Meiji Era

For most of Japanese history, Buddhism and the native kami cults had operated as intertwined institutions rather than separate religions, sharing precincts, priesthoods and the honji suijaku theology that treated kami as local manifestations of Buddhist deities. The new Meiji government dismantled that arrangement almost immediately after the 1868 restoration of imperial rule, issuing the shinbutsu bunri edicts ordering the separation of kami worship from Buddhist practice at shrines across the country, part of a broader project of building State Shinto as an ideology of imperial loyalty distinct from, and officially superior to, Buddhism.

A study of the religious persecution that followed the edicts describes the government's aims as much political as theological: an emperor whose authority was to be grounded in unbroken descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu needed a Shinto establishment untangled from centuries of Buddhist interpretation and institutional entanglement, and the shinbutsu bunri decree was the legal instrument that began that untangling. Shrine priests were ordered to remove Buddhist images, texts and ritual implements from shrine precincts, and Buddhist clergy who had for centuries also served shrine functions were forced to choose one institutional identity or the other, a bureaucratic separation that, once set loose in the countryside, quickly outran the government's own stated intentions.

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.