hakamaya noriaki - scholarship as criticism - p. 113

7/31/2019 HAKAMAYA Noriaki - Scholarship as Criticism - p. 113

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Scholarship as Criticism

HAK AM AYA Noriaki

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man schweigen

L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logica-Philosophicus

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAYis intended as a takeoff on Max Webers

Scholarship as a Profession. Had my only purpose been parody,I would have chosen something like Scholarship as a Non-

Profession, or The Scholarship Trade. But I have other reasons fortaking Weber on. I begin with comments from a column I wrote for theKomazawa University Campus Newsletterentitled 600 Words on Aca-demic Rumors:

I cant help thinking that universities, dominated by a pseudo-objectivitythat takes satisfaction in peddling bits of knowledge, have been taken inby the kind of nonjudgmental ethos Max Weber writes about inScholarship as a Profession.

As evidence of this, we only have to look at the way that syn-cretismoriginally used as a pejorative term to describe a kind of spiri-tual opportunismhas suddenly attained the status in religious studies,cultural anthropology, and folklore studies of a civil right that allows forany religious mishmash to be viewed, value-free, as valid as any other.

For me, the minimum requirement for a religion is that it expressesones belief in words and seeks to ascertain the truth or falsity of those

words. I therefore wish to set for myself, as a self-imposed minimumcondition of my university employment, an ideal of Scholarship asCriticism that stands in direct contradiction to Webers ideal.

At this point in my life, I must own my failures are more obviousthan my ideals. But with an outspokenness untempered by tact as myonly virtue, and in the spirit of Nietzsches sincerity (Wahrhaftigkeit) andCartesian common sense (bon sens), I resolve to carry on with my criticalresearch in the eld of Buddhist Studies. To begin with, I propose to


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expose the seamy side of the ethos of harmony (wa)we nd enshrined

in the Kokutai no hongithat the Ministry of Education issued in 1937.1

This was the rst time that I used the phrase scholarship as criti-cism in an anti-Weberian sense. By pure coincidence, my columnappeared on the second page of the Campus Newsletter, following thefront-page coverage given to the signing of an inter-collegiate exchangeprogram between Komazawa University and the University of BritishColumbia. The lead article included a summary of the commemorative lec-ture delivered by our president Sakurai Tokutar at the University of BritishColumbia on Japanese Folk Religion and the Traditional Concept ofKami. While it is not entirely fair to judge his talk from a reportersresume, what I read seemed to put us at exact opposite ends of the spec-

trum:The things worshiped in Japan as kami are many and varied: things ofnature like mountains, trees, rocks, and water; natural phenomena likerain, wind, thunder; the spirits of humans and animals; the spirits ofthose dead who are singled out for reverence as the ancestor of a familyor clan. Local communities and professional associations also elevate a

whole range of protective deities to guard their territory or workplaceand insure prosperity. Scholars of religion in the West studying this pat-tern of behavior labeled it polytheism and relegated it to the mostprimitive stage of religious development in order to stress its distancefrom the monotheism of the most advanced world religions likeChristianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Such a viewpoint is both premature

and supercial. Obviously the Japanese kami do not suggest a monothe-ism, but this does not mean that they coexist in great numbers withoutorder or organization. On the contrary, they are bound to each other inan incredibly systematic hierarchy that functions according to certainprinciples. Usually hidden away quietly in the other world, far fromhuman habitation, the kami appear in this world when they have a neces-sary role to play. The kami of Japan have a kind of pantheistic character.2

The scientic study of religion and folklore has developed along thelines of Webers injunction, Let the facts speak for themselves,3 seekingin this way to secure an objective autonomy within the academy. Theproblem is that Sakurai, though giving the impression of delity to thefacts, has taken a giant stride beyond the limits of objectivity.

First of all, religious typologies such as polytheism, monotheism, andpantheism are neither more nor less than a way to sort out and catalogue

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the phenomena we call religions, much the same as a window-dresser

arranges a display for a department store. So, too, different scholars adoptdifferent typologies for the same phenomena, which is all well and good.I am not even sure there are any Western scholars who would classifyBuddhism as a form of monotheism the way Sakurai claims they do. Buteven that will not detain me here. My problem is with his appeal to reli-gious typology to argue the superiority of Japanese folk religion becauseof its pantheistic character. And why is this a problem for me? Because itsimply does not make sense. Sakurai begins by offering an objectivetypology and then steps right over the borderline of scholarly conscienceto advance his personal opinions as if they partook of the same objectivity.

Let there be no mistake. I have no intention whatsoever of denyingthe importance and public relevance of personal beliefs. Quite the con-trary, I insist that we must nd words to express our beliefs if we are toassess their truth or falsity. But it seems to me a violation of the rules, akind of cheating, to place oneself on the high ground of the objectivescholar of religion and folklore, claiming to engage in the typologicalstudy of religion from a position outside the traditions themselves, to letthe facts speak for themselves, and then assert the superiority of Japanesefolk religion. My wording may be a bit harsh, but I know of no other wayto convey the conict I felt between what was written on the rst and sec-ond pages of that Campus Newsletter.

If it were no more than an in-house disagreement, I should prefer tolet the matter rest there. But the very conict of viewpoints has permeated

our society so profoundly and so subtly that it has all but become trans-parent to us. In such a situation, even an apparently trivial instancedeserves attention. The conict is not a new one, of course. It has proba-bly been around as long as language has been. It is in Descartes that itcomes into clearest relief. Descartes did not trust in scholars but in theraison naturelleor hard common sense of people, and proposed his criti-cal philosophy in French, which is the language of my country, in pref-erence to Latin, which is that of my preceptors.4After Descartes death,Giambattista Vico hoisted the banner of a topical philosophy in opposi-tion to Descartes,5 thus setting up an opposition between criticaand top-ica. The term topicaderives from the GreektpoV (Latin also uses its owntransliterations, though the native equivalent is locus) and means the

method of topos. It refers to the intuitive grasp of an empty space, void,or place (topos) prior to all action or judgementa brute ability that has

SCHOLARSHIP AS CRITICISM

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no need of language. Lest I be accused of exaggerating, allow me to

quote the more moderate comments of Iwasaki Minoru on Vicos De nos-tri temporis studiorum ratione(On the study methods of our time):

Topica precedes critica, in terms of both existence and cognition,because criticism is the art of judgement, whereas topicais the art of dis-covery. The discovery of universal premises naturally precedes the judge-ment of their truth value.6

Although Vico emphasizes the superiority of this art of discovery, it isthe art of judgement that has dominated the development of Europeanphilosophy, though perhaps not in the way Descartes might have expected.Sasaki Chikara has the following to say of Vicos theory of modern sci-ence:

Humanistic logic (that is, the study of human thinking and articulation),such as that of Rodolphus Agricola or his successor Petrus Ramus, whichappeared during the Renaissance in opposition to the scholastic logic of

Aristotle, can be divided into two parts. The rst part deals with dis-covery or invention. The second part deals with judgement. Generallyspeaking, the former corresponds to topicaand the latter to critica.7

In the terms of this distinction, the mainstream of European philoso-phy survived only as the science of judgement. These two aspects cor-respond almost exactly to the distinction betweenpratyakaand anumnain Indian philosophy. The fundamental difference from their Europeancounterparts, however, is that in India thinking is overwhelmingly based

on the primacy ofpratyaka, with the exception of the Buddhist logicaltradition of Dharmakrti (seventh century), later inherited by Tsong kha pa(13571419) and the Gelukpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism.8 But it is not acomparison of the intellectual history of Europe and India that concernsme here. If the Descartes-Vico debate was merely a European issue, noone in Japan would bother with Vico, but the fact is that the conspiracythat seeks to revitalize the opposition against Descartes is notconned toEurope. The special issue of the journal Shispublished in February of1987 on Reading Vico symbolizes the resurgence of topical philoso-phy here in Japan. The idea-importers might counter that they are sim-ply reporting the European rediscovery of Vico to Japan, but theindigenous Japanese topical philosophy that has traditionally given prior-

ity to an intuitive grasp of the void, and the Asian tradition of direct expe-rience (pratyaka), seem only too willing to join ranks with Vicos topical

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philosophy and in so doing open their arms to postmodernism and the

the new-age science of Fritjof Capra and his ilk. No, it is not merely amatter of reporting on trends abroad. It is a reconrmation of a Japaneseethos that, uncritically afrming its own tradition and claiming to be theepitome of topical philosophy, will accept anything as long as it is not crit-ical. It is a simple matter to take advantage of this national ethos if one

wishes to make claims about the superiority of Japanese folk religion,armed with no more than a cookie-cutter typology of religions andunperturbed by the absence of critical argument. Too many in Japantoday take this tack; nothing short of a solid tradition of critical philoso-phy, however small at rst, can hope to combat it. The difference betweenSakurai and me, then, comes down to the conict between topical phi-losophy and critical philosophy.

It is July as I am writing these lines, and summer break is approaching forthe university. Over the past year I have noticed any number of examplesof the conict between topical philosophy and critical philosophy that I

view as symptomatic of something wrong in society today. On December8th (immediately after the issue of the Campus Newsletterjust referred tohad come out), the Komazawa Universitys Steering Committee forBuddhist Ceremonies hosted a Symposium Commemorating theBuddhas Attainment of True Knowledge, at which the President of

Kyasan University, Matsunaga Ykei, delivered an address entitled TheCosmic View of Esoteric Buddhism. His main point was that esotericBuddhism is an all-inclusive religion that makes room for folk beliefs and

just about everything else within the garbha-sabhava-ma^ala. Thisstruck me as a highly inappropriate way to commemorate kyamuniscalm and clear insight into a new and different way of thinking.

I was hoping to have the chance to question the speaker at the recep-tion after the address, but Okabe Kazuo, then chair of the Faculty ofBuddhism, was able to raise most of the questions I had in mind. If eso-teric Buddhism is an all-inclusive religion, what makes it Buddhist? CouldKiriyama Seiys Agonsh be considered esoteric Buddhism, and if so,

why? Matsunagas reply went something like this: We may consider it

esoteric Buddhismbut there is no need to go into the details. Later, atthe end of the reception, Wakimoto Tsuneya, a professor in the Cultural


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Studies Program, delivered a short speech in which he commented to the

keynote speaker:Listening to your lecture on the all-embracing garbha-sabhava-ma^ala, I had the strong impression that it is very close to what reli-gious studies does. Certain people nowadays claim that only a certainkind of Buddhism is true Buddhism, but religious studies is an academiceld like thegarbha-sabhava-ma^ala. It considers all religions, eventhose that make such exclusivist claims, to be religion.

The event ended on this note of inclusivist magnanimity, an altogethertting symbol of what is happening in Japan today.

Personally I nd it incredible that my university would solicit a lectureabout esoteric Buddhism on the anniversary of the Buddhas attainment

of true knowledge, but the matter was too convoluted for me to do any-thing about it. Besides, Mt. Kya had become the center of attention as aresult of the Kkai boom going on in Japan at the time, which made itall the more difcult for my views to get a hearing. I should have knownfrom the beginning the only forum for criticism would be to sit down and

write an essay like this.Another example. On 8 November 1986 a symposium was held at

Mt. Kya under the joint sponsorship of Kyasan University and theMainichi Shinbun. Its topic was Kyasan Sagti: In Search of HumanPotential. Three weeks later, on 29 November, the Mainichi Newspaperdid a two-page spread on the event, including abstracts of the talks.9

Presenters at the symposium included Colin Wilson, a writer from

England; Fritjof Capra, the American physicist; Ryan Watson, an animalbehavior scientist from England; and Matsunaga Ykei, the president ofKyasan University. One can excuse the foreign guests for their miscon-ceptions about Buddhism, but Matsunaga, who should know better, gavea talk that sounded like some sort of Upaniadic mysticism in whichMikkyconrms the identity of the self and the world of the absolutenot through academic arguments but through the cultivation of theThree Secrets, expressing the physical body and the cosmos and mani-festing the nature of humanity. If this is what the president of a Buddhistuniversity understands to be Buddhism, how can one even begin to ques-tion the views of the other participants?

The newspaper report also included a fawning review of the whole

event by Kurita Isamu, shamelessly kowtowing to ideas about Buddhismthat could not be further from what Buddhism really is! Humanity, he

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writes, is by nature absolute, that is, Buddha. Emptiness is not a nega-

tion, but rather an afrmation of the absolute. No one who is sincereabout understanding Buddhism can fail to see this as a perversion of itsteaching. Human beings are by nature empty of absolute existence(antman, no-soul), and knowing this is what becoming a Buddha is allabout. Emptiness does not afrm any absolute but is a non-afrming orabsolute negation (prasajya-pratiedha, med dgag).10 The fact that all ofthis is diametrically opposed to Kuritas view matters nothing to himbecause the mandala leaves plenty of room for the authenticity of bothabsolute afrmation and absolute negation. In fact, he did not give a sec-ond thought the following year to setting aside his enthusiasm for Kkaiand getting all excited about Saich. How well-timed! There is to be a

summit of the worlds religious leaders on Mt. Hiei in August of this year.Kurita has wasted no time in jumping on the bandwagon with a hope-lessly outdated article on Saich and Original Enlightenment. The timehas long since passed when anyone at my university would dare to publishsuch naivete on original enlightenment, but intellectuals are an odd sortand do not seem to mind applauding this kind of mediocrity. AlthoughKurita subtitled his piece Prolegomenon to an Introduction, the liter-ary critic Akiyama Shun took this as rhetorical modesty and welcomed thepiece as Kuritas crowning thoughts on the source of the Japanese spir-it. I nd it laughable that someone whose ideas have jumped aroundfrom Ippen to Dgen and Kkai to Saich could have crowningthoughts on anything. In any case, Kuritas ideas on the source of the

Japanese spirit are not so novel as to deserve such gushing praise, as wesee from his discussion of Saichs twelve-year retreat:

Living through this experience in the natural setting of the mountains,driven almost beyond human limits, Saich realized the logic and sensi-tivity the Japanese have towards nature, a sensitivity nurtured fromancient times and owing in his blood. In Buddhist terms he must haveactually experienced the oneness (ssokuo) of nature and self. We can-not forget how strongly Saich was inuenced by the unique Japanese

view of nature. For the Japanese, nature is both creator and created, andmore than anything else, it is movement. Thus true existence is experi-enced within the phenomenal by becoming one with nature. This waspassed on in the unutterable words of the ritual initiations ofmikkyandlater developed into the broader Japanese tradition of original enlighten-ment.11


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This notion of original enlightenment is what Kurita calls the source

of the Japanese spirit, parroting yet again an idea that has been aroundever since the time of Shimaji Dait at the end of the Taish era:Japanese intellectual history found its culmination in the notion of orig-inal enlightenment, the center around which it has revolved from ancienttimes right down to our own age.12 Kuritas description of the Japanese

view of nature may sound new, but it really amounts to the same thing asSakurais appeal to the uniquely Japanese concept of kami noted above.

As illogical as it is to say that Mt. Hiei and the Grand Shrine of Hie areone and the same just because they happen to exist on the same moun-tain, the idea has considerable inuence today. It shames me to say so,but creativity and logic seem to be of little moment when popular essay-ists turn their sights on Buddhism. They study Buddhism in order tomake sense of their own traditions, and then discover some indigenousuniqueness and suddenly have no further need of Buddhism. They refuseto let the details of what Buddhism actually teaches interfere with theirown arrogance.

Umehara Takeshi is another example of this self-serving arrogance.In June of 1987 he published a book called Saich Meditationsbased ona series of television talks for NHK and timed to coincide with the Mt.Hiei summit. His ideas are no different from Kuritas, particularly in theirtotal lack of critical understanding of the role played in Japanese intellec-tual history by the structure of esoteric-exoteric Buddhism on Mt. Hiei.13

First, a passage from Kurita:

Without question Tendai is a doctrine of integration and unity; com-pared to Shingon esoteric Buddhism it is open and inclusive. This alsomeans that its inuence was widespread, as can readily be seen from thefact that Zen, Jdo, and the Hokke movement all stem from Mt. Hiei.This leads us to suppose that it is the Tendai notion of original enlight-enment rather than the Tendai school as such that resonates [with thesource of Japanese spirit].14

And now Umehara:

Saichs Tendai joined with Shingon and gave birth to the Tendai theoryof original enlightenment, best encapsulated in the well-known phrase,mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees all attain Buddhahood. Here isthe point at which Buddhism, a religion of human self-awareness,became thoroughly centered on nature. It is this intellectual climate thatgave birth to Hnen, Shinran, Eisai, Dgen, and Nichiren. Though each

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has a different point of view, they were all inuenced by the Tendai the-

ory of original enlightenment and each developed it in their own way.15

As I have argued elsewhere, the second that Buddhism came to beunderstood as a religion of self-awareness, it ceased to be Buddhist.16

Needless to say, my thesis is not widely accepted. So let us say for the sakeof argument that I am mistaken. We still have to admit that whenBuddhism changed from being a religion of self-awareness to a reli-gion centered on nature, at that moment it ceased to be Buddhist. Thisis precisely the reason that the founders of the new movements ofKamakura Buddhism reacted against this shift. It is a total perversion ofthe facts to claim that Zen, Jdo, and the Hokke movement all stem fromMt. Hiei or that original enlightenment theory created the intellectual cli-

mate that made Hnen, Shinran, Eisai, Dgen, and Nichiren possible.Kurita and Umeharas claims notwithstanding, the fact is that thosefounders, bravely challenging the political authority of the pseudo-Buddhism of their time, were rigorously suppressed. Even the cautiousand astute Dgen developed a very pointed critique of religion centeredon nature, the false Buddhism that asserts that mountains, rivers, grass-es, and trees all attain Buddhahood. In his later Shbgenz shizenbhikkhu, Dgen criticizes it with these words:

Some people say that, because the enlightenment of the Buddhas andTathagatas encompasses the whole world, even a speck of dust manifeststhat enlightenment. Because that enlightenment encompasses both sub-

ject and the object, mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, stars, the four

illusions, and three poisons express it as well. To see mountains and riversis to see the Tathagata, and the four illusions and three poisons are theBuddha-dharma. To see a speck of dust is to see the dharma-dhtuandeach spontaneous act is a manifestation of supreme enlightenment. Theysay this is the great understanding and call it a Patriarchal transmission.In latter-day Sung China, those who subscribe to this view are as numer-ous as rice plants, hemp, bamboo, and reeds. Their [religious] lineage isunknown, but it is clear that they do not understand Buddhism.17

Dgens rejection of the religion centered on nature proclaimedby some people is very clear.18 But in his bookHow to Read Dgen,Kurita lumps Mye and Dgen into the same loaf. So we have Myethinking himself one with nature: seeking nothing, becoming again play-

ful, life is satised. In Myes famous verse, as it should be(arubekiyauwa), Kurita nds the quintessenial meaning of the idea that


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all sentient beings are the Buddha-nature:

Persons must hold to the seven characters of a-ru-be-ki-ya-u-wa%Ke. Monks should be as monks, laity as laity. The emperorshould be as the emperor, and the ministers as ministers. Acting contraryto this [principle of] as it should be is the source of all evil.19

To Mye, of course, the founders of the new Kamakura Buddhismwere the evil ones who contravened the propriety of the status quo. Ina sense, this does indeed capture the avor of the notion of originalenlightenment that Buddha-nature exists in all sentient beings. It is this

way of thinking that also supported social discrimination and fostered anethic of blind obedience to ones superiors. That Kurita nowhere makesmention of Dgens criticisms in this regard comes as no surprise, but we

may leave this matter aside for now.20What I cannot overlook is his blind-ness to the difference between Dgen and Mye that has him stumbleinto the nonsense of claiming that In general, all who draw near theessence of Buddhism, be it Mye, Dgen, Shinran, or Ippen, however

widely their words may vary and their paths diverge, in the end approachthe same destination.21 Dgens words are telling in this connection:

Careless people claim that Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism areultimately one, only the entrances are different. Or they say those teach-ings are like a tripod. That kind of view is often heard among the monksof the Great Sung China.

If they hold such opinions the Buddha Dharma has already disap-peared into the earth for them. Even a speck of dust of the BuddhaDharma cannot be found among that type of stupid people.22

If Kurita wishes to disassociate himself from these careless people,he needs to clarify his positionor perhaps it would be enough if he sim-ply retitled his bookHow to Misread Dgen. But Kurita is safe in the pre-sent intellectual climate, because it is rather sharp-tongued people like me

who are dismissed as careless. And then, too, just like Wakimoto andhis notion of religious studies as the all-inclusive garbha-sabhava-ma^alathat embraces religions in all its forms, Kurita will no doubt nda niche somewhere in his scheme for my complete rejection of his ideas ashaving nothing to do with Buddhismperhaps by dragging it under theumbrella of his benecent doctrine of integration and unity. This is the

very attitude that gives rise to the institutional ideology of avoiding con-ict by accepting everything just as it is, in the same way that Mt. Hiei

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opened its arms to all of the founders of the new Kamakura Buddhism

(who had rebelled against everything the mountain stood for) and linedthe inner sanctuary of the Great Lecture Hall with their statues. This alsoseems to be the spirit of the summit of world religions being held therethis year. Umehara, incidentally, mentions the images from the GreatLecture Hall in a chapter of his Saich Meditationsdevoted to Japaneseculture, and then goes on to say:23

Prince Shtoku must have considered Ekayana Buddhism, with its prin-ciples of unity and equality, the best system of thought on which to forgein Japan a national polity based on legal codes. In other words, he musthave seen the emphasis on unity and equality in Ekayana as the mosteffective ideology for creating a nation based on a functional bureaucracyunder the Emperor and independent of the clans.24

The ideology of harmony (wa) in the Seventeen-Article Constitutionattributed to Prince Shtoku is indeed as Umehara has it. But if this is

what was really intended, then let it not be confused with true Buddhism.Like Kuritas integration and unity, and Umeharas unity and equalityboth reek of the same ideology of harmony that surrounds the arrange-ment of the founders statues in the Great Lecture Hall. Nothing couldbe further from this obscuring of all essential opposition than the basicideas of the Lotus Sutrathat Saich valued so highly. Matsumoto Shir isperhaps the rst to clearly and sharply point this out in his bookThePractice of Buddhism.25 (The relevant section in Matsumotos book was

juxtaposed with Umeharas stereotypical interpretation of the Lotus Sutra

for an ethics exam in the Komazawa Universitys Faculty of Eco-nomics.26)

To get an idea of how dangerous this insistence that an integrity,unity, and equality replace discrimination between truth and falsehoodcan be, consider the following from the Kokutai no hongi:

Harmony as of our nation is not a mechanical concert of independentindividuals of the same level that has its starting point in [cold] knowl-edge, but a great harmony that holds itself together by having the parts

within the whole through actions that t the parts. Hence therein is prac-ticed mutual respectful love and obedience, endearment and fostering.This is not a mere compromise or concord of mechanical or homoge-neous things; but is [a thing] with all things having their characteristics,mutually different and yet manifesting their characteristics, that is, man-ifesting the essential qualities through the partsthat thus harmonize with


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the world of the one truth. That is, harmony as in our nation is a great

harmony of individuals who, by giving play to their characteristics, andthrough difculties, toil, and labor, converge into one. Because of char-acteristics and difculties, this harmony becomes all the greater and itssubstance rich. Again, in this way difculties are developed, special char-acteristics become beautiful, and at the same time even enhance thedevelopment and well-being of the whole. Indeed, harmony in our nationis not a half-measure harmony, but a great, practical harmony that man-ifests itself with freshness in step with the development of [all] things.27

When I stop to think that it is this very ideology of harmony that will becelebrated at the summers summit of world religions on Mt. Hiei (andthe phrase the parts within the whole remind me of Myes as itshould be), I cannot refrain from voicing my criticismif only to clear

my nausea. Okabe Kazuo writes of what happened in the past as a resultof letting this kind of thinking pass by without comment:

The fact the Buddhism of the Kamakura period was able to manifest somuch power and change history was due in part to the rise of the warriorclass, but it was also due to its sharp criticism of the Buddhism that hadbecome a power-broker within the Heian power structure.

Dgens words express his harsh rejection of the kind of Buddhismthat seeks to accord itself with worldly power. The path to extinction isto blindly follow the way of the mundane world. There is no wisdomattained by attempting to please the mundane world. Those who trans-form the mundane are sages. Those who accord with the mundane aregreat fools.

The Buddhism of World War II, on the other hand, is an appallingexample of what happens by simply oating along with the current of thetimes, in this case succumbing to militarism and even singing its praises.This is a stain on the history of Buddhism that can never be obliterated.29

Few times in history seem to be as little concerned with distinguishingwhat is true from what is false as the present. How did we get to thispoint? Is it simply old-fashioned to profess ones beliefs as true? Even inthe religious world it seems that the only ones who speak up about whatthey believe are the weak and aficted who give witness to their hope for

salvation. Perhaps it is all part of the general mood of tolerance andunderstanding that marks the times in which we live.

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I say perhaps. In July of 1987 the Faculty of Buddhism sponsored

a public lecture by Fujiyoshi Jikai, professor emeritus of HanazonoUniversity and abbot of the Pure Land Buddhist temple Kmy-ji inKamakura, entitled Zen and Pure Land. I couldnt believe my ears

when, in the course of his talk, Fujiyoshi remarked that, the Paradise ofthe Western Pure Land is an upya. From the time he was a child gazingup at the sun sinking into the Ariake Sea to the West, he had been raisedto believe that his deceased father had gone there, to the Paradise in the

West. But after going to college and studying with Hisamatsu Shinichi,he completely changed his way of thinking and came to understand the un-scientic image of Paradise of the Western Pure Land as merely an upya.

After listening to Fujiyoshi speak, I read some of what he has written

and came away feeling that he is devoted to Hisamatsu to the very mar-row of his bones, referring to him even as a contemporary Vimalakrtiwho had experienced a similar self-awakening.30 It struck me that maybehe should just convert from Pure Land Buddhism and take refuge inHisamatsu, though no doubt he would nd the suggestion irreverent.Most people would probably nd such a decision agonizing, but I do notget the sense that this would be the case with Fujiyoshi.

It is not my intention to censure Fujiyoshi personally, not leastbecause a follower of Dgen has no right to point a nger at a follower ofthe Pure Land tradition. I mean only to observe that the overwhelmingtendency in Japan is such as would deny any substantial differencebetween Pure Land Buddhism and Hisamatsus brand of Rinzai Zen.Some might take pride in this as a sign of Buddhist tolerance, but does itreally make any sense to speak of such tolerant religious beliefs or tol-erant religious convictions? If I were a Pure Land believer, I would cer-tainly be most upset at one of my abbots babbling such nonsense withoutgiving it a second thought. As it happened, after the lecture, I ran intoKchi Eigaku and asked him what he thought about the idea that thePure Land was simply an upya. His face at once contorted in an expres-sion of distaste, but before he said anything he recovered his composure,smiled, and said, I have discussed this in detail in my book. I mentionthis because Fujiyoshis lecture made me realize that a truly critical atti-tude towards the Buddhist tradition is impossible from a standpoint out-

side of it. This was the rst time I had listened to a lecture wonderingwhat I might think if I were listening to it as a member of a different sect.31


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In any case, I came to the realization that it was important to discuss

my relationship to religious beliefs and convictions precisely because intel-lectuals who discuss matters of religion and culture today seem to be socompletely oblivious of this problem. I recall stopping in a bookstore topick up a copy of Umeharas Saich Meditationsand running across EtJuns bookA Glance at Our Timesin the new arrivals section. Leangthrough the book, I immediately recognized it as full of his usual poppy-cock but decided to take it along anyway.

In it I found an essay on religious convictions entitled The Glance ofthe Living and the Glance of the Dead, one of Ets typical whiningimpressions of a committee meeting that he attended on the problem ofgovernment bureaucrats paying ofcial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.Being the transcription of an interview, it is barely readable, but may beconsidered a fair expression of his true feelings on the matter. Et saysthat from the start he was skeptical of the committee, which had nointention of interfering with ofcial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and didnot at all enjoy the repetitiveness of the discussions. I cannot understand

why he did not just turn down the invitation or even make a public resig-nation and bring the issue out into the open, giving the names of thoseinvolved. Instead, on 9 August 1987, he added his name to fourteen oth-ers on the ofcial committee report. How can he pretend, then, thatunlike all the others, he distanced himself from the minor details, as ifhaunted by the ghosts of the military heroes staring at him from the ceil-ing of the Prime Ministers main dining room?

This is the kind of thing that make his writings so whimpering. Onthe one hand, he sets himself up as a man of letters who can lament theatrocity of postwar censorship inicted on Japan by the Occupation,

who insisted, for example, that Kawaji Ryks poem Returning Spiritsbe amended to read simply Returning, as leaving but the skeletalremains of the poem. On the other, he does not seem to care a whitabout the editorial atrocity of censorship and excision that Japan inictedon itself during the war.

Or again, throughout the essay he quotes Yanagita Kunio, displayingthe same hoary ideology of harmony that presents the Japanese nationalentity as something unchanging, and yet shakes off the least hint that hisideas might be of the same sort as those minor details discussed in the

meeting. As always, Et avoids using telltale terms like the ideology ofharmony, preferring to speak instead of the makeup of the nation, in

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deference to the etymology of the English word constitution. After

considering the question of ofcial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine from theviewpoints of the constitution, politics, and culture, he takes up this ideaof the makeup of the nation from the viewpoint of culture. Bearing inmind that his adoption of English terms like constitution and makeupof the nation does not mean that he is saying anything new, we may citea few examples:

My fundamental premise is that constitutional law is based on the con-stitution of Japan, rather than that constitutional law should be the pri-mary determiner of the constitution.32

In other words, the constitution is the source of Japan and the

unchanging essence of the national polity. He goes on:The most important thing for Japanese, that which they naturally holddear, is the Japanese national characterin other words, the makeup ofJapan. This is the continuity of the nation that has been preserved fromthe time of the the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and the Manyshup to today.It is on top of this that individual memories and national memoriesaccumulate.33

But waitis it really only the Japanese that have national memories?

Things would be simple if, as was the case with Germany, Japan hadbeen annihilated, recreated under the direction of the Allied forces, andthus molded to follow the dictates of a legislative bureaucracy. But was

Japan annihilated? Even if it had been, the memories of the Japanesewere not. All families remember the faces of relatives lost in battle. Ourown fathers, like gallant young warriors, remain in all of our memories tothis day. How can such memories be erased?34

So we are supposed to believe that the Germans have no memories oftheir loved ones that died in battle? Apparently so, as the following quo-tation shows that this is something, come what may, that can never hap-pen to Japan:

O-bonis the day on which we pay respects to our ancestors. Returning toones home town, greeting the ancestral spirits, and refreshing onesenergies so as to be able to work industriously for the rest of the year.

Whether war breaks out, whether heaven and earth shift, absolutelynothing changes. Thisis the Japanese constitution.35


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Ets unshakable faith in the absolute stability of the Japanese con-

stitution has nothing whatsoever to do with religious faith, much lessliterary convictions. (Indeed, the whole style of the piece is a rather piti-ful display for a man of letters who once professed some feeling for liter-ature.) Let us consider yet another example in which Ets seeminglyreasonable claims disguise a presumption to speak for the religiosity of allJapanese and completely ignore the voices of its minorities:

When there is an airplane crash, the Japanese feel obliged to gather upeach and every fragment of the bones of the deceased. Even today theJapanese still send groups to the farthest reaches of the earth to collectthe remains of those who died in the war. The Americans, in contrast,seem to care little for recovering the remains of the dead, as the recentexplosion of the space shuttle shows. According to Christian teachings,after death one ascends to God; there is no belief approaching theJapanese idea of the spirit (reikon). The relationship between theliving and the dead is naturally different.36

Does Et assume that there is no such thing as a Japanese Christian?Does he think that if you are Japanese Christian, you must be moreJapanese than Christian? No doubt Japanese Christians do struggle withtheir identity as Japanese, but Ets stereotyping completely ignores this.Or again, are there no Japanese Buddhists who break out of the stereo-type to actually long for rebirth in Amidas Land of Bliss? Are there none

who believe so deeply in the cycle of transmigration that they have littlecare for what happens to their body after they have died? But who knows,

maybe not, since a Pure Land priest like Abbot Fujiyoshi of Kmy-ji canuphold the same stereotype by claiming that the idea of the Pure Land isno more than an upya.

I have no particular desire to single out celebrities for criticism, but Ind it unacceptable that the likes of Et should be allowed to trample onthe beliefs of minorities with his theories of an absolute and unchangingconstitution of Japan. Such hegemonic theory is cut of the same clothas the ideology ofwa found in the prewar Kokutai no hongi. Et him-self argues that, under current law, there is no need to recognize as legalreligious entities shrines founded on that ideology. But it is preciselybecause it has been shown that theyarein fact based on political ideologythat it becomes all the more important to restrict them as legal religious

entities in order to protect the beliefs of minorities from being ravaged asthey were by the prewar Yasukuni Shrine (administered by the Army and

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Navy) or by other shrines administered by the Bureau of Shrines in the

Ministry of Home Affairs.I nd it intriguing that Et should insist on the importance of

objective facts while at the same time confessing belief in a religion ofJapaneseness (nihonky) that propagates the idea of an absolute andunchanging Japan. One is hard pressed to nd a worse candidate for thestatus of a concrete fact. In a discussion with Kobori Keiichir ofTokyo University published as The Greater East Asia War and the Pacic

War, Et returns to this stress on objective facts. The implication hereis that the Pacic War was not an objective fact, but that The GreaterEast Asia War was.37 Note the following exchange triggered by Koborisclaim that it is important for us to make known factssuch as theNanking massacre or the Northern territories lost to Russia at the end ofthe warwhich have been twisted in high-school history textbooksthrough the efforts of the Japan Teachers Federation:

Et: Youre absolutely right. When we lecture in the classroom, asteachers, that is all we can do. It might be different in countriesthat incorporate ideological training into the curriculum, but atleast in Japanese universities we must present the facts to the stu-dents as objectively as we possibly can. We must not interfere

with each individual students judgment of the facts and whatsort of ideas they draw from them. If we do, we will not bedoing our job.

Kobori: Though it is a slight exaggeration to say so, the only way toexpress history is through an accurate timetable of events.38

Et agrees with Kobori, but what has happened to the literary criticsconcern for the narrative of history when faced with the brazen idea thathistory is no more than an accurate timetable of events? Even Etsteacher, Kobayashi Hideo, once wrote that, It is a serious matter thatpeople, who forget everything once graduation has liberated them fromthe shackles of rote memorization, have no history books to teach themhistory as ideas to be studied.39

In any case, the only objective facts for Et are the facts of thenihonkyfaithful. This is why he can rail against the censorship imposedby the U.S. Occupation Army and yet completely pass over the censorshipof the Japanese government. In the same way, the Nanking massacre and

the issue of the Northern territories are not the only facts that high-schoolhistory textbooks do not accurately report. They also fail to present an


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accurate description of Prince Shtoku, the facts of which are that the

authorship of the Seventeen-Article Constitution and the Sangygishoremain a matter of some controversy. Difculties with facts are every-

where to be seen, in spite of the simplistic objectivist belief that every-thing can be resolved by merely waving around the banner of objectivity.Similarly, Ets understanding of the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtins termchronotopos40 suggests that the only thing needed is for one to line up thetemporal order (chronos) of things while lounging on top of the uniquelyJapanese space (topos) ofnihonky. Perhaps Et also thinks that modernhistory cannot be accurately recorded until a generation after the events,

when all the data has been collected.41 If so, I do wish he wouldconne himself to drawing up timetables and give up trying to mitigateJapans wartime behavior on the continent with such claims as, Japannever declared war against China.42

It is also curious that, in spite of his emphasis on objective facts,Et remains thoroughly steeped in an idea of topos that somehow cameto mean Japanese uniqueness. By some twist of logic, Et enlists Webersexaltation of objective facts into the service of a a doctrine of topical phi-losophy. As simplistic as all of this might seem, it is not entirely withoutrhyme or reason that the reverence for topos should appeal to objectivefacts, while the commitment to criticism should hold language in highesteem. The former need only redene facts as topos, while the latter must

work with language to express critical thinking. Weber himself enjoined,die Tatsachen sprechen lt (Let the facts speak for themselves), and yet

clearly stated also that whenever a person of science introduces personalvalue judgement, a full understanding of the facts ceases.43 In this vein:

Now one cannot demonstrate scientically what the duty of an academicteacher is. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellec-tual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine math-ematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values,

while it is another thing to answer questions of the valueof culture andits individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cul-tural community and in political associations. These are quite heteroge-neous problems. If he asks further why he should not deal with bothtypes of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because theprophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.

To the prophet and the demagogue, it is said: Go your ways outinto the streets and speak openly to the world, that is, speak where crit-icism is possible. In the lecture-room we stand opposite our audience,

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and it has to remain silent. I deem it irresponsible to exploit the circum-

stance that for the sake of their careers the students have to attend ateachers course while there is nobody present to oppose him with criti-cism. The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledgeand scientic experience and not to imprint upon them his personalpolitical views.44

This approach to the scholars profession is everywhere in evidencein Et, perhaps accounting for his claim that we are not doing our job

when personal political views come into the picture. I can hardly believethat a teacher, lacking any personal value judgement and based solelyon the distinction between stating the facts on the one hand, and rais-ing questions of value and action on the other as quite heterogeneousproblems, can actually serve students with his knowledge and scienticexperience.

Of late I nd myself more and more convinced that I must say whatI believe, even if I am accused of behaving like a prophet or dema-gogue. I see no intellectual integrity in placing myself outside theBuddhist tradition in order to speak about that tradition, in effect yieldingthe eld to nihonkyfaithful like Et and Fujiyoshi who place themselveson a ground prior to all differentiation of religion. I have no desire tospeak unilaterally without attending to my students criticisms, althoughthe architecture and ethos of the classroom that encourages this doesseem to impede the sort of questioning I would like. If, however, mutualcriticism between teacher and students, or among teachers, is sacriced to

academic freedom, one can hardly imagine a more comfortable voca-tion than that of the university professor.The German Beruf, variously translated here as profession and

vocation, would more accurately be rendered as calling, which alsocarries connotations of a divinely-inspired mission. Webers idea ofWissenschaft als Berufseems to me to be driven by nothing so much as bythe frustration of a scholarship (Wissenschaft) that has lost its Godlikeauthority and wishes to recover its vocational raison dtre. In the midst ofthis literal frustration and bereft of its God, theology hitched itself to

Webers train in order to turn scholarship as vocation in the directionof religious studies, anthropology, and folklore studies. Weber himselfhad the following to say about theology:

Now you will be inclined to say: Which stand does one take towards thefactual existence of theology and its claims to be a science? Let us


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not inch and evade the answer. To be sure, theology and dogmas

do not exist universally, but neither do they exist for Christianity alone.Rather (going backward in time), they exist in highly developed formalso in Islam, in Manicheanism, in Gnosticism, in Orphism, in Parsism, inBuddhism, in the Hindu sects, in Taoism, and in the Upaniads, and, ofcourse, in Judaism. To be sure, their systematic development variesgreatly. It is no accident that Occidental Christianityin contrast to thetheological possessions of Jewryhas expanded and elaborated theologymore systematically, or strives to do so. In the Occident the developmentof theology has had by far the greatest historical signicance. This is theproduct of the Hellenic spirit, and all theology of the West goes back toit, as (obviously) all theology of the East goes back to Indian thought.45

What is interesting here is that Weber sees all Asian mythologies orig-

inating in Indian thought and all Western mythologies in the Greek spirit.Needless to say, it is a rather broad brush he paints with here and glossesrather crudely over the facts as we know them. But as long as we are inthe mode, I beg the readers indulgence to make a rough sketch of them.Both the Indian intellectual tradition and the Greek spirit belong to theindigenous ethos of their respective traditions. It does take no more thana moments reection to realize that Indian thought can no more swal-low up true Buddhism than Hellenism can provide a solid ground forChristian theology. In any case, after Weber, religious studies and anthro-pology have tended to nd a single topos on which everything can belocated. Much the same as Et, in apparent oblivion of what he is doing,ends up locating Christian and Pure Land followers on the same topos of

nihonky.How did it happen that the whole wide world should have suc-cumbed so easily to the idea of scholarship promulgated by someone like

Weber, whose works contain so many errors of objective facts?46

According to the Japanese translator of Scholarship as a Profession,Weber misquoted the proverb I do not believe what is absurd, but Ibelieve because it is absurd (credo non quod, sed quia absurdum est, oftenabridged into I believe because it is absurd) as Augustines, and pointsto it as an example of the sacrice of intellect. The proverb, however,should not be attributed to Augustine, but to Tertullian. Augustinesproverb is I believe in order to understand (credo ut intelligam),47

which is not a renunciation of intellect at all, but its correctexercise.

Some of my readers may be impatient with me for unfairly accusingreligious studies with so little evidence given in support of my accusa-

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tions. I feel it necessary, therefore, to give at least some idea of the sort of

topical approach to religious studies that I am criticizing. A perfectexample right at hand is Mase Hiromasas The Philosophy of ReligiousPluralism, where we read:

Both exclusivism and inclusivism self-righteously claim their own religionto be primary and other religions peripheral. Neither a religious theologynor a world theology can be constructed from such a stance. The ideathat any one particular religion, such as Christianity, constitutes a core ofrevelation around which other religions revolve at some distance is com-pletely mistaken when seen in the light of the broad and manifold varietyof the religious experience of humanity. There is sincere devotion to thesacred, profound spirituality, and a rich religious life to be found in otherreligions as well. It is therefore important for Christianity in the future to

shift from a Christocentric to a theocentric standpoint and thus,alongside of other great world religions, to take its place in relation tothe one and only ultimate divine Reality. John Hick refers to such arecognition as a Copernican revolution, suggesting that it will requirenothing less than a paradigm shift from a Christ-centered or Jesus-centeredmodel to a model centered on divine Reality or on that which is sacred inthe constellation of all religious faiths.48

Words fail me in the face of such triumphalist declarations comingfrom the worlds most tolerant religion trying to ground religious plu-ralism on the topos of an ultimate divine Reality. The only words thatcome to mind are maledictions. I have already touched on the subject ofhow tolerance can actually stie the voice of religious minorities and

will not repeat it here. I do wonder about the purpose of trying to fabri-cate such a theology, though perhaps this is what one ought to expect ofthe kind of people who go to world religions summits and talk aboutinciting Copernican revolutions in religious belief. As far as I am con-cerned, the tolerance that Mase brandishes about can only have ananaesthetic effect on critical conscience. By taking a stand outside any reli-gious tradition, he has in fact become an academicposeurlooking downon religious faith.

I am fortunate to have received a wide range of responses to my Critique

of the Kyoto School, which has further stimulated my thinking. I amparticularly encouraged by my exchange with Takeuchi Yoshir, all of


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which began when I ran across the following lines at the end of Iyanaga

Nobumis The Fantasy Orient:Every time positivist-scientic rationalism did something to objectifyOriental reality, antimodern thought was quick on its heels to bran-dish the results in the battlecry for a new dream of unity and fusion (or ofexclusion and obliteration) in an absolute wisdom. This fantasy Orientthat was created by the West was then reimported back to its supposedorigins together with Western modernity. It proclaimed a fusion of cul-tures East and West as the new mission of the Japanese people, andattempted to build an earthly paradise of the universal Greater AsianCo-Prosperity Sphere with the emperor as the sole divinity. Today thisfantasy Orient inthe Orient masquerades as a new mysticism of theoccult, as the fusion of the new physics with perennial Oriental wis-

dom, seeking to awaken the ancient and yet constantly new spirits inour hearts as we nd ourselves on the brink of nihilism.49

I immediately sent Iyanaga a note to thank him for having sent thebook, along with an offprint of my essays criticizing the Kyoto school forbeing a mishmash of original enlightenment and German idealism. Ireceived a long letter in reply on 1 January of this year in which heinformed me of certain works by Western authors and two recent articlesby Nakamura Yjir related to the problem of overcoming moderni-ty.50At the end of the winter break I read them and was even moreappalled than Iyanagas warnings had prepared me for.51

At the end of Nakamuras essay in Shisthere was a postscript that

gave a brief critique of Takeuchi Yoshirs The Postmodern Trap ofIntelligence. I did not know Takeuchi, but the fact that he was beingattacked by Nakamura, whose article I had found annoying, piqued myinterest. I located the original essay and was struck by the fact that itseemed to have been composed under much the same circumstances asmy Critique of the Kyoto School, namely, the period following thelandslide victory of the Liberal Democrats in the 1986 elections. Ourmotivations for writing were also similar, though his criticism of Japanesepolitics and culture is sharper and more far-ranging than I could everachieve. The following criticism of Nakamuras shameless attery ofNishida philosophy drew my attention:

The unwillingness to confront reality within the current of postmodernthought continues. One such example is the rehabilitation of Nishidaphilosophy that has become so apparent of late. According to Nakamura

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Yjir, one of the representatives of that movement, all of the character-

istics of postmodern philosophyideas like the unconscious self (theOriental no-self) as opposed to the conscious self, the philosophy oftoposin place of the philosophy of the subject, the physical versus thespiritual, the feminine principle versus the masculine, the knowledge ofpathos versus logocentrism, predicate logic versus subject logic, thedecentralization of knowledge versus systematic thoughtall of thesecan already be found in Nishida philosophy. This is said to be the greatphilosophical heritage common to all humanity, not only the Japanese.

Of course I do not mean to refute all of these claims as mistaken.But the fact is, Nishida philosophy was incapable during the war of offer-ing a critique of the Japanese war of imperial aggression, which was itselfclearly an accomplishment of modern principles. Not only was thereno criticism, but, as is well known, Nishida philosophy sanctioned the

war effort and incited numbers of eager youth to join in the ugly strug-gle. It is altogether beyond me how people can fail to see the self-evidentfact that the overcoming modernity, at least in this philosophicalformthat is, as a postmodern philosophyis both ineffective andharmful.52

I hardly need note that the characteristics of postmodern philosophysummarized here are the same as those of the topical philosophy that Iam against, whereas the counterposition corresponds to the critical phi-losophy I am trying to advance. There is no point in detailing the differ-ences again here. Sufce it to say that the point of Takeuchis critique ofthe ambiguity of a topical philosophy in postmodernist dress is its unwill-

ingness to confront reality. In reply to the criticisms of Nakamura,53

Takeuchi discusses Nishida philosophy, the topical philosophy popu-larized in postmodernism, as Mahayana Buddhism cumGerman ideal-ism. If we change the rst term to read original enlightenment andreject the claim of original enlightenment to be Buddhist doctrine, then Iam in complete agreement. The mistaken identication of original enlight-enment with Mahayana Buddhism is, of course, the fault of Buddhistscholars, not of Takeuchi, and this only compels me more than ever topersist in arguing against the theory from within the Buddhist tradition

while leaving the sharp and wide-ranging criticism of Japanese politics andculture to people like Takeuchi.

Matsumoto Shir initiated the critique of topical philosophy within

the Buddhist tradition as the criticism ofdhtu-vda. He argues thatdhtu(stratum) is the topos (he uses the Latin word locus) within the


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Buddhist tradition, feeding like a parasite off a mighty lion. In China and

Japan the parasite fattened and grew strong by taking the form of the phi-losophy of original enlightenment, debilitating the lion almost to thepoint of killing it. But the parasite could not transform itself into the lion.It is hard for many to see this simple truth. Some even quibble that a par-asite that has lived so long in the lion has become part of it. This is in factthe dominant view and it might actually be true in the sense that the lionhas yielded to the authority and expectations of the crowd. But there can-not be any question but that what makes Buddhism Buddhism is itschampioning of critical philosophy against all forms of indigenoustopical philosophy.

As Okabe has written:

It is a matter of a historical fact that Buddhism is at its most vigorouswhen it has raised its banner high to declare this is true Buddhism,even when this means going against the currents of the time or incurringoppression from the authorities of the time.54

Those who boast of Buddhism as a religion of tolerance only placethemselves foursquare outside the Buddhist tradition and yield to theforce of the herd. Like Mase, who declared religious pluralism distinctfrom any particular religion yet based on the topos of an ultimate Divinereality, they commend a topical philosophy of all religions as one, thusrelieving themselves of the obligation to distinguish what is Buddhismfrom what is not. It is only from within the Buddhist tradition that one

can speak of true Buddhism, but in the case of Buddhist studies it appearsas if the more brilliant the scholar, the more difcult it is to recognize thisobvious point. The adoption of the idea of true Buddhism in order tolevel a critique against the Buddhism that has yielded to the authority ofthe crowd from inside the tradition itself is what I call scholarship as crit-icism. But Buddhists, one would assume, already know this.

In a nal lecture commemorating his retirement from Tokyo Univer-sity this past January, Takasaki Jikid spoke on The Ultimate in Maha-

yana Buddhism, at the end of which he remarked, As long as we standat the university lectern, we must follow Max Weber. I took the remarkas an indirect swipe at the short piece I referred to at the start of thisessay, but I was too wrapped up in my anticipation of his refutation of

Matsumoto Shirs scholarly critiques to give it a second thought. In fact,he completely passed over the basic points of their dispute in order to

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censure Matsumoto for his emphasis on the question of what constitutes

true Buddhism.Not unrelated to this, I presented a paper at the 1987 annual meeting

of the Japanese Association for Indian and Buddhist Studies entitled ACritique of the Vimalakrti Sutra in which I argued that this sutra,

which may be considered the foundational scripture for the Kyoto schoolof philosophy,55 argues for a reality underlying the Three Jewels ofBuddhism and in that sense does not deserve to be included in theBuddhist canon. A number of questions were raised, but it surprised me,given that the conference took place in Kyoto, that none of them tried totake the position that the Vimalakrtirepresents the pinnacle of theMahayana scriptures. In any case, of all the questions only Takasakis wentto the heart of the matter: Do you really expect to be allowed to cometo an academic conference and stand there, as a Buddhist, giving us yourone-sided declarations of what is true and what is not?

I was tempted at that point to thank Takasaki for his question andleave the podium. It is not that I did not anticipate such a question, butonly that I did not expect it to come directly from Takasaki. His forth-rightness caught me off guard and, truth to tell, still leaves me stutteringfor an answer. At the time I think I replied that, since my talk waspremised on my Buddhist belief, and since he had in his nal lecture atTokyo disagreed about the propriety of such assumptions in scholarly

work, it is not surprising that we should disagree, but that I wished to bea Buddhist and a scholar at the same time and place, and so forth and so

on, and that one day I would try to address the question head-on withouthedging. Or something to that effect.On leaving the podium I felt as if I had given myself a stiff homework

assignment, and ever since I have the sense that I still have not nished it.I am not sure just how persuasive one can be in a world that takes theobjective, purely academic approach to be the only legitimate avenue fora scholar to take. What I do know is that I must continue to write about

what I believe, come what may.It may be out of line for me to turn the tables on Takasaki, but I have

some unresolved questions of my own. Now, I do not necessarily thinkthat becoming a monk or shaving ones head is the most important thingabout being a Buddhistnot as important as pursuing the question of

what true Buddhism is. It seems superuous for someone like me to addhere that I believe Takasaki, abbot of the St Zen temple Seish-ji, to be


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an eminent Buddhist. Setting aside his purely scholarly work, I want to

know whether, when he writes books in a more popular vein such asAnIntroduction to Buddhism56 or What is Buddha-nature?, is he writing as asa scholar or as a Buddhist? Perhaps he feels that as long as one doesntcome right out and say This alone is true Buddhism, it doesnt reallymatter. If that is the case, then I would ask him to refrain from repeatingclichs in public like As Buddhist studies ourish, Buddhism perishes.57

If the two are the same, then what benets one will benet the other;whereas if they are different, then it is indeed obvious that Buddhism willperish at the hands of irresponsible Buddhist scholars who choose to taketheir stand outside of the tradition. By the same token, if truth and falsityare unrelated and something becomes Buddhist merely by being pro-

claimed as such, then I suppose shouting, Dhtu-vdaIS Buddhism!(as Tsuda Shinichi did to me over the telephone) should by that very actmake dhtu-vdaBuddhist.

My problem is that if anything and everything can be consideredBuddhism, how are we to understand Takasakis claim to take pride inJapanese Buddhism as the ultimate of Mahayana Buddhism?58 Perhapshe would counter that words like ultimate and pride do not implythat this alone is true, which is entirely right. I am reminded of Weberscomment:

Science further presupposes that what is yielded by scientic work isimportant in the sense that it is worth being known. In this, obviously,are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be provedby scientic means. It can only be interpretedwith reference to its ulti-mate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimateposition towards life.59

On 29 June, as I was about to sit down to work on this essay, Ireceived the rst volume of Yamaguchi Zuihs Tibet. Two days later Ireceived a letter from Takeuchi asking for my opinion of NakazawaShinichis gushing praise of Nakamura Hajimes new work, Baudda,

which had appeared a few weeks earlier in the Asahi Shinbun. Becauseboth of these works had a profound inuence on the writing of this essay,I should like to cite some representative passages.

My rst idea was to center this essay on the premise that the object of

scholarship is not mere information. I was therefore thunderstruckwhen I opened the foreword to Yamaguchis book and read:

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I would ask those who consider Japanese Buddhism to represent the true

tradition of Indian Buddhism, please to read this book as it stands, with-out any predisposition to advocate any particular faith; please under-stand this as mere information about what I have considered to beanother true tradition of Indian Buddhism.60

As I read on, I quickly realized that Yamaguchis book was not, infact, simply a tour guide lled with mere information, but that it clearlyreected his own convictions about Tibetan culture and customs. (Ithink, for example, of his description of sky burial.) I understood thatthe purpose of his prefatory remarks was to parry possible attacks on hisscholarly commitment. The professor will probably scold me for my one-sided interpretation, but I wish to compare the following comment to the

remark cited above from Takasakis What is Buddhism?:There is no question that differences that exist within particular religionsthat worship under the same name are useful in helping us to reect dis-passionately on the Japanese national character. I wanted to add thiscomment, as once again the illusion that Japan is in every way superiorseems to be coming to the fore again as the memory of our past mistakesbegins to fade.61

It is not for me to decide whether I have succeeded or not, but my aim inthis essay was to enliven Yamaguchis warning.

And now a brief reply to Takeuchis question. In reading Nakazawasreview of Nakamura and Saegusas Baudda, I was surprised how diamet-

rically opposite my own estimation of the book was from his eloquent andconvincing praise of it. The review is not important enough to fuss over.Baudda, on the other hand, will no doubt have an immense impact. Whatstruck me at rst glance was the symbol of the Three Jewels that appearsthroughouton the jacket, the cover, the inside cover, everywhere. Thesymbol, probably chosen by scholars, consists of three circles above sup-ported by a larger circle underneath. The image left me with the impres-sion that the lower circle was given a foundational value that seemed toslight the three upper circles. This is precisely the idea I had rejected inmy Critique of the Vimalakrti Sutra. It also happened to correspondperfectly with the approach and content of the book. The following pas-sage is a shining example of how the dharma jewel, if made to expand

and sink to the ground, can be transgured into a universal law thatpermits all things:


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The one path that we must preserve as human beings is the path of rea-

son. This is what maintains humanity as humanity. If humanity doesnot preserve it as its own path, we become non-humans in humanform. We become animals.

Moreover, human beings live out their lives in a number of differentcapacities. The same person at home, for example, can be husband andparent, and yet remain a child to his own parents, a younger or olderbrother to his siblings; a woman can be wife, parent, child, older sister, or

younger sister. Each of these relationships represents one of the capaci-ties in terms of which they live, and each relationship determines a paththat one must walk.A husband has a path he must maintain as husband,and a wife a path that she must maintain as wife. The child as child, the

parent as parenteach has a duty to fulll. To each person there is a path orprinciple that must be realized in each of the many various relationships or

capacities of life. This is their unique dharma or duty.If we widen the scope still further, there is a further principle that

each must realize as a member of a group, a local community, a prot-seeking society, a nation, and a race.

The form and nature of that practice will differ according to thecountry and the times, but the dharma itself is an eternal principle. Itmust be realized universally.

The principle is universal and eternally applicable, not somethingxed or static. This universality must be actualized in the present reality.For even if the fundamental principle is the same, its actual manifesta-tions will differ from one time and place to another. The principle forhumanity develops along with actually living beings because, philosoph-

ically speaking, it is possessed of an unlimited potential for growth.62

This sounds to me like a direct plagiarizing of Myes just as it shouldbe. If not rejected right then and there, this universal principle willprevent Buddhism from ever becoming true Buddhism.

My essay draws to a close and all I can think about is how many things Ihave not had the chance to say. Still, it does not seem quite right for meto criticize everyone else and exempt myself. I conclude, therefore, with abrief attempt at self-criticism.

To begin with, my call for scholarship as criticism is an attempt to

reject topical philosophy in favor of critical philosophy, the formerbeing a denial of language, the latter its reafrmation. Next, I think this

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needs to be considered in the context of a Japanese tradition that exalts

silence, in order the better to contrast the two philosophies. I realize Ihave not been able to accomplish all of this. The rst thing that needs tobe done is to demonstrate the benet of the nomenclature itself. There ismuch that could be said here, but difculties still remain.

For one thing, until language itself is precisely dened, it is ratherpointless to argue about whether it is being valued or devalued. Judgingfrom his published writing, we would probably not consider Bergson asdevaluing language, although his theory of language as symboledoes havethat effect. By the same token, there is no question that Norinaga valued

words as the leaves of words (koto no hau), but that is not quitethe same as logos, and in fact he is usually regarded as having valuedpathosover logos. Perhaps it is better to leave so ambiguous a notion as lan-guage out of the picture altogether.

At this stage I cannot deny my own contribution to the ambiguity.When I think back now to my review of Kobayashi Hideos MotooriNorinaga63 in which I cited Bergson and compared his view of language

with Norinagas (even though Kobayashi never actually referred toBergson in his book), I recognize a rst step away from my starting pointin the tradition that devalues language and towards the tradition that

values language. No doubt the effort at clarity of expression does forceone to think more clearly, but all along I had been exerting myself pre-ciselynot to speak clearly. Would not breaking away from this style ofexpression mean disqualifying myself from the current denition of what

it means to be academic and thereby succumbing to the authority ofthe crowd, in this case the conventional wisdom of the scholarly world?Perhaps so.

I remember the rst paper I ever wrote in college, a fairly self-complacent and straightforward piece (although I refrained from men-tioning how odd I found some of my professors ideas).64 From that timeup until the review of Kobayashis book, I wrote with no clear awarenessof actually writing in the Japanese language. I did not take conferencepresentations very seriously. It took very little time to prepare handoutsthat gave the requisite appearance of weighty and important data, thusrelieving me, I reasoned, of any obligation to prepare a written text.Thinking about it now, I recoil in shame at my lack of self-respect and the

overwhelming disdain for my audience. A talk that I gave at the OsakaBuraku Liberation Center in 1985 brought this home to me and changed


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my thinking. For the rst time I realized that, for all my stress on the

importance of language in general, I had cultivated a supreme indiffer-ence to my own use of it. Since that time I have resolved on all occasions,be it an academic conference or a panel discussion, to try to prepare amanuscript in addition to whatever data I bring with me.

Last June 20th, during an unusual downpour in the midst of an oth-erwise dry rainy season, I paid a visit for the rst time to the home ofTakeuchi Yoshir, whose wife was kind enough to pick me up at the sta-tion and drive me back again. I have many memories of our conversationsthat day, in particular his comments about lies, which I nd comingback to me again and again. Of late he has been writing about funda-mental human religiosity from the time of the earlier Stone Age up to theage of universal religions. In the course of discussing these matters, henoted how humans have been lying as long as they have had language,and noted the presence of proscriptions against lying common to civiliza-tions everywhere. At the time I did not pay much attention to theremarks, but later I began to reect, in slightly different terms, on the factthat only human beings lie. I remembered thinking about this many

years before, but now the idea came back to me with renewed force,together with another fact that had been pestering me and that was alsoclosely tied up with the question of language: Only human beings havethe capacity for social discrimination. Given the quasi-linguistic facultiesof animals that enable communication and distinction, the fact that it isonly we humans who can lie and create social structures that discriminate

is not unimportant for our understanding of human language. Might itnot be that the reason lies and social discrimination are so painful forsensitive people is that they are such an unavoidable part of our humanmakeup? Or conversely, that what makes politicians, shielded behind thearmor of political facts, so oblivious to lies and social discriminationis the fact that they are so insensitive by comparison?

I, too, share in this insensitivity to lies and social discrimination. Onthe one hand I feel disdain for textual studies; on the other, I follow atraditional academic path, appearing to value objectivity, historical factic-ity, and textual dataall the while closing my eyes to what is going on inmy language. It is a strange thing, but for all the years that I stood upthere waving my facts around and reveling in the competition of the aca-

demic game, people thought me a properly modest scholar. But once Ibegan to say honestly what I was thinking, all of a sudden I was castigated

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as arrogant and self-willed. I feel myself rebuffed by the words of Max

Weber: The prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academicplatform. To the prophet and the demagogue, it is said: Go your waysout into the streets and speak. But I stand up to the rebuff. I will notallow myself to be vanquished by the facts and will live trusting in lan-guage. Henceforth I renounce the quest for any hidden text read intothe works of others in accord with my private and arbitrary intuitions,however fashionable this may be in current hermeneutics.

As part of the dubious methodology of the hermeneutics in fashiontoday, Ludwig Wittgenstein is casually invoked in the eld of Buddhiststudies. I know little about Wittgenstein, but I do know that it is mistakento assume that the silence he had in mind when he wrote Of that which

we cannot speak, of that should we remain silent is the same as thesilence of the Zen masters.65 In fact, I can hardly imagine anybody lesslike the Zen masters than Wittgenstein, a man whose views of languageran the gamut from that of Bergson to Norinaga in the course of a singlelifetime. Wittgenstein never succumbed to any easy path as Norinagadid. His belief in and struggles with language were difcult and tormentedto the end. Perhaps only one so committed to language could change hisideas as dramatically as did Wittgenstein.

Meanwhile, we try to make our way with textbooks that do littlemore than line up the facts as if carved in stone, independent of what any-body thinks about them. I, too, am responsible for the genre, havinghelped to write a textbook still in use called Religious Studies I.66As the

preface states, the book represents a major revision of an earlier text calledGeneral Buddhism, though much of the earlier text was simply taken overas is. Even the topics I was assigned to cover in my chapter on IndianBuddhism had been predetermined, and my job was simply to give anobjective description of each item on the list. I was given little editorialdiscretion, and as I look back today at what I wrote, I feel that nothingshort of a complete rewrite is called for in the case of my chapter. I discussthese issues in the classroom where I continue to use the textbook, but Iam continually embarrassed by my casual and facile use of language. Is itnot amazing how everything we nd wrong with a textbook when westudy it as a student is conveniently forgotten when we reach an age when

we have to compose one of our own?

At the outset of this essay I set up a contrast between topical philos-ophy as a tradition that devalues language and critical philosophy as


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hakamaya noriaki - scholarship as criticism - p. 113

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