Blending the Rivers, Loosing the Flavor: Shaku Sōen’s Ambiguous Stance on Sri Lankan Buddhism and Colonialism

This articles examines the response of the Japanese Zen master Shaku Sōen 釈宗演 (1860–1919) to his experience of British colonialism on Sri Lanka from the point of view of a global history of religions. Previous scholarship has situated Sōen in the context of the Zen school and more generally has conceptualized the formation of modern Japanese Buddhism in the framework of “from the West to the rest” theories of modernization. The present article instead builds on recent work recovering the agency of Asian actors. It demonstrates that Sōen was deeply indebted to the Sri Lankan Christian intellectual James d’Alwis (1823–78), who mediated Western influences on Sōen and conditioned his understanding of Buddhism’s potential as an anticolonial force. The article consequently shows Sōen’s thinking as arising from an entanglement of modern Japanese Buddhist politics, Western discourses on Buddhism, and, crucially, Sri Lankan Buddhist and Christian perspectives. It concludes by tracing the legacies of Sōen’s politics, especially his conception of a metaphysically grounded social equality, to explicitly totalitarian or autocratic understandings of the Japanese polity in the first half of the twentieth century.