Inoue Enryō’s Philosophy of Buddhism

Abstract

The chapter introduces Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) as a pioneer of the academic field of Buddhist philosophy in Japan. In his key work on this topic, Living Discourse on Buddhism, Enryō attempted to give Buddhism a philosophical foundation suited to the modern world. The chapter outlines this groundwork project and interprets its marginal reception as being due to Enryō’s ignorance of Sanskrit studies and his support of Japanese imperialism. The first generation of enlightenment thinkers of the Meiji period were convinced that the East Asian history of thought was backwards and stagnant because it lacked a culture of discussion and dissent. By revealing dialectical patterns in its genealogy, Enryō meant to prove Buddhism’s progressive philosophical character. The Buddhist doctrine of the Middle Path as it became influential in East Asia was not constructed as the avoidance of extremes but as the sublation (G. Aufhebung) of opposites. The dualisms of being and non-being, affirmation and negation were to be transcended to a higher synthesis, which is ultimately equivalent to the non-discriminative state of enlightenment. Enryō believed that the historical development of Buddhism could be reconstructed as the progressive spelling out of all possible metaphysical positions following dialectical patterns. Through this, Buddhist philosophical truth would become more and more abstract and Buddhism itself more and more encompassing. The apex of such a complete system was to be reached in the unbiased notion of the middle subsuming all possible viewpoints. Enryō mostly referred to this highest notion of Buddhism, which he believed to coincide with Hegel’s Absolute or Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable,” as “Suchness” (J. shinyo 真如).