The Politics of Essence: Towards a History of the Public Study of Buddhism in 1880s Japan

This article examines the early institutionalization of Buddhist studies in Meiji Japan, focusing on the University of Tokyo’s establishment of Buddhism as an academic discipline between the late 1870s and the 1880s. By centering on key figures such as the Sōtō Zen priest Hara Tanzan and the Shin Buddhist cleric Yoshitani Kakuju, it explores how the emerging discipline was shaped by both domestic imperatives, such as reasserting Mahayana Buddhism’s legitimacy against Edo-period critiques, and new pressures from Western scholarship, which often dismissed Mahayana as a later development in Buddhist history. Beyond a purely academic pursuit, this public study of Buddhism served broader sociopolitical aims, including efforts to construct a unifying moral foundation for a modernizing nation. The article demonstrates how early Meiji Buddhist intellectuals navigated these multiple agendas, seeking to articulate an “essence” of Buddhism adaptable to evolving notions of religion and philosophy while simultaneously upholding the Mahayana tradition as both historically valid and ethically relevant.