[Buddha-l] Zen War Guilt/Zen and the Sword

[Stephen Hopkins]

Denizens -

In light of responses to my first post, perhaps a little background by way
of clarification might be helpful.

I'm not at all shocked, as it happens, by revelations about the personal
misdeeds, if I may characterise them as such, of Zen masters, or those of
other 'spiritual' teachers for that matter.  Some of the finest teachers I
have had the good fortune to encounter have had their fair share of failings
- 'enlightened with defilements', perhaps - and unusual histories in other
regards - one who I learned a great deal from happened to have been a rear
gunner in WW2 bombers.  Be a lamp unto yourself.  Don't look at the finger
pointing.  Nor am I unduly exercised by the problem of 'war guilt'.  But my
father, who was almost killed by a sword wielding Japanese soldier - that
sword hangs now, as it did throughout my childhood, in the room of my
parents house that they still call mine - understandably takes a different
view.  

No, what concerns me, both as a Buddhist practitioner and simply as a human
being, in the personal and the collective spheres is, I suppose, how it can
be that sincere practitioners of Zen in Japan (at all levels, and in
particular, though by no means only Zennists) and institutions who represent
or embody it can seem to be either unable or unwilling to acknowledge what I
will call, for want of a better way of putting it, moral failings of the
grossest kind without, in the main, first being pushed pretty hard by work
of the kind Victoria has produced.  What does this imply for those of us who
study Zen about Zen itself?  Especially, perhaps, about those who even now
have yet to apologise, if such exist.  Is it that, as Victoria put it in
2003, "....institutional Zen Buddhism in Japan is not Buddhism.  And
therefore, what has passed as Zen has for a very long time been a distortion
of Buddhist teachings"?

My interest in Victoria's question about the possibly heretical nature of
the Zen and the sword doctrine flows both from the problems, as I see them,
outlined above, and from my own study of Hitsuzendo, in which the unity of
zen, ken and sho is often alluded to.  And from that sword on my childhood
wall.  Switching to Soto Zen isn't an answer.

My interest in post Victoria reassessments of DT Suzuki also flows from
these sources, and from a long standing interest in Suzuki's work.  His work
was amongst the first I read when my interest in Buddhism began, thirty
years or more ago.  If his feet are also made of clay, well, so be it - I'd
just like to know.

Steve Hopkins