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Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture)

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In view of the challenge this book has posed for the Western Buddhist community, it was surprising to find but one review for it - on Amazon. com. Published ten years ago (Hawaii Uni Press) the material edited by James Heisig and John C. Maraldo puts Zen in a decidedly critical spotlight, effectively tracing the historical precedents linking Zen Buddhism, the State, Nationalism and - Militarism. Read alongside Daizen Victoria's 'Zen at War/Zen to Senso,' (Weatherhill, 1997), it is obvious that we need to review the ethical bases of Zen and face the fact that it has been put to some distinctly 'un-buddhist' uses. Hence, the rather derisory title -'Rude Awakenings.

While such issues have elicited concern in the Western Buddhist community, the ties between Zen and the martial arts hardly raise an eyebrow in other quarters and even seem to bestow a 'normative' perspective on things. After all, Zen became the adopted religion of the Samurai, the Japanese warrior caste. It is often said that true exponents of Budo see their arts as a way of sublimating aggression. That is probably true of the best sort of Budo practitioners and it would be mean spirited to see the traditional samurai as blood thirsty brigands, who like violence for its own sake. Encyclopaedia Brittanica - surely an objective source, has described the Samurai as one of the most efficient fighting forces known to history, for the most part displaying high mindedness and a strong sense of discipline.

Nevertheless, whatever it meant in Japan's feudal past, the saying 'Zen ken ichinyo' - or that 'The way of Zen and the way of the sword - are the same' has been grossly exploited in the context of modern state power - and indeed, used as a cover to glorify sheer brutality. Like Daizen Victoria's book, the essays found in the present volume explore the way that Buddhist language has been exploited to serve ulterior motives i.e. - to further the self-interest of power groups and ultimately, in the modern context - the State. Moreover, contrary to what might be supposed, this strange alliance and the terms of thinking underpinning it, did not come to an end with the cessation of hostilities at the close of W.W. 2. In modified form, it survived as part of the Japanese corporate mentality - or as a vehicle to help sustain it. Furthermore, elements of it have informed the Kyoto-school of philosophy - which, despite the kudos it has enjoyed in the West, might need to be thought-through, all over again.

Like Daizen Victoria's book, this material is a 'wake-up call' for Western students of Buddhism. Nevertheless, as with the 'Critical Buddhist' movement as a whole, there are points where the arguments in this book become overly generalised and jejune. For instance, one wonders if it makes any historical sense to fault Prince Shotoku's 'Constitution' of 604 A.D. because it didn't function like a modern one? Still, accepting the limitations of feudal society for what they are - or were, it would be fallacious to assume that it has all been a question of base 'yea-saying' in accordance with the hierarchical pecking order. Despite its surface politeness, Hakuin Zenji's long letter to Ikeda, governor of Iyo (Iyo no kame) - which appears in Hakuin's Zenshu under the title Hebiiichigo, was virtually a diatribe and written as an act of social justice. To my knowledge, nothing like it, penned by anyone of eminence in the Japanese Buddhist establishment, found its way to the authorities in the modern era. Bearing this in mind, it seems problematic and somewhat unjust, to draw a line through Japanese history, seeing the old alliance between the Zen establishment and the Bushi/samurai as a precursor to Zen's role in the emergence of modern Japanese state nationalism. Under the Meiji, traditional samurai families were disenfranchised and no longer determined strategy or decision making, a privilege reserved for a centralised high command, whose desire for 'lebensraum' (to be blunt - a wholesale invasion of S.E. Asia) would have seemed incomprehensible to samurai leaders of yore.

In a mytho-poeic sense, perhaps, the ideologues who drove Japan down the road to war in the 20th c. had exploited 'traditional' imagery and archetypes. Nevertheless, like Hitler's invocation of the 'volk' - and the Nazi philosophy of 'blut und boden' - the images invoked were hollow caricatures. The causes underlying the rise of modern nationalism are complex, but wherever it has manifested, it has depended upon idealised abstractions. Yet these have been but remotely connected with the realities of the past. 'Emperor worship' has frequently been blamed as one of the sustaining causes of modern Japanese nationalism, but in actual fact, the military government which seized control of Japan in the 1930's had little respect for the Emperor.@Moreover, historically speaking, the exercise of power in Japan has often rested in the hands of a Shogun, rather than the Royal family. In other words, it is has been an arbitrary lust for power, rather than ‚definite social entity or status quo which has invoked trouble. Modern nationalism is very abstract and faceless, hence its need to exploit the past - including religious imagery, in the hope of giving itself substance.We ought to exercise caution here, lest we blame the unworthy deeds - on the worthy, and ignoble deeds - upon the noble./

This is a well-done study of an important question, the legacy of Zen and its political colorations, most tragically during the World War era of this century, that in the process provokes a deeper series of questions about religion, the histories of such, and their relations to social states. If Zen wishes us to escape time then the times and places to do this might end by preventing this, being timebound, reaching nowhere, as a destination. In the end some must have slipped away, but the form of the religion succumbs to history, with the ambiguous or sad ending here described. The Chinese-Japanese legacy of Buddhism is a brilliant creation, unique beyond anything in the more ideological monotheistic religions, but in the end the preemption of Zen by the Nationalist state during the twentieth century requires careful study, not only by historians, but by students of religion. For there is a point after which religions, intended to help people, cease to help them. As the book details the control of Zen by the state began very early, and as with the Constantinian version of Christianity we have an ambiguous cultural entity, distancing itself from the forest renunciations of the original Buddhism.
The studies in this book are invaluable food for thought, and very scholarly snapshots, with an interesting essay on Daisetz Suzuki, the Zen missionary to America. He seems to have sensed the whole problem, and in his detachment slipped away with the treasure to the land of the disorderly and too zany Americans, the next to try their luck with this religion.
It may not be meditation to read this book, but it is worth reading anyway, for it is clear that the history of a religion is not a spiritual reality. One hitchhikes on the form, to slip away in the end...
There is of course a dialectical antithesis: Buddhism, beginning in a forest, became in short order the Indian State...How so?
Perhaps the state might need protection from this other state...