Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

“Religion” in Japan became both a problem and a problematized concept in the late nineteenth century. Buddhists in Japan met the first aspect, the aggressive persecution of Buddhism and the near elimination of several aspects of this once-dominant institution, in numerous ways. One of the more intriguing responses to this persecution was dedicated to the construction of a New Buddhist history. Works ranging from biographies of the Buddha, to studies of the geography of ancient India, to reviews of the early Buddhist conferences filled monograph after monograph and journal after journal as the New Buddhists sought to inscribe (or, one might say, recover) the origins of their faith within a specific and verifiable time, place, and intellectual [End Page 526] milieu. Under the threat of eradication in the early Meiji era, these Buddhist theologians returned to basic questions: What is Buddhism? Who founded Buddhism? What will the Buddhism of the future be?¹

To bridge the vast expanse of time and place that separate the “origin” of Buddhism from the contemporary world—and thus provide a means to answer these questions—New Buddhists find it necessary, in the words of Murakami Senshō 村上専精 (1851–1929), one of the first modern Japanese Buddhist historians, to discard the “imaginary age” (kūsō jidai 空想時代) and ascertain the “actual age” (jijitsu jidai 事実 時代) of Buddha’s life and Buddhism’s past.² Such an epistemological shift would be possible only through rigorous “logical research” and “historical excavation,” which must be presented to both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike in a “sober-minded,” “trustworthy,” and “commonsensical” fashion. While this new history in fact embodied the characteristics of the modern age, which drove the Meiji persecution of Buddhism, it was also perceived as a means to free Buddhist institutions from their critics.

Classically, these so-called New Buddhists sought to use the weapons of their enemies to confound their enemies, not realizing that they could not simply put down those weapons again after they finished. They themselves were indeed changed in the rewriting of their own history, when tensions emerged between the modern and what I have elsewhere called the nonmodern.³ For Fujii Senshō 藤井宣正 (1859–1903) and other New Buddhist historians of the Meiji era, history is not a static chronicle of events, and persons are not aligned as antecedents to a particular tradition (contra contemporaneous views of the Buddhist past). Rather, history, Buddhist or otherwise, should be understood as a vital developmental process (hattatsu 発達) intimately linked to the global advancement of civilization (bummei 文明) and culture (bunka 文化).⁴ Thus, if Buddhism is to be understood at all, the New Buddhists claimed, its history must be read to reveal its [End Page 527] interaction with the global trajectory of civilization. Or, as Fujii notes, there are two types of history, the universal or general (futsū 普通) and the particular (tokushū 特殊). The former is employed in histories of whole societies, nations, or even the world itself; the latter is used in histories of particular religious, political, or artistic traditions.⁵

Yet Buddhist history cannot, as one might expect, be confined to the particularistic style of history. Inasmuch as any history of Buddhism would include an analysis of the Three Jewels—Buddha, teaching (dharma), and community (sangha)—such a history would necessarily be implicated within a simultaneously both specific and universal social, racial, cultural, political, literary, geographic, and philosophical milieu (this is in fact Fujii’s list). The history of Buddhism, thus, becomes the history of humanity itself, or at least a significant portion thereof.

Indeed, the historical exercise as practiced by Meiji-era Buddhists was seldom limited to purely domestic concerns. Even contemporaneous works with such unassuming titles as Nihon bukkyōshi kō 日本佛教 史綱 (Outline of Japanese Buddhism) and Meiji shoshū kōyō 明治諸宗 綱要 (Essentials of Meiji [Buddhist] sects) base their interpretations of “Japanese” Buddhism on the global trajectory of a Buddhism created in India and inexorably...