Document Type

Contribution to Book

Source Publication

鈴木大拙を顧みる：生誕１５０年を記念して

Publication Date

Fall 10-1-2020

Editor

Shoji Yamada and John Breen

Publisher

Shibunkan

City

Tokyo

ISBN

9784784219971

First Page

57

Last Page

81

Department

Comparative Humanities

Description

In modern Western thought, pantheism remains a powerful if controversial undercurrent. Recent re-evaluations of the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) point to pantheism’s radical implications for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Pantheism (Jp. hanshinron 汎神論) also has significant valence within Japanese Buddhist modernism, particularly in the work of scholars and lay activists who articulated the outlines of a New Buddhism (shin bukkyō 新仏教) from the 1880s through the 1940s. For these thinkers, pantheism provided a “middle way” between materialism and idealism, as well as between theism and atheism. In the postwar period, lapsed radical turned Buddhist Sano Manabu further developed these connections between pantheism, Buddhism and Marxism, but Sano himself got caught in the “Hegelian trap” of attempting to dissolve contradictions and distinctions in the name of harmony, rendering his Marxist-infused Buddhist pantheism ineffective as a basis for critical resistance against the status quo. In early works such as A New Interpretation of Religion (Shin shūkyōron 新宗教論, 1896), New Buddhist Suzuki Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1962) developed a particular interpretation of “post-pantheism” as an ideal form of or approach to religion. However, while Suzuki’s post-pantheism, which can be interpreted as a phenomenological approach to religion, struggles to avoid the danger of a static, and potentially nihilistic “materialism,” it ultimately falls prey to Hegelian and Spencerian assumptions about change and “evolution.” This chapter employs Suzuki’s early work as a portal through which to dig further into the problems and possibilities of pantheism as an archetypal catchword—but frustratingly vague principle—of Japanese Buddhist modernism.

Comments

This is a Japanese translation of James Mark Shields: "From Post-Pantheism to Trans-materialism: D. T. Suzuki and New Buddhism,” in Beyond Zen: D. T. Suzuki and the Modern Transformation of Buddhism, edited by John Breen, Fumihiko Sueki and Shōji Yamada, p. 15–32., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022.

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