The Question of Quintessence: Buddhism in Wartime Japanese Academia

Abstract

Efforts to find the unique character of “Buddhism” as it developed in the Japanese archipelago are by no means peculiar to modernity. However, especially after the Mukden Incident of 1931, as the Japanese empire expanded both ideologically and geographically, Buddhists came to play, through the intrinsic “Pan-Asian” character of their religion, a fundamental role in legitimizing the colonial ambitions of the Japanese state throughout the continent. In scholarly terms, this period witnessed the multiplication of essentialist narratives that, to a certain extent, continue to frame discussions of Japanese Buddhist history even today. In an attempt to both contextualize the deepening of such discourses and understand the simultaneous coalescing of historical accounts on the nature of “Japanese Buddhism,” this chapter focuses on the works of Hanayama Shinshō (1898–1995) and Miyamoto Shōson (1893–1983), two central Buddhist intellectuals of this time and faculty at the Tokyo Imperial University.

This chapter reproduces parts of my “Between Essence and Manifestation: Shōtoku Taishi and Shinran during the Fifteen-year War (1931–1945),” in 2012 nendo kenkyū hōkokusho, ed. Ryūkoku Daigaku Ajia Bukkyō Bunka Kenkyū Sentā, 279–294 (Kyoto: Ryūkoku Daigaku Ajia Bukkyō Bunka Kenkyū Sentā, 2013); and “Jūgonen sensōki ni okeru Miyamoto Shōson to Nihon Bukkyō,” Kindai bukkyō 19 (2012): 26–39, reprinted here with permission. In preparing this chapter, I benefited from conversations with Ishii Kōsei and Sueki Fumihiko. I thank Emily Anderson for her valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.