2 Inoue Tetsujirō and the Debates on Religion and Philosophy

Abstract

One of the important landmarks of the lineage of in Japan is the course of lectures entitled Comparative Religion and Eastern Philosophy given at Tokyo Imperial University by Inoue Tetsujirō. By outlining the content of the Comparative Religion and Eastern Philosophy course, which has seminal significance in the history of religious studies in Japan, this chapter situates Inoue's ideas on comparative religion within his own career as a scholar and ideologue and in the intellectual circumstances of Japan at the time. It examines Inoue's scholarship and the ways it changed in the years just before the end of the Meiji period in 1912. The methods for researching comparative religion and original Buddhism that Inoue had brought back with him from Germany represented the up-to-date knowledge about Western research on Asia at that time. One can see how Inoue's scholarship in the 1890s served as driving force in intellectual society.Keywords: Buddhism; comparative religion; Eastern philosophy; Inoue Tetsujirō; intellectual society; Japan