Zen at War

About this digest

Zen at War is in copyright, so this page is not the book. It is our summary of its argument, chapter by chapter, with a few short quotations. Read the book itself in the second edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, ISBN 978-0-7425-3926-6), which adds a long new chapter, “Was It Buddhism?”.

The author is not a hostile outsider. Brian Daizen Victoria is an ordained Sōtō Zen priest, and he writes as one who wants his tradition to face its past. The book made history as well as describing it: after its Japanese edition appeared in 2001, two major branches of the Rinzai sect, Myōshinji and Tenryūji, apologised for the first time for supporting Japanese militarism.

The thesis in one sentence: from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the surrender of 1945, Japan’s Buddhist institutions, and Zen most of all, subordinated the Buddhist teaching to the state, and ended by presenting obedience to the emperor and killing in war as forms of Buddhist practice.

Part I. The Meiji Restoration and Buddhism

1. The attempted suppression of Buddhism. Under the Tokugawa shoguns Buddhism had been a de facto state religion: every household had to register with a temple, and many priests became government functionaries. The Meiji state turned on it, promoting Shinto and stripping Buddhism of its privileges. By 1882 the government had split Shinto into a “religious” part and a “non-religious” State Shinto cult of the emperor, and the 1889 constitution granted freedom of religion only “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order”. Victoria’s point is that Buddhism entered the modern age frightened, and eager to prove its usefulness to the state.

2. Early Buddhist social ferment. The “New Buddhism” of the 1880s set out to show that a foreign-born religion could serve the nation: useful socially, compatible with Western science, and loyal to the throne. Buddhist leaders backed the wars with China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05). Victoria introduces the Rinzai master Nantembō and his lay disciple General Nogi Maresuke. Asked how to face life and death, Nantembō answered: “Apart from loyalty and duty, there is no life and death!” He also taught that there was “no bodhisattva practice superior to the compassionate taking of life.”

3. Uchiyama Gudō, radical Sōtō Zen priest. The counter-example. Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911), a village priest who sympathised with socialists and anarchists, was arrested in the High Treason Incident of 1910, an alleged plot against the imperial family. After a closed trial he was hanged in January 1911, the only Buddhist priest among those executed. The government destroyed his papers and would not allow his name on his gravestone.

4. Institutional Buddhism rejects progressive social action. The sects’ response to Gudō is the hinge of the book. Sōtō, Rinzai and Shin leaders issued abject apologies for failing to control their priests and pledged loyalty to the emperor. In 1912 the government gathered Buddhist, Shinto and Christian leaders in a Conference of the Three Religions to unite religion behind the state. From then until 1945, Victoria writes, no major religious leader in Japan publicly opposed government policy in any organised way.

Part II. Japanese militarism and Buddhism

5. Buddhism enters the war machine (1913–30). After victory over Russia, Zen spokesmen such as Nukariya Kaiten presented Zen as the creed of the samurai and the secret of Japan’s rise. Buddhist missions followed the army into Korea, China and Manchuria. They ran schools and welfare work, and some served as cover for “pacification” and intelligence. D. T. Suzuki contributed the idea of a spiritually united East confronting the West.

6. Buddhist resistance. The Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (1931), led by the Nichiren layman Senō Girō, attacked the sects as an opiate serving the powerful and opposed militarism. The police broke up its meetings; Senō was arrested in December 1936, and more than two hundred members followed from October 1937. Victoria also profiles a handful of individual dissenters. In 1937 Prime Minister Hayashi Senjūrō warned Buddhists that “Buddhism and the state’s policies must be united”. With some 200,000 priests in 70,000 temples, Victoria argues, Buddhism was one of the few bodies in Japan capable of real resistance, and it chose not to resist.

7. The emergence of Imperial-Way Buddhism. In the 1930s the sects systematised their position as kōdō Bukkyō: the Law of the Buddha was subordinated to the Law of the Sovereign, and the emperor was presented as sacred and inviolable. Victoria quotes Eiheiji’s chief abbot Hata Eshō in 1938, claiming that the Buddha himself had fought “a just war” in a former life and that “a just war is one task of Buddhism”.

8. Imperial-State Zen and Soldier Zen. The book’s longest chapter traces how Zen came to be fused with Bushido, from Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido (1905) through the Sōtō master Iida Tōin to D. T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen and the sword. Central figures are the Rinzai master Yamazaki Ekijū and his lay disciple Lieutenant Colonel Sugimoto Gorō, whose book Great Duty was read in study circles by middle-school boys late in the war. The chapter ends with schoolboys pressed into special attack units, the kamikaze.

9. Other Zen masters and scholars. Yamazaki Ekijū was typical rather than exceptional. Zen masters ran meditation retreats for officers and for “industrial warriors” in war factories. In 1944 the Great Japan Buddhist Federation called on some ten thousand priests to leave their temples and work in munitions plants while giving the workers spiritual training.

Part III. Postwar trends

10. Postwar Zen responses. After 1945 the sects quietly changed their liturgies but rarely examined their record. D. T. Suzuki blamed Shinto and a narrow-minded clergy, but, Victoria argues, never confronted his own writings. Scholars such as Ichikawa Hakugen began the work of self-criticism. Victoria contrasts this with the Rinzai master Seki Seisetsu, who had declared on national radio in 1937 that “showing the utmost loyalty to the emperor is identical with engaging in the religious practice of Mahayana Buddhism”, and with a postwar Rinzai leader who put Zen’s complicity down to “ignorance of the international situation”.

11. Corporate Zen. The same techniques moved into postwar companies. From the late 1950s, firms sent new employees to Zen temples for training designed to instil obedience, conformity and endurance. Victoria follows the masters who also led retreats for the Self-Defense Forces, and asks whether the doctrine of the unity of Zen and the sword has travelled to the West with Zen itself.

12. Was it Buddhism? Added in 2006, this chapter surveys 2,500 years of Buddhist social thought, from the non-violence of the Eightfold Path to the “nation-protecting Buddhism” of East Asia and the samurai Zen of Takuan and Suzuki. Victoria concludes that wartime Zen was not a sudden aberration but had deep historical precedents, and that turning meditative power to the service of killing desecrates the Dharma. Until Zen reconnects with its roots, he writes, its claim to be an authentic expression of the Buddha’s teaching “must remain in doubt”.

Key terms

• Imperial-Way Buddhism (kōdō Bukkyō): the subordination of Buddhist teaching and institutions to the emperor and the state.
• Imperial-State Zen (kōkoku Zen): Zen presented as the spiritual essence of the Japanese nation and its warrior code.
• Soldier Zen (gunjin Zen): Zen training used to make soldiers fearless and obedient, indifferent to their own death and to killing.
• Unity of Zen and the sword: the claim that the “no-mind” of Zen and the swordsman’s mind are one.

Debate

The book was controversial, especially for its treatment of D. T. Suzuki, the man most responsible for bringing Zen to the West. Some scholars and Zen practitioners have argued that Victoria quotes Suzuki selectively and gives too little weight to his private doubts about the war. Others credit the book with forcing Japanese sects to confront their record. Either way, it changed how Zen’s modern history is written.

Why it belongs here

Zen at War is a case study in what happens when a spiritual tradition hands its conscience to the state. A conservatism that values inherited institutions has to ask what those institutions are for, and what they owe to a higher law than the government of the day. Read it alongside Burke on the “little platoons”, which stand between the individual and the state, and Chesterton on the difference between loyalty to one’s country and worship of it.