Shuyo and a Conception of Future Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the philosopher Inoue Tetsujiro argued that religion was heading toward an "ethical religion" (rinriteki shukyo). Buddhist and Christian intellectuals criticized this expectation as impractical, but they too engaged in conceiving the future of religion, as religious intellectuals participated in religious reformations. In the background was a contradiction: the separation of "education" and "religion" along with the necessity of religion for moral education. Religious reformers, therefore, while criticizing "ethical religion" as an abstraction, connected some specific religious characters (such as the Buddha) or practices like zazen with it, and created a new ethical-religious category called shuyo (cultivation). Some religious reformers and intellectuals, including Inoue, began to promote shuyo as a supra-religious alternative. In this way, a discursive space of shuyo between ethics and religion had a broad influence on Japanese people before World War II.