{"id":407,"date":"2024-03-25T12:51:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T03:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/?p=407"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:22:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T02:22:38","slug":"new-information-coming-soon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/2024\/03\/25\/new-information-coming-soon\/","title":{"rendered":"TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series Vol. 12"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Shields on \u201cThe Moral Sensorium: Perception and Practice in the Radical Buddhism\u00a0of Seno\u2019o Gir\u014d\u201d<\/h2>\n

This lecture marks the resumption of the TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series. It will present Seno\u2019o Giro (1889\u20131961) as a key figure in the development of \u201cradical Buddhism\u201d 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\u2019o Gir\u014d through an unusual but revealing lens: the senses. While Seno\u2019o is typically read in ideological terms\u2014whether as a Buddhist socialist, a critic of capitalism, or a transitional figure in modern Japanese religious thought\u2014his 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\u2019o\u2019s 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\u2014what might be described as an ethical sensibility grounded in the everyday. In this respect, Seno\u2019o\u2019s project resonates with broader currents in modern Buddhism that sought to \u201creturn\u201d 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\u2019o\u2019s thought can be read as a form of \u201csensory critique\u201d 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\u2019o 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\u2019o reorients both around the question of how human beings experience the world\u2014 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 prat\u012btyasamutp\u0101da.
\nThe TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series<\/strong>\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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About the author: James Mark Shields is a distinguished philosopher and scholar specializing in modern Buddhist thought, Japanese philosophy, and comparative ethics. He is a Professor of Comparative Humanities and Asian Thought at Bucknell University, where his research focuses on the links between Buddhist philosophy, political radicalism, and modernism. He also holds roles as Director of Comparative and Digital Humanities, Faculty Director of the Bucknell Center for Sustainability & the Environment, and Affiliate Faculty in East Asian Studies and Philosophy. Website:\u00a0https:\/\/www.bucknell.edu\/fac-staff\/james-shields<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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This event is supported by TUJ Research:
\nhttps:\/\/www.tuj.ac.jp\/research\/events\/2026\/06\/15\/tuj-philosophy-lecture-series-12https:\/\/www.tuj.ac.jp\/research\/events\/2026\/06\/15\/tuj-philosophy-lecture-series-12<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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James Shields on \u201cThe Moral Sensorium: Perception and Practice in the Radical Buddhism\u00a0of Seno\u2019o Gir\u014d\u201d This lecture marks the resumption of the TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series. It will present Seno\u2019o Giro (1889\u20131961) as a key figure in the development of \u201cradical Buddhism\u201d in interwar Japan, noted for his engagement with socialism, critiques of capitalism, and … Continue reading TUJ Philosophy Lecture Series Vol. 12<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14923,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-talks","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14923"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tujphilseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}