DOI: 10.30792/2949-5768-2024-9-40-46
«CRITICAL BUDDHISM» AND THE PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL DISCRIMINATION IN JAPAN
Lugavtsova Alena Petrovna – Candidate of Historical Sciences, Junior Researcher at the Federal State Budgetary Institution of Science Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies SB RAS (Ulan-Ude, Russia).
E-mail: alena.karnap@mail.ru.
The article deals with the socio-ethical aspect of “Critical Buddhism”, which is one of the modern trends of Japanese Buddhist philosophy. It is shown how its ideologists attempted to find the source of social problems of Japanese society, in particular, discrimination against Burakumin (descendants of so-called “impure” castes), and ways to solve them through the prism of religious perception of Buddhism by the population of the Japanese islands, namely, the centuries-old imposition of Buddhist doctrines of “primordial enlightenment” and “Buddha nature”. It is revealed that for the ideologists of “Critical Buddhism” the very foundations of Japanese and the whole Far Eastern Buddhism, contained in these doctrines, centered in themselves false ideals contrary to the “authentic” teachings of The Buddha, and the root of the social inequality that continues to persist in Japan.
