"We call many of these religious movements something genuinely new, but ...."

In my previous post I looked at J. Gordon Melton's 2007 article on "New New Religions" ("What is wrong in some societies where new religions are relatively absent?"). In that post I also included a table listing some of the major "new religions" that have appeared in Japan since 1925. That table was drawn from a collection of essays by Susumu Shimazono titled From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Trans Pacific Press, 2004). In a review of that collection, Daniel A. Metraux (a religion scholar of some note in his own right) describes Shimazono as "one of the foremost scholars of the contemporary religious scene in Japan." Metraux's whole review is available online here: http://www.globalbuddhism.org/6/metraux05.htm.

In this post I want to call attention to the fact that Shimazono has raised serious doubts about just how "new" the so-called shin-shûkyô of Japan really are, by emphasizing both (1) the fact that real objective similarities exist between the teachings of various ancient religious traditions (especially Buddhism and Shinto) and ideas characteristic of "new spirituality movements", and (2) the fact that many proponents of these "new spirituality movements" subjectively feel a very strong affinity to ancient traditions (especially Buddhism). In discussing this section in his review, Metraux appears willing to go a little further, or at least to be somewhat more direct, than Shimazono, when he (Metraux) states: "We call many of these religious movements something genuinely new, but scholars such as Shimazono correctly point out their strong roots in more traditional Buddhist or Shinto culture in Japan."

Here is the relevant section of Metraux's review of Shimazono's book:

Shimazono makes links between more traditional Buddhism and some of the New Religions and New Spirituality movements. There are concrete differences between the new spiritualism and traditional Buddhism in that some of these newer movements do not focus as much on an awareness of human suffering and lack a concept of personified agents such as God, gods, or a sacred Other. But, he notes (p. 302) that

[I]f we interpret Buddhism as a teaching that every person can undergo the Buddha’s enlightenment as one's own experience if one follows the righteous paths based on the truth, then Buddhism is rather close to the new spirituality movements and culture. Significantly, some persons involved in the new spirituality movements and culture are so sympathetic to Buddhism that they consider their own quest in the new spirituality movements and culture as merely a new evolution of Buddhism for the contemporary world.

This last point is well argued and most interesting. We call many of these religious movements something genuinely new, but scholars such as Shimazono correctly point out their strong roots in more traditional Buddhist or Shinto culture in Japan. To get back to the Soka Gakkai, there are those who assert that the Soka Gakkai is not a real "Buddhist movement," but Shimazono's chapters on the Gakkai, as well as Reiyukai and other Lotus Sutra-based New Religious Movements (NRMs), indicate that many of the most popular of these groups are indeed very Buddhist in their orientation — and quite traditionally Buddhist at that.

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