COLUMN ONE : Zen and the Art of Modernity : Japan’s Buddhist priests struggle to keep up with changing times. Some moonlight to make ends meet. Others embrace social causes to re-energize a religion rooted in the past.

In this ancient capital and cradle of Japan’s religious heritage, the Buddhist priest faithfully chants his sutras. He honors the spirits of ancestors and presides over funerals. He maintains the temple grounds and attends to his flock’s spiritual needs, just as every priest did before him in the Daiouji Temple’s 300-year history.

But Yasuo Sakakibara has a confession to make.

“I’m much more comfortable talking about economics than Buddhism,” he says.

In fact, to combat Japan’s spiraling cost of living, the priest spends more of his time teaching economics at Doshisha University to make ends meet. So even if he falters in explaining Buddhist doctrine or eschews meditation, he’s a crackerjack at statistical analysis.

And at least he has followed his father’s priestly footsteps--a duty his two children have firmly rejected.

His temple’s future? Unclear.

As Daiouji goes, so goes Japan. Modern life is rocking this country’s 1,440-year-old practice of Buddhism, a religion professed by 78% of Japanese. Population shifts are robbing rural temples of followers and priests, forcing their closure. Robust economic growth has boosted costs and living standards, compelling more priests to take outside jobs. Changing social attitudes have made the priesthood less attractive--making it tougher to find successors in a country where temples have come to be handed down not so much from master to disciple, but from parent to child.

And as one way to attract new followers and revitalize what in Japan has become a religion preoccupied with death and ancestors, some younger priests are turning to social activism and modern ideologies of feminism, environmentalism and anti-discrimination.

For instance, the Soto branch, one of Japanese Buddhism’s two major Zen sects, has embarked on a massive effort to eradicate discrimination against the untouchable class, or burakumin ; it has begun workshops on women’s rights and sponsors Cambodian refugee relief efforts.

“Buddhists were able to live through the ages in Japan within themselves, surviving on the supply and demand of funerals and rituals,” said Toshinori Yoshinami, a Zen priest who works in the Soto branch’s Tokyo headquarters. “But the future is a bit different.”

Buddhism in Japan has survived far greater threats than modernity. Introduced via China and Korea in AD 552, the religion took on a distinct character here. Among other things, Japanese Buddhism has been marked by close ties to the state and a strong link not to individuals but to households, traditionally the basic unit of society here.

As a result of the household link, Buddhism’s chief duty was transformed from the original Indian ideal of promoting individual enlightenment to holding funerals, requiems and other rituals of ancestor worship aimed at honoring a clan’s lineage.

And its ties to the state have meant that the religion’s fortunes have depended on government whim. When the Tokugawa regime wanted to suppress Christianity in the 17th Century, it made Buddhism the de facto state religion and created the unique Japanese danka system, under which every household was forced to register with a temple.

But when Meiji reformists seized power in 1868 and reasserted the emperor and the indigenous Shinto religion, the ensuing persecution of Buddhists destroyed countless temples and reduced the ranks of priests and nuns from 500,000 to 77,000. The state also decreed that priests could marry and take on other secular trappings in a move to weaken Buddhism, said Ryusho Soeda, an official with the Shingon branch at Mt. Koya.

Since those turbulent times, Buddhism has recovered and now benefits from freedom of religion in modern Japan, where religions not only peacefully coexist but also almost intermingle.

But challenges are mounting for the nation’s 96.2 million Buddhists scattered throughout 80,000 temples in 28 branches and sects.

The irreplaceable role that temples once played as a community’s spiritual core--acting as schools, medical clinics, nursing homes, administrative offices and recreational centers--has diminished. Now, although some aspects of the faith are thriving, mainstream Japanese Buddhism is struggling to maintain its economic foundation and its moral and spiritual authority.

“Its dogmas have become unintelligible to the public, and few people show an active interest in the religion,” Hajime Nakamura, one of the nation’s foremost Buddhist scholars, said in an analysis for the Encyclopedia of Japan. “The Buddhist ideals of human life have been forgotten.”

In a wind-swept area of Shimane prefecture, a remote area facing the Sea of Japan, the Joenji Temple offers a glimpse of one of Buddhism’s current challenges: Like a growing number of rural areas, it has no priest.

Its last cleric, Shonen Nishihara, left in 1958, and demographics tell why. His Shimane temple had only 15 families. Although many Japanese fled to rural areas during World War II to escape bombing, they surged back to the cities in search of jobs. As their sheep fled, the shepherds followed.

As his new base, Nishihara chose Matsudo city, whose population has grown from 40,000 to 450,000 in the last 40 years. There, in Chiba prefecture outside Tokyo, he presides over 400 families. With a larger congregation, he was able to build the $2.6-million Tenshinji Temple in 1972.

Unlike Christian ministers, Japanese Buddhist priests do not receive a salary. And because they now marry and rear children, officials say it takes a congregation of 200 families to comfortably sustain a temple family. And those numbers are increasingly scarce in Japan’s rural pockets. In one survey, only 10% of the 239 temples in a three-county area of Shimane prefecture had such a large congregation. Overall, 48 temples were without priests.

“When we have a temple, we tend to stay away and take it for granted. But once we lose it, it’s lonesome,” one village elder told reporters in the town of Kawamoto after her Myozenji Temple lost its chief priest and closed in a merger with a neighboring temple in 1988. “I’m sorry, Buddha,” she said. “I’m sorry, ancestors.”

But big-city temples are facing problems as well.

At Daiouji Temple in Kyoto, Yasuo Sakakibara has plenty of followers, but spiraling labor costs have put him in the red--and in the unusual position of working at a Christian university to maintain his Buddhist temple.

He’s hardly alone. The Shingon branch estimates that 22% of its chief priests, or those in 800 of its 3,600 temples, moonlight.

The Shinshu Otani sect reports a 37% figure, while the Soto branch found 28.5% of 11,586 chief priests work on the side.

Although priests have always performed other functions--from warriors to teachers to doctors--the work was done as part of temple duties and not to secure extra cash.

Sakakibara, an articulate, witty man who taught economics for two years at an American college, wanted to make use of his other considerable talents. But he could hardly survive otherwise, he says, as he obligingly rattles off his temple’s balance sheets.

Expenses: $97,405 annually for insurance, cleaning service, gardener, flowers, incense and other temple accouterments.

Income: $42,560 annually from donations for four major festivals, Sunday service and funeral fees.

(Besides rising costs, two other postwar changes helped undermine smaller temples’ economic foundations: An extensive land reform program forced many to sell property they had rented to tenant farmers as one steady source of income. Then the Japanese passed a family law to abolish the household as the basic legal institution; that put a de facto end to the danka system--though experts say it persists in many areas--and undercut another steady source of contributions.)

Sakakibara’s father managed to subsist on temple income alone, although he did not buy property insurance and did his own gardening and cleaning. As a result, he spent more time on religious duties than does his son.

His father read sutras every morning, prayed before each meal and held more memorial services, usually one hour, in strict accord with Buddhist ritual. His son, however, cleans the temple on Saturdays, holds service on Sundays, generally celebrates only the four major festivals and funerals and has pared back service time to 35 minutes.

“I’m a bad priest,” Sakakibara says with a laugh.

At least he is a priest. His daughters, one a cellist in Paris and the other a scholar in the United States, have told him they do not intend to inherit the temple. In the old days, Sakakibara says, he might have looked for a priest to marry a daughter and take over the temple. Times have changed and now he simply hopes a successor can be found.

A growing number of temples are in similar straits. In its 1985 survey, the Zen branch found only 68.8% of 11,586 chief priests had a successor--a decrease from 73.9% a decade earlier.

“It’s not necessarily great to be a priest these days,” said Yoshinami, the Zen official. “The image is of a shaved head, of living modestly in a rural area and being concerned with rituals and funerals.”

Worried that such negative images will drive the religion into irrelevance, a generation of younger priests is aiming to breathe life into Buddhism with programs of social action.

Rengetsu Fujitani--a 39-year-old priest at the Kakuryoji Temple, in the Osaka suburb of Moriguchi--is one of them. She wears a spiky hairdo and black leather pants. She rushes from English class to jazz dance, lectures on Japan’s colonization of Asia, gives shelter to anti-nuclear groups and upbraids male parishioners for the political incorrectness of making women serve tea.

She believes that social justice for the living is as important as salvation for the dead. So she has unilaterally cut down on the traditional Buddhist duties, such as home visits to pray for the spirits of the dead. “Even old people should face present-day problems rather than worship ancestors,” she declared.

But her radical style hasn’t sat well in Moriguchi. Temple members voted her down as chief priest last fall, although she was entitled to succeed her father and would have been her sect’s first woman head priest in 400 years. The issue remains up in the air.

“She wears that spiky hair with mousse and aerobic leotards and talks about discrimination against women,” complained Teruyo Kondo, a local beauty shop owner.

The Soto branch is trying to promote social change too--but more subtly. While Fujitani swept in the changes, Yoshinami said it took him and others years to persuade cautious officials to embrace social justice causes.

In some ways, political events forced their hand. In 1979, Soyu Machida, head of the Soto branch, declared at a world religious peace conference that there was no discrimination in Japan against burakumin, who are ostracized because their ancestors performed “unclean” jobs such as killing animals. The ensuing public furor prodded the Soto branch to launch an effort to locate and rename all deceased outcasts; in a Buddhist rite for the dead, Zen priests had given burakumin discriminatory names, exposing their outcast status.

The branch hopes to take on issues of global peace and disarmament, environmentalism, women’s rights and racial discrimination.

Others note that Japanese Buddhist clerics have been involved in assistance programs, for example, aid for the blind, but Yoshinami said Japanese Buddhism “is a very closed society. They have not had to address social issues. But we will gradually reach the state where things become more borderless.”

One unlikely pioneer in the new frontier of Japanese Buddhism is Daifukuji Temple near Nara in western Japan. It is in the town of Koryo, a homogenous city of 20,000 people who maintain the old, complex and time-consuming rituals of gift-giving, home visits and the cultivating of human relationships.

But Daifukuji is about to become one of the first Buddhist temples in Japan to anoint a foreigner as chief priest: onetime news reporter Susan Noble, 36, an American being formally ushered in under her Buddhist name of Eko this month.

Noble’s appointment will take Daifukuji’s rejuvenation one step further, following chief priestess Tairyu Kato, 89. Kato reopened the temple in 1941, which had been shuttered for nearly a century under the Meiji era’s purges. Worshipers expect Noble to bring the outside world to their small community.

“She said she’d teach us English,” said Mieko Sugimoto, a parishioner. “Everyone is delighted.”

For townsfolk, Noble promises to bridge the gap between the religious and material worlds and also between Japan and foreign countries.

“When you look at her, she looks like a foreigner, but when you speak to her she’s just like a Japanese,” said Atsuko Sugita, another worshiper. “There is no resistance at all.”

Chiaki Kitada, a researcher in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this report.