"Only Shinran will not betray us": Takuechi RyÅ'on (1891-1967), the Åtani-ha administration, and «burakumin»

Shin Buddhism in Japan supports human rights today because it was forced to come to terms with its own discrimination against burakumin—a Japanese minority that has experienced severe caste-like disadvantage and exclusion based on heredity, occupation, and place of birth. The majority of burakumin follow Shin Buddhism, in which they have been treated as outcastes, just as they have been within other Buddhist schools and within Japanese society as a whole. Over the course of the twentieth century, buraku advocacy groups pressured the Shin sects to respond to specific doctrinal and structural incidents of discrimination, both contemporary and historical. One of these sects, the Ōtani-ha, developed its institutional policy on this serious social problem precisely by interacting with buraku advocacy groups, both secular and sectarian, and responding to their specific criticisms.The story of this institutional struggle can be effectively told through the story of one of its priest-bureaucrats, Takeuchi Ryō'on (1891-1967). Takeuchi, who flourished in the Ōtani-ha administration from the 1920s to the 1950s, worked to alleviate buraku discrimination and put forward a Shin Buddhist theory of social engagement. Takeuchi's story reveals how a Buddhist bureaucrat and his faction—with time, personnel, and money—worked under pressure to create an ethical social policy based on Shin doctrine. In addition to examining the issue of buraku discrimination, a Shin Buddhist sect, and a member of its "middle management"—topics rarely addressed in English language Buddhist studies—this dissertation performs two important tasks. First, it describes a type of Buddhist ethical thought that is self-consciously historical and concerned with the religious organization, the "order" (kyōdan), as a whole in its actual and ideal aspects. My examination of this type of ethical thought provides a rare but important complement to scriptural, philosophical, and individualistic accounts of Buddhist ethics. Second, it challenges current scholarly models of Buddhist social engagement, or "socially engaged Buddhism," which tend to neglect the early twentieth century and large, established Buddhist groups. I find social engagement in pre-1945, large, conservative organizations, and not just in post-1960, small-scale, progressive groups. This is because social engagement is a Buddhist response to modernity itself and not tied to a particular modern political ideology.

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