Abstract

From 1915–1916 there was in Kyoto a trans-national group of Buddhists named the Mahayana Association, which published an English Buddhist periodical, Mahayanist. Two members of the Mahayana Association, William Montgomery McGovern and M. T. Kirby, were among the earliest cases of Westerners ordained in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism in Japan. Kirby explored the temples of Jōdo Shinshū and the monastic life of Rinzai Zen and Theravada Buddhism in search of salvation. McGovern, on the other hand, had been searching for an alternative to Christianity, which he found unscientific and dissatisfying. He finally found Jōdo Shinshū, which he held to be the essence of Mahayana Buddhism. His understanding of Buddhism was influenced by D. T. Suzuki's version of Mahayana Buddhism. Utsuki Nishu, who helped McGovern and Kirby run the Association, joined the Theosophical Society (Adyar, India) while he was studying at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles and later helped Beatrice Suzuki run the Mahayana Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Drawing on forgotten documents discovered only recently in a Japanese temple, this paper offers a progress report on research into these documents and explores a significant but hitherto unknown side of the history of modern Japanese Buddhism.