The New Buddhism.
In our day and time, Japanese Buddhism, in the presence of aggressive Christianity, is out of harmony with the times, and the needs of forty-one millions of awakened and inquiring people; and there are deep searchings of heart. Politically disestablished and its landed possessions sequestrated by the government, it has had, since 1868, a history, first of depression and then of temporary revival. Now, amid much mechanical and external activity, the employment of the press, the organization of charity, of summer schools of "theology," and of young men's and other associations copied from the Christians, it is endeavoring to keep New Japan within its pale and to dictate the future. It seeks to utilize the old bottles for the new vintage.
There is, however, a movement discernible which may be called the New Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins. It is democratic, optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it is hospitable to science and every form of truth. It is catholic in spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist controvertists. It is represented by earnest writers who look to natural and spiritual means, rather than to external and mechanical methods. As a whole, we may say that Japanese Buddhism is still strong to-day in its grip upon the people. Though unquestionably moribund, its death will be delayed. Despite its apparent interest in, and harmony with, contemporaneous statements of science, it does not hold the men of thought, or those who long for the spiritual purification and moral elevation of Japan.
Are the Japanese eager for reform? Do they possess that quality of emotion in which a tormenting sense of sin, and a burning desire for self-surrender to holiness, are ever manifest?
Frankly and modestly, we give our opinion. We think not. The average Japanese man has not come to that self-consciousness, that searching of heart, that self-seeing of sin in the light of a Holy God's countenance which the gospel compels. Yet this is exactly what the Japanese need. Only Christ's gospel can give it.
The average man of culture in Dai Nippon has to-day no religion. He is waiting for one. What shall be the issue, in the contest between a faith that knows no personal God, no Creator, no atonement, no gospel of salvation from sin, and the gospel which bids man seek and know the great First Cause, as Father and Friend, and proclaims that this Infinite Friend seeks man to bless him, to bestow upon him pardon and holiness and to give him earthly happiness and endless life? Between one religion which teaches personality in God and in man, and another which offers only a quagmire of impersonality wherein a personal god and an individual soul exist only as the jack-lights of the marsh, mere phosphorescent gleams of decay, who can fail to choose? Of the two faiths, which shall be victor?
[JAPANESE BUDDHISM IN ITS MISSIONARY DEVELOPMENT]
"The heart of my country, the power of my country, the Light of my country, is Buddhism."—Yatsubuchi, of Japan.
"Buddhism was the teacher under whose instruction the Japanese nation grew up."—Chamberlain.
"Buddhism was the civilizer. It came with the freshness of religious zeal, and religious zeal was a novelty. It come as the bearer of civilization and enlightenment."
"Buddhism has had a fair field in Japan, and its outcome has not been elevating. Its influence has been aesthetic and not ethical. It added culture and art to Japan, as it brought with itself the civilization of continental Asia. It gave the arts, and more, it added the artistic atmosphere.... Reality disappears. 'This fleeting borrowed world' is all mysterious, a dream; moonlight is in place of the clear hot sun.... It has so fitted itself to its surroundings that it seems indigenous."—George William Knox.
"The Japanese ... are indebted to Buddhism for their present civilization and culture, their great susceptibility to the beauties of nature, and the high perfection of several branches of artistic industry."—Rein.
"We speak of God, and the Japanese mind is filled with idols. We mention sin, and he thinks of eating flesh or the killing of insects. The word holiness reminds him of crowds of pilgrims flocking to some famous shrine, or of some anchorite sitting lost in religions abstraction till his legs rot off. He has much error to unlearn before he can take in the truth-"—R.E. McAlpine.
"There in a life of study, prayer, and thought,
Kenshin became a saintly priest—not wide
In intellect nor broad in sympathies,
For such things come not from the ascetic life;
But narrow, strong, and deep, and like the stream
That rushes fervid through the narrow path
Between the rooks at Nikkō—so he grasped,
Heart, soul, and strength, the holy Buddha's Law
With no room left for doubt, or sympathy
For other views."—Kenshin's Vision.
"For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same, my name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered unto my name, and a pure offering, for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts."—Malachi.