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Borrowing From Every Tradition It Touched

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Borrowing From Every Tradition It Touched

Seimei no Jisso does not stay inside one inherited religious vocabulary, and that is by design rather than accident. Taniguchi drew on Shinto reverence for a divine, harmonious order running through the natural world, on Buddhist concepts of an ultimately unreal phenomenal realm, and on ideas he encountered from Christian Science and the broader international New Thought movement, weaving all three into a single teaching rather than presenting them as separate influences to be kept apart.

The central claim that emerges from that blend is that illness, poverty and suffering belong to the phenomenal world, the realm of appearances, rather than to a person's true nature, which the teaching holds is already perfect and already whole. A follower's task is not to fix a broken self but to recognize a wholeness that was never actually damaged, a formulation close enough to Christian Science's own teaching on the unreality of illness that the connection is not incidental.

What makes Seicho-no-Ie distinctive within that wider family of related movements is less any single idea than the specific combination, an explicitly Japanese religious sensibility carrying claims that arrived from American and European sources, refitted into a teaching that reads, in Taniguchi's own presentation, as a single coherent system rather than an assembly of borrowed parts.

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Seimei no Jisso (Truth of Life)
Masaharu Taniguchi
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