Evola's Samurai in context

A new article places Julius Evola’s understanding of the figure of the Samurai in its Italian context. It is Michele Monserrati, “The Transnational Samurai: Nation-Building and Community for the Italian Far-Right,” Japan Review 41 (2026): 255–280, available (open access) here.

Italian interest in the Samurai started after the Japanese victory against Russia in 1905, and was initially guided by the English-language Bushido: The Soul of Japan by the Japanese nationalist Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933), which understood the Samurai ethic in terms of medieval European chivalry. Bushido was translated into Italian in 1917 but many Italians had by then reimagined the Samurai in terms of the classical Roman hero, popular among Italian nationalists. There then emerged two models of the Samurai in Italy, according to Monserrati, a Shinto-inflected model that emphasized patriotism and a Zen-oriented model that that emphasized individual spirituality. The Shinto-inflected model, which the article examines in detail, was dominant until the end of Fascism, which killed Italian militarism, leaving the field to the Zen-oriented model, of which the most important proponent (though not the first) was Evola. For Evola, “the samurai’s warrior ethos represented a potential archetype for rediscovering a lost Western tradition of heroic spiritual transformation.” He “emphasized the spiritual reawakening of the individual as a condition for the heroic gesture.” This view, writes Monserrati, subsequently became popular among the Far Right, but he spends less than a page on this.

Monserrati says he is not investigating Orientalism but what he calls “the process of cultural translation.” In this case reception was positive, though inevitably molded by the circumstances and interests of the period.

New Project on Traditionalist Approaches to East Asian Religions

Traditionalists have drawn heavily on Asian religions and their concepts, notably Islamic Sufism and Indian Vedanta, but also on East Asian religions such as Japanese Zen Buddhism and Shinto, and Chinese Daoism. They have adapted these concepts to their own intellectual framework in an Orientalist manner. 

While the South Asian and Middle Eastern connections and influences of Traditionalism have been relatively well researched, the East Asian dimension has received less attention. Figures such as Julius Evola (who produced two “translations” of the Daodejing, among others) and second-generation Traditionalist Seraphim Rose engaged substantially with East Asia. Orientalist tropes of Japanese religion and culture are conspicuous in several Traditionalist projects, living on in popular culture to this day.

The project “Traditionalist East Asia” therefore explores how Traditionalist thinkers have approached East Asia and its traditions, and how these continue to influence various religious and political discourses, sometimes in highly controversial ways, to the present day. Topics covered range from the contemporary appropriation of Zen by the Far Right and perennialist images of Japan in American counterculture to the mid-twentieth-century exchange of concepts of race and empire.

This three-year project has commenced at the University of Vienna and the University of Graz with funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project is led by Lukas K. Pokorny (University of Vienna) and Franz Winter (University of Graz). The postdoctoral researchers are Moritz Maurer (University of Vienna) and Marleen Thaler (University of Graz). The research collaborator is Davide Marino (University of Göttingen).

More on the history of the esoteric-exoteric distinction

The Swiss scholar Urs App, in his The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), gives an early instance of the esoteric-exoteric distinction that I missed in my book Western Sufism. The esoteric-exoteric distinction is, of course, central to René Guénon's Traditionalism.

In Western Sufism, I identified the analysis of Chinese religion of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) as an early example of universalism (WS, pp. 92-93), but failed to note that some of Ricci’s colleagues were adding an esoteric-exoteric framework to their understanding of Japanese religion. At abut the same time, another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), interpreted the Buddhist doctrine of the “two truths” into something approaching the esoteric and the exoteric, starting a tradition of interpretation of Japanese religion that leads us to Leibniz and then perhaps to John Toland (1670-1722), whose definition of esoteric and exoteric in Clidophorus (1720) I emphasize in Western Sufism.

According to App, Valignano first made a distinction between the gonkyō (権教, Sanskrit saṁvṛti-satya, provisional or mundane, approximately exoteric) and the jikkyō (実況, Sanskrit paramārtha-satya, ultimate, approximately esoteric) in his Sumario de los errores del Japon (Summary of the Errors of Japan) of 1556.  He made the same distinction again in his Catechismus christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostrae religionis ostenditur, et sectae Iaponenses confutantur (Catechism of the Christian Faith, in which the truth of our religion is shown, and the Japanese sects are refuted) of 1586, which then became standard reading in a 1593 re-edition. 

Ricci did not make Valignano’s distinction, but João Rodrigues (1561-1633) did, and in this was followed by Niccolò Longobardi (1559-1654) in his Trattato su alcuni punti della religione dei cinesi (Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese). Longobardi was cited by Leibniz in his Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Discourse on the natural theology of the Chinese, 1716) as writing that the Chinese 

have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures [symbols]; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words (cited in App, p. 144). 

Longobardi, then, may have been a source for Leibniz’s one-time friend Toland.

One further update. In Western Sufism, I identify the French Protestant scholar Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) as the first person to identify Sufism, along with Buddhism, as a form of Spinozism in 1702 (WS, p. 103). App notes that an opponent of Bayle’s, the Swiss protestant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736 ), in fact made the same connection in the case of Buddhism, though not of Sufism, rather earlier, in 1688 (App 150-151).

New book on Toshihiko Izutsu

Just published: Japanese Contribution to Islamic Studies: The Legacy of Toshihiko Izutsu Interpreted, ed. Anis Malik Thoha (Kuala Lumpur: IIUM Press, 2010). ISBN: 978-967-5272-63-9.

I have never quite understood the relationship between Toshihiko Izutsu and Traditionalism, and this new collection may hold some of the answers to that question. It is the proceedings of a 2008 conference held in Kuala Lumpur, with 19 articles, including:

• "The Place of Mulla Sadra's Kitāb Al-Mashāʻir in Izutsu's Philosophy" (Shigeru Kamada)
  "Reconsidering Izutsu in a Post-Postmodern Framework" (Janan Izadi and Ahad Faramarz Gharamaleki)
• "God and Man in the Works of Toshihiko Izutsu" (Ibrahim Abu Bakar)
• "Communicating Pure Consciousness Events: Using Izutsu to Address a Problem in the Philosophy of Mysticism" (Sajjad H. Rizvi)
• "The Significance of Izutsu’s Legacy for Comparative Religion" (Kojiro Nakamura)
• "The Legacy of Toshihiko Izutsu in Turkey: Application of Semantics in Contemporary Qur’anic Studies" (Necmettin Gökkir)

Traditionalism in Japan (and Greece)

Unesco has produced an Index Translationum, a database of translated books. A quick search reveals that

• Guénon was translated into Japanese in the 1980s (La crise du monde moderne in 1986 Le roi du monde in 1987). The translator, Yoshihiro Tanaka, seems to specialize in serious esoteric works, and has also translated Antoine Faivre.
• Guénon and Schuon were translated into Greek in the 1990s (Le symbolisme de la croix in 1993, and in 1995 both La crise du monde moderne and Schuon's Castes et races).