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The Secular Ground Bass of Pre-Modern Japan Reconsidered: Reflections Upon The Buddhist Trajectories Towards Secularity |
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| Author |
Kleine, Christoph (著)
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| Source |
Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“ 5
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| Date | 2018.07.19 |
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| Pages | 35 |
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| Publisher | Leipzig University |
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| Publisher Url |
https://www.uni-leipzig.de/en
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| Location | Leipzig, Germany [萊比錫, 德國] |
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| Content type | 專題研究論文=Research Paper |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Note | The HCAS is part of Leipzig University and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). |
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| Abstract | As can be easily recognised, the title of this paper alludes to a famous statement by Robert N. Bellah. In his article “Values and Social Change in Modern Japan,” originally published in 1970, Bellah identified “worldly affirmativeness, the opposite of denial” as “the ground bass […] of the Japanese tradition.” His argument runs as follows: So we have this great outpouring of the recognition of transcendence in Kamakura times together with new forms of society and
new cultural forms that in many ways laid down the lines of Japanese development through the Tokugawa period. However the note of transcendence was soon lost. It was drowned out by the ground bass, so to speak, of the Japanese tradition of this-worldly affirmativeness, the opposite of denial. This may, at first sight, seem to be consistent with my rather provocative notion of the ‘secular ground bass of pre-modern Japan.’ Is “worldly affirmativeness” not actually a key feature of ‘secularity,’ and of ‘modernity’ for that matter? However, Bellah’s argument runs in the very opposite direction. Contrary to what one might expect, worldly affirmativeness, in Bellah’s view, did not pave the way for secularity but, rather, prevented it. The reason is, says Bellah, that the alleged ground bass of worldly affirmativeness was responsible for the ‘failure’ of the early modern Japanese to actualise the moment of transcendence that had been recognised and strongly emphasised by medieval Buddhist thinkers already – most prominently by Shinran 親鸞 (1173–1263) in the 13th century. And this failure, in Bellah’s view, accounts for the inability of the Japanese to establish a truly “axial civilization,” become modern and thus secular. They had missed, so to speak, the chance to develop a Protestant ethic and a spirit of capitalism out of their own cultural resources. I do not comment upon Bellah’s ideas here, which are somewhat tainted by classical evolutionist and teleological theories of modernisation and secularisation popular at that time. I adopt a completely different approach instead. In accordance with the basic assumptions of our research project Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities, I aim to demonstrate that the medieval Japanese had already developed a set
of epistemes with a longue durée, which turned out to be favourable for appropriating modern Western concepts of secularity in the 19th century, because they clearly distinguished between two social domains, which we
– from a modern perspective – would label roughly as ‘religion’ on the one hand and ‘politics’ on the other. In other words, we find social structures and related systems of classification that come quite close to the ideal type
of secularity as originally defined by Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, namely: “institutionally as well as symbolically embedded forms and arrangements for distinguishing between religion and other societal areas, practices and interpretations.” To be sure, it is not my intention to claim that medieval Japan was a secular society in our modern understanding. I only argue that the notion of secularity as it was propagated by Western powers in the 19th and 20th centuries fell on fertile ground in Meiji Japan. Broadly speaking, it is the primary goal of our interdisciplinary project to find explanations for the evident multiplicity of secularities, i.e. for the multiplicity of forms and arrangements for distinguishing between religion and other ‘nexuses of activities.’ We reject the oversimplified post-colonial narrative of secularity being a concept completely alien to non-Western cultures upon which the ‘religious-secular divide’ was forcefully imposed in colonial times. I do not deny the fact that either secularity or secularism were concepts established in the so-called West, and that the separation of religious from secular domains played a crucial role in the establishment of modern nation states throughout the world. On the other hand, it |
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| DOI | https://doi.org/10.36730/2020.1.msbwbm.5 |
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| Hits | 132 |
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| Created date | 2023.03.13 |
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| Modified date | 2023.03.13 |
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