This is my final term paper of Japanese Buddhism taught by Dr. Kieko Obuse in the first semester of 2015. In all courses I took in those years, I love this subject the most. I really learned a lot of things from the class’s massive readings, thanks to Dr. Obuse’s enthusiasm. The Japanese way of things always fascinates me.
After studying Japanese Buddhism in some details, a thought usually comes up to one who studies it, especially a student of religion, “What kind of Buddhism is that?” We encounter unexpected non-religious things in Buddhist settings, such as married priesthood, temple business, and other worldly-religious mix-ups. From the traditional point of view, we are reluctant to say that Japanese Buddhism, no matter how Buddhist it is, is a good example of Buddhism.
In the framework of doctrinal perspective, we cannot go beyond this pejorative conclusion. In order to make some more sense from what is going on there, we must change the way we look at it. The concept of secularization may be a good point to start. In the essay, I will look Japanese Buddhism, or Japanese religion in general, through the lens of secularization theory. Although I am not fully confident that it will be successful, at least I hope it will bring us some new perspective.
Before we go any further, I must make it clear from the outset what I mean by ‘religion.’ I do not intend to propose a definite or comprehensive description of religion here. I just define my operative definition which I find it relevant to Japanese context. This definition is not my own but comes from Melford Spiro who defines ‘religion’ as “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.”
By ‘institution’ he means anything we designate ‘religion’ onto. And ‘interaction’ is whatever activity that has putative value system related to superhuman beings. Obviously, what Spiro really means by ‘religion’ has many things to do with superhuman beings (It is in the same line of the classic Tylor-Frazerian definition). This is the central point of his definition, and I will also use this implication when I talk about religion or religious things.
This essay does not deal with whether the definition given is relevant to Buddhism or not. It is another issue which not relates to the topic and goes beyond the scope of our discussion. I just state my intended meaning and draw the boundary of my framework. However, some twist can be found toward the end.
What is secularization?
The term ‘secularization’ was used for the first time in the Peace of Westphalia, the end of Thirty Years’ War in 1648, to mean “the change in statute of certain ecclesiastical territories that were being added to Brandenburg as compensation for its territorial losses.” To put it simpler, it means the transfer of territories previously under the control of priests to lay political authorities. This particular use corresponds in some sense of the general use in later time. The term implies two poles of power, one is the church and another is the secular. Secularization is therefore characterized by a shift of control or importance from the religious pole to the secular one. This process is conspicuous in many Christian countries nowadays, which the church once had dominating power.
However, different scholars define secularization in different ways. To Bryan Wilson, secularization essentially relates to “a process of decline in religious activities, beliefs, ways of thinking, and institutions that occurs primarily in association with, or as an unconscious or unintended consequence of, other process of social structure change.” He also gives us a briefer version, “secularization is the process in which religious consciousness, activities, and institutions lose social significance.”
N. J. Demerath III puts it this way: “Secularization is the process by which the sacred gives way to the secular, whether in matters of personal faith, institutional practice, and political power. It involves a transition in which things once revered become ordinary, the sanctified becomes mundane, and the otherworldly loses its prefix.” And Karel Dobbelaere defines the term in a more functional and a bit confusing way; secularization is “a process by which the overarching and transcendent religious system of old is reduced in modern functionally differentiated societies to a subsystem alongside other subsystems, losing in this process its overarching claims over these other subsystems.”
I will digest and make some sense out of these descriptions. Secularization is a process. This means there is a change from one state or circumstance to another; and the direction of change is toward a less religious condition. By my definition which religion relates to supernatural power, this means that the notion of superhuman beings or the transcendent loses its grip over people’s consciousness. The process can occur in all levels: personal concern, organization, and the whole society. If we see religion as a part of society, or a subsystem in Dobbelaere’s words, this process reduces its privilege over other parts of society. From this understanding, we can see some relevant causes and consequences of secularization.
At social level, the increasing of specialization of functions and roles in structural differentiation reduces the influence of religion over other social institutions. By this line of reason, we can say that secularization is a result of modernization.
One of major tenets of modernization theory is that societies develop on different degrees and patterns of social differentiation and reintegration of structural and cultural components, which are functionally compatible for the maintenance of society. To put it simpler, in modern societies people are divided by their functions or specialization into social classes. This differentiation develops different subsystems, such as economy, polity, science, education, religion, and so on. While other subsystems do their particular functions, religion, once has an overarching power, loses its dominating function and significance to other subsystems.
At organizational level, while religion gives way to secular specialization, at the same time, religious institutions are increasingly influenced by values and standards that prevail in the secular society. When religion loses its supernatural function, religious institutions must struggle for their survival. This entails a change in organizational strategy in order to compete with other social subsystems, and this also opens a space for new forms of religion (NRMs) to emerge. World-rejecting religions become more world-affirming. The level of transcendence is lowered near to mundane, or great transcendences which refer to the state beyond everyday life become intermediate transcendences in here and now.
At personal level, secularization can come from rationalization. I use rationalization not in the way sociologists use it (typically by Max Weber) but simply to mean ‘rational thinking.’ With advancement in science, people think more in term of cause and effect using naturalistic rationality. This makes people have less faith in supernatural power. Science offers a more reliable way to make things happen. Religion then loses its appeal in personal concern. With this development, religious observances cease to be obligatory to members of society and become entirely voluntary. For some person, religion still has some meaning but it works mainly in personal sphere—religious affair is partitioned into each individual concern. Sociologists also call this compartmentalization.
Let us briefly talk about theories of secularization. Generally, there are two theories from sociologists of religion concerning the contemporary religious situation: (1) decline theory, and (2) permanence theory. The distinction between the two is whether religion can decline and disappear eventually; the former says ‘yes’ the latter ‘no’.
The former view has an empirical orientation, defining religion primarily in terms of its social forms and emphasizing the fact that its traditional functions are now being taken over by other agencies, such as the government, science, etc. The most typical representative of this stance is Bryan Wilson, as we have seen in his definition above—secularization is a loss of religious significance.
On the other hand, permanence theory instead stresses the function of religious symbol systems and adopts an interpretive approach. Robert Bellah may be the best representative of this view. He says “What is generally called secularization and the decline of religion would in this context appear as the decline of the external control system of religion and the decline of traditional religious belief. But religion, as that symbolic form through which man comes to terms with the antinomies of his being, has not declined, indeed, cannot decline unless man’s nature ceases to be problematic to him.” In this view, the old forms of religion undergo change and the new forms emerge to do the same function.
Some scholars like Thomas Luckmann and Richard Fenn see that under the process of secularization religion remains important as a phenomenon of the ‘private sphere.’ Whereas Robert Bellah proposes his thesis on ‘civil religion’ which traditional religious systems being replaced by the functional alternative of national or civil symbol systems as sacred legitimations of the social order.
Secularization in Japan
As we have seen so far, secularization or the process of a shift from religious domination to the secular can correspondingly explain the Western world, especially Christian countries. How about Japan? Bryan Wilson sees the term is inappropriate to Japan, “where diverse, loosely related, symbiotic religious traditions never constituted anything remotely equivalent to the ‘age of faith’ of Christian Europe.” Still, he says Japan is eligible for secularization, because now the emperor is no longer divine; most Japanese are only loosely attached to Buddhist temples or Shintō shrines; ancestor worship has sharply declined in recent decades; and in the houses of young people, both the god-shelf (kamidana) and the memorial altar (butsudan) have become less common.
However, this is not the whole story. The magico-religious dispositions of the Japanese are still far from eclipsed. Various magical practices continue in healing, fortune-seeking, and propitiatory acts, some of them institutionalized by the temples or in new religious movements.
Winston Davis gives us a similar picture. In one sense, religion in Japan really declines. He encountered some Japanese who assured him that there was no longer such a thing as religion in Japan. He also shows evidences that religious belief in Japan has declined since World War II, and among the believers there is a low level of commitment to specific beliefs. But, those who call themselves “unbeliever” or “indifferent to religion” continue to do religious things. Religion for the Japanese is not about belief. It is about praxis (shugyo) and feelings (kimochi) as Davis remarks.
That is why he seems to see that applying secularization concept on Japanese culture, in which the sacred and the profane are not understood as categorical opposites, is problematic. We can find the sacred within the profane commonly in Japanese context. For example, the phase “to become a Buddha” (hotoke ni naru) means simply “to die.” When someone dies, he becomes a kami automatically. And the most conspicuous example of this mix in Buddhist setting is married priesthood.
Now we have two contrasting pictures of Japanese religiosity: one follows the pattern of modernity that people have less religious concern; another is in the other way round, while many people admit themselves as a non-believer, they readily respond to formal religious behavior, such as wedding and funeral. As Winston Davis notices it, well-educated people from higher income families who may score badly on religious belief are generally the most scrupulous in their performance of these public rituals. Furthermore, the burst of new religious movements (NRMs) after World War II also tells us that the Japanese are not really less religious. This seems to us the two theories of secularization, decline and permanence, are useless to explain Japanese religiosity, and maybe also the whole idea of secularization itself. How do scholars in Japan studies deal with it?
The term ‘secularization’ has its Japanese transliteration as sezokuka, first taken up by Christian academic circles. Noriyoshi Tamaru defines the term loosely as “some sort of change from religious to a non-religious, or from a sacred to a secular (profane) mode of being.” In Buddhist terminology both se and zoku are used to designate the ordinary, daily sphere of life in distinction from the properly religious one, for instance, lay people in contrast to monks (sō) who have renounced the world.
According to Ichirō Hori, the first scholar who applies the term ‘sezokuka’ to the history of Japanese religion, tendency toward secularization had appeared in an early stage of the development of Buddhism in Japan. Buddhism, a religion with a very high degree of anti-secularism, had become subservient to secular powers. This reflects the nature of Japanese religion (in the boarder sense), which from the very beginning was a “secular religion” subordinate to political values. By this reason, it is by no means possible to trace a process of ‘secularization’ in the modern Western and Christian sense of the word. Mikiharu Ito, a Japanese scholar, concludes that the indistinguishability between the sacred and the profane in Japan makes secularization ultimately impossible.
Max Eger sees more or less in the same way. He says Buddhism has never dominated the thought and behavior of the Japanese population in the way that the Catholic Church once dominated the thought and behavior of the European. Secularization in the sense of “loss of ideological control” is irrelevant to Japanese Buddhism. Eger sees the postwar modernization of Japan entailed not secularization but instead ‘sacralization’, because after that time there were explosive emergences of new religious movements (NRMs). Also he thinks that moving toward rationality fails to explain secularization in Japan. He asserts that “the Japanese social structure is remote indeed from any concept of rationality.” He gives us intriguing examples: in politics, family ties play an important role, and parliamentary seats are often almost inherited; in education, Japanese youths must spend amazing amounts of time and energy memorizing masses of useless data so as to reproduce them at university entrance examinations. A whole book could be written on such examples of Japanese ‘irrationality.’
It seems obvious that we reach an impasse by taking ‘secularization’ route. No one sees it is the right idea to explain religiosity of Japanese people. How shall we go next?
How does Japanese Buddhism tell us about Japanese religiosity?
I will revisit some points in Japanese Buddhism which I have learned for several months briefly, and wrap up everything we have talked so far.
When Buddhism came to Japan at the first time, it served the state as a supernatural agent—to protect and promote the well-being of the state and people, not to make anyone enlightened. Buddhism for the Japanese is about magical power and worldly well-being from the first perception. When various knowledge and practices of Buddhism came (mostly from China), Buddhists branched into many sects and had many ways to speak of the Buddhist-ness. Some still held the traditional ideal of enlightenment, such as Zen schools. Some went further by changing the fundamental rules and blurring the line between monk and lay person, so came married priesthood in Jōdoshin. Japanese Buddhism really has a wide spectrum of tenets and practices. But I think various sects look different only in apparent level, beneath their colorful varieties lies a unity of something. We can call this the nature of Japanese religiosity or in short the Japanese-ness.
Jan Swyngedouw tells us “in the mind of ordinary Japanese people differentiation between the various religions at the level of doctrine has long been treated as a matter of minor importance.” In another place, he says “most Japanese have no interest in doctrinal differences and readily put ‘gods and buddhas’ on the same level.” To put it in simpler words, people do not care much what the Buddha and priests teach, they concern whether it brings what they want. Of course, sectarian Buddhism in Japan has many strands and they fight with each other, but differentiation appears only on the level of organizational structure, not on the level of culture. This is why some religious activities, such as pilgrimages and mizuko kuyō, are non-sectarian.
Swyngedouw also points out that there is no such thing as orthodoxy in Japan. He remarks further that it is the ‘religiosity’ of the Japanese that gives a kind of sacred aura to all entities that shape their daily life and make them truly ‘Japanese.’ Swyngedouw calls this kind of religiosity “religion of Japanese-ness (nikonkyū),” which makes the Japanese able to accept religious traditions of foreign origin and adapt them to fit into the pluralistic pattern of mutual tolerance and relative role-differentiation. At the core of Japanese religiosity, stands a rich variety of symbolic thinking and behaviors, and has a ‘particularistic’ nature. Swyngedouw makes this point clear by saying that “Though universalistic in origin, Buddhism was completely domesticated to serve the particularistic values of its adoptive country.”
We can see that the way Japanese people handle Buddhism from the first come up to now reflects the characteristics of Japanese people themselves. They can twist anything in order to fit their preferences. If we asked Shinran “Why do you marry?” he might say “It is in mappō (the final age of Dharma), we can’t help doing this.” It is not because the mappō made him do that, it is his expression of the Japanese-ness which many people felt in the same way with him. Therefore, married priesthood can survive and thrive in Japanese society. It is not just Shinran alone who made married priests acceptable. In the same way, some may blame the Buddhist idea of hongaku (we are already enlightened) that makes Japanese Buddhism as it is. But the way the Japanese use hongaku is exclusively a Japanese way, another expression of Japanese-ness.
How does Japanese Buddhism teach us about Buddhism as a whole? My conclusion at this point is that Buddhism is not an ideology (religion included in this sense), because it loses its original identity when merging with environment, only its name survives. It is better to see Buddhism as a technology adopted and adapted by culture to serve whatsoever purposes. If it does not work in the way we want, we just change it in a more effective way.
Does it make any sense to talk about Japanese religion at all? If we stick to my definition of religion given above, it does, but not in an exact way. It is true that no matter how modernized Japan is, many people still have supernatural and/or spiritual concern. That is because Japanese people do not separate what we regard as sacred from the everyday life, and they do not think the sacred is something special. So, this supernatural definition does not seem to fit in Japanese case, in the same way as the idea of secularization that fails completely to capture Japanese religiosity.
I think it can make more sense in terms of Durkheimian definition—religion as the society itself. People still perform formal religious rituals regardless of what they believe, because it is the way to express and stabilize their cultural identity. We can say that what we mean by religion is in fact the Japanese society itself. It turns out to be Durkheim, a dark horse, who wins. This surprises me at the end.
Notes