-
Introduction
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I N T R O D U C T I O N Preaching a gospel of non-violence, the Dalai Lama has presented Buddhism to his wide audience as a religion of peace. Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers imagined an East Asian Zen populated by poets, hermits, and eccentrics, defiantly extricated from conventional morality and political co-optation. While these representations may hold sway in the popular imagination, history presents a different Buddhism. During the first half of the twentieth century, for example, Zen Buddhist leaders contributed actively to Japanese imperialism, giving rise to what has been termed “Imperial-Way Zen” (kōdō Zen), one variety of broader “Imperial-Way Buddhism” (kōdō Bukkyō). This historical record prompts a number of questions. How could Zen, a religion ostensibly committed to non-violence, the cultivation of wisdom and compassion , and the vow to liberate all sentient beings, have collaborated with Japanese imperialism, with all of its parochial nationalism1 and destructive militarism? To what extent have postwar Zen leaders reflected on recent history and perhaps even apologized for their war responsibility? Have they made efforts to reform their tradition and thereby avoid being doomed to repeat mistakes? Might such core Buddhist moral values as non-violence and compassion have moderated that wartime collaboration and now provide resources with which Japanese Zen thinkers can construct a critical social ethic? This book in part seeks to answer these questions. Most scholars who have investigated the connections between religion and Japanese imperialism from the Meiji Restoration (1868) up through the FifteenYear War (1931–1945) have focused on Shinto, the Japanese religious tradition most integrated into and implicated in modern Japanese imperialism.2 Buddhism, however, has attracted its share of scrutiny as well. A small but growing number INTRODUCTION of Japanese scholars have written on Imperial-Way Buddhism.3 Several writers in English have sketched Buddhist nationalism during the Meiji period (1868–1912),4 collaboration with later governmental attempts to control new religious movements ,5 and contributions to Japanese imperialism from the Meiji up through the Taishō (1912–1926) and early-Shōwa (1926–1945) periods.6 The foremost scholar of Imperial-Way Zen is priest, professor, and activist Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–1986). From the end of the war until his death he chronicled Zen support for Japanese imperialism and pressed the issue of Buddhist war responsibility. And he did so almost single-handedly, living as he did in a climate that was long on celebration of postwar democracy and peace but short on analysis of wartime militarism and belligerence. In his critique Ichikawa advanced arguments about the Zen approach to religious liberation and society, political ramifications of Buddhist metaphysical and logical constructs, traditional relations between Buddhism and governments in East Asia, tensions between Buddhist and Marxist thought in Japan, the philosophical system of Nishida Kitarō (1876–1945), and the vestiges of State Shinto in postwar Japan. Greatly influenced by Ichikawa, Brian Daizen Victoria has recently detailed in English the actions and ideology of the most active Zen supporters of Japanese imperialism, and his writings have prodded Rinzai Zen leaders to begin reflecting on and apologizing for their tradition’s wartime actions. Despite the importance of Ichikawa’s writings, no scholar in Japanese or any other language has outlined Ichikawa’s critique. I have written this book to begin filling that void, while offering my own reflections on Zen ethics in light of the historical phenomenon of Imperial-Way Zen. After devoting the first chapter to an overview of the actions and ideology that characterizedImperial-WayBuddhismfromtheMeijiRestorationupthrough1945, I turn to Ichikawa. In chapter two I sketch his arguments about the facets of the Zen religious path that contributed to Imperial-Way Zen. As we will see, he claims that the “peace of mind” (anjin) central to Zen liberation—cultivated by extricating oneself from discriminating thought, “becoming one with things” (narikiru), making one’s mind like a mirror that reflects all things “just as they are,” and “accepting and according with circumstances” (nin’nun)—undermines criticism of and resistance to sociopolitical actuality, and largely because of this mindset Zen Buddhists have accommodated if not actively supported the status quo. Ichikawa argues that this tendency was exacerbated by the “logic of sokuhi” and certain interpretations of Huayan (J. Kegon) Buddhist metaphysics, which obfuscated distinctions between the “is” and the “ought” and led Buddhist leaders and philosophers like Nishida to valorize actuality and certain particulars therein, whether the emperor or the imperial household. Ichikawa also called into question Zen...