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Chapter Two: Peace of Mind at Any Price
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Buddhists contributed actively to Japan’s attempts to forge itself into a modern nation-state and pursue imperialism throughout Asia. They lent their social status and homiletical skills to propaganda campaigns run by the state to cultivate obedient imperial subjects; pursued social welfare activities; organized and participated actively in patriotic groups; exhorted parishioners to “serve the public” in wartime by enlisting, practicing austerity on the home front, and buying war bonds; engaged in monthly “patriotic alms-begging”; diverted temple funds to the construction of warplanes; donated temple bells as scrap metal; ran officer-training programs; performed rituals to promote Japanese victory; assisted the families of the war dead; served as chaplains for troops fighting overseas; and helped “pacify” occupied areas and mold colonized Asians into imperial subjects. Buddhist clerics also served state objectives through their sermons, lectures, and writings, in which they celebrated the emperor, imperial system, and Japanese state by aligning Buddhist doctrines with the reigning imperial ideology. In his writings, Ichikawa Hakugen advances numerous arguments about the reasons for this “Imperial-Way Buddhism.” In Buddhists’ Responsibility for the War (Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin, 1970) he argues that Buddhists had at least three options for responding to state power in the early Shōwa period: criticism (hihan ), avoidance (kaihi), and accommodation in the form of service (junnō-hōshi). Virtually no Buddhists chose the first option, and Ichikawa attributes this lack of criticism to four features of Japanese Buddhism: 1. its fundamental standpoint is based on emptiness rather than being, on non-duality rather than dualism; Peace of Mind at Any Price C H A P T E R T W O PEA C E OF MIN D AT A N Y PRIC E 2. it is a religion of peace of mind . . . not a religion focused on ethics; 3. it either isolates itself from state power or abides in a peace of mind within the [state] system; and 4. it depends on the patronage of and [funds gained through] memorial services performed for the middle and upper classes, from which its priests come and among whom they live.1 Ichikawa claims that few Buddhists chose the second option of avoidance either. Rather, the typical Buddhist response to state power during the Fifteen-Year War was, initially, passive accommodation (junnō), followed by active support (yokusan).2 To account for these wartime stances, in Buddhists’ Responsibility for the War Ichikawa focuses on seven overlapping facets of Buddhism: (1) the doctrine of peace of mind (anjin-shugi3 ), (2) the ethic of negating the ego and being selfless , which is central to the Buddhist focus on attaining a particular state of mind (shinkyō-shugi4 ), (3) the ethic of non-contention and harmony, (4) the logic of soku (“none other than”),5 (5) the logic of “becoming one” with things, (6) the static and passive logic of “absolute negation is none other than absolute affirmation ” (zettaihitei-soku-zettaikōtei), and (7) the Huayan Buddhist logic of the “nonobstruction between thing and thing” (jiji-muge).6 Elsewhere in that volume Ichikawa links Buddhist war responsibility to five facets of Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhist thought. The first is the uncritical stance that emerges from “insight into the true form of things” (jissō-kan), a religious epistemology in which one “sees the universal principle in the individual thing” (ji no naka ni ri o miru). To Ichikawa, the logic of this insight can lead to an overemphasis on such institutions as the household (ie), whether the home or family in the ordinary sense or the national household (kokka)—the nation-state—headed by the patriarchal emperor. This epistemology “contributed directly and indirectly to the formation of the ethos of the Japanese people, who get easily swept up in things, such as the Manchurian Incident, the war between Japan and China, and Founding of the Dynasty Day (kigensetsu7 ).”8 The second facet of Mahāyāna thought is the logic that “differences are none other than equality” (shabetsu-soku-byōdō), “which functioned to support and protect the [imperial] system.”9 The third is the logic of sokuhi,10 and the fourth is “the epistemology of the Buddhist religious approach with its focus on mental states, in which the desire for ‘peace of mind’ (anjin) gets swallowed up by the desire for ‘physical safety’ (anzen).”11 The fifth facet is the overall functioning of the first four “as logics of a mental technique for establishing oneself in peace of mind by securing an ‘internal mental...