Some Reflections on Critical Buddhism

Abstract

THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT known as (hihan Bukkyo wJ~f#LM ) began around the mid-1980s in Soto Zen circles, led by Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro, both Buddhologists as well as ordained Soto priests. Since then it has indeed raised storm waves on the normally placid waters of Japanese academic Buddhist studies. Criticism alone is Buddhism, declares Hakamaya, by which he means the critical discrimination of truth from error. Aggressively normative, Critical Buddhism does hesitate to pronounce on what represents true Buddhism and what does not. By its definition, Buddhism is simply the teachings of non-self (andtman) and dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada). Many of the most influential of Mahayana ideas, including notions of universal Buddha nature, tathagata-garbha, original enlightenment, the nonduality of the Vimalakirti Sfitra, and the absolute nothingness of the Kyoto school, are all condemned as reverting to fundamentally non-Buddhist notions of dtman, that is, substantial essence or ground. Thus they are to be rejected as not Buddhism-the pruning of this volume's title. At stake is merely a claim about doctrinal correctness but a reform of Buddhism's social role. For Critical Buddhists, the proposition that all things participate in an innate, original enlightenment, far from being egalitarian, has in fact engendered and perpetuated social injustice by sacralizing the status quo. The present volume both examines the issues raised by Critical Buddhism and introduces to a Western readership the major points of

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.