Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West (review)

Rinzai Zen has always seemed to me the most attractive form of Japanese Buddhism, because of its association with the arts. Two places, in particular, have made me feel close to the Rinzai spirit: the sublime garden at Ryōanji and a tiny center in Higashi-Nakano where a group of athletic young men used to meditate and practice calligraphy and martial arts under the guidance of Ōmori Sōgen (1904-1994). But if Shoji Yamada is to be believed, I have been taken in by a meretricious construction of Zen, a mirror polished in the West by charlatans and adopted in Japan because it flattered the Japanese self-image.

The copyright of Yamada's beautifully produced book is held by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. As the book targets Japanese narcissism, it might seem at odds with the ethos of an institution often held to promote such an attitude. But in reality its deconstruction of narcissism is itself an inverted form of the same thing. Though the inquiry might seem to evince stern scholarship or at least fearless journalism, the thrill it conveys comes from the sense of naughtiness as the sacred mirror is queried. The disarming charm of the declaration "I am the fairest of them all!" is augmented by a new twist: "Gee, I guess I am not the fairest after all!" Under this spell, we are lured into a sequence of circumstantial investigations that read like a detective novel. Earl Hartman's relaxed translation adds to the effect, keeping a light Japanese flavor; one criticism that might be made is that Hartman often uses "ambiguous" where "vague" would make more sense.

Yamada's first target is Eugen Herrigel, author of Zen in the Art of Archery, a cult bestseller published in German in 1948. A short and rather light work, it gave an engaging account of a course of training in archery, providing along the way glimpses of what the Zen spirit of archery is and ending in a burst of ponderous transcendental jargon. First surprise: Herrigel, rector of Erlangen University, had been classified as a "fellow-traveler" (Mitläufer) of Hitler's fallen regime in his denazification hearing and suspended from teaching. But is this really a surprise? Yamada himself quotes an essay in Encounter (February 1961), by Gershom Scholem, with the title "Zen-Nazism?" in which Herrigel is called "a convinced Nazi." Yamada's suggestion that Herrigel's refusal to take refugees into the university grounds amounts to "a crime against humanity" (p. 98) savors of overkill. Yamada gives the text of Herrigel's defense (pp. 255-62), in which the rector claimed to have resisted Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism.

Though D. T. Suzuki wrote a preface for the English translation of Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel knew next to nothing of Zen, Japanese, or archery. His religious interpretation of archery derived from the eccentric view of his teacher Awa Kenzō and his own misinterpretations of Awa's utterances. Yamada ridicules Herrigel's mystical language: "I at any rate know that it is not 'I' who must be given credit for this shot. 'It' shot and 'It' made the hit" (p. 50). While Yamada suggests that "It" (Es) is related to the Freudian term "Id," I think a more likely source, if a Western one is really required, would be Herrigel's admired mentor, the Jewish-Austrian philosopher Emil Lask (1875-1915), whose use of "Es" and "Es gibt " also influenced Heidegger.

Certainly, the assumption that the way of archery is intimately linked with Zen, and meaningless without it, will be sifted skeptically in light of Yamada's critique. But the reduction of Japanese archery to merely physical terms is surely not the whole story either. Yamada adduces as a corrective William Acker's book The Fundamentals of Japanese Archery (Tokyo: Shishokai, 1937; reprinted as Kyudo: The Japanese Art of Archery, Tokyo...