The Small Vehicle: The Construction of Hinayana and Japan's Modern Buddhism

Abstract:This article demonstrates how the strategic misrepresentation of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia by Japanese Buddhist intellectuals during the Meiji period was integral to the emergence of modern Japanese Buddhism. This strategy, which painted the Buddhism of that region as Hinayanist (and therefore inferior), hinged on three factors: First, the encounter between East Asian scholasticism and Western scholarship; second, the encounter of Japanese Buddhists with Sri Lanka's form of Buddhism; and, finally, the nationalist and colonial context within which these encounters took place. This history, I argue, demonstrates that translocal exchanges between Asian Buddhist actors were crucial in the construction of Buddhism as a world religion in general and modern Japanese Buddhism in particular.