Historians have often described early-twentieth-century Japanese Buddhists as ignorant of the importance of religious freedom, myopically focused on their parochial agendas, and sycophantically aligned with the state. Such depictions assume that the attitudes of a minority of elite Buddhist clerics represent majority Buddhist opinion; they also problematically treat religious freedom as a universal principle rather than a historically contingent concept subject to the conflicting claims of competing interest groups. This article highlights the contingency of religious freedom law and the diversity of its interpretation by introducing three discrete attitudes that surfaced in Buddhist responses to a controversial Bill advanced by the Japanese government in December 1899. Tracing differences between statist, corporatist, and latitudinarian interpretations of religious freedom, it shows that religious freedom is never unitary or uniform in any time or place.

中文翻译：

---

日本佛教对 1899 年宗教法案的回应中的各种宗教自由

历史学家经常将 20 世纪早期的日本佛教徒描述为对宗教自由的重要性一无所知，短视地专注于他们狭隘的议程，并且与国家结盟。这样的描述假设少数精英佛教神职人员的态度代表了大多数佛教观点。他们也有问题地将宗教自由视为一项普遍原则，而不是受制于相互竞争的利益集团相互冲突的主张的历史偶然概念。本文通过介绍佛教对 1899 年 12 月日本政府提出的一项有争议的法案的回应中出现的三种不同态度，强调了宗教自由法的偶然性及其解释的多样性。