{"id":1002,"date":"2021-10-27T09:05:18","date_gmt":"2021-10-27T09:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2021-10-27T09:05:18","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T09:05:18","slug":"miki-kiyoshis-marxist-buddhism-the-impact-of-imagination-on-the-past-present-and-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2021\/10\/miki-kiyoshis-marxist-buddhism-the-impact-of-imagination-on-the-past-present-and-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Miki Kiyoshi\u2019s Marxist Buddhism: The Impact of Imagination on the Past, Present, and Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBut the fact that we see the imagination as a faculty peculiar to artists is probably related to the fact that we view artistic activities in particular as original creations. Our job is to elucidate the logic of imagination as a logic of historical creation, while liberating it from its restriction to the realm of beauty and broadly introducing it into the world of action.<\/em>\u201d – Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination<\/em><\/p>\n

Miki Kiyoshi, a 20th century utopian thinker who combined Marxism and Pure Land Buddhist philosophy, used the relationship between imagination and history to clarify his vision for the future of society.\u00a0 Miki\u2019s work is influenced by the Kyoto School \u2014 an intellectual movement led by thinkers who interpreted Western philosophy in the context of East Asian intellectual traditions \u2014 which lays the foundation for his conception of ideas like logos<\/em>, pathos<\/em>, and imagination.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 His novel ideas about the historical applications of imagination not only created new ways of interpreting history, but also unprecedented ways of imagining the future.<\/p>\n

In his published collection of essays, The Logic of Imagination<\/em>, Miki argues that imagination is not a purely fictional realm belonging only to artists, but a process which directly impacts the real world.2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 This is also true of myth, which he sees as the product of imagination, and whose impact on historical reality can be traced throughout history.3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 If imagination influences action, and action shapes history, then imagination must directly influence reality.\u00a0 This supports Miki\u2019s claim that, \u201cbeing human also means to exist in a particular historical context \u2014 as Miki puts it in \u2018History\u2019s Reason,\u2019 \u2018human beings do not exist outside of history; they stand within history\u2019.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 He defines human reality as grounded in historical reality, and historical reality as directly influenced by imagination.\u00a0 In her study of Pure Land Buddhism and 20th century utopian thinkers, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley argues that Miki used the imaginary utopia of the \u201cPure Land\u201d as a historical myth to help shape his Marxist vision for the future.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

According to Miki, the myth of the Pure Land belongs to the realm of imagination, but this does not negate its importance \u2014 if anything, imagination provides a conceptualisation of the future which cannot be found in reality.\u00a0 The ability to imagine a better future or a \u201cPure Land\u201d allows humans to act on this myth.\u00a0 Here, he applies Marxist theory to imagine such a future: a unified human community supported by the principles of mutual aid.6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0 Religion, which exists primarily in the human of imagination, is an internal realm, but \u201cMiki maintains that this internal experience inevitably and directly manifests socially, generating new religious phenomena or new forms of social life that are founded upon a demand for happiness and thus arc always toward utopia.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Imagination, by Miki\u2019s definition, is both a historical actor as well as a force which influences our future.<\/p>\n

  1. Masakatsu Fujita, The Philosophy of the Kyoto School<\/em>, trans. Robert Chapeskie (Singapore: Springer, 2018), vi, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-981-10-8983-1_5. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. John W.M. Krummel, \u201cIntroduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his Logic of the Imagination,\u201d Social Imaginaries<\/em> 2, no.1 (2016): 17. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Ibid., 19 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination<\/em> (Honolulu: University of Hawai\u2019i Press, 2017), 141, http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/j.ctvvmxmx. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Ibid., 148 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Ibid., 151 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. Ibid., 143 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cBut the fact that we see the imagination as a faculty peculiar to artists is probably related to the fact that we view artistic activities in particular as original creations. Our job is to elucidate the logic of imagination as a logic of historical creation, while liberating it from its restriction to the realm of … Continue reading “Miki Kiyoshi\u2019s Marxist Buddhism: The Impact of Imagination on the Past, Present, and Future”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,142,69,119],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-marxism","tag-miki-kiyoshi","tag-pure-land-buddhism","tag-utopian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1004,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}