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

[jkirk]

> ........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"?....................
Steve Hopkins
=====================================
In his review of Brian Victoria's Zen at War, David Loy notes the close 
association of Buddhism in Japan and agencies of governmental control,  and 
asks a similar question:

"...From its beginnings in the Kamakura period, Zen was compromised by its 
samurai patronage, but the roots of the problem go all the way back to the 
emperor Kimmei (539-71), who allowed Buddhism into Japan because he 
recognized that "it would be of service to him" (132). Buddhism never 
subsequently escaped state control, and however transcendental Buddhist 
liberation may have been in other cultures (a controversial point), it was 
kept very down to earth in Japan, which accepted desires as natural and used 
egolessness to promote social integration and deference to authority. We 
need to reflect further on how compatible Japanese Buddhism is with its 
Indian origins."

David R. Loy
http://www.bpf.org/tsangha/loy-victoria.html

Joanna