Was bedeutet die Bewegung? What does this movement mean?
Bringt die Ost mir frohe Kunde?
Goethe, cited from “West-östlicher Divan,” on title
page of George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in
the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Knopf,
1968). Sansom, of course, was certain that the West did not need to
learn anything from the East. Does the East bring me glad tidings?
An analogy comparing Shin Buddhism—the largest, most
active, and most liberal of Japan's traditional Buddhist
institutions—to Protestant Christianity has existed for a
long time, beginning with the sixteenth century Jesuit encounter
with Japan. See Galen Amstutz,
Interpreting Amida: Orientalism and History in the Study of Pure
Land Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997). The analogy has always been distinctly limited in
scope and in important respects has also always—in the
context of all world history—remained primarily confined
to the Shin-Christian encounter. Apparently, the kind of evolution
of consciousness it indicates is historically rare. Notably, the notion of protestant has never developed
into a systematic comparative term even in religious studies. See
Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 180–1.