"Only Shinran will not betray us": Takuechi RyÅ'on (1891-1967), the Åtani-ha administration, and «burakumin»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".