Jonathan Watts

This paper will attempt a cursory evaluation of Buddhist organizations’ social activities in Japan, especially in reference to the growing movement of socially engaged Buddhism (SEB) throughout Asia. The key characteristics of such socially active Buddhist groups will be identified and mapped out in a typology. “Relief,” “Evangelistic,” and “Reform” will be three ways to consider the core intention of various groups’ activities. In particular, the ideological element behind Buddhist social activities in Japan will be discussed, with brief comparisons to some of the more well know SEB groups in other parts of Asia. A final section which discusses the emergence of Japanese Buddhist NGOs and the development of an ideological component to Buddhist social action, which will be argued is one of the key components to an authentic socially engaged Buddhism.

Introduction
I would like to pick up the concept of civil society here at the beginning as a tool that may help us better evaluate socially engaged Buddhism in Japan. Civil society is usually understood as the public arena which exists between the state and the market for citizens to “debate questions of public interest” and “contribute to the public good” (HARDACRE 2004, p.391). As this suggests, the dominant norm of civil society is ethical – that is, civil society is concerned with the moral or beneficial behavior of people towards each other, hence the idea of civic virtues as the basis of civil society. This corresponds to the conception of civil society, understood by the Greeks and Romans as “a law-governed society in which law was seen as the expression of public virtue, the Aristotelian ‘good life’….in which rulers put the public good before private interest” (ANHEIER, GLASIUS & KALDOR 2001, p.12). This conception, however, is not confined to the Greeks or the West. Rather, I think this “perennial” notion of civil society is found in all human civilizations in which the social sphere implies a realm of human relationship guided by ethical norms.
This perennial notion of civil society is naturally connected to religious organizations that throughout history, for better and worse, have sought to establish communities of faith based on the ethical teachings of their founders.[1] Although modern civil society appears to be different because of its secular nature, it still emphasizes ethical kinds of behavior that support such modern, secular notions as democracy and human rights. Historically, the roots of modern civil society in the West seem to have begun with the Protestant Reformation and subsequent attempts by various new Christian denominations to create their own religious and highly ethical commonwealths of citizens. The struggle to create modern civil society in the West was an attempt to recreate the ethical bonds of community which were disintegrating under the rapid changes brought about by modern technology and science, the development of mass urban communities, and the collapse of the all encompassing theology of the Catholic Church. (LOY 2002)
Various scholars, such as Toshimaro Ama of Meiji Gakuin University, have questioned whether modern Japan has ever had a civil society like those in Europe or North America. While the Japanese may indeed lack a strong sense for the modern concept of civil society as a social sphere autonomous from state and market, I would contend that they do have a sense for the perennial concept of civil society. Certainly, the radical Pure Land and Nichiren communities of the Kamakura Era (1192-1333) exhibited a type of civil society movement in creating communities based on religious norms that stood above larger social ones. In the succeeding Muromachi Era (1333-1573), these religious communities formed the basis for outright citizen revolts in the Pure Land (Ikko-ikki) and Nichiren peasant rebellions (Hokke-ikki).
The Japanese term for civil society is shimin-shakai (市民社会). The characters for shimin mean literally “city” (市) and “people” (民). This suggests that the Japanese concept of civil society is an outgrowth of modern urban culture. Yet Ama notes that this concept is still not fully understood by most Japanese who tend to regard society in terms of the term seken (世間), which literally means “the world” or “the public”. Unlike the understanding of civil society which refers to a public sphere autonomous from state and market, seken for Japanese is more inclusive and implies something that one does not attempt to change but tries to get fit into (personal correspondence, June 22, 2004). The development of modern civil society in Japan has been greatly stunted by the bureaucratic control of the state and its power to recreate social containers for the urban populace (Hardcare, p.394-395) However, the steady influx of new worldviews since modernization began in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) has slowly broken down traditional conceptions of Japanese community. This can be seen directly in the religious sphere, especially in the new religious movements (shin-shukyo) of the 1920s and the second wave of new, new religions (shin shin-shukyo) of the 1980s. These groups have sought to address the increasing alienation of urban Japanese afloat in a new world of uncertain community and unclear ethical values.
The centrality of ethical and moral norms, which are commonly grounded in religion and provide the basis for the creation of civil society, can help us to understand the social activities of Buddhist groups in contemporary Japanese society and to evaluate the extent of an authentic socially engaged Buddhist movement. In this way, the questions to be asked at each turn in this paper are: how much is a movement or a group of individuals contributing to the ethical well-being of Japanese society? And perhaps an even more important question: is the intention of the groups or individuals focused on contributing to the welfare of civil society – that is to the general public at large – or are there other agendas involved in these actions? A final question to keep in mind is: how successful have these Buddhist groups been in articulating and demonstrating a truly indigenous form of civil society which derives from the religious and ethical norms of their own Buddhist tradition, rather than from the Christian influenced humanism of western civil society?

A Typology of Buddhist Engagement

With the above questions in mind, I would like to make a very broad assessment of the types of social activities in which Japanese Buddhists typically engage. I think we should be on guard here not to attempt to label an entire organization as solely fitting into one type or another, but rather to see these different types as modes of action of which a single organization may manifest all, some, or none. In this way, we can use this typology to more deeply understand the complexity of a group’s actions, rather than using it as a device to pigeon-hole them.

1) Relief

These are the traditional activities of established religious organizations in their natural roles as centers of traditional civil society. For example, in pre-modern Japan, especially during the Edo or Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), a Buddhist temple could be found in every village, and the monks would usually be engaged in various types of community support activities such as running schools (terakoya 寺子屋) or supporting community infrastructure projects. During the period of modernization beginning with the Meiji Era, the influx of western ideas and the development of secular and modern bureaucratic institutions presented a threat to the traditional social roles of the priest and the temple. To confront this crisis, Buddhist priests also began to look abroad, not only in the West but in other parts of Buddhist Asia, and developed newer, modern forms of social welfare activities, like day centers and kindergartens, during the Taisho Era (1912-26).
One prominent example is the work of the Jodo-shu priest Shiio Benkyo (1876-1971). He created within Jodo-shu the Kyosei Movement (kyosei-kai 共生会). Kyosei is roughly translatable as “mutual co-existence”, and Benkyo based this idea on the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of pratitya-samutpada, the dependent co-origination and inter relatedness of all things. He interpreted pratitya-samutpada in terms of the matrix of human society and insisted that one should realize the salvation of Amida Buddha in social and daily life. This movement inspired many priests in Jodo-shu to establish day-care centers and kindergartens within or near their temple grounds or to engage in other forms of social service. In this example, it would appear that some important initial steps were being taken in the development of a civil society based on indigenous Buddhist concepts. The development of such universalistic themes tied into the practice of Buddhism in daily life as a means towards inner and social transformation was common also to the new Buddhist schools emerging in this era as well as Shinto organizations (STONE 2003). However, movements such as this did not become official activities promoted by the sects as “social welfare” (shakai fukushi 社会福祉) activities until after the war, and thus were largely confined to the individual initiatives of priests. Furthermore, there appears to have been some limit to the ethical and ideological nature of these activities since they never developed into a movement which challenged the growing nationalism of the government and society. Although Benkyo appears to have been opposed to the war at first, he remained as a Diet member and a religious leader who supported the war until the end (EISAWA 2002).
In this way, I have labeled this first category “relief,” because the nature of social action is not to challenge aspects of the existing social structure, especially politically, but to preserve it by providing aid or relief to citizens in either chronic or emergency duress. In a certain way, the activities could be seen as part of civil society, because they focus on locating agency into the individual to act positively and ethically in the social sphere. However, on another level, we may not consider them properly civil society activities, because by emphasizing individual agency they often fail to take account of structural injustices, thereby becoming open to complicity with oppressive power (STONE 2003). This is clearly seen in the use of the Buddhist temple by the Tokugawa Shogunate to monitor Japanese citizens through the mandatory temple registration system (danka seido), and in the modern era, in the regulation of religious organizations through the creation of religious public interest corporations (shukyo koeki hojin 公益法人), whose legal status can be revoked by the government (HARDACRE, p.395). The Taisho Era activism of Buddhist priests was perhaps partially imbibed with the notion of serving the public good, but it was also a survival tactic by traditional Buddhists to maintain their footing in the rapidly changing and dangerous world of early modern Japan with its secular and Shinto sentiments and the rise of new Buddhist denominations. In this way, these modes of activity truly come up short of the civil society ideal because they do not offer an alternative to state power. In the worst cases, they may warp the true meaning of civil society in perpetuating the ideology of the state as the full embodiment of civil society (as in times of hyper-nationalism) and by cleaning up the manifestations of oppression and injustice created by an oppressive state through their relief activities.

2) Evangelistic

These activities are the work that any religious group does as part of building up the organization as a mass movement. Traditionally, such activities would have been sending missionaries to new regions to propagate the teaching and subsequently building temples around new groups of converts. In modern times, especially amongst the new Buddhist groups of Japan, this has been greatly enlarged to encompass the virtual building of whole new societies within larger Japanese society by constructing schools, universities, hospitals, etc. These activities have sought to provide and care for not just the spiritual needs of the community but also all the material needs of it. In this way, these current activities and the new relief ones cited above exhibit the typical modern tendency in a focus on the material welfare of people as much as their spiritual welfare.
I have labeled these activities “evangelistic”, because although there may be the ethical intention to do good towards others, there is the fundamental “selfish” impetus behind the activities to build the scope, power and prestige of the organization. In this way, it would be difficult to label these activities truly civil society ones since the priority is on the well-being of organization and the development of an internal group of believers, rather than on the larger society as a whole, especially those who withhold their allegiance. In this way, we can distinguish the relief activity of building a kindergarten by a traditional temple from the evangelic activity of building a high school by a new Buddhist group as a basic difference in energy dynamic; that is the former is more of a defensive measure to maintain status in society, while the latter is more of an offensive measure to gain status in society. The “offensive” nature of these activities may also manifest itself as a challenge to existing society, and in the case of the new Buddhist groups, certainly a challenge to the co-dependent power of the traditional Buddhist sects and state authority. From an ideological standpoint, these groups may appeal to the supramundane truths of their faith as transcending the mundane laws of the state. Such an appeal was a conspicuous characteristic of the teaching of Nichiren who appealed to the higher law of the Lotus Sutra while spending a good part of his ministry challenging the state and the Buddhist establishment. It seems not uncoincidental that the most notable new Buddhist groups of modern Japan all come out of the Nichiren stream, reflecting a full ideological spectrum from right to left as Soka Gakkai, Reiyukai, Rissho Koseikai, and Nipponzam Myohoji.
In terms of civil society, the new Buddhist groups, most conspicuously Soka Gakkai, have made an appeal to a different kind of social order, a kind of social reformism, different from both capitalism or communism, and based on the aspiration of the marginalized masses during the modernization and high economic growth period. In the post-war period of rapid social transformation, the growing urban population needed some spiritual pillar and social support, and Soka Gakkai certainly responded to their needs, based on Buddhism. This is certainly a kind of civil society which is not necessarily controlled by the state, but which rather aimed to restructure the public arena through the formation of political representation. Thus Soka Gakkai created the Komei party in 1964, which advocated transparency and welfare, both of which were lacking in this period of high economic growth. In this way, the vision of a new social-spiritual order by such new Buddhist groups may represent the true spirit of civil society in offering an alternative power base to entrenched power. However, the evangelistic and “offensive” energy of such groups can often create new forms of complicity to other forms of non-civic power, such as those of the market – the other pole of which civil society is supposed to offer an alternative. In the highly capitalistic environment of post-war Japan, the expansion of the funeral industry by traditional Buddhist groups and the mass marketing and mass construction activities of new Buddhist groups have made Buddhism highly complicit with financial power. While we can argue over the merits or demerits of a capitalist system, it becomes difficult to call these activities civil society actions when their core focus is not the ethical development of society but the financial development of their own organizations.

3) Reform

These activities correspond to what I would call mature and fully developed civil society activities, and also what I would call a full fledged socially engaged Buddhist movement. As with the other two types, this is an ideal or stereotypical type, which is probably realized nowhere in perfection but which Buddhist groups may embody to various degrees. There are two key characteristics of this type of movement.

1. The first is an ideological critique of the topology of power in the existing society. Such a critique firmly establishes the group as a part of an authentic civil society movement that offers an alternative view of society outside of state and business norms. This has been a key element in the socially engaged Buddhist movements in other parts of Asia. In Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka, this critique has typically addressed the structural violence and ethical bankruptcy of modern development, both capitalist and communist, while advocating a uniquely Buddhist style of development, such as the “awakening of all” of the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka and the concept of “Dhammic Socialism” coined by the Thai monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (QUEEN & KING 1996).
2. The second characteristic is a pairing of this ideological critique with a progressive social action movement, seen in Sri Lanka as the massive rural development program of Sarvodaya and the work of development monks in Thailand.

The key point in designating this category as “reform” and as unique from the other two categories is that the ideological and social action components deeply inform each other and create a dialectical tension which prevents either one from going wayward. From a Buddhist doctrinal standpoint, we can understand these two characteristics as the dialectal modes of wisdom and compassion. Wisdom with no compassion can be cold and instrumental, while compassion without wisdom can exhaust itself in unclear application.

For example, a movement that is more ideological in focus can lose its grounding in the basic social service activities through which it draws its ethical sensibilities. An ideological critique that loses such grounding can become too involved with its critique of power and with its engagement with power, thereby becoming susceptible to the same attractions to power which is critiques. In a more benign way, this manifests itself in Buddhist organizations which speak of social service yet because of their higher priority given to developing organizational power end up preferentially serving their own group of believers. In a more harmful way, the ideological critique turns into a divisive political movement which may eventually find itself in consort with “regime changes” in state and business power. This is clearly seen in Sri Lanka where the movement of the monastic Sangha to redefine itself against the threats of western modernism has led it to expound a racist form of nationalism based on the fusion of state, religion and people. In terms of Japan, this trend can be evidenced once again in the Nichiren movement. Nichiren himself made a deep ideologically critique of the political state of Japan in his well known Treatise for Establishing the Correct and Safe Nation (Rissho Ankoku-ron). However, in the pre-war era, Nichiren’s critique of the state was warped into a fusion of his religious ideas with the state to advocate Japanese imperialism. This was called Nichiren-shugi (Nichirenism) and was first articulated by former Nichiren-shu priest Tanaka Chigaku (1861-1939) who formed the Rissho Ankoku-kai lay organization to promote Nichiren-shugi (STONE 2003). Today, Soka Gakkai serves as a great enigma in this area. While advocating world peace in numerous international activities, on the domestic front, they form the ideological backbone of the powerful and conservative Komei party which presently is part of Japan’s support for US intervention in the Middle East. This policy is connected to the movement to send troops overseas and to alter Japan’s pacifist constitution, a constitution which Soka Gakkai leader Daisaku Ikeda has declared makes Japan “entirely qualified to be in the vanguard, to mobilize all the peace forces of the world, to assume the leadership, and to rouse world opinion through the United Nations”. (STONE 2003, p.86) Soka Gakkai’s continued absence in pan-Buddhist and pan-religious peace and civil society initiatives within Japan reinforces these doubts, and appears to conform to their general philosophy of non-cooperation with other religious groups, Buddhist or not.
On the other hand, a movement which lacks ideological critique and focuses on social action tends to resemble the relief activities of many Buddhist organizations. This is conspicuously present in most Buddhist organizations which work for social action today in Japan. A major segment of these groups is involved in “international cooperation activities”, which include various types of relief aid to Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. There is also a great amount of rhetoric about peace. I use the word “rhetoric” since most of the activities constitute seminars, publications, and declarations, with very little if any critique of Japan’s political and economic complicity with the state of conflict all over the world. The Japanese general public is usually taught to blame the US for these problems, rather than to examine how their need for oil and fossil fuels and their consumer lifestyles play an important role in the perpetuation of US hegemony in the world. From a Buddhist perspective, Burma is probably the best example of this complicity and lack of meaningful Buddhist social analysis in Japan. Myanmar, a fellow predominantly Buddhist country, has been under a crushing military dictatorship for over forty years. Yet Buddhist organizations in Japan have made no systematic effort to educate the public on this issue and to lead a conclusive campaign against the Japanese business activities and Japanese foreign aid which props up that government. While certain Buddhist magazines advertise Burmese teak for sale to use in rebuilding Buddhist temples, the Christian West continues to be the leader in the aid and trade boycotts of the Burmese military junta. It should be noted that Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia have also not been able to change their government’s stance on Burma. However, Japan is clearly different from them in the level of economic development and democratic accountability which is on par with the West.
Conclusion
It is at this point that I have come up with the difficult question of why Japanese Buddhists have yet to develop their own powerful ideological critique based in Buddhist teachings which is harmonized with a type of social action that supports an authentic civil society as an ethical public arena autonomous from state and business power. One might explain that since Japan did not experience colonialization from the West, it never had to seek and develop indigenous values, like Buddhism, as part of an independence struggle. However, Thailand shares this same lack of colonial legacy, yet it has developed one of the richest socially engaged Buddhist visions as an alternative to the power of western modernism. Another explanation could be Buddhism’s perennial role in nation-making ideology since its inception in Japan. As we saw in the section on “relief” activities, Japanese Buddhism has almost always been tied to the state. In this way, Buddhism’s intimate links with the Tokugawa Shogunate played a key role in its marginalization during the initial modernization boom of the Meiji Era. Prof. Jun Nishikawa of Waseda University offers the explanation that both this initial modernization boom and the one which followed the war (which again coincided with a reaction against traditional Buddhism as an accomplice of oppressive state power) marked a great diversification of people’s value systems in Japan. Because of this, Japan has developed a much more secular form of modernization with no state religion in comparison to the Buddhist societies of South and Southeast Asia (personal correspondence, February 20, 2004). The much later entry of these countries into the phase of high modernity has meant that Buddhism has survived more strongly as an indigenous ideology to serve the use of local reformers. It should also be noted that Japanese Buddhism’s highly sectarian nature, even without the advent of all the new Buddhist schools, offers a much less unified ideological vision of society than the much more homogenous Theravadin tradition common to South and Southeast Asia.
In this way, Japanese civil society has tended towards much more secular (humanism) and materialistic (socialism/communism) conceptions, highly influenced by the West. Thus, Buddhism has more often than not been seen as an obstacle rather than as a resource. A particular anecdote from an old friend strikes me here. She has been active in NGO and civil society activities for many years as well as being a devout Buddhist, not surprisingly a Nichiren Buddhist. At one point, she was working for one of the better known, very progressive and very activist Japanese NGOs which has done work on development and peace issues. This group like many of the strongest and most active Japanese NGOs has had a mostly Marxist basis to its ideology. Eventually, she found she could no longer work for them due to the sometimes outright distaste expressed for her Buddhist beliefs and practices, like saying a Buddhist grace to herself before lunch. Personally, while working for years in Thailand for a major Buddhist NGO, I often experienced a great friendliness from people when they found out about my work. On the other, I have experienced almost the opposite in Japan where people have often been suspicious that I am doing something with a cult group, even while representing a major Buddhist sect like Jodo-shu.
These general perceptions of Buddhism and of the nature of modern Japanese society have had an important retarding effect on the development of a robust socially engaged Buddhism. The overall secularization and privatization of Buddhist practice in modern Japan has also stunted the development of initiatives by socially concerned priests who often speak of how difficult it is to persuade their lay followers about actions they wish to take for society. Furthermore, as secular culture, especially in education, has outpaced traditional Buddhist culture, priests are rarely looked upon as intellectual leaders in society. The adoption of a secular lifestyle by Japanese priests, which is conspicuous to Japanese Buddhism, has also robbed them of the moral and ethical authority that a renunciate priest with a certain level of religious insight had in the past (Tomatsu, 1995). Buddhist priests and devout believers often still do engage in NGO and civil societies activities, but usually remain “in the closet” about their Buddhist-ness. This has created the situation of a sort of underground engaged Buddhist movement where numerous individuals go about creating international and domestic social activities yet have very little knowledge or awareness of each other. It was to remedy this situation that the Buddhist NGO network was in part formed in 2002.

Steps Towards an Authentic Buddhist Civil Society Movement: The Development of Buddhist NGOs

In this next section, I would like to give a brief overview of the development of Buddhist NGOs in Japan. I think such a task will illuminate the struggle of Japanese Buddhists to move beyond the somewhat narrow confines of “relief” or “evangelical” engaged Buddhism.
The movement into a more robust socially engaged Buddhism, as I have mentioned above, requires the dialectical tension of a critical ideology and a progressive social action. Concerning the development of a critical ideology, it is paramount that Japanese Buddhists fully develop the universal ethical implications of Buddhist teachings, which doctrinally speak of alleviating the suffering of all sentient beings and historically opened up religious practice to women and social outcasts at the time of the Buddha. Unfortunately, as we have seen above, previous attempts at such universalization have stopped short at the national or sectarian level. This universal ethic is what is currently bonding the progressive globalization movement. Groups from all over the world have found this universal ethic in their own traditions and have endeavored to synchronize it with those of others.
The roots of such a true universal ethic can be found in the development of some of the new Buddhist schools. As we have noted above, Soka Gakkai’s record on this issue is somewhat unclear, yet the international branches of Soka Gakkai International seem genuinely engaged in non-sectarian peace activities. Perhaps a more consistent image is portrayed by Rissho Koseikai. Under the leadership of its late co-founder Nikkyo Niwano, it has been deeply engaged in international ecumenical peace dialogue since the 1950s and has been a long-time integral player in the World Council for Religion and Peace (WCRP) headquartered at the United Nations in New York. In this way, the new Buddhist schools have been much more proactive in engaging in true international ecumenical activities, while the traditional sects have had to spend much more time confronting (or in some cases ignoring) their deeper complicity with the war as an initial step towards developing a genuine international ecumenical ethic.
With this very basic background in mind, the first emergence of Japanese Buddhist NGOs was in the early 1980s in response to the intensifying crisis in Indo-China with the boat people from Vietnam and the mass of Cambodian refuges living on the border of Thailand. These groups, like the Buddhist Aid Center (BAC) created in 1982 by mostly priests from Nichiren-shu, was in part a response to criticism in the mainstream media that Buddhism had become irrelevant to modern society and that Buddhist priests had no concern for the general well-being of people. Another factor was the increasing international exposure that Japanese and Japanese priests were getting as the economy prospered. At the inaugural public symposium of the new Buddhist NGO network in July of 2002, Rev. Yoshimichi Ito of BAC expressed the shock and embarrassment that many Japanese Buddhists experienced on their first visits to the Cambodian refugee camps. First, they found that almost all of the religious-based groups doing aid work were Christian ones coming from the West. Secondly, they found Cambodian monks working with the barest of resources creating educational and others sorts of aid and development programs. Rev. Ito commented, “Here I was, a priest of the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) tradition which emphasizes the selfless path of the bodhisattva, coming from Japan with nothing much to offer except a suitcase of money, and there I found monks of the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) tradition, who supposedly are only focused on personal enlightenment, working in the barest conditions using their heart to pass on whatever wisdom and abilities they could to the common people.” These sorts of experiences spawned a great movement of international relief activities by not only Buddhist NGOs but various official and unofficial organs of most Buddhist sects, both old and new.
It should be noted here that the term “NGO” as it is adopted by Japanese civil society and these Buddhist organizations has a specific meaning that differs from the common conception. The term “NGO” stands literally for “non-governmental organization”. In this way, it is very consciously a civil society organization which sees itself as certainly autonomous from state bodies as well as from business bodies and as typically concerned with some form of social welfare. Japanese NGOs would definitely share this social welfare concern. However, the sense of an NGO being part of the creation of civil society is somewhat of a stretch, because in the Japanese context, NGO refers specifically to a group engaged in “international cooperation activities” (kokusai kyoryoku katsudo 国際協力活動) (Shimizu 1999, p.699). While it could certainly be seen that NGOs are part of the movement to create a global civil society, it is usually seen that a country must develop its own civil society movement before it can fully engage in the international one. This rather unique understanding of the NGO speaks to not only the marginal nature of Buddhist NGOs as actors in domestic Japanese civil society but to the struggle of Japanese society in general to develop a public sphere that exists autonomously from the state and corporate affiliations, which have been so all inclusive for so long.
In this regard, a second seminal moment for both Japanese NGOs, and specifically Buddhist ones, was the great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. The well-known paralysis of governmental bodies in responding to this crisis led to a huge and spontaneous outpouring of relief work by common Japanese, including many of the “international cooperation activity” NGOs. For the first time in a long time, Buddhist priests and organizations had a deep experience of their old tradition as civil society actors by taking part in these efforts. This experience combined with the increase in social disease during the post-bubble depression has made Buddhist NGOs more sensitive to domestic issues as they continue their international work. An example of such an increasing domestic focus is the Buddhist NGO AYUS (Sanskrit for “life”) founded by a group of predominantly Jodo-shu and Jodoshin-shu priests. Unlike most other international cooperation NGOs which engage in direct relief activities in foreign countries, AYUS engages in the critical but usually neglected work of supporting the administrative capacities of NGOs inside Japan. Thus instead of retracing or repeating the work of other NGOs, as many groups do, they attempt to increase the integrative efficiency of the NGO movement but supporting its infrastructure.
An extension of the internal domestic development of Japanese civil society and a third watershed in the movement was the 1998 Non-Profit Organization (NPO) Law, which amongst other things enabled NGOs to raise funds by appealing to the tax write-off afforded to donors. Anyone coming from the West where such a practice has become standard would have been shocked to see such a highly modernized society as Japan be so late in developing such a regulation. This is another indication of the slow development of what would be considered a typical civil society movement, at least by western standards. In relation to the term NGO, NPO has generally a broader meaning encompassing both international and domestic activities, but with a certain stronger sense for the latter. One of the important effects of this law is that it has greatly opened up the funding possibilities of Buddhist NGOs. Whereas many of these NGOs have had some sort of affiliation or connection with an official Buddhist denomination in order to maintain basic financial support, now they are less dependent on this sort of income. Take, for example, the Buddhist NGO now known as the Shanti Volunteer Association (SVA). It was established in 1980 by the Soto Zen sect as the Japan Soto-shu Relief Committee (JSRC) for the purpose of aiding Cambodian refugees. As it continued to develop, it took the name Soto-shu Volunteer Association (SVA) and became one of the largest NGOs in Cambodia. In 1999, when it got its new legal status as an NPO, it changed its name to the Shanti Volunteer Association (SVA) in part to clearly separate it from any religious or sectarian ties which would interfere with gaining either government financial aid or other such non-affiliated financial support.
This development presents the opportunity for the increased integration of Buddhist NGOs into the general civil society movement without the constraints of some of the more conservative influences of traditional Buddhist denominations. This integration has great potential to further universalize the ethical standpoint of their work. However, it also carries with it the danger of a deeper dilution of the already thin Buddhist identity and ideology that these organizations carry. As we have seen, the majority of them are still focused on relief activities which are largely confined to the international sphere. For a robust socially engaged Buddhist movement to appear which has a progressive effect on the development of civil society within Japan, Japanese Buddhist NGOs need to develop a unique social critique based on Buddhist principles that socially engaged Buddhists in other countries have captured in addition to their growing integration in both common Japanese civil society and international civil society. Although it is still early, the events of 9/11 and the war in Iraq might provide another watershed for Buddhist NGO development. There has been a great outpouring of peace rhetoric from all sorts of Buddhist groups since 9/11. However, one senses that Buddhist organizations are not leading Japanese society but merely trying to catch up with the general, humanistic peace movement that remains strong in Japan. At the same time, it appears that the urgency to find some way to respond to this crisis is leading numerous Buddhist organizations into a much deeper examination of what peace means, and in turn, what are the truly vital aspects of the Buddhist tradition which can offer some response to the ideological quagmire of Islamic fundamentalism and American religio-nationalism. For the traditional Buddhist sects, this has also coincided with an attempt to more fully and publicly confront their complicity during the Pacific War. This attempt at a deeper examination was witnessed recently at a meeting held on March 2, 2004 in Tokyo entitled “The Pursuit of Peace Now” [いま平和を求める] composed of religious groups which included numerous new and traditional Buddhist groups (of which Soka Gakkai was conspicuously absent). This is a positive sign in that such a deeper examination is a critical part of developing an authentic Buddhist ideological critique and standpoint towards society.

The Emergence of A Socially Engaged Buddhist Ideology?

In this last section, I will examine the challenges and potentials of the growing socially engaged Buddhist movement to develop its own Buddhist ideological critique and standpoint towards society. To begin, we can posit the question that if creating a civil society means developing civil virtues and a culture of ethical reciprocity, then what are the existing values and ethical foundations of contemporary Japanese society? As we have noted, the modern age has brought in a wide variety of new viewpoints and values such as humanism, socialism/communism, consumerism and so forth. The problem, however, seems to be that Japanese society is currently adrift in its value systems, unclear on whether to follow the US model of total economic globalization or to pursue an alternative path which has yet to be articulated. Meanwhile, its young generation floats along without direction, seeing little hope in the job-house-family dream.
Norwegian sociologist and peace activist Johan Galtung is one of the few thinkers outside of religious circles who has taken seriously the need for religion as a formative part of rebuilding healthy societies. Galtung has written of the twin factors of destructuration and deculturation in the deterioration of life in regions strongly affected by economic globalization. In terms of deculturation, he speaks of the failures of modern secularism in providing a normative moral culture for post-modern society.
Secularism, in the shape of humanist ethics, has not been capable of producing binding norms for human behavior. Why shall you not commit adultery, kill, steal and lie when other humans are mere objects and there is no accountability to higher forces as there is no transcendent God anyhow? The final result is the total anomie of Formation IV [post-modern society], with human beings left with the only normative guidance that always survives: egocentric cost-benefit analysis. The point is not normlessness, the point is that they are not binding; that is the meaning of culturelessness. (GALTUNG 1995, p.14)
It is difficult to say that Japanese society has much mooring in Buddhist ethical standards. The long historical influence of the Pure Land movement’s emphasis away from maintaining the traditional Buddhist ethical norms helped to develop the secularized modern priest (Tomatsu, 1995). The continued anti-clerical trend in Japanese Buddhism, as witnessed by the new Buddhist groups complete abandonment of a monastic order, has meant that faithand ritual are the predominant features of Japanese Buddhist religiosity, with a subsequent de-emphasis on ethical and meditative/practice oriented religiosity. It is perhaps this emphasis that allowed Japanese Buddhist priests, most ironically characterized in the great Zen meditation teachers, to propound an ethic of holy war and spiritually sanctified murder during the war.
This does not mean of course that Japan is not an ethical society. Rather, it is my contention that Buddhism does not serve Japanese culture as an ethical discipline. Regarding the deep respect for authority and the emphasis on reciprocal family relations and hierarchical group relations, it seems to me that Confucianism and the indigenous communal values associated with Shinto provide that ethical discipline for Japanese society. Rather than considering the potential shortcomings of these systems, I think it would be better to emphasize the enhanced ethical potential of Japanese society if it also had a stronger Buddhist ethic. Galtung’s method for promoting culturation is to promote the softer, unifying aspects of religion while demoting the harder, intolerant aspects of religion. In this way, the first and foremost ethical principal of Buddhism, non-harming (ahimsa), certainly would be a civic virtue that could compliment the already existing peace movement in Japan. This would also serve as a universalizing ethic to counter balance the tendency towards nationalistic and chauvinistic articulations of a civil society conflated with state hegemony.
In this vein, it would be good to look briefly at three individuals of the present socially engaged Buddhist movement, important for their ideological contributions: the late Rev. Jitsujo Arima of the Soto Zen sect, Rev. Teruo Maruyama of the Nichiren sect, and Prof. Jun Nishikawa of the Department of Economics at Waseda University.
Jitsujo Arima was one of the founders SVA. His work for society actually began years earlier in his home temple, where he created special memorial services for the neglected ashes of forced Korean immigrants from the war period. He then extended himself by beginning some social activities within Soto-shu, which culminated in Soto-shu’s aforementioned creation of the Japan Soto-shu Relief Committee (JSRC) for aiding Cambodian refugees. What is significant about Arima and SVA is that after Soto-shu stopped officially supporting this work, they continued on with it. Therefore, unlike evangelical activities, this work was clearly more focused on serving wider society than on the advancement of the Soto Zen name and its organization (Arima, 1993). In this way, Arima had an unusually high level of respect from the larger secular NGO community. While many socially minded Buddhists in Japan do not integrally use Buddhist ideas in understanding society and their own work, Arima’s social ethic sprang from a deep and sophisticated understanding of Buddhism. For example, he drew on the teaching of the four brahmaviharas (shishobo四摂法), central to both to Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, as a basis for social action. He felt if a person develops friendliness (metta, the first of the four), and meets people who are suffering (dukkha), then it is natural for the second, compassion (karuna), to emerge. From this basis, the third, sympathetic joy (mudita) that is without jealousy, also arises when encountering those not in suffering. Finally, it is the basis of these three which compels one to one engage for the benefit of others while shedding the egoistic concerns of building or preserving one’s own organization. Such truly selfless activity creates a deep experience of equanimity (upekkha), which is the last of the four (Arima, 1993). Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned secular nature of Japanese society, Arima only really spoke on this level in largely scattered, unpublished writings and in conversations with interested individuals. Therefore, although Arima remains an important influence to a small group of ideologically minded socially engaged Buddhists, neither he nor SVA ever articulated a powerful social critique of Japanese society. In the NGO world, SVA has been considered quite conservative; for example, it did not join many other progressive NGOs who criticized the problematic implementation of the UN peace-keeping force in Cambodia, called UNTAC, after the end of the war there. This conservative character appears to be less likely to change now with SVA’s new funding ties to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (外務省 gaimusho) and also Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (郵政省 yuseisho).
In contrast, Rev. Teruo Maruyama has always been a very outspoken critic of Buddhism’s role in society and Japanese political culture. Maruyama was born into a mainstream Nichiren-shu temple located at the foot of the sect’s holy mountain, Mt. Minobu. However, the traumas of the war, the early death of his mother, and the ideological flip-flopping of Japanese Buddhism from war supporter to progressive peace supporter and back to supporter of conservative power, made him distrustful of the world and pushed him to seek his own understanding of it. By the early 1950s, he had joined the Communist Party of Japan and became an important regional leader whilst still a student at Rissho University. These activities naturally ran him afoul of his university, his denomination, and his family. However, this period created the basis for creating his livelihood outside the temple – an experience which he thinks is essential for the conscientization of Buddhist priests and the reform of Funeral Buddhism in Japan. After working on reforming Nichiren-shu in the 1960s, Maruyama began to work more actively on social issues in the 1970s, such as the campaign to stop the construction of Narita airport in the rural farming areas of Chiba. In the late 1980s, he joined Sulak Sivaraksa in creating the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). From his long life as a social critic and iconoclast – he has always been “the nail that sticks out” while refusing to be hammered back – it is natural to see that Maruyama feels that, “Original Buddhism in my view is conscientization.” (Maruyama, 1998, p.50) For Maruyama, this is conscientization to suffering, to one’s historical roots, and to the present social structure. He feels from this first step of conscientization, each individual can find their own way of working for the betterment of society. Rather than establishing a single blueprint for social action or a single social ideology, Maruyama feels it is important for each individual to come to their own understanding in order to be able to change their own lifestyle and engage in social action on a highly conscious level. When each individual is empowered from having created their own standpoint, then it is more possible to create a harmonious, just society. This “process philosophy” of Maruyama’s comes from his understanding that Buddhism does not really teach a single truth or have a single essence. Rather, Buddhism offers a way for deeply seeing into the process or methodology of any phenomenon. When we can understand the process of any phenomenon, then we can act in proper accordance with it rather than imposing our own preconceptions on it (Maruyama, 1998). While Maruyama has at times been an important ideological leader, his often extreme positions have isolated himself and his small circle of associates in the Japan branch of INEB. In this way, INEB Japan has not developed a progressive social action movement – the essential compliment to an ideological critique – and at present does not function organizationally.
Prof. Nishikawa offers us a different figure in that he comes from outside the Buddhist community and shows its growing interconnection with the larger civil society movement. Prof. Nishikawa is one of the most prominent development economists in Japan who in recent years has become more and more interested in various models of alternative development. He has translated both of David Korten’s books (When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Corporate World) into Japanese and has hosted a an ongoing series of international conferences with academics and civil society leaders from all over Asia, the most recent one held last November on the theme “Civil Society In Asia: Toward New State Governance of The Post－Developmentalist Era”. In 1994 and 1995, he organized his graduate seminar in economics on the theme of development monks in Thailand. Together with one of his students, Rev. Noda Masato – a Tendai-shu priest and prominent Buddhist NGO activist and academic, he edited a comprehensive book on Buddhist-style alternative development in Thailand based on this research (Nishikawa & Noda, 2001). In the opening chapter of the book, Prof. Nishikawa introduces and elaborates on the Thai scholar monk Ven. P.A. Payutto’s distinction between development as a solely material process (patana) and development as a deeper holistic spiritual process (bavana). The common term for economic development in Japan is kai-hatsu 開発 (kai=to open, begin; hatsu=to emit, arise, awaken). Prof. Nishikawa and his colleagues have re-read the two Chinese characters for this word in the traditional Buddhist way as kai-hotsu. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, this character for hatsu/hotsu is used in terms which refer to the resolve to attain enlightenment and develop bodhi-citta (hotsu-bodaishin) or to the vow to follow the Buddha’s way (hotsu-gan). This play on words is significant in that it presents a way to develop a new kind of language to express a different orientation towards development. At the same time, it does not present a new kind of jargon (which ancient Buddhist terms may seem like) which is opaque to economists, secular activists and other groups involved in social change. In elaborating this concept, Prof. Nishikawa has focused on how certain key Buddhist concepts like “the middle way” and “interdependence” can help Asia, with its significant Buddhist population, to develop its own unique understanding of civil society and the civil virtues on which it is based.
We have noted how Japanese NGOs have become increasingly focused on domestic affairs amidst the conditions of economic and social downturn in Japan. In this way, more and more NGOs, schools, and other institutions have extended their international relief activities to include “work camps” in which Japanese do not merely go to these poorer countries to “help” these people. Rather, they go to engage in activities and gain from the emotional and spiritual resources that are so lacking in Japan and other parts of the developed world. This change in orientation of not only Buddhist groups, but other Japanese groups involved in international activities, marks an important sea-change in both the development movement and the civil society movement. When kaihatsu begins to shift to kaihotsu, activities change from the one way movement of economic resources from North to South to a two way interchange of material and spiritual resources. This is the foundation for a rich civil society movement which creates a network of solidarity among different countries.

Conclusion: A Roadmap for Japanese Socially Engaged Buddhism

To conclude, I would like to offer a brief outline of the successes and challenges of the Japanese Buddhist civil society movement, what I would call an authentic socially engaged Buddhism. In doing so, I would again like to draw on an articulation that comes from outside of Japan, from the Thai development monk Phra Phaisan Visalo. Phra Phaisan is the leading development monk in Thailand today because of the incredible range of his talents and activities. Still in his forties, he has been a monk for over twenty-years. However, before ordaining, he was a student activist and an NGO worker so that his awareness and knowledge of social issues is especially sophisticated for a monk. He was ordained and trained under a famous meditation master, so that his spiritual and moral qualities are highly respected among Thais. Since his ordination, he has been a leading figure in numerous social activist projects ranging from community development to environmental protection to non-violence training. Finally, he has written a number of important articles and books on the problems with the present Thai monastic system and the role of religion in civil society. Along with Prof. Nishikawa, he was the keynote speaker at the Buddhist NGO Network’s inaugural meeting in July of 2002. In his talk, he outlined four areas where he felt Japanese Buddhist activists and NGOs can deepen their cooperation in the development of a more empowered civil society. These areas include: 1) humanitarian relief; 2) peace activities; 3) a structural critique of present social and political systems; and 4) the “development” of inner peace and spiritual well-being. I think these four areas offer us a good framework for making a final evaluation of the socially engaged Buddhist movement in Japan.
* humanitarian relief – As we have seen, this is a particular strength of Japanese Buddhist organizations. In the last twenty years, they have certainly diverted large amounts of capital from Japan to the developing world in all sorts of humanitarian aid and relief. Of course, some of this aid has not been wisely spent. However, Buddhist NGOs have been very conscious in confronting the whole issue of aid and attempting to develop alternative means of support, such as right livelihood initiatives like supporting vocational training in traditional handicrafts.
* peace activities – This has also been a perennial theme of emphasis among Buddhist organization. However, as I have noted, there needs to be more substance to the rhetoric of peace which is so pervasively spoken of among Buddhist groups. The dedicated work of the small group of monks and nuns from the Nipponzam Myohoji stands out in this respect. They have put their bodies and lives on the line all over Japan and the world in their peace marches and peace witnesses in places like El Salvador, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the Middle East. Phra Phaisan felt activities such becoming peace workers, witnesses and activists in various parts of the world could be an important contribution for Japanese Buddhists.
* a structural critique of present social and political systems – As noted, this has been a weak point for Japanese Buddhists, who mostly adopt the secular critiques developed by other civil society groups. As we saw with Prof. Nishikawa, it has taken a non-Buddhist academic to import from another country a Buddhist critique of economic development and introduce it to Japanese Buddhists. One of the essential aspects of this critique, as Phra Phaisan notes, includes developing new values and new paradigms for society. This, I would submit, means reinvigorating Japanese Buddhist ethical values to speak to modern issues and to provide a set of universal norms, as Galtung emphasized, to ground and hold Japanese society together. The basis of this reinvigoration of Buddhist ethical values must start in the reform of Funeral Buddhism and enlarging Buddhist practice beyond just rituals.
* the “development” of inner peace and spiritual well-being – This work comes as an extension to that of reinvigorating ethical norms, and for Phra Phaisan, meant creating a new consciousness that goes beyond consumerism. From a Buddhist standpoint, to properly critique the ethical nature of a society requires more than intellectual analysis, but also a psychological and emotional grounding that a spiritual discipline offers. This area is perhaps the most unique and most essential contribution that Buddhism can offer the civil society movement. However, it is also the area at which Japanese Buddhism is presently the weakest, as years of secular and material influences have greatly deteriorated the spiritual discipline of most Buddhist organizations. Participants in a civil society movement who practice a spiritual discipline have at their disposal psychological, intellectual and emotional tools that secular humanism cannot offer; for example, the power of a meditative practice which helps to integrate the emotional content of social work, to disengage from divisive and harmful viewpoints and behaviors, and to provide spiritual refreshment from the long, arduous social work that often culminates in burn out.
presented at The 19th World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), March 29, 2005, Tokyo, Japan.

 

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[1] Such communities especially refer to the great world religions of the axial age, such as the Abrahamic faiths, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, all of　 which sought to ethicize and universalize pre-existing tribal religions that were based on ritualism and divinely sanctioned class roles.