A Medieval Doctrine on Trial in the Twentieth Century

Beginning in the 1980s a group of Japanese scholars working under the banner of Critical Buddhism, principally Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro, argued that original enlightenment thought functioned as an ideology of unquestioning affirmation, one that by declaring the world already perfect as it stands gave religious cover to existing social hierarchy and specifically to Buddhist institutions' historical entanglement with caste-like discrimination against burakumin communities in Japan. Jacqueline Stone's history takes the criticism seriously enough to test it against the medieval sources directly and reports that the textual record does not support treating hongaku thought as having been used, at the time, as an explicit argument for accepting social rank or political rule; the absolute affirmation it taught was aimed at a metaphysical claim about buddhahood rather than stated as a claim about social order. What is easier to establish is hongaku's influence on the new Buddhist movements founded during the Kamakura period by monks trained inside Tendai, Honen, Shinran, Dogen and Nichiren among them, each of whom scholars read as answering the doctrine in a different direction, whether by radicalizing its implications or by building a practice discipline meant to correct what they took to be its complacency.