Pure Land for the People

Following the untimely death in prison of Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, his unfinished essay on Shinran was assembled for publication, serving as a kind of final testament. Early in his career, Miki had come into conflict with other Japanese Marxists over his contention that religion could play a positive role in the proletarian revolution. The Shinran essay picks up on this possibility, framing the Pure Land Buddhist view of the Dharma ages in terms of the historical dialectic. According to Miki, Shinran (like Marx) discerned that the trajectory of history points toward the establishment of a truly human society, or a buddha land built upon the earth, in which the full exercise of individual human capacity will be possible for the first time. Miki’s utopianism is complicated by his role in articulating a vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, relying on some of the same logic we see in the Shinran essay.

The Modern Tradition

Abbot Kōnyo’s pastoral letter of 1871 codifies an understanding of the Pure Land as a transcendent realm, attainable only after death, and of faith as a private matter of the heart. This understanding is valuable as a way of negotiating a place for Shinshū in the regime of the modern nation-state. Early Meiji thinkers like Shimaji Mokurai rely on this understanding of religion as internal in arguing for the separation of church and state. Shinshū reformer Kiyozawa Manshi pushes this focus on interiority to its limit, destabilizing the complementary relationship between the Buddhist law and the imperial law that his predecessors sought to secure. During the Taishō, Kiyozawa’s disciple Kaneko Daiei attempts to rearticulate the connection between the ideal Pure Land and the real world, while the Honganji-ha thinker Nonomura Naotarō argues that it is time for the Pure Land tradition to set aside the myth of the Western Paradise.

Introduction

The utopian vision of the Pure Land that flourished in medieval Japan becomes a problem for some thinkers in the modern Shinshū tradition who, like other religious modernists, find utopianism embarrassing. Theodore Adorno and Edward Said suggest a way of preserving the critical force of utopianism by tying it to exile. Japanese thinkers working during the war years also seize on this possibility, using ideas drawn from Pure Land Buddhism to imagine alternatives to the nation-state. Thinkers without specialized training in ritual or doctrine are able to make use of Buddhism in this way as a result of the same processes of secularization that make the Pure Land a problem for Shin modernizers.

Man Without a Hometown

Historian Ienaga Saburō turned to religion in search of a way to resist the ultranationalism of his day. He discovered in Japanese Buddhism what he termed a logic of negation, first articulated by Shōtoku Taishi and eventually made thoroughgoing in the religion of Shinran. He understood this logic of negation as informing both retreat from society and confrontation with society. Ienaga continued to explore this logic of negation after the war, criticizing mainstream Buddhism for its accommodation of state interests but praising some Buddhist activists and reformers for carrying into the present what Ienaga considered to be Shinran’s legacy. The logic of negation also informed Ienaga’s own stance toward the state, as he entered into a decades long confrontation with the Ministry of Education over textbook censorship. Ienaga’s postwar career models the kind of critical utopianism that his contemporary Theodore Adorno called for in the aftermath of the war.

Special Marxist, Special Buddhist

Kawakami Hajime was one of the most influential Japanese Marxist thinkers of his time. Before turning to Marxism, Kawakami had briefly been involved with Itō Shōshin’s utopian movement, Muga-ai (Selfless Love). Kawakami was sent to prison in 1933 as a result of his involvement with the Japanese Communist Party; while in prison, resisting ideological conversion (tenkō), he took up the question of religious truth and its relationship to Marxist social science. In his Prison Ramblings, Kawakami presents his theory of religious truth. In his autobiography, he details the connections between this theory of religious truth and the religious experience he had as a young man, triggered by his encounter with Itō. Kawakami’s interpretation of Pure Land Buddhism reflects his understanding of religious truth as thoroughly subjective and internal, allowing him to use Buddhism as a tool for securing a stable, autonomous self.

The Land in Pure Land

Polemical accounts suggest that the Western Paradise has traditionally been imagined as a strictly transcendent pocket universe, having no relation to this world. But medieval Pure Land believers sought the Pure Land in this world in a variety of ways, mapping it onto the landscape around them in order to rehearse the event of birth. Hōnen’s understanding of the Pure Land amplifies its supernatural character as a site within which the laws governing the real world do not apply. Shinran’s identification of himself as neither monk nor layman further knits together estrangement from the real world and birth in the Pure Land. Rennyo takes Shinran’s self-identification seriously, attempting to build a community based on the principle of mutual equality and organized according to seniority, reflecting the utopian values of the Warring States period. “Traditional” Pure Land does not begin to emerge until the early modern period.

Epilogue

A recent revival of interest in Marxism in contemporary Japan suggests new ways of thinking about Pure Land Buddhist utopianism as politically significant. Drawing on the work of Japanese Marxist Hiromatsu Wataru and Korean historian Baik Youngseo, Nakajima Takahirō makes an argument for rethinking East Asian relations from the periphery. Shinshū—with its emphasis on exile, marginal places, solidarity, and conviviality—has much to offer theorists interested in new ways of approaching social relations, as is already apparent in the work of Hishiki Masaharu and his understanding of the Pure Land as a principle of criticism. This way of imagining the Pure Land in a critical engagement with the real world should not be understood as brand new; on the contrary, it represents a return to the kind of critical hope that characterized medieval Pure Land.