Jonathan Watts

Socially engaged Buddhism in Japan is somewhat of an enigma. It does not have a single hi-profile person who leads a major social change organization like A.T. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka, Sulak Sivaraksa and his many small NGOs in Thailand, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in exile, or even Aung San Suu Kyi and her democracy movement in Burma. Although some have painted Daisaku Ikeda and Soka Gakkai in a similar light to these figures, it is an erroneous comparison as Soka Gakkai inside of Japan largely devotes itself to its own organization expanding activities and very partisan political organization. Amidst highly secularized and highly western influenced Japanese society, many socially engaged Buddhists keep their Buddhist side to themselves. Further, there has been very poor networking among socially engaged Buddhists due to this discrete Buddhist identity and also due to the difficulties of cross organization cooperation in traditional Japanese social groups. Part of this difficulty in being overtly Buddhist in a modern Japan is perhaps the warranted distrust of the way Buddhism and authoritarian power have made bed fellows in the past. In this way, priests and lay Buddhists have certain hesitations in reaching out beyond the typical social activities of religious organizations which are largely confined to proselytization of new members and basic social welfare activities like running kindergartens. In this way, numerous individual priests and lay organizations have journeyed overseas using Japanese Buddhismﾕs economic largesse to engage in supporting social welfare activities abroad, mostly in South and South East Asia, but also commonly in Africa and the Middle East. However, without a public identity and a network to unite themselves, the individuals and organizations operate in relative ignorance of each other, often retracing each other’s steps and making donations to the same organizations.

It is from this unfocused and disunited situation that the leaders of the most significant Buddhist NGOs have decided that socially engaged Buddhism in Japan needs to come out of the closet. It needs a clear and strong social identity that is known to others. It needs to not be afraid to apply Buddha Dhamma teachings and practice to social problems. It needs to learn from the secular world as well as to offer its potential to a Japanese society that is ideologically and existentially groping for a new identity. This identity needs to be one that joins it significantly with its Asian neighbors and crawls out from under the paternalism of the United States which has so profoundly shaped everything in Japan over the last 55 years.

In this way, these Buddhist NGOs have launched an effort to make a non-sectarian Buddhist NGO network in Japan which will not seek to dictate the activities of assorted socially engaged Buddhist groups. Rather, it will seek to help them find a common identity and develop what we could call a sangha of socially engaged Buddhists who can draw on each other for information, resources and wisdom. The first modest attempt to get this network off the ground was a symposium held on July 6 in Tokyo entitled “Buddhism, NGOs, and Civil Society“. The program was headed by two prominent guests: Phra Phaisan Visalo, a development monk from Northeast Thailand, and Jun Nishikawa, Professor of Economics at Waseda University. Phra Phaisan was here in Japan finishing a four month stay to study religion and globalization and had been invited to offer his insights on Buddhist activism from his long time experience in Thailand. Prof. Nishikawa is one of the most prominent 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 recently co-edited a comprehensive book on Buddhist-style alternative development in Thailand.

In his talk, Phra Phaisan traced the rise of developments monks in Thailand, specifically showing how they have stepped in to meet the intangible cultural and spiritual needs of people in this age of economic development. At the same time, NGOs have helped Buddhism to see and more deeply understand the injustices of the present development paradigm. Phra Phaisan outlined areas where he felt Buddhist activists and NGOs can deepen their cooperation in the development of a more empowered civil society. These areas include: 1) humanitarian relief, which has long been a common form of social engagement for Buddhists and a focus of most Buddhist NGOs in Japan; 2) peace activities, which Phra Phaisan felt could be a key area of activism for Japanese Buddhists as peace workers, witnesses and activists in various parts of the world; 3) the structural violence of present social and political systems which globalization has exacerbated. This includes developing new values and new paradigms for society. NGOs have a particular strength in this area from which Buddhist should learn; and 4) inner peace and spiritual well-being, which means the creation of a new consciousness that is beyond consumerism. This last area is obviously the particular strength of that Buddhist and other religious groups can offer the civil society movement.

Prof. Nishikawa followed Phra Phaisan with a general outline of the various trends of the development age and the rise of alternative development models, especially socially engaged spiritual ones. One of the more significant points in his talk and in his recent work on this issue has been his picking up of the Thai scholar monk Ven. 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 today is kai-hatsu (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 new 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.

Prof. Nishikawa’s conclusion 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. Until now, the idea of civil society has been fashioned in a largely western way with its civil virtues rooted in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. “Justice” is one of the key virtues that has developed out of these religions and into a common social concern for the modern world. While this concept of “justice” is important in many ways, it is not without its problems, as seen in the drive for ultimate “justice” by both the United States and Islamic fundamentalists in their new “holy war”. Although Buddhists may gain from developing a deeper understanding of justice, especially social justice, Buddhist tend to have other orientations which focus on the inner transformation of ignorance rather than the external retribution of “evil”. (for a more in-depth discussion of these issues see David Loy’s articles On the Nonduality of Good and Evil, and The Spiritual Roots of Civil Society)

The second half of the program was a panel discussion by representatives of four of the major Buddhist NGOs in Japan. These are: the Buddhist Aid Center (BAC) formed in 1982 in response to the refugee tragedies in Indo-China and run by a number of Nichiren Sect priests (not of the new Nichiren based groups Soka Gakai, Rissho Koseikai or Nipponzam Myohoji); AYUS formed in 1993 by a group of mostly Jodo Shu priests to give administrative and basic support to others small NGOs in Japan; the Shanti Volunteer Association (SVA) originally formed in 1980 as the Soto Shu (Soto Zen) Volunteer Association which has focused its efforts on relief and community support services in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia; and the Rissho Koseikai Fund for Peace (One Meal Fund) formed in 1974 which engages in various relief work in all parts of the world.

Through the personal reflections of each of the representatives of these organizations, the audience gained a very interesting perspective on how Japanese Buddhist groups’ approach to development work and international cooperation has changed over the years. In the early 1980s with the Cambodian refugee crisis at its height, Japanese Buddhist activists were very focused on relief activities. This was the period of the first emergence of Japanese Buddhist NGOs which came in response to numerous factors. One was 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. A second factor was the shock and embarrassment that many Japanese Buddhists experienced on their first visits to these crisis areas in South East Asia. First, they found that here in Asia almost all of the religious-based groups doing aid work were Christian groups coming from the West. Secondly, they found Theravadan monks working with the barest of resources running educational and others sorts of aid and development programs. As Rev. Yoshimichi Ito of BAC noted in his comments, “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 encounters have had great impact on Japanese Buddhists over the years. Increasingly, they have seen that although they may be able to provide large sums of money to run various programs, the people in these “poorer” countries have vast amounts of emotional and spiritual resources. In the present age of economic and social decline in Japan, more and more NGOs, schools, and other institutions have begun to create “work camps” in which young Japanese don’t merely go to these poorer countries to “help” these people, but go to these countries to engage in activities and gain from these 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 exchange of material and spiritual resources. This is the foundation for a rich civil society movement which creates a network of solidarity among different countries. In an age of multinational corporations and undemocratic quasi-governmental trade organizations, such a global grassroots civil society movement is clearly a vital development.

Compared with South and South East Asian NGOs, Japanese NGOs, especially Buddhist ones, are in their infancy. During the years of the great economic boom here, such groups could hardly concern themselves with anything but giving economic support to those in need in other countries. This remains a role that Japanese Buddhist groups can play. However, with the economic downturn in Japan, Japanese in general have been doing serious soul searching on the real value of life and material development. This soul searching has begun to create a change in thought and approach to relief, social change and international activities. The development of such a non-sectarian network of Buddhist NGOs and individual Buddhist activists is a sign of this trend which we hope will develop (kaihotsu) more strongly in near future.

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Jonathan Watts is a long term member of INEB and a participant in the Think Sangha, a socially engaged Buddhist think tank. He lives and works in Japan as a teacher at Bunkyo University and research fellow at the Jodo Shu Research Institute.