ABSTRACT
New Buddhism covered a wide range of issues, including research on Buddhist origins, historical studies of religion, original poems, translations of articles on Western religions, and discussions of the Russo-Japanese War and the problem of religious missionaries in China and Korea. In the West, a number of scholarly works of the past few decades have sought to elucidate "Buddhist modernism" as a general category of thought and practice. Watanabe Kaikyoku soon began to put his thoughts developed in Europe on Buddhist social activism into practice. Despite strong links with a number of socialists, Christian, Unitarian, and otherwise, the leading members of the New Buddhist Fellowship were reluctant to throw their hat entirely into the ring for socialist revolution—mainly due to their reluctance to adopt a purely "materialist" perspective—a hesitation that finds clearest expression in a critique of their socialist peers.
