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

[miriamdelight at comcast.net]

Denizens,

This is not a direct reply to Steve Hopkins' question, except as a response to his concern about the possibly heretical nature of the "Zen and the Sword" doctrine. In recent years there have been persuasive arguments by Profs. Karl Friday, Cameron Hurst and William Bodiford, among others, that a connection between Zen and martial arts before the Meiji (1868- ) restoration is extremely hard to find; it may, in fact, have been created by Shaku Soen and D.T. Suzuki.  While there is evidence that Ashikaga shoguns supported Zen temples financially, there is no real evidence that samurai went there to practice Zen, and particularly none that samurai thought Zen training was important to their swordsmanship.  In the Tokugawa period we find the association between Zen training and mastery of swordsmanship made by Takuan Soho, but Takuan's two famous essays on this topic are but two of many many essays on swordsmanship in the Tokugawa period.  The rest are very predominantly Confucia!
 n in theory and language.   What we call "Bushido" was a product of texts produced in the Tokugawa, when samurai were trying to find a justification for their high social position in a time of 250 years of settled peace. The famous "Bushido" texts are not "Zen," but Confucian primarily.   As the Meiji leaders built up a powerful Western-style army, they sold the idea that to be a gunjin (a soldier) was to be a samurai, and live by the Bushido code.  The martial arts were not predominantly associated with Zen, or Buddhism, prior to WWII; more often with Shinto.  After World War II, when martial arts were in disrepute as having contributed to a warlike, imperial culture of "samurai," martial arts teachers bought into the idea of their association with Zen, admired in the West as a peaceful training that combined powerful self-mastery and enlightenment with non-harming.  We really cannot trace the association between Zen and the Sword back before Takuan (17th century, and a mi!
 nority voice at the time), Shaku Soen and D.T. Suzuki.   

Miriam Levering
University of Tennessee


> 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
> 
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