Critics and Opponents of Shakubuku in the Modern Times Part. 1 [The devil Nichiki patron saint of the Nichiren Shu]

Critics and Opponents of Shakubuku in the Modern Times Part. 1

Author unknown

During the Tokugawa period attempts had already began within the
Nichiren tradition to codify doctrine based on Nichiren's writings,
independently of the strong Tendai influence that had pervaded its
seminaries. Crucial to such reformulations was the question of what role
shakubuku should play in the changing era.

A pivotal figure in this connection was the scholar Udana-in Nichiki
(1800-1859), one of the pioneers of modern Nichiren sectarian studies.
Nichiki argued forcefully for abandoning traditional shakubuku in favor
of the milder sh ju. Although influenced by the accommodative Nichiren
scholarship of the Tokugawa period, Nichiki's position derived
explicitly from Nichiren's admonition that the method of spreading the
Lotus Sutra Should accord with the times.

He was acutely aware of mounting anti-Buddhist sentiment, having studied
the critiques of Tominaga Nakatomo (1715-1746) and Hirata Atsutane
(1776-1849) (see Ketelaar 1990, pp. 19-36) and having personally
witnessed the ruthless suppression of Buddhism in the Mito domain
(Miyakawa 1977, p. 122). Nichiki saw clearly that Buddhism had long
since lost its intellectual hegemony, and that the Nichiren sect from
then on would have to coexist, not only with other, more influential,
forms of Buddhism, but with Confucianism, Nativism, and various European intellectual traditions.

In his Gukyo yogi [Essentials of disseminating the sutra], Nichiki
argued that shakubuku was inappropriate in an age when changing one's
sectarian affiliation was prohibited by law. Criticizing other sects was
also apt to provoke anger, making people adhere all the more firmly to
their original beliefs and preventing them from learning the True Way.
An effective expedient in Nichiren's time, shakubuku was now an outmoded
approach that could only provoke contempt from educated people (J g en
1975, vol. 3, p. 5).

Elsewhere, Nichiki wrote that the shakubuku method was readily misused
by those deficient in scholarship and patience, and that those attached
to its form often lacked the compassion that represents its true intent.
Moreover, their arrogant attacks on other sects could drive previously
innocent people to commit the sin of slandering the Lotus Sutra (Shiku
kakugen ben [Discussion of the four declarations],J g en 1975, vol. 4,
p. 918).

In the Sho shaku shintai ron [The choice of sh ju or shakubuku], Nichiki
welded such arguments to a reinterpretation of traditional mappo
thought. Shakubuku, he said, had been appropriate during the first five
hundred years of mapp a period defined in the Ta-chi ching [Great
collection of sutras] as the fifth of five five-hundred-year periods in
the decline of the Dharma following the Buddha's parinirvana (T #397,
15.365b). Calculating from the year 1052, which premodern Japanese
scholars generally identified as the start of mapp , Nichiki concluded
that this fifth five-hundred-year period, during which Nichiren had
lived and taught, had ended in the year 1551 (Jog en 1975, vol. 4, p.
332).

Moreover, in Nichiren's time Japan had been a country that slandered the
Buddha Dharma, and so shakubuku was appropriate; now it was a country
evil by virtue of its ignorance of Buddhism, so sh ju was preferred.
Nichiki listed several occasions after the supposed 1551 turning point
when, in his opinion, blind attachment to shakubuku had needlessly
brought down on the sect the wrath of the authorities (J g en 1975, vol.
4, p. 596).

Nichiki even asserted that the Rissh ankoku ron, long regarded as the
embodiment of Nichiren's shakubuku practice, no longer suited the times
(K jutsu zatt [Answers to various questions in the year 1850], J g en
1975, vol. 4, p. 972). Miyakawa Ry toku suggests that in rejecting the
Rissho ankoku ron for its connection with shakubuku, Nichiki also
rejected its premise that the tranquility of the nation depends on
establishing the True Dharma (1977, p. 125). If so, this represents a
far greater departure from Nichiren's teaching than the mere adoption of
a different form of propagation. It is ironic that in striving to
implement Nichiren's admonition that propagation of the Lotus Sutra
should fit the times, Nichiki arrived at a concept of the religion
considerably different from Nichiren's.

Nichiki's work has raised difficult hermeneutic questions about which
elements define the Nichiren tradition and the extent to which they can
be altered without compromising its integrity. Such questions are
especially troubling for those involved in the formulation of normative
doctrinal interpretations. Studies of Nichiki by Nichiren sectarian
scholars today show a certain ambivalence, combining a frank admiration
for his innovative attempts to meet the challenges of the Bakumatsu
period with serious reservations about the extent to which he reread the
doctrine (cf. ASAI 1958 and ONO 1977). Few if any Nichiren communities
today engage in confrontational debate-style shakubuku, but there
remains a general unwillingness to erase it from the rhetoric of
orthodoxy in the explicit manner Nichiki proposed.

Nichiki's disciples were to play key roles in guiding the Nichiren sect
through the turbulent years of the early Meiji period, when the
promulgation of the Shinto-Buddhist Separation Edicts, aimed at
disestablishing Buddhism and promoting a Shinto based state ideology,
sparked the brief but violent wave of anti-Buddhist persecution known
as haibutsu kishaku . Foremost among these disciples was Arai Nissatsu
(1890-1888), who in 1874 became the first super intendent (kanch ) of
several allied branches within the Nichiren sect (the present
Nichirenshu was officially incorporated under this name in 1876).

Like many other Buddhist leaders during the persecu tion years, Nissatsu
saw intersectarian cooperation as his sect's sole hope of survival, a
view reflecting his teacher Nichiki's position on the inappropriacy of
continued confrontation." Nissatsu devoted much of his career to such
cooperation, often in the face of criticism from within his own sect.
Nissatsu was active in the Shosh D toku Kaimei (Intersectarian
Cooperative League), organized in 1868 in an attempt to counter the
Meiji government's anti-Buddhist policies.

Like thousands of other educated priests, both Shinto and Buddhist,
Nissatsu was inducted into the Daiky nin (Great Teaching Academy), the
administrative center of the Ky bush (Ministry of Doctrine), as a
doctrinal intructor charged with disseminating the Shinto derived
"Great Teaching" that formed the new state orthodoxy. While there, he
supported the efforts of the prominent Nishi Hongan-ji leader Shimaji
Mokurai (1858-1911) to have the Great Teaching Academy dissolved in the
name of freedom of religion.

Nissatsu was also instrumental in launching intersectarian Buddhist
social welfare projects on the Christian model, instituting a program
of prison chaplaincy in 1879 and founding an orphanage in 1876. In 1877
he joined such noted Buddhist leaders as Shimaji, Shaku Unsho, Fukuda
Gyokai , and Ouchi Seiran in forming the Waky kai (Society for Harmony
and Respect) to promote intersectarian understanding.

While still at the Great Teaching Academy, Nissatsu is said to have
produced a curious, ecumenical rereading of Nichiren's "four
declarations." As mentioned above, the four declarations are "Nenbutsu
leads to Avici hell, Zen is a devil, Shingon will destroy the nation,
and Ritsu is a traitor." By assigning alternative readings to the
characters and rearranging the syntactical markers that govern the
Japanese reading of the text, Nissatsu produced: "Because we
contemplate the Buddha, ceaselessly devils are quieted; because our
words are true, traitors who would destroy the nation are subdued"
(Makinouchi 1937, pp. 6~67).

This completely undercuts the critical intent of the original reading.
That Nissatsu would so radically alter a statement long considered
fundamental to the tradition suggests not only his commitment to
Nichiki's non-confrontational sh ju approach but also his recognition
of the difficulties posed by traditional Lotus exclusivism at a time
when Buddhist leaders of all denom inations saw the need to unite for
their very survival.

The moderation adopted by Nichiki and his disciples differed somewhat
from that seen in earlier Nichiren Buddhism in that it represented, not
the complacency of established institutions, but an active, creative
attempt to respond to changing times. Other Nichiren Buddhists, however,
reacted in a quite different manner. One can point, for example, to a
sudden rise of shakubuku activity on the part of many lay Nichiren
Buddhists in the Bakumatsu period, often in defiance of bakufu
authority. A certain Surugaya Shichihye, a second hand clothes dealer
active through his lay association in the study of Nichiren's writings,
was banished from Edo and had his shop confiscated for practicing
shakubuku against other sects. Akahata Jingyo, the son of a pharmacist
in Nihonbashi, was thrown in prison and poisoned for displaying a flag
emblazoned with the four declarations and criticizing the bakufu policy
prohibiting changes of sectarian affiliation (Ishmawa 1977, p. 79).
The reasons underlying this upsurge of shakubuku in the Bakumatsu period
may perhaps be found in the writings of the Nichiren scholar and lay
believer Ogawa Taid (1814-1878), said to have been Akahata Jingy 's
teacher. Ogawa's Shinbutsu h koku ron [On having faith in Buddhism and
repaying one's obligation to the country], written in 1863, compares the
crises afflicting late Tokugawa Japan--crop failures, epidemics,
earthquakes, internal unrest, and foreign interference--to the disasters
that ravaged the country in Nichiren's day and that prompted his writing
of the Rissho ankoku ron. Then as now, Ogawa declared, "The safety of
the nation depends on the prosperity of the Buddha Dharma" (Ogawa 1991,
pg. 132).

Ogawa was highly critical of those who advocated shoju as the
appropriate practice for the age. Since only the Lotus Sutra had the
power to secure the peace of the nation, he argued, shakubuku was the
essential way to repay one's debt to Japan. However, he went on, the
contemporary situation differed from that in Nichiren's time in that
there now existed a well-established Nichiren sect unfortunately marred
by internal corruption. Thus shakubuku must now entail not only
challenges to other sects but a rigorous internal purification. "The
time has come when both the Dharma of the ruler and the Dharma of
Buddhism must undergo reformation," Ogawa warned (1991, p. 158). For
Ogawa, such reformation clearly did not include the early Meiji Buddhist
transsectarianism.

In an 1872 petition to O Taku, governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, Ogawa
asserted that Nenbutsu, Shingon, Tendai, and other forms of Buddhism did
not accord with the principles of "revering the kami and loving the
nation"; he urged that they be abolished by the imperial court and that
Nichiren's teaching alone be endorsed as the true Buddhism (Ogawa 1991,
pp. 456~59).

By the second decade of Meiji, when Buddhist organizations were
recovering from the anti-Budddhist policies of the immediate
post-Restoration years, certain Nichiren clerics and lay leaders began to
reassert the tradition's exclusive truth claim in a more forceful
manner, bringing them into direct conflict with the new rhetoric of
intersectarian unity. Attacks appeared in several Japanese Buddhist
journals after two prominent Nichiren prelates wrote to John Barrows,
chairman of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, urging that
"illegitimate" forms of Buddhism should not be represented at the
Parliament (KETELAAR 1990, p. 160). Another, possibly related, incident
involved the editing of the Bukky kakush koyo [Essentials of the
Buddhist sects] compiled by the Bukkyo Kakushu Kyokai (Buddhist
Transsectarian Committee), to which each of the major Japanese Buddhist
traditions had been asked to submit an essay outlining its essentials of
doctrine.

Honda Nissho (1867-1931), a prominent cleric of the Nichiren
denomination Kempon Hokke Shu, had been asked to edit the section
dealing with the Nichiren tradition. Two subsections of his
manuscript--one on the "four declarations" and the other on "admonitions
against slander of the Dharma"-were rejected by Shimaji Mokurai, chief
of the editorial board, as obstructive to the aims of the Transsectarian
Committee. The resulting disagreement not only delayed publication for
some years but escalated into a major ideological controversy, in the
course of which Nissho, filed suit in the Tokyo courts. Though
ultimately unsuccessful in having the editorial decision reversed,
Nissho gained a great deal of publicity and used the opportunity to
revive support for shakubuku within the Nichiren sect (Isobe 1931, pp
75-103; Kettlaar 1990, p. 198).

Along with the resurgence of hardline Lotus exclusivism, this period saw
new forms of Nichirenist rhetoric linking shakubuku to militant
imperialism. An early and influential example was Tanaka Chigaku
(1861-1939). As a novice priest at the Nichiren Academy (Daiky in),
recently established under the leadership of Arai Nissatsu, Tanaka is
said to have become disillusioned with the accommodating sh ju approach
of the new Nichiki school orthodoxy, which he saw as contradicting
Nichiren's claim for the sole truth of the Lotus.

The new Meiji era, when sectarian affiliation was no longer restricted
by law, impressed Tanaka as the perfect moment for a revitalization of
shakubuku (Tanabe 1989, pp. 199-99). He left the academy and eventually
became a lay evangelist of "Nichirenism" (Nichirenshugi), a popularized
Nichiren doctrine welded to nationalistic aspirations. In Tanaka's
thought, shakubuku became the vehicle not merely for protection of the
nation, but also for imperial expansion. In his Sh mon no ishin
(Restoration of the [Nichiren] sect), published in 1901, he wrote:

"Nichiren is the general of the army that will unite the world. Japan
is his headquarters. The people of Japan are his troops; teachers and
scholars of Nichiren Buddhism are his officers. The Nichiren creed is a
declaration of war, and shakubuku is the plan of attack.... Japan truly
has a heavenly mandate to unite the world." (translation from LEE 1975,
P. 26)

Similar rhetoric, likening--even equating--the spread of the Lotus Sutra
through shakubuku with the extension of Japanese territory by armed
force, recurred in Nichiren Buddhist circles up through WWII. It was
linked to broader issues of modern Japanese nationalism, imperialist
aspirations, and the position of religious institutions under the
wartime government; Nichiren groups were by no means unique among
Buddhist institutions in their support--willing or otherwise-for
militarism. While such issues are too complex to be discussed here, it
should be noted that the understanding of shakubuku proposed during the
modern imperial period differed from that of any other era in that it
was aligned with, rather than critical of, the ruling powers.