James Shields on “The Moral Sensorium: Perception and Practice in the Radical Buddhism of Seno’o Girō”

This lecture marks the resumption of the TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series. It will present Seno’o Giro (1889–1961) as a key figure in the development of “radical Buddhism” in interwar Japan, noted for his engagement with socialism, critiques of capitalism, and efforts to mobilize Buddhist thought for social and ecological transformation. This paper reconsiders the thought of Seno’o Girō through an unusual but revealing lens: the senses. While Seno’o is typically read in ideological terms—whether as a Buddhist socialist, a critic of capitalism, or a transitional figure in modern Japanese religious thought—his diaries from the 1920s and early 1930s offer a more intimate archive of perception. They are filled with tactile encounters (working the soil with his hands), auditory irritations (the harsh speech of fellow prisoners), visual and aesthetic judgments (landscape preservation, bodily comportment), and even moments of quiet pleasure and frustration in meditation. Taken together, these fragments suggest that Seno’o’s radicalism was not only theoretical but deeply embodied. His turn toward a socially engaged Buddhism emerges not simply from abstract commitments to justice or doctrine, but from a cultivated attentiveness to lived experience—what might be described as an ethical sensibility grounded in the everyday. In this respect, Seno’o’s project resonates with broader currents in modern Buddhism that sought to “return” to the historical Buddha, while also paralleling the work of contemporaries such as Miyazawa Kenji, for whom sensory awareness and moral imagination were inseparable. By foregrounding the senses, this paper argues that Seno’o’s thought can be read as a form of “sensory critique” of modernity. His reflections on industrial pollution, agrarian labor, speech ethics, and the failures of both capitalist and statist systems reveal a consistent concern with how modern life distorts or dulls human perception. Against this, Seno’o advances an implicitly alternative vision: a mode of life in which ethical, social, and even political transformation begins with the refinement of perception itself. This perspective also complicates prevailing narratives about the relationship between Buddhism and socialism in interwar Japan. Rather than simply synthesizing doctrine and ideology, Seno’o reorients both around the question of how human beings experience the world— and how that experience might be reconfigured. In doing so, he offers a distinctive model of engaged Buddhism that is neither purely materialist nor idealist but rooted in what we might call a phenomenology of interdependence, grounded in the Buddhist principle of pratītyasamutpāda.

The TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series is a non-profit forum of Temple University, Japan Campus (TUJ) for the promotion of critical thinking. The lectures are free, open to the public, and feature speakers from various universities around the world. The lecture series is a great way to learn about recent research in philosophy and in the humanities as a whole.

This event is supported by TUJ Research.