This paper focuses on the understanding of freedom in the thought of the True Pure Land (Shin) Buddhist philosopher, reformer, and cleric Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903). Its starting point is located in contradictory statements which Kiyozawa makes in regard to the issue of individual freedom. One the one hand, Kiyozawa writes, “As the story of Śākyamuni Buddha teaches, anyone who seriously wishes to enter into the religious world must abandon parents, wife, and children, wealth and nation. Further, one must abandon one’s self. In other words, one must abandon worldly beliefs such as filial piety and patriotism.”2 From writings such as this, scholars have presented his thought as promoting a radical form of individual autonomy in response to the Meiji state’s indoctrination program of national morality (kokumin dōtoku).3 As encapsulated in the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), national morality insisted that the duties of loyalty and filial piety toward the emperor were the foundation of Japanese national identity. Through the public education system and civic rituals, Japanese were inculcated in these values to produce loyal and obedient subjects who would be willing to sacrifice themselves to the state in “times of crisis.”4 In contrast, Kiyozawa’s injunction to abandon “wealth and nation” and “filial piety and patriotism” seemed to reject soundly the tenets of national morality. Further, his insistence upon personal conscience as the ultimate locus for responsibility as well as religious belief appeared to negate the absolutist claims of state and society and to create a space for autonomous and independent human agency and identity. On closer inspection, however, this characterization is hard to uphold. For example, Kiyozawa closes the very same article in which the above quote appears by writing, “Take the law of the king as the foundation and put its ethical code first. Follow the common ways of the world, and deepen your faith (anjin) within your heart.”5 Here he seems to subordinate the needs of the individual to this very same national morality, arguing for subservience to the “law of the king” (ōhō), a Buddhist formulation that had become equated with the state’s ethical program. To this could be added numerous other passages where Kiyozawa calls for hierarchy in society and obedience to those in power. For example, in his talks on self-cultivation he writes that one must “obey one’s lot in life…. Forgetting your lot and thoughtlessly yelling about equality and recklessly crying about freedom, this is to mistake one’s direction and to completely fail to distinguish the way.”6 In other places, he speaks of the naturalness of social classes and the duty of the poor to obey the rich.7 Given this, what are we to make of Kiyozawa’s insistence that his signature reform movement of spiritual activism (seishinshugi) represented a stance of “complete freedom” (zettai jiyūshugi)? Was this simply a sham? Further, what was the meaning of his claim that “freedom and submission” went hand in hand?8 In order to answer these questions, this paper will attempt something rather unusual. It will examine Kiyozawa apart from his usual role as a Buddhist modernizer or Shin sectarian reformer and recast his thought as a reaction to a particular historical form of freedom, that of classical liberalism.9 In Meiji Japan this was most clearly represented by Fukuzawa Yukichi and the movement for civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika) in the 1870s. This paper will argue that while Kiyozawa did ultimately embrace the illiberal ideas of inequality and obedience to authority, he did not share national morality’s goal of bolstering state power. Rather, Kiyozawa’s thought represented an attempt to replace the heteronomy of the atomistic and self-interested individual of classical liberalism with the autonomy of a divine whole. As Kiyozawa saw the present social order as in fact an expression of the divine will, submission to its dictates bec
目次
Civilization’s Discontents Banbutsu Ittai and the Organic Body of the Infinite Conclusion notes
