Blending the Rivers, Loosing the Flavor – American Legacies of Japanese Buddhist Discourses on Caste, Race, and Empire

In his most popular work, *The Buddha and His Dhamma*, B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) used the image of the river entering the ocean to illustrate the nature of the early Buddhist community, entering into which every postulant lost his caste-status just as every river looses its taste upon entering the sea. Ambedkar was not the first to draw on this parable, already found in the Pāli canon, to articulate a modern Buddhist conception of social equality. Writing in 1918, the Japanese-American Buddhist minister Yemyo Imamura (1867–1932) in his pamphlet *Democracy According to the Buddhist Viewpoint* adduced the very same image of the sea to position Buddhism, through its adherence to the principle of social equality and consequent abolishment of caste, as the "perfect model of democracy."

Scholarship dating back as far as Eugène Burnouf's groundbreaking *Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien* (1844) has cast doubt on the image of the Buddha as social reformer bent on overthrowing caste. Rather than revisiting this debate, this paper proposes to undertake an investigation into how the simile of the river and the sea has been appropriated by a number of actors both Buddhist and non-Buddhist to strategically articulate modernist notions of social equality not found in the common canonical sources on which they drew. The question, in short, is not whether the pre-modern Buddhist tradition had or did not have a notion of social equality. Rather, its is how the discursive resources it provided could be adapted to various political agendas in strategically formulating such a notion. These adaptions, the paper concludes, reveal Buddhist conceptions of social equality–of race, caste, or class–to be ethically ambiguous in that historically they lent themselves both to liberatory anti-colonial politics and to the ideological justification of various forms of totalitarianism and even fascism. This ambiguity, the paper urges, needs to be reckoned with in attempts to formulate a progressive Buddhist social ethics rooted in the Buddhist traditions' intellectual legacies.

The paper focuses on the experiences of the Japanese Zen teacher Shaku Sōen (1860–1919) on Sri Lanka. Sōen arrived on Sri Lanka in 1887 in order to study Pāli and what he considered "Indian" Buddhism. Sōen was viscerally struck by the exploitative nature of the British colonial regime characterized by a violence he also saw at work in other Asian Buddhist countries under Western domination. This encounter for Sōen raised a existential question: What was Buddhism to be in a world in which it was among the subjugated?

In order to redeem the Buddhist traditions, Sōen drew on three sources. First, the Japanese understanding of the Buddhist world had undergone a dramatic transformation since the opening of the country following the 1868 Meiji Revolution. In specific, Japanese Buddhists had discovered the South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions as the Hīnayāna or "Small Vehicle." This Small Vehicle, the Japanese claimed under recourse to their own traditional doxography, was characterized by a renunciant ethics and a negative soteriology. Second, under the influence of (social) Darwinist thought and environmental determinism Japanese travelers to South and South east Asia, including Sōen, had come to view these regions' inhabitants as a race made soft and indulgent by the abundance of their natural environment so different from the climes of Japan that produced a more hardy breed of human. Third, Sōen absorbed from the Christian and colonial apologetics of the Singhalese convert James de Alwis (1823–1878) the notion, common among Victorian audiences, that Buddhism possessed a notion of social equality that elevated it above the brutish Hinduism of the Indian mainland. According to Alwis, this tendency towards equalizing class, caste, and race, which he illustrated drawing on the image of four rivers blending into the ocean of the *buddhadharma*, was both Buddhism's strength and the seed of its downfall: Buddhism had prepared Sri Lanka to be brought fully into the kingdom of Christ.

Sōen combined there three motifs into his reconceptualization of (Japanese Mahāyāna) Buddhism as a colonial religion in the sense that to overcome colonial subjugation was of constitutive concern. Sri Lankan Buddhism, Sōen argued, as the renunciant Small Vehicle, reinforced distinctions of race, caste, and class. It thereby exacerbated the inequalities of Sinhala society, dividing it against itself and making it easy prey for Western Christian-colonial avarice. Japanese Buddhism as the Mahāyāna, on the other hand, was founded on the principle of the equality of Buddha nature. Hence, it could out-equalize Christianity and transform Sri Lanka into a modern, unified nation capable, with a little help from its Japanese Buddhist friends, of throwing off its colonial yoke. In order to illustrate this principle of social equality, Sōen introduced the simile of the four rivers blending into the single flavor of the sea.

Sōen's conception of social equality grounded in Mahāyāna the metaphysics of Buddhanature soon crossed the line from anti-colonial solidarity into support for Japan's own imperialist projects. Troublingly, it is this very metaphysical structure illustrated by the simile of the rivers extinguished in the ocean that reappears in Imamura's defense of Buddhism as the "perfect model of democracy." What renders this notion of equality problematic is that it is only in their own extinguishment, in loosing their flavor, that the rivers are redeemed as equal. This ambiguous legacy, the paper concludes, should give pause when making appeals to Buddha nature in order to argue Buddhism's progressive ethical credentials.