Uchiyama Gudō [内山愚童] (1874-1911) was among the very few Sōtō Zen Buddhist priests outspoken against the Emperor System in Japan, and the outright fascist and imperial undertones surfacing the country during prewar years; fight for which his life was taken, executed at the gallows during the High Treason Incident [大逆事件]. This thin and rare book concerning Uchiyama Gudō's biography and writings is among the very few academic analysis of a manifold phenomena: the overwhelming support for war, atrocity and unquestioning submission to the state among most Buddhist institutions and individuals during this period and the following brutality in China (something our modern Western understanding of the religion may have trouble facing and explaining). While so-called State Shintō [国家神道] certainly came to be the prevailing religious instrument for the submission of minds to the military rule (to the point of also decimating Buddhist institutions in Japan), this wouldn't have been possible without the full submission of Buddhist leaders to central authority, whether reluctant or enthusiastic. This is also a great complement to Brian Daizen Victoria's two classics on the subject: Zen At War (1997) and Zen War Stories (2002).
While Brian Daizen's work emphasizes how Buddhist supporters of fascism relied on doctrinal aspects such as śūnyatā (selflessness, unquestionably filled by the will of the state), reincarnation (as justification for statu-quo and relentless work) and Bushidō, the martial way of protecting hierarchy to death and 'pay respect' to feudal institutions, Fabio Rambelli's reveals its reversal: how Gudō drew from ''modern Buddhism, socialist thought and praxis, and the Edo period Japanese tradition of anti-authoritarian political activism as exemplified by Sakura Sōgorō, Ōshio Heihachirō, and Ninomiya Sontoku (a tradition which draws, among others, upon Daoist elements and the thought of Wang Yangming)''. Given the fact that Zen Buddhism actually inherits much from Daoism and its emphasis on self-reliance and spontaneous development of life and action, Gudō's synthesis came way closer to Zen in that ''Both claimed that every member of society must labor physically to secure his or her living and that an ideal society would have no need for government'', as exemplified in the Zhuangzi or the Tao Te King. Also, unlike imperial appropriations of Buddhism, Gudō's blend of religion and politics was deeply personal and heartfelt, not systematic nor absolute in nature: his oeuvre is not a manual nor a philosophical system, but rather fragmentary articles and leaflets with a quite limited reach.
Uchiyama Gudō's life began as his father's: producing beautiful, serene wooden-carved Buddhist images (some of which, as this one, exist to this very day) by hand, and teaching Buddhism within a small peasant's district, where the exploited and illiterate country folk awakened his thirst for a more just society. While Marx and Engels's influence delayed its reach to Japan, older forms of socialism and communitarianism were being discussed: Christian socialism, Russian populism or the Anglo-Saxon libertarians, along with the ancient systems of communal existence and field property of Japanese origin, best represented by Andō Shōeki. He often quotes Śākyamuni, Diogenes and Jesus Christ. In 1904, a column first appeared on the socialist Heimin Shinbum [平民新聞]:
Mr. Uchiyama Gudō (Hakone, Sagami Prefecture): As a Buddhist preacher, these are the golden words that constitute the basis of my religious faith, namely, ''All sentient beings have buddha-nature'', ''This Dharma is undifferentiated and there is no high and low on it'', and ''All sentient beings are my children''. When I discovered that what socialism says is in perfect accord with these maxims, I became a believer in socialism.
Another important movement in which Gudō took part in was the muga no ai [無我の愛] (Selfless Love) movement, which emphasized compassion, and a conscious take of contact with the oppressed and dispossessed. With strong scriptural support, it developed into a mutual-aid theory ''not very distant from ideas of mutual aid put forth various socialist and anarchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1805-1865) and Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), which were also a reaction against contemporary social Darwinism that emphasized force, coercion and selfishness''. Gudō's take was revolutionary: land cannot be conceived as property but rather cultivated in common, the state should be abolished (since war and taxation overwhelmingly target the poor, and justice can be administered by the community), only direct democracy is conceived as indeed democracy (the notion of ''leadership'' or ''representatives'' is seen as unnatural and pernicious) and must be exercised within the family, the women are seen as equally human and valuable as men, and they must be free to work the way they prefer, or marry whoever they want, collective funds must be created in municipalities for healthcare, disaster relief or work insurance, a free and permanent education system must exist. All these principles were, according to him, inspired by the example of the shanga or ''community'' of Buddhism, in origin closeted self-organised systems which worked as a miniature society without personal property nor money (both rejected by Śākyamuni).
Various authors have indicated that the constitution of the shanga is essentially democratic and republican, if not quite socialistic. It is characterized, among other things, by its prohibition against private property, common ownership of property, communal life, and decisions based on collective deliberation. In East Asia in particular, millenarian revolts were sometimes inspired by Buddhist teachings, and some radical movements had libertarian and anarchist components.
Uchiyama Gudō remains among the few who defended expanding this model to an entire society, therefore destroying its false national fabric and dissolving it into smaller human communities, where people could take care of their own way of life and work. Institutions such as the army, the police, the Emperor System and many others were obviously obstacles to such a realization, and Gudō, after long reflection, questioned himself about the value of non-violent action, engaging in correspondence around the subject with his socialist acquaintances at Heimin Shinbum such as Shūsui Kōtoku [秋水 幸徳]: ''It is true that I agreed with Kōtoku's theory of violent revolution, but I did think it was still too soon for that. I mean, in such a time of police interference it was impossible to carry out spoken and written propaganda in the open; rather, I believed that it was strategically preferable for the unfolding of our mission to make propaganda through secret publications and gather many comrades in that way''. Gudō's statements were indeed incendiary and illegal, but while sympathizing with his comrades' plights (arbitrary detentions, anti-socialist propaganda, violent crushing of worker unions, policial censorship of meetings and publications), he consistently defended propaganda over violence, also deeming it more effective as a teacher himself. Nevertheless, that correspondence was also illegal, and thus he was arrested on 1909. His common remarks and fierce critique of the Emperor System were also illegal since Meiji (The Imperial Restoration was focused on making the Emperor, as head of the nation, completely invulnerable to criticism), and often went like this:
The head of the government, the emperor, is not divinely descended, as state propaganda maintains, but rather a descendant of murderers and thieves from a remote corner of Kyushu.
Calling him also a ''burglar behind the mask of God'', Gudō's (fair) remarks were deemed inflammatory and conspirational, and he was sentenced to death along with Kōtoku, anarchofeminist Sugako Kanno and many others. While some other Buddhist priests were initially charged, only Gudō was hanged among them; some reports picture him entering the execution chamber so serene, the guard bowed before him. Yet, Gudō was in pain: in June 1910, before the year of his execution, the Sōtō Zen sect deprived him of Buddhist priesthood as a punishment for insulting the Emperor. It took years of war ahead, American occupation and decades of mutism until he was symbolically restituted his status on 1993, along with an issued apology. Such a delay is frightful, considering that many older heads of the sect died happily condemning Gudō's resistance to oblivion, and Brian Daizen Victoria inquires about its deep underlying motives, part of a whole array of Japan's nationalistic movements trying to erase not only reparations but the whole memory of the war years and its genesis from the collective memory.
Zen Anarchism contains a first half divided into two chapters, (biography and approach to his intellectual formation) and a second half, including translations of his works: ''Vademecum for the Soldiers in the Imperial Army'', ''Anarchism and the Repudiation of Morals'', ''Anarchist Communist Revolution'', ''Common Consciousness'', ''Fragment from a prison manuscript'', ''To the Conscripts'', ''Anti-Moral Consideration''. While of course political in nature, Uchiyama Gudō's writing is striking, and filled with a mystical, fin de siècle romantic sensibility adorned by both references to the sutras and a simplicity typical of a village teacher writing on short leaflets. It is also to his merit that he reached modern conclusions on his intuition of socialism, as a mutual aid-free association movement achieved by a democratic vanishing of the state and military power, short before the Russian Revolution led to a fairly opposite model in which few of the Marxist premises were effectibly archieved. But beyond his socialism, is his human compassion and courage that set him apart from most Japanese religious and political figures at the time. Part of a slim yet existent antiwar movement, denouncing superstition and upholding truth and human rights, he became a martyr to real democracy who only recently has got any recognition. It is ironic that Buddhism has come to be known mainly because of authors such as Teitaro Suzuki [鈴木大拙], openly nationalist and prowar Buddhist author during wartime and later introducer of Buddhist studies to the West and to the beatnik movement. While being a prolific intellectual in the field of religious philosophy, as Keiji Nishitani [西谷 啓治], both of them supported war while being aware of the massacres in Chinese territory, and held hands with the also tainted Martin Heidegger on different occasions after the conflict. Meanwhile, austere Uchiyama Gudō, from a humble origin and a peasant village, unknown to academia, voluntarily went into oblivion for an entire century in order to hold his humanity and right to freedom of thinking.
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