Syncretism and the New Thought Question

Seicho-no-Ie sets its core teaching about the unreality of suffering and the divine nature of every person beside an unusual combination of additional material: Shinto and Buddhist devotional elements and, distinctively, the veneration of ancestors, a practice standard in Japanese religious life generally but one that sits somewhat awkwardly beside a doctrine holding the phenomenal world, including presumably the ancestors' own former embodiment within it, to be less than ultimately real.

Scholars classify Seicho-no-Ie alongside Western New Thought bodies such as Unity and Religious Science on the strength of a genuine intellectual resemblance, since Taniguchi had read Christian Science and New Thought writers directly and the core teaching runs closely parallel to theirs, but this is a classification based on documented influence and resemblance rather than on any organizational descent connecting Seicho-no-Ie to the American movement, a distinction worth stating plainly rather than letting the resemblance imply a shared institutional history that does not exist. The movement has a substantial following in Brazil today, carried there through twentieth century Japanese emigration and sustained since as an independent regional branch of the movement.