Uchiyama Gudō

Uchiyama Gudō (内山 愚童^?, May 17, 1874–January 24, 1911) was a Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest and anarcho-socialist activist executed in the High Treason Incident. He was one of few Buddhist leaders who spoke out against the Meiji government in its imperialist projects. Gudō was an outspoken advocate for redistributive land reform, overturning the Meiji emperor system, encouraging conscripts to desert en masse and advancing democratic rights for all. He criticized Zen leaders who claimed that low social position was justified by karma and who sold abbotships to the highest bidder.

Uchiyama Gudō learned the trade of carving wooden statues, including Buddhist statues and family altars, from his father. As a student, Uchiyama received a prefectural award for educational excellence and became influenced by Sakura Sōgorō. Uchiyama's father died when he was 16.

Gudō was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 1897 and became the abbot of Rinsenji temple amid the rural region of the Hakone Mountains in 1904, thus completing his Zen studies. According to town legend, every autumn, he distributed the harvest of the temple's trees to local families, who were generally poor. In the same year that Gudō became abbot of Rinsenji, he reflected on the Chinese sangha of his Buddhist lineage as a model of communal lifestyle without private property. By this time, he had begun to identify as an anarcho-socialist after encountering the ideology in the newspaper Heimin Shimbun. Quoting passages from the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra in the January 1904 edition of Heimin Shimbun, Gudō wrote:

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