  Citation: Mattice, Sarah. 2022. Shinran as Global Philosopher. Religions 13: 105. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel13020105 Academic Editor: Jeffrey L. Richey Received: 5 December 2021 Accepted: 14 January 2022 Published: 21 January 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article Shinran as Global Philosopher Sarah Mattice Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL 32224, USA; s.mattice@unf.edu Abstract: Gutoku Shinran 愚禿親鸞 (1173–1263) is one of Japan’s most creative and influential thinkers. He is the (posthumous) founder of what ultimately became J ¯ odo Shinsh ¯ u, better known today as Shin Buddhism, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan. Despite this, his work has not received the global attention of other historical Japanese philosophical figures such as K ¯ ukai 空海 (774–835) or D ¯ ogen 道元 (1200–1253). The relationships of influence between Shin Buddhism in general—or Shinran’s work more specifically—and earlier Chinese sources, especially non-Buddhist sources, are complex, rarely examined in much detail, and often buried under layers of interpretive difficulties, made all the more challenging for contemporary Anglophone scholars by the ways in which Shin Buddhism has been marginalized in much of the philosophical scholarship on East Asian traditions. Exploring his work through a lens of connection to the broader Chinese philosophical landscape reveals new insights, both for our understanding of Shinran’s philosophical project, and for contemporary comparative engagement across East Asian traditions, helping to resituate Shinran as a globally significant philosopher. Keywords: Shinran; comparative philosophy; hermeneutic failure 1. A History of Hermeneutic Failures Outside of Japan, Pure Land Buddhism in general, and Shin Buddhism in particular, have not received a great deal of philosophical scholarly attention. Dennis Hirota argues that there are two main reasons for this marginalization of Pure Land Buddhism. The first is: the lingering assumption, vigorously asserted in the nineteenth century by Chris- tian missionaries in Japan, that Shin is not only geographically and temporally removed from ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ Buddhism but removed fundamentally in philosophical outlook and soteriology. (Hirota 2019, p. 415) In other words, one reason for the scholarly marginalization of Shin Buddhism is that it was not seen by early western scholars as “real” Buddhism. When we consider how scholars in the nineteenth century were thinking about Buddhism, this begins to make more sense. Buddhism was introduced to the West by scholars such as Charles Hardwick (1821–1859), who had this to say about it: What I intend by Buddhism is the system of metaphysical and social philosophy, organized by Shakyamuni or Gautama Buddha. Neither am I speaking here of Buddhism in its modern development, as modified by intermixtures either with the popular forms of Brahmanism, or with the older superstitions of the countries where it afterwards gained a footing: for that view of it will come more properly before us, when we pass from Hindustan to China, and the other regions where it still possesses a complete ascendancy. In different words, we shall be dealing now with a philosophy rather than with a religion. (Hardwick 1882; Masuzawa 2005, p. 127) A scholarly vision of Buddhism, imposed from this kind of starting point, would certainly struggle with Pure Land traditions, which differ in many key respects from the Religions 2022, 13, 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020105 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions