as the scientific religion, mindfulness practice given the stamp of approval of psychologists; Buddhisms attendance to the everyday is seen as pragmatic and scientific, fitting with a secular American culture. But even here McMahan—possibly overstating the case some—argues that Buddhism has been cut off from its roots, mindfulness and associated practices turned into tools for self-actualization and the improvement of individual Western lives, minimizing social relationships and community—another in a long list of practices, then, that have come to isolate the American individual further and further.
Nothing is permanent, the Buddha says, and that goes for Buddhism, too.
(less)
An excellent intervention into contemporary debates about Buddhism and the category religion. I teach it in most of my courses on Japanese Buddhism.
