ABSTRACT
Underlying all of the specific targets of the Critical Buddhists lays a more pervasive, fundamental source: topicalism for which Matsumoto employs a Sanskrit neologism, dhatu-vada a mode of understanding, expressing and living religiously in terms of mysticism and appeals to harmony and unity at the expense of discrimination, logic, and criticism. This is in turn based on an assumption of topos as a singular place or locus which gives rise to a plurality of phenomena. In order to flesh out the meaning of topicalism, a more extensive analysis of Critical Buddhism with respect to the issue of religious syncretism, the doctrines of Buddha-nature and original enlightenment, and Nishida's conception of 'pure experience' is necessary. The main reason for Hakamaya and Matsumoto's disdain for topicalism, whether Buddhist or otherwise, stems from their suspicion of an inherent and inevitable link between a philosophy or religious system based on a foundational 'locus' and socio-political ideologies of discrimination, exclusion and authoritarianism.
