STUDIES OF RELIGION IN JAPAN AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Shoto Hase Many people think that philosophy of religion, unlike descriptive studies of religion, takes a normative standpoint and has no point of ‘refer- ence’ to serve as a foundation for objective knowledge. Such a restrictive understanding of this eld does not apply to philosophy of religion in Japan, however, where investigations into religions have habitually been based on questioning as to the source from which, or through what kind of reality, examinations should be conducted. In other words, the fundamental issue of the philosophy of religion in Japan has been to explain what the point of ‘reference’ is. Joachim Wach has argued that the philosophy of religion does not have any reference.1 According to him, Religious Studies as a discipline examines religions from a descriptive viewpoint, on the basis of facts. The philosophy of religion, on the other hand, stipulates what religions should be from a normative viewpoint, according to rationality. The difference between these two viewpoints is that, while Religious Studies as an empirical eld \ nds a clear referential dimension in particular facts that serve as a foundation for scienti c knowledge, philosophy of religion does not have such a referential dimension. On this ground, philosophy of religion has widely come to be regarded as taking an abstract and fundamentalist stance of prescribing the essence and meaning of religions, regardless of facts. This proposition by Wach follows the neo-Kantian tradition of de n- ing reality in an extremely narrow manner by limiting the dimension of linguistic reference to the objective reality of the empirical sciences. Even though this neo-Kantian, narrow view of reality enjoyed a period of popularity, it is well known that it has been overtaken by later trends in phenomenology, as well as by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the hermeneutical and other schools in philosophy. Thus, even though Wach’s view has been superseded, in Japan Religious Studies as a 1 Joachim Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, ed. by Joseph Kitagawa and Gregory Alles, New York: Macmillan, 1988. 268 shoto hase discipline has continued to use Wach’s paradigm for the sake of conve- nience in order to classify and understand the various divisions within the eld by determining their relative positions and relationships. It was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) as well as Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945), the central gure in the philosophy of religion in Japan, who challenged the neo-Kantian perspective. It is not an overstatement to say that after writing Zen no Kenkyu (An Inquiry into the Good),2 Nishida’s utmost effort was exerted in overcoming the limitations of the neo-Kantian view of reality and developing a more profound understanding of it. According to neo-Kantianism, the realm of meaning and value is separate from the realm of being and reality. Nishida, however, made clear that the things that had been distinguished from being and encapsulated in the realm of meaning, value, and norm are still reality, or rather a deeper reality. He therefore paid careful attention to ‘intuition’ (immediate perception) as the basis of objective knowledge, and to the ‘principle of the given’. Nishida’s exhaustive speculation concerning the view of reality cannot be overlooked, as it constitutes his philosophy of basho (place), which in turn has become the origin of his abundant religious re] ections. For the philosophy of religion, Nishida’s phenomenology meant a recovery of reality as an existing entity. The reality that Nishida’s philosophy of religion has reclaimed is inspirational, introspective, and formless, and thus cannot be seen in particularistic, empirical, or psychological phenomena. Nishida referred to it as ‘experience’, ‘awareness’, ‘will’, ‘place’, ‘nothingness’, or ‘life’, and he concentrated on pursuing it in the direction of noesis as an original referent within the philosophy of religion. Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990) regards such a reference as ‘self ’. He asserts that it is the distinctive stance of the philosophy of religion to question religions in the light of ‘present circumstances of self ’. In this case, the ‘present circumstances of self ’ does not signify a subjective and individualistic sense of self; instead, it indicates a comprehensive view of human experience that is being perceived inwardly.3 The reality that the philosophy of religion has highlighted as a refer- ence point in the examination of religions has been termed by Wilfred 2 Kitaro Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 3 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982..