ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dialogue between Japan and India in the 1920s as it appeared in The Young East, a Japanese journal published in English between 1925 and 1931. Though its masthead declared it to be a ‘Journal of Buddhist Life and Thought’, what The Young East offered was not Buddhist philosophy but a socially and politically engaged Buddhism, one that aimed to address the problems of the modern world. The ‘Buddhist life’ of the title was an active ‘Buddhism in the world and for the world’; ‘Buddhist thought’ was the perspective of Buddhists on current world problems. The Young East was, in its aims, personnel, and networks, a continuation of the Meiji Buddhist revival that had sent the delegation to the World’s Parliament of Religions, but it was also very much a reflection of the historical context of the mid-1920s.
The dialogue took place at a time when Japan was one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations; when the government and liberal intellectuals—the journal’s founders among them—were committed to active world citizenship. They felt both a right and an obligation to assist in solving world problems, and the only hope for enduring peace, as they saw it, was in spreading the culture, philosophy, and faith of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This was not a matter of conversion, however. The Young East’s mission began with a Japan-led reinvigoration of Asia through education, social and political reform based in the principles of Eastern Buddhism—a movement already underway in Japan—to create a strong Asian regional power that could in turn exert a positive influence on the West. It aimed to create an Asian power to mediate between Europe and America. It was a mission that resonated with many and the pages of the Young East testify to strong international support. Prominent among Indian contributors was the revolutionary intellectual in exile Lala Hardayal, whose vision for social reform in India and challenging colonial rule was similarly based in an engaged, humanist Buddhism.
