tention to the relationships among martial arts, religion, and spiritual de-
velopment in premodern Japan.Modern Theories of Religion and Martial Arts
Jonathan Z. Smith provocatively notes that religion “is a category imposed
from the outside on some aspect of native culture” (1998, 269). Nowhere
is this fact as well documented as in Japan, where a traditional Japanese
word for religion did not exist. The concept of religion was forced on Japan
during the 1860s by diplomats who employed the theretofore rare Chinese
Buddhist technical term shûkyô [3] (roughly, “seminal doctrines”) in
treaties written to guarantee freedom of religion (shûkyô wo jiyû [4]) for
newly arrived foreign Christians. Significantly, this occurred just as the term
religionwas beginning to lose its exclusively Christian connotations in the
West. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, European universities
inaugurated the academic study of religions (in German, Religionswis-
senschaft) to create a new framework independent from Christian theology
for the analysis of common elements of evolution in myths, in propitiation
of gods and ghosts, in social rituals, in taboos and norms of behavior, in
sect organizations, and in psychological aspects of those elements. The
founding generation of scholars approached this new field of research from
a wide range of academic perspectives, but on the whole they shared sev-
eral common beliefs: in scientific progress, in the universality of religion, in
the common origin of religion, and in the evolution of religion through var-
ious stages beginning with the primitive and concluding, depending on the
orientation of the scholar, either with Christianity or with secular science.
Belief in the universality of religion forced secular scholars to attempt
to draw a distinction between the specific historical features of any partic-
ular religion and the general essence shared by all religions, which they
then attempted to define. By the beginning of the twentieth century, schol-
ars had postulated more than fifty competing definitions of religion, each
one more or less useful in accordance with a given focus of study, theory of
origin, or evolutionary scheme. As secular academic approaches asserted
ever greater authority over explanations of the objective aspects of religion
(e.g., historical accounts of scriptures, anthropological explanations of rit-
uals, sociological theories of sectarianism), theologians and religious
thinkers increasingly began to define the essential essence of religion in psy-
chological terms as belief or experience—subjective realms lying beyond
the reach of secular empirical critique. This conceptual separation of inner
psychological essence from the external forms of religious life (e.g., ritual,
dogma, institutions, history) laid the foundation for the popularization in
the West of romanticized notions of Zen.
Japan also redefined itself during the latter half of the nineteenth cen-474 Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan