Known as the founder of the drinks company Calpis, Mishima Kaiun 三島海雲 (1878–1974) was the son of the Jōdo shinshū abbot Hōjō 法城.He studied at the former Nishihonganji literary dormitory of Ryūkoku University. Subsequently, in 1904 he journeyed to Mongolia and encountered a dairy drink which was a favorite of the nomads, kumis (in Mongol, airag). After his return to Japan, based on this, he commercialized Calpis and became financially successful.
When he was a child, Kaiun had a complicated feeling that he was born as a successor to the temple, so much that his father Hōjō, lost in his sūtra recitation, burned the Buddha statue. When he commercialized Calpis, after studying with Sugimura Sojinkan 杉村楚人冠 (1872–1945), who later became a famous reporter of the Asahi Shimbun, he named the product name “Calpis” (カルピス) after the Sanskrit word sarpimaṇḍa, which refers to the refined essence of milk. When his invention was about to be stolen by Suzuki Saburosuke鈴木三郎助 (1868–1931), the third generation owner of Ajinomoto, he regained control with the help of the Buddhist activist Takashima Beihō 高嶋米峰 (1875–1949), and gradually strengthened himself as a Buddhist.
In his later years, he publicly pushed for reforms with regard to meat eating and clerical marriage (肉食,妻帯) and, spreading the true intentions of the Buddha widely in the world, proclaimed his respect for Shinran. The President of Ōtani University, Yamaguchi Susumu山口益 (1895–1976), said to him, “The Christians have their Bible, but Buddhism does not. So you go and create a Buddhist Bible!” 55 years after he began to sell Calpis, in 1974, he published the Buddhist Bible (Bukkyō Seiten 仏教聖典), and carried out many types of activities to promote Buddhism.
This paper considers modern Buddhism by focusing on the life of Kaiun.
