The Temples That Did Not Survive

The shinbutsu bunri edicts separating Shinto from Buddhism were not intended by the Meiji government as a persecution of Buddhism itself, but the legal separation quickly became one in practice, as local officials, disaffected former shrine priests and mobs treated the decree as license to attack Buddhist institutions outright. A study of the resulting haibutsu kishaku movement, literally destroy the Buddha and discard Shakyamuni, describes temples burned or converted to secular use, Buddhist images and ritual implements melted down or destroyed, and monks forcibly laicized across the early Meiji years, with some estimates putting the number of temples lost or closed in the tens of thousands nationwide.

The intensity varied sharply by region, driven partly by local resentment of the wealth and land Buddhist temples had accumulated under the previous Tokugawa order, and partly by the new government's own early enthusiasm for a purely Shinto national ideology before more moderate voices prevailed. The state eventually reined in the worst of the destruction once its scale and disorder became clear, and Buddhism survived the era, though the institutional and material losses of the haibutsu kishaku years left permanent gaps in Japan's temple landscape, and the episode remains, in Japanese Buddhist memory, the closest the tradition came to a state-sponsored eradication in the modern period.