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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Vincente writes:

> the V.Brian's work is not very honest. In example he writes:
>
> "When Buddhism was introduced to Japan in the sixth century by Prince
> Shotoku, it was introduced as 'nation-protecting Buddhism.' In the
> teachings, as we know them, of Shakyamuni Buddha, there is no
> suggestion that Buddhism protects the nation. This is the fundamental
> error, in my opinion"
>
> However, we can read the same protection in the CakkavattiSihanada
> Sutta, in this advice to the king:
[...]
> Basically, he present many things in the same conspiranoic way.

I could give either a simple response, or one more complicated. The simple
response is that the bill of goods sold to Shotoku (and imperial courts in
China and Korea) is something entirely different than what the Pali Buddha
was speaking about in Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta.

To get more complicated: The former is magical protection -- protect the
institution and practioners of Buddhism, and in turn Buddhism, like a
talismen, will protect your kingdom from all its enemies, natural and
supernatural. At issue is not tthe Prince's own actions per se (aside from
patronage), but the power of the Buddha statues, and whatever spiritual
efficacy resides in the monks and their rituals, etc. The Pali Buddha, on
the other hand, is saying that if you yourself practice Buddhism and follow
its behavioral guidelines, your life and the lives of your community will be
enriched and bettered. Put another way -- more in line with Victoria's
point -- the Pali Buddha is recommending ethical self-development, Shotoku
is buying divine protection by patronizing rituals and institutions. How do
we know that the latter is the case? Check the immediate history surrounding
Shotoku and the Japanese acceptance of Buddhism. When bad things happened,
it was blamed on letting Buddha statues, etc., into the country, and they
were temporarily banned, until they proved their talismanic efficacy.

Put once again in a simpler way, the Pali Buddha was not a nationalist. All
was anicca, including the buddhadhamma -- he wasn't trying to help Maghada
become an eternal nation magically protected from all adversity. He
renounced his kingdom; preserving and protecting it were not his goals.
When, after his Awakening, he revisits his family, they end up joining the
sangha. He doesn't become their councilor or the spiritual protector of his
late father's kingdom.

As one traces the morphing of Buddhism from its inception in India to its
later forms in places like Japan (where it is called Buddhism but actually
becomes Hinduism, atmanic worship, castes system and all) one can usually
find some sort of Indian precedent that, once removed from its original
Indian context and given an expansive new East Asian context and sets of
relations (sometimes I think that is what Vaipulya really meant!), it takes
on a life of its own, frequently evolving into something either totally
unrelated to its original meaning or else the utter opposite of what it had
originally signified. So technically, yes, Buddha talked to kings, and
advocated Buddhism as a way to make things better. But it was a different
sales pitch, with different snake oil.


> Japanese militarism cum
> DL> nationalism cum suppression (which will get a Buddhist rubber stamp
soon, no
> DL> doubt). The 21st century is shaping up to be a lot like the one we
just left
> DL> behind.
>
> your cocktails are very strange. If I remember well, Japan was the
> only country seriously concerned for the luck of Jewish people in the
> pre-war. You can read about Jacob Schiff. Manchuria and the
> Russian-Japanese war.

During the Russian-Japanese War, Japanese troops were exposed to and became
obsessed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Czar-created forgery
that spun the yarn that the Jews were conspiring to take over the world. I
wasn't in fact addressing the issue of Japanese antisemitism (to see that in
what I wrote suggests you may be sipping strange cocktails yourself :-) -- 
But should you want to look further into that, I recommend David Goodman and
Masanori Miyazawa, _Jews in the Japanese Mind_ (2000) which documents the
development of Japanese antisemitism (a most curious case, since it
developed in the virtual absence of actual Jews, imbibed along with European
culture; not just the Protocols... the most performed Western play in Japan,
for well over a century, remains the Merchant of Venice). You will find that
there indeed were some strands in Japanese culture that thought well of the
Jews (and there are today some Christian pro-Zionists who even make periodic
pilgrimages to Israel, study Hebrew, etc.), but these were and remain the
minority, and they were themselves persecuted during the 30s and during the
War. Shanghai during the war was also an unusual situation. To the Japanese
govt's credit, despite repeated pressure from their German ally and certain
factions within their own govt and military to treat the Shanghai Jews much
more harshly (or deport them back to Europe, i.e., the death camps), those
pressures -- at least in practice -- were largely ignored. It's probably
safest to say that the Japanese govt. was ambivalent about the Shanghai
Jews, neither benign nor ready to turn it into a death camp. The reports
after the war from those who lived there are also ambivalent, some more
positive in their depiction than others, some more negative. I can send you
a large reading list if you are interested.


> In example, in past days appeared a Christian preacher inside all the
> TVs of this funny world.

You mean the well-known lunatic, Pat Robertson.

> [...] in the Heian period
> there were armed monks to protect temples and the establishment.
> In those times, a good part of the institutional Zen was mixed with
> ruling powers. And today we see the same thing with some lay religious
> groups in the USA.
> It is just the human condition.

Your comparison with Robertson is apt, but counterproductive for your point,
for a couple of reasons.

First, as you may know, when Victoria first went to Japan he was a Methodist
missionary from the US Midwest. What eventually attracted him to Zen,
leading him to convert and receive ordination as a Soto monk, rather than
continue to convert Japanese in the other direction, was what he initially
perceived as a more profound doctrine and pursuit of Peace (Peace of mind,
but also peace in the world). It was bumping up against the institutional
hostility to Peace (despite the change in rhetoric post-war, the practice
and attitudes had remained largely the same) that initially disillusioned
him, and set him on the research course that has become the two books he
wrote. He is not seeking revenge against Soto or Zen, but trying to get them
to live up to their own ideals. Obviously Robertson was exactly the kind of
religionist he has been trying to get away from and overcome for many
decades. He is the first to point out that dangerous religious
fundamentalism is universal to all religions, including Buddhism. If
anything, THAT is what makes zennists uncomfortable. They'd like to imagine
that growing hemmorhoids on a zafu makes them exempt, or that there could
never be a Buddhist bin Laden.

In terms of this being the human condition, ok, all is duhkha and most
people are dangerously ignorant. Zen (and Buddhism in general) was designed
to be the corrective to that, not its reinforcer. Making excuses for them
when they've institutionalized it, rather than seeking to reform or
radically redesign those instititutions is not only anti-Buddhist, it is
dangerous.

Robertson has his followers (much fewer than he had a couple of decades ago
when he actually tried to run for president), but even most evangelicals are
distancing themselves from his more recent outbursts, and he is becoming
increasingly irrelevant. The situation of the Zen institutions in Japan was
different. Their various roles in promoting, recruiting for, and providing
justification for the govt and military's actions were central -- all
documented in Victoria's books, so I won't reiterate that here.

Finally, to what extent should we condone Zennist imitation of the worst in
Christianity and Islam (and Suzuki and others *were* christianizing and
westernizing Zen -- a project engaged in earnestly and foundationally by Zen
leaders since shortly after the Meiji Restoration), before saying this is no
longer Buddhism?

> Maybe for an implicit elitism, some scholars ignores that today,
> anyone can fly to Asia to check some absurdities, as "today, Japanese
> Zen is not Buddhism". These suspicions about the actual Japanese Zen
> monks being heirs of the war slogans of the WWII, it doesn't surpass
> the requisites of any cheap Manga comic.

When is the last time you heard of Zen institutional participation in
anything antiwar (and I DON'T mean Hiroshima memorials), or critical of
anything the Japanese govt. is doing?

Let me give you one more example, one I mentioned in a footnote in my essay
in Pruning the Bodhi-Tree (the Critical Buddhists were the first to coin the
slogan that "Zen is not Buddhism," and I would recommend reading what
Matsumoto and Hakamaya have to say about that before dismissing it so
simply). Through the 15th century certain Temples acted as sanctuaries,
particularly for women who were suffering unbearable lives and unable to go
anywhere else. The Japanese govt. eliminated those institutions during the
Tokugawa period, but the Buddhist institutions have made no effort to
restore or replace them since. Modern relevance? As I mention in the essay,
women from the Phillipines and Thailand who had been brought to Japan under
false pretenses, only to find themselves prisoners of brothels, sought
assistance from the local Buddhist Temples and institutions (the Thai women
were Buddhists, after all), but the Temples, not wanting to tangle with
Yakuza and for other reasons of general cowardice and callousness, turned
the women away. The Phillipine women them approached Christian groups who
immediately went into social action and had the women repatriated to their
homelands, raising a major public stink in the process.

I agree with Matsumoto. That sort of Zen is NOT Buddhism.

Dan Lusthaus