The Development and Background of Kimura Ryūkan’s View of Mahāyāna Buddhism

Abstract

This paper discusses Kimura Ryūkan’s 木村龍観 views on the position of Mahāyāna Buddhism and examines the background and intentions behind them. Although his conclusions were not very groundbreaking, Kimura added a new focus on ethnicity to the study of Buddhism. Kimura attempted to combine theories already accepted in Japan with new findings in anthropology and archaeology, mainly from India, to make Japanese theories acceptable to scholars around the world. This article presents some of the intellectual exchanges that took place in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, where different agendas were intermingled.