[Buddha-l] Buddhism & War: Use of Force and Justifications

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 02:45, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> It is very instructive to keep in mind the genesis of those books.

Oh boy! Dan is about to give us an example of the genetic fallacy. (To save 
you all a trip to the Wikipedia, the genetic fallacy consists in trying to 
dismiss an argument by discussing not its actual substance but its origins. 
It is akin to the ad hominem, which Dan also uses with admirable regularity.)

>Think about that: he was expressely forbidden
> to protest war AS A BUDDHIST.

That's not the moral I get from the story you tell. The moral I get is that he 
was forbidden to protest AS A MONK. I know of many parallels in North America 
in which Zen teachers have discouraged their students from participating in 
demonstrations while wearing the garb of monks. It's not in a monk's job 
description to farm, do physical work, run for public office, vote in secular 
elections or protest for or against governmental policies. But unless your 
claim is that nobody but a monk is a Buddhist, there is no merit to the 
conclusion you are trying to foist off on us.

> That led to the research that
> became his two books -- discovering that many of the venerated figures in
> the Soto school were right-wing, antisemitic [yes, Richard, I dare use that
> word -- Victoria's got a whole chapter on it] fascists, and, as he was
> discovering first hand, that was NOT ancient history but present today.

It takes no daring to use a word correctly. Hardly anyone who has lived in 
Japan would deny that there is still a pretty strong anti-Semitic streak. I 
can recall being told in dead earnest by a very well-known Japanese 
professor, who also happened to be a Buddhist priest, that it's very easy for 
Japanese people to spot Jews, because they are ugly, smelly, loud and 
obnoxious. I was utterly shocked, but not made speechless by that claim.

> Comic, if you think of it: Hippies opposing the war and expressing their
> alternative morality by venerating antisemitic fascists!

I doubt that you would be able to find many Western "hippy" pacifist Buddhists 
who admired anyone at all for being anti-Semitic or fascist, if for no other 
reason than that about 40% of those "hippy" Buddhists were Jewish, many of 
them Marxists. My suspicion is that had those "hippy" Buddhists known the 
sorts of thing that Brian Victoria later revealed, they would either have 
naively turned to some other gods with feet of clay or they might have said 
something like "to err is human, to forgive divine." Most of us eventually 
learn to take our inspiration from where we can get it and to sift through 
our sources of inspiration, carefully removing the parts we find unhelpful or 
even harmful. 

Never having encountered any source of inspiration anywhere that was not mixed 
in with plenty of material that disgusts me, I do not seem to mind that a 
number of my cultural heroes have been less noble than God Almighty is 
alleged by his many morally flawed and benighted fans to be.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes