Beyond Engaged, or, How to meditate with a hammer: Radical Buddhism as history, concept and provocation
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building
- Room
- R201
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
Several decades before the emergence of Socially Engaged Buddhism out of the work of Asian Buddhist leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh and the XIVth Dalai Lama, some Buddhists in Asia had already dedicated themselves to the following hybrid proposition: Buddhists have heretofore adjusted to the world (of suffering); the point is to change it!
Standing out among these was Seno’o Girō (1889–1962), founder of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (YLRB; in Japanese: Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟), modern Japan’s most significant experiment in the application of radical political ideas such as socialism, anarchism, and communism to Buddhism, and vice versa. Anti-capitalist, anti-militaristic and antiimperialist— at a time when it was risky to be even one of these things—Seno’o and his young comrades sought nothing less than a “Buddhist revolution.”
The YLRB was forcibly suppressed in late 1936, and its leaders, including Seno’o, arrested, incarcerated and forced to “confess” their crimes against the imperial state. And yet, the legacy of Seno’o and the YLRB remains one that we can, and must, wrestle with, since many of the “wicked problems” he faced—poverty, inequality, racism, war—have remained very much with us, while others, such as climate change, pose new challenges for us a species. In this talk, I use Seno’o’s work to examine both the prospects and problems of “radical Buddhism” today.
About the speaker
James Mark Shields is Professor of Comparative Humanities and Asian Thought at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA). He works at the intersections of modern Buddhist thought, Asian and comparative philosophy, Buddhist ethics and political theory. He is author of Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought (2011), Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (2017), and co-editor of Teaching Buddhism in the West: From the Wheel to the Web (2004), Buddhist Responses to Globalization (2013), and The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics (2017). His current projects include a digital portal on the topic of radical Buddhism and a biography of Japanese Buddhist socialist Seno’o Girō (1889–1962).
Attending the event
This event is free and open to all.
- Organiser: SOAS Centre for the Study of Japanese Religion and Centre of Buddhist Studies
