A New Buddhist Dialectic - Conclusion to Volume 1: Fear of Religion
Part 10 of an ongoing series.
Note: This is the conclusion to the first “volume” of my “A New Buddhist Dialectic” essay series. This volume covered Japanese Buddhism from the Medieval to the Modern periods with a focus on Nichiren Buddhism in particular, while the second volume will move to developments in Western Buddhism.
While it will not be necessary to read all of the prior parts in order to understand this one, doing so would still provide valuable context for this piece. Therefore, if you enjoy this work, I highly encourage you to check out the other “A New Buddhist Dialectic” posts, which can be found here:
With that said, please enjoy…
Nichirenism differed from the New Religions it eventually spawned in that it tried to sell itself as a unique ideology that could compete with the likes of Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism without being shackled to a singular organization. In a way, it was successful, as it left an indisputable mark on the religio-political environment of Japan which, in some ways, is still felt even to this day.
Yet Nichirenism’s lack of a firm gravitational center outside of its founder, Tanaka Chigaku, meant that the groups it eventually spawned diverged from its doctrine in significant ways. Soka Gakkai combined Nichiren Buddhism with Western philosophies, as Nichirenism did, yet rejected Tanaka’s Shinto-related dialectical view. Toda Josei and Kenshokai both borrowed from Tanaka’s ideas around the Honmon no Kaidan, yet recontextualized it to fit into Nichiren-shoshu doctrine. Reiyukai adopted Nichirenism’s emphasis on filial piety and ancestor worship in the context of Lotus Sutra Buddhism, yet downplayed most of its other aspects.
While Nichirenism declined after the second World War, all of the aforementioned inheritors of Nichirenism’s various ideas went on to have their heyday in the later half of the 20th century, bolstered by their relatively strong organizational structures. Yet they also have, in recent memory, experienced a stagnation and/or decline. But why is this the case? I can think of several reasons.
For one, all of these groups are now absent the charismatic leader who drove them to success in the first place. As with Nichirenism, such a loss had devastating effects. Soka Gakkai weathered the storm of Toda’s death by essentially building him a replacement in the form of Daisaku Ikeda, an endeavor which was met with rousing success, yet in their post-Ikeda state, it seem there will be no Ikeda 2.0 for the foreseeable future.
One could also blame shifting sentiment towards New Religions. Indeed, the havoc wrought by the infamous cult Aum Shinrikyo in the 1990s left a black stain on all New Religions, even those which had been entirely peaceful. “For the first time since the 1970s, Japan reeled from catastrophic violence perpetrated by a domestic terrorist group,” writes Levi McLaughlin in his essay “Did Aum Change Everything?” regarding the sarin gas attacks of 1995, “and this violence, committed by an apocalyptic new religious movement, permanently transformed concern about new religions into characterizations of these organizations as cults that kill.”
McLaughlin also notes, however, that this phenomenon had not started with Aum Shinrikyo. Indeed, Soka Gakkai had been on the receiving end of public scorn for decades by the time Aum Shinrikyo had started murdering people. We must remember that Hirotatsu Fujiwara’s controversial book “I Denounce Soka Gakkai” was written all the way back in 1970, and reached best-seller status after its publication, illustrating that anxiety around new religious groups had already been a part of the Japanese public consciousness at the time. McLaughin elaborates:
When Aum attacked the Tokyo subways, negative reactions to new religions were already making regular news thanks to a public anti-Gakkai initiative waged by a coalition of politicians, journalists, public intellectuals, and religious rivals. Hysteria over new religions following Aum was instigated in part by the same people who were busy vilifying Soka Gakkai and its affiliated political party. Politicians and journalists were able to amplify rhetoric already employed routinely against Soka Gakkai by the mid-1990s to whip up hysteria over “religion” after the Aum attacks, and in some cases maneuvers against Aum Shinrikyō were in fact strategies within anti-Gakkai and anti-Kōmeitō campaigns.
It could also be said that this anxiety around New Religions pre-dated Soka Gakkai. One major example provided by McLaughlin in his essay is the still-extant religion Oomoto, which began gaining traction among the Japanese population in the early 20th century:
The new religion Oomoto was first targeted for official reprimand in 1921, and in the 1930s the group was condemned for transgressing state orthodoxy. Oomoto raised anxiety among government officials in large part because, through imitating imperial ritual and providing adherents with sub-organizations that promoted a vision of a sacred Japan that embraces modern internationalism, it gave citizens a persuasive alternative means of demonstrating loyalty to the Japanese nation (Garon 1997).
In her profile of Oomoto and Deguchi Onisaburō (1871–1948), the dynamic leader who shaped Oomoto in the period of its rise and catastrophic confrontations with the Japanese government, Nancy Stalker recounts how, as the leader of a group outside the orbit of state management, Onisaburō expanded Oomoto’s mandate beyond the realm of the strictly “religious” into many other spheres, including art, museum exhibitions, voluntary associations, modern media, and international exchange — all elements in a progressive trend Stalker characterizes as “religious entrepreneurship” (Stalker 2008). The group gained popularity, yet it also earned the scrutiny of government officials who suspected that its close emulation of the state was subversive.
This government suspicion of Oomoto culminated in a raid on their headquarters in Ayabe, outside of Kyoto, based solely on rumors that they had been stockpiling weapons in preparation for an armed conflict or uprising. While the rumors had been proven false, Oomoto’s base was destroyed and their leaders were imprisoned, charged with violating the Peace Preservation Law of 1925. They were the first religious leaders in the country to be met with such a charge.
It’s possible that the government’s suspicion of Oomoto was not entirely unjustified. After all, they were closely affiliated with the nationalist paramilitary “Black Dragon Society,” a matter that is now public record. Such an alliance between an ostensibly religious group and extreme political faction was not unheard of in this era. The “League of Blood” (Jpn: Ketsumeidan), who would go on to assassinate two Japanese politicians, had also been organized under religious pretense by the self-styled priest Inoue Nissho, and held meetings at his temple. It’s worth noting that their assassinations happened less than a decade after Oomoto was shut down for the first time, and just a few years before the second shutdown of Oomoto and arrest of Onisaburo in 1935.
Going all the way back to the Edo period, it’s also apparent that the Shoguns saw religious sects as potential rivals to their power. Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had been troubled by the Pure Land-inspired Ikko Ikki peasant uprisings of the Sengoku era, famously split the Jodo-Shinshu school of Pure Land Buddhism into two after taking power as a means to assure that they would not trouble him again. One could say that Buddhism in general was neutered under the Shogunate, as they were forced to consolidate under government-approved lineages and their ability to proselytize was restricted. Such fears and anxieties seemed to have been inherited by later regimes after the Meiji Restoration.
Yet even with this cultural push and pull between the Japanese state and upstart religions, it’s a fact that the New Religions did experience a period of immense growth in the 20th century, so such sentiment against them was far from universal. Was it really Aum Shinrikyo who brought about their downfall? Did the public simply grow tired of their shenanigans? What actually happened here?
In my view, it’s quite simple: technology and modern social currents simply turned against their favor. Just like in America, the proliferation of radical individualism and alternative forms of community overrode the factors which drove people to the New Religions in the first place. It was less that New Religions were all seen as dangerous, and more that the people who saw them as dangerous couldn’t imagine wanting to join such groups in the first place. They had become, in a word, “alien”; removed from their time and, in some cases, displaced by decentralized and comparatively individualistic New Age beliefs.
In a sense, the New Religions suffered from the same fatal affliction as Nichirenism: they were left behind by the very zeitgeist which had previously given birth to them, albeit far more gradually. Considering the rapidly changing nature of our very interconnected technological society, I imagine it will only be more difficult to keep up with the shifting of the social landscape as time goes on.
Speaking personally, as someone who was raised in America after the cults and New Religious movements in this country had largely faded away, I can say that such Japanese New Religions are entirely unappealing to someone like me, and I would wager that most Japanese people of a similar age feel the same when they look at groups like Soka Gakkai. With their sanitized corporate appearance, they give off a smell similar to that of multi-level marketing companies (even if they do differ in content), and I simply can’t see such organizations going through another round of explosive growth.
Interest in organized religion as a whole, in fact, has been at an all time low during my lifetime, and my personal experience also speaks to this. Out of everyone in my friend group, I am the only one who has become religious to any meaningful degree, and I am still largely independent, unaffiliated with any formal religious institution. To put it simply: almost nobody I know is religious anymore.
Yet it’s questionable if such trends will continue unabated. We have faced, in recent years, what some have dubbed the “loneliness epidemic.” This term became a matter of governmental record in America in 2023 when the Surgeon General published an advisory entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” “In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” the advisory states. “And that was before the [2020] COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.” This issue has, of course, been mirrored in Japan, as the English-language website Tokyo Weekender explains in a 2022 article:
The Legatum Prosperity Index, which comprehensively assesses social and economic wellbeing across the globe, puts Japan in the top 20 most prosperous nations worldwide. Its social capital rating, however, which “measures the strength of personal and professional relationships”, ranked it 143rd out of 167 countries. The result, so incongruent with the rest of Japan’s scores as to be wildly anomalous, is an indictment of its ability to foster meaningful interpersonal relationships.
A relatively small survey conducted by cybersecurity outfit Kaspersky, which looked at the connection between technology and loneliness, showed that 55.6 percent of Japanese respondents reported feeling lonely before the pandemic began. A larger study released in January this year suggested that loneliness (unsurprisingly) remained fairly high post-Covid across all age groups. These qualitative surveys align with data from the OECD Better Life Index, which consistently puts Japan below average in the Community and Work-Life Balance verticals.
Religiously minded pundits in America have frequently predicted that this crisis would resolve itself through the revival of organized religion. However, at least in the States, this has not manifested. Instead, Pew Research Center claims that “decline of Christianity in the U.S. has slowed, may have leveled off” in their February 2025 Religious Landscape Study report. Their summary of the study’s findings reads as follows:
The latest RLS, fielded over seven months in 2023-24, finds that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians. That is a decline of 9 percentage points since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007.
But for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range.
Most of the other categories, including the religiously unaffiliated and religious non-Christians, had also changed very little over the previous half a decade, with the former essentially unmoved and the latter rising by only around a percentage point.
Japan’s attitudes towards religion are possibly more dire, with distrust towards organized religion in general rising substantially among the younger generations. The site Nippon.com writes in a 2023 article:
A survey looking at attitudes toward religion in Japan was recently conducted by the Tokyo temple Tsukiji Honganji. Of the 1,600 people targeted, when asked if their views of religion had changed in the past one to two years, 39.7% said that they felt increased distrust. Notably, around 50% of women aged from their late teens through their forties had this feeling.
What this tells us is that, despite the plague of loneliness seemingly brought about by modern conditions, people in developed countries are not seeking solace and community in established religions, and in general it appears that shifts in religiosity are far harder to predict than some may expect.
In light of this, it’s clear that Buddhism must evolve to address modern circumstances and overcome the fear of religion, yet how exactly this can be accomplished is a question no one has, as of yet, been able to sufficiently answer. Western Buddhist and Buddhist-adjacent movements have been the most extreme in their adaptation of the Buddha-dharma, but it does not seem to have earned them a significant influx of converts in recent history.
It has, in many cases, led to the Buddha-dharma being bastardized to fit within non-Buddhist frameworks like Psychology or New Age beliefs, but adherents to these are not “Buddhists” in any substantial sense, and while there are “Buddhist Churches” and “Dharma Centers” that ostensibly teach actual Buddhism, they are still mired in the baggage of late 20th century progressivism; indefinitely trapped in a kind of Boomer samsara.
In order to determine how we can push Buddhism toward new horizons, we must next examine how Buddhism evolved once it reached Western shores and, more importantly, where its evolutionary trajectory went astray.
Thank you all very much for reading.
To be continued in Volume 2…
This has got to be a book at some point