Zen Says It's Sorry

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 11, 2003
Meditating on War and Guilt, Zen Says It's Sorry
By ALLAN M. JALON

To many Americans, Zen Buddhists primarily devote
themselves to discovering inner serenity and social
peace. But Zen has had strong ties to militarism —
indeed so strong, that the leaders of one of the
largest denominations in Japan have remorsefully
compared their former religious fanaticism during
Japan's brutal expansionism in the 1930's and 40's to
today's murderously militant Islamists.

The unexpected apology for wartime complicity by the
leaders of Myoshin-ji, the headquarters temple of one
of Japan's main Zen sects, was issued 16 days after
9/11, which gave it a particular resonance. But the
leaders of Myoshin-ji — as well as other Zen Buddhist
leaders who have also delivered apologies over the
past two years — mainly credit a disillusioned
Westerner for their public regrets: Brian Victoria, a
former Methodist missionary, who is a Zen priest and
historian.

Buddhist leaders in Japan and the United States said
in recent interviews that Mr. Victoria had exerted a
profound influence, especially in the West, by
revealing in his 1997 book, "Zen at War," a shockingly
dark and unfamiliar picture of Zen during World War II
to followers who had no idea about its history.... 

Now, in a new sequel called "Zen War Stories," Mr.
Victoria has dug more specifically into relationships
between Zen leaders and the military during World War
II.

>From its beginnings in Japan, Zen has been associated
with the warrior culture established by the early
shoguns. But the extent of its involvement in World
War II has stayed mostly submerged until recently.
Many people in the United States and Europe know Zen's
indirect traces through the poetry of the Beats or the
quietist aura of contemporary architecture and
clothing.
 
[...]

The more detailed version apologized for helping to
lend a religious purpose to invasions, colonization
and the former empire's destruction of "20 million
precious lives." The self-critical account also
described how Myoshin-ji members followed Japanese
invaders across Asia, "established branch headquarters
and missions" in conquered areas, even "conducted
fund-raising drives to purchase military aircraft."

[...]

In 1964, ordained a Soto priest while living in Japan
and increasingly active in opposing the Vietnam War,
he was chastised by a religious superior for taking
part in peace protests. He then discovered the
writings of Ichikawa Hakugen, a Zen priest who had
taken an early look at Zen's war-time role. It was
buried, like that of Emperor Hirohito, by efforts to
stabilize Japan during the cold war, Mr. Victoria
said.

[...]

"Zen was a large part of the spiritual training not
only of the Japanese military but eventually of the
whole Japanese people," he said in an interview. "It
would have led them to commit national suicide if
there had been an American invasion."

[...]

Both of Mr. Victoria's books peel back layers of the
career of D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia
University in the 1950's and remains the best-known
Japanese advocate of Zen in the West. In 1938,
however, Mr. Suzuki used his prestige as a scholar in
Japan to assert that Zen's "ascetic tendency" teaches
the Japanese soldier "that to go straight forward and
crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him."

"What Brian Victoria has written is mostly right,"
said Jiun Kubota, the third patriarch of Sanbo-kyodan,
a small Zen group outside Tokyo that has also issued
an apology. "I dare say that Zen was used as the
spiritual backbone of the military army and navies
during the war."

Mr. Victoria's research has revealed that the founder
of Sanbo-kyodan, Mr. Kubota's longtime teacher, was an
outspoken militarist and anti-Semite during the war
years. His name was Hakuun Yasutani, and he was one of
the most significant figures in advancing the
popularity of Zen Buddhism in the United States in the
1960's. 

In 1999, the New York-based magazine Tricycle
published excerpts of a 1943 book that Mr. Victoria
had unearthed in which Yasutani expressed his hatred
of "the scheming Jews." Actually, the Zen master
probably knew few if any Jews, and Mr. Victoria
believes he was using them as a stalking horse for
liberalism.

Traditionally, Zen stresses an inward search for
understanding and mental discipline. But Mr. Victoria
said that imperial military trainers developed the
self-denying egolessness Zen prizes into "a form of
fascist mind-control." He said Suzuki and others
helped by "romanticizing" the tie between Zen and the
warrior ethos of the samurai. Worse, he charges, they
stressed a connection between Buddhist compassion and
the acceptance of death in a way that justified
collective martyrdom and killing one's enemies. 

"In Islam, as in the holy wars of Christianity, there
is a promise of eternal life," Mr. Victoria said in an
interview. "In Zen, there was the promise that there
was no difference between life and death, so you
really haven't lost anything."

[...]

Mr. Victoria sees hope for Buddhism in a Western-style
"engaged Buddhism" that increasingly seeks to combine
meditative practice with work for social progress and
peace.

That moral growth, he believes, must come with a
cold-eyed look at how basic Zen concepts were abused
in the past: "I want my work to provide a model that
it is possible to take an unflinching look at what is
really happening with a religion while remaining
essentially committed to it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/11/arts/11ZEN.html

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