It must be admitted that religions were submissive to the nation in modern Japan, and supported the aggressive war with little resistance. It should also be admitted, however, that religious thinkers earnestly investigated the problem of the relation between religions and nation when they tried to establish their ideas on the nature of religion. In this article, I would like to examine the ideas of three Buddhist thinkers in the Meiji period on the relation between Buddhism and nation, and try to find out the reason why their ideas could not become a principle of resistance against the power of the nation. Shimaji Mokurai, who established freedom of religion, restricted the field of religion to individual minds, and thus could not provide a principle for criticizing national policy. Kiyozawa Manshi, who investigated the philosophical nature of the Absolute Infinitive, could not make clear the nature of the Otherness of the Absolute Infinitive and could only give in to the secular ethics of the nation. Tanaka Chigaku, who aimed to establish a religious nation, could not recognize the antagonism between nation and religion, and ended up uncritically following national policy. After having examined the ideas of these three thinkers, I would like to mention some aspects of the problem of Yasukuni Shrine, in order to clarify the relation between Buddhism and Shinto in modern Japan.
