Zen
and the Art of Divebombing,
or
The Dark Side of
the Tao
In the Bhagavad
Gita, Arjuna is taught by Krishna that it is his dharma as a
warrior to fight the righteous battle with his cousins and kill them, and that
if he kills them without passion or expectation, practicing karmayoga, he
can achieve salvation even while he does this. A similar mix of purposes,
religious and martial, though with major differences, can be found centuries
later with the samurai warrior class of Japan, and with the militaristic
ideology that later developed in modern Japan.
Although fighting battles and
killing enemies would seem to violate the Buddha-dharma, specifically the
Precept of the Buddha not to kill, an apparent violation that has troubled many
over the years, certain samurai, and later the modern military, ultimately could
see themselves as fulfilling a Buddhist purpose in what they did, even in the
horrors of World War II in the Pacific. The code of the samurai, later called bushidô,
the "Way of the Warrior," was in no way a religious duty like Arjuna's
dharma, but a connection between religion and battle was made through the
way in which Zen Buddhism wedded Buddhist purposes to both the
Taoist practice of an art or a craft and, in a historical tradition dominated by
a military class, the Japanese "martial arts."
While the most important modern
political application of karmayoga has been Mahâtmâ Gandhi's Satyagraha,
"non-violent resistance," which inspired Martin Luther King's conduct
of the civil rights movement in the United States, the mix of Zen and bushidô
arguably contributed to the aggression and war crimes of Japan during the
"China Incident" and the Pacific War. The ultimate lesson, as we shall
see, is one about the nature of morality.
"Zen" is the
Japanese pronunciation of the name of a School
of Buddhism that originally began in China, combining Buddhist ideas with
influence from the ancient Chinese school of Taoism.
 The Chinese name was "Ch'an"
(Chán in Pinyin), which itself was the Chinese pronunciation of dhyana,
"meditation," in Sanskrit. It has become common to use "Zen"
to refer to the Ch'an School both in China and in the other places to which the
School spread, like Korea and Vietnam. This has occurred probably because Zen
was popularized in the West by Japanese practitioners like D.T. Suzuki
(1870-1966). The chart illustrates the historic flow of influence, with the
Korean and Vietnamese pronunciations, as well as the Japanese, of "Ch'an."
The major schools of Zen in Japan are also given.
Traditionally, Ch'an is supposed
to have begun in China with a semi-legendary Buddhist missionary from India, Bodhidharma
(died c.528) -- Japanese Bodai Daruma, or just Daruma. The story
is that Bodhidharma arrived in China, went to the Shao-lin Monastery, famous as
the place were kung-fu, Chinese boxing, is supposed to have originated
(and so popularized in the Kung Fu television series, starring David
Carradine, in the 1970's), and sat down to stare at a wall. After nine years, he
suddenly achieved enlightenment. Bodhidharma is often shown with legs that are
whithered, or have even fallen off, because of how long he had sat on the legs,
cutting off the circulation.
In this strange story, Bodhidharma
is supposed to have achieved "Sudden Enlightenment," whose
characteristic is not just that it is sudden but that it is inexplicable.
There is nothing about the wall, or about what Bodhidharma was thinking about
(if anything), that explains why or how he achieved enlightenment. This goes
back to a fundamental feature of Buddhist thought, that not everything about
reality is or can be explained. Thus, when the Buddha was asked about certain
things, he said they were "questions which tend not to edification,"
and refused to answer them. The Buddha said:
Bear always in mind what it is that
I have not elucidated, and what it is that I have elucidated. And what have I
not elucidated? I have not elucidated that the world is eternal; I have not
elucidated that the world is not eternal; I have not elucidated that the world
is finite; I have not elucidated that the world is infinite; I have not
elucidated that the soul and the body are identical; I have not elucidated
that the soul is one thing and the body another; I have not elucidated that
the saint [arhat, one who achieves enlightenment in Theravâda
Buddhism] exists after death; I have not elucidated that the saint does not
exist after death; I have not elucidated that the saint both exists and does
not exist after death; I have not elucidated that the saint neither exists nor
does not exist after death. And why have I not elucidated this? Because this
profits not, nor has to do with the fundamentals of relgiion, nor tends to
aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, the supernatural
faculties, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana; therefore have I not elucidated it.
And what
have I elucidated? Misery [duhkha, pain, suffering -- from the root du,
to burn, pain, torment] have I elucidated; the origin of misery have I
elucidated; the cessation of misery have I elucidated; and the path leading to
the cessation of misery have I elucidated [i.e. the Four
Noble Truths]. And why have I elucidated this? Because this does profit,
has to do with the fundamentals of religion, and tends to aversion, absence of
passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana;
therefore have I eludicated it. [Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in
Translation, Harvard University Press, 1896, Atheneum, 1962-1987, p.122 --
Sutta-Pit.aka, Majjhima-Nikâya, Sutta 63]
The Buddha's refusal to
"elucidate" that the saint exists after death, or does not exist, or
both, or neither, produces one of the basic principles of Buddhist thought, the Fourfold
Negation (or "tetralemma"). The Greek Hellenistic
philosopher Pyrrho of Elis picked up this idea while in India with the
army of Alexander the Great,
and taught a skepticism where we are to "suspend judgment" in all
things, refusing to say of anything either that it is, or that it is not, or
both, or neither. The Buddhist origin of this is unmistakable, even if we did
not also have credible evidence of Pyrrho having been in India. In Buddhism
itself, a stronger idea developed, not just that these issues do not "tend
to edification," but that the nature of reality is such that these
rational alternates cannot apply to it, so that, in fact, the saint neither
exists after death nor does not exist nor both nor neither
-- because, whatever the nature of the saint's existence, it is beyond rational
comprehension, beyond the affirmation or denial of any possible predicate.
We see this in a story recorded
about Bodhidharma by Tao-yüan (Dôgen, in Japanese) in about 1004. Desiring to
choose a "dharma heir" and return to India, Bodhidharma asked his
closest students to state the essence of his teaching [these are the Japanese
versions of their names]:
Dofuku said, "In my opinion,
truth is beyond affirmation or negation, for this is the way it moves."
Bodhidharma replied: "You
have my skin."
The nun Soji said: "In my
view, it is like Ananda's sight of the Buddha-land -- seen once and for
ever."
Bodhidharma answered: "You
have my flesh."
Doiku said: "The four elements
of light [i.e. fire], airiness [i.e. air], fluidity [i.e. water], and solidity
[i.e. earth] are empty [shûnya, i.e. neither existence nor
non-existence, etc.] and the five skandhas
are no-things. In my opinion, no-thing is reality."
Bodhidharma commented: "You
have my bones."
Finally, Eka bowed before the
master -- and remained silent.
Bodhidharma said: "You have
my marrow."
[Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Charles E. Tuttle, 1967, Anchor
Books, and Shambhala, 1994, pp.ix-x]
In Buddhism, the
"marrow" here is a distinctively Ch'an idea, that the ultimate
teaching is silent. This is not, of course, an unfamiliar idea in China, where
Taoism was already the "Silent Teaching" and the Tao
Te Ching said, "One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does
not know" [LVI:128]. This characteristically Taoist idea, then, is
assimilated into Buddhism through Ch'an. A Buddhist background for it, however,
needed to be discovered or....manufactured. The legend that developed was that
Bodhidharma was the 28th "patriarch" in a line of apostolic succession
from the Buddha's disciple, Mahâkâshyapa, who had smiled faintly and attracted
the Buddha's attention after the Buddha delivered a sermon and was just twirling
a lotus flower. Mahâkâshyapa understood that the real teaching was the
silent twirling of the lotus, and the Buddha recognized that he alone understood
this.
As it happens, one of the most
important Buddhist texts in the Mahâyâna
tradition is the Lotus Sûtra (in full, the Saddharma Pun.d.arîka Sûtra,
the "Sutra of the True Dharma of the Lotus Blossom," Miao-fa Lien-hua
Ching in Chinese and Myôhô Renge Kyô in Japanese), which has the
peculiar structure of referring to a sermon that the Buddha gives, the Lotus
Sermon, even while it is never clear that he actually does give this sermon in
the text (cf. Leon Hurvitz, Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma,
Columbia University Press, 1976). Although I don't know if the claim was ever
made, the Ch'an tradition could easily say that the "Lotus Sermon" was
in fact the silent twirling of the flower, which could not be recorded in the
text, but which did constitute the extra-texual "silent teaching." As
it happens, the episode with Mahâkâshyapa is supposed to have taken place on Gr.dhrakût.a,
"Vulture Peak" ("Mount of the Numinous Eagle" to Hurvitz),
which is where the sermon of the Lotus Sutra was located.
Thus, Ch'an claimed a special
"transmission separate from texts," which had to be confirmed in
someone by a person in the line of transmission from Mahâkâshyapa. The idea of
the transmission apart from texts could be fiercely denied by other Buddhist
figures. Zen may sometimes seem to dispense with texts altogether, but this
tendency was even criticized by some Zen figures, like Dôgen (1200-1253), who
said that without texts Buddhism was nothing but "bald headed monks."
Indeed.
Since each person's enlightenment
needs to be certified by someone in the apostolic succession, Ch'an contains an
essential element that could easily become authoritarian and dictatorial,
depending on the personal authority of the certified teachers. But Ch'an
contains the opposite tendency also, at times seeming very antinomian, anarchic,
and individualistic, as in the saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road,
you should kill him -- since enlightenment is not be found in some person. Other
factors will determine which tendency predominates at different times and
places.
The indirect nature of the
"silent teaching" can be illustrated with a couple of examples. One is
a story, the very first one I ever heard about Zen (back in 1967):
A young man hears that there is a
Zen master living as a hermit in the forest. He decides to become his student.
After much searching, he finds the hut of the old master, and the man himself
is out in front of the hut, raking leaves. Introducing himself and explaining
his desire to become the master's student, the young man is surprised to then
receive no answer. The old man has continued his raking and never even looks
up or acknowledges the young man's presence. This is naturally very
disconcerting, and the young man stands and thinks for some time. Then he does
off in another part of the forest and builds his own hut. Ten years later,
while he is raking leaves, he suddenly achieves enlightenment (satori).
He immediately returns to the old Zen master, bows, and says, "Thank
you."
This little story exhibits the
purest form of the "silent teaching." Indeed, it is no less than the
"silent treatment" by the old Zen master. Few Zen masters are so
reticent. The Japanese Zen master Bankei (1622-1693) was famous for his popular
lectures. But this story illustrates very well the idea that enlightenment
cannot be conveyed by language. Indeed, there is a familiar saying that nothing
can be said that can do more for enlightenment than what a finger
pointing at the moon can do for seeing the moon. In this image, it is not
hard to understand that the finger is not the moon, has basically nothing to do
with the moon, and that once the moon is seen, the finger becomes superfluous
and irrelevant. Someone who continued pointing at the moon after all others had
already seen it would be thought a fool. I especially like his image because I
had a cat once, and whenever I used to set out her dinner and tried to point to
it, she always just looked at my finger. In Ch'an, one would say that we are
distracted by the language the same way that my cat was distracted by my finger.
With my cat, I could move my finger toward her dinner, and eventually she
would notice the food and forget about the finger. With enlightenment, or even
with the moon, such an expedient is not available.
Bodhidharma is supposed to have
anointed as his successor (the "second Patriarch" in China) his
student Hui-k'o (Eka, the "marrow" student above, in Japanese). After
the death of the fifth Patriarch, Heng-jen, there was a split in the tradition,
resulting in the Northern School, of Shen-hsui, who held that enlightenment is
attained gradually (a common idea in Buddhism at the time, when it was thought
that merit, from worthy deeds, needed to be accumulated over many
lifetimes), and the Southern school, of Hui-neng (638-713, Enô, in Japanese),
who taught the charactestic Ch'an idea of sudden and spontaneous enlightenment.
The Southern School is the one that became particularly antinomian, careless of
ritual, and emphasizing the "silent teaching" passed from teacher to
student.
Eventually the Southern School
eclipsed the Northern School, but by the 9th century, two more tendencies began
to differentiate Ch'an practice, over the manner of meditation. The basic
practice of meditation, as Bodhidharma seemed to be doing it himself, was called
"just sitting" (tso-ch'an in Chinese, zazen in
Japanese). This is meditation without any of the meditative aids familiar from
India, mantras (words or formulas), man.d.alas (diagrams), or mudrâs
(gestures). Staring at a wall for nine years is indeed "just sitting."
This practice becomes characteristic of the Ts'ao-tung School in China,
the Sôtô School in Japan.
Another form of practice also
became popular, however. Stories or questions that had arisen in the tradition
could themselves become the objects of meditation (as, in effect, mantras).
These were called kung-an in Chinese (Pinyin gongàn -- kôan
in Japanese), a term that originally meant a judge's table and which came to
mean court cases. So in meditation one can consider "cases." This
became characteristic of the Lin-chi School in China, the Rinzai
School in Japan.
It is a Japanese kôan,
from Hakuin (1685-1768), that is probably the most famous of all. To begin
meditation, one might be asked (by the master or by the abbot of one's monastary),
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Several simple
answers might suggest themselves. The sound of one hand clapping could be
silence. "Silent teaching," right? Or it might be slapping the hand
against one's thigh, or even clapping the palm of the hand with the fingers on
the same hand. All of these answers, however reasonable, might only earn a
beating from the Zen master. The point of all such kôans is that there
is no answer. The negation goes deeper than just saying either
"silence" or "no sound." The negation applies to the
question itself: It is a self-contradictory question. One hand cannot
clap. So the whole idea of the sound of one hand clapping is meaningless.
What is the point of asking
meaningless questions? Entirely to disrupt rational thought and make the mind
jump the tracks that normally confine it. Since that is the only way to get at
enlightenment, which also defeats rational thought, then even humble questions
can do the job. But how does one answer the question to the satisfaction of the
Zen master? With an answer just as meaningless and irrelevant as the question,
or perhaps by giving the Zen master a beating himself.
A monk asked Fuketsu: "Without
speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?"
Fuketsu observed: "I always
remember springtime in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable kinds
of fragrant flowers." [Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, p.200]
 Meditation
by "just sitting" and by trying to answer a kôan are what I
call the theoretical side of Ch'an. In mediation what you want is knowledge
or understanding. You are not doing anything. Indeed, in Zen
meditation there is a tendency for one to fall asleep, which is why a proctor is
often used to thrash sitters back to consciousness. Bodhidharma may have
achieved enlightenment after staring at his wall, but he had not done anything
practical, and, if his legs really whithered, he had damaged his ability to ever
do very much that was practical. We find, however, a Zen tradition that
displays a practical application of its ideas. This is especially
conspicuous in the Zen classic, Zen in the Art of Archery (originally Zen
in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens), by the German philosophy professor Eugen
Herrigel (1884-1955).
Herrigel had been interested in
Zen for some time and managed to get a teaching appointment in Japan, back in
the 1930's, just so he could explore the "mysticism" of such a
different tradition. However, he was discouraged at every attempt to enter into
the practice of meditation. His Japanese hosts (in their own politely xenophobic
way) did not think that meditation would be to his taste (i.e. the gaijin
isn't up to it). What was eventually suggested, however, was that he study an art
under a Zen master. Archery was something he already knew a little, so that
seemed like an agreeable avenue. His wife simultaneously took up flower
arranging.
The archery techniques were rather
different from what was familiar to him. But the first lesson, drawing the bow,
was not so bad. The second lesson, however, was very bad. He was told by the
archery master that he must release the arrow without releasing the arrow:
"You mustn't open the right hand on purpose" [Zen in the Art
of Archery, Vintage Books, 1989, p.29]. This would seem to be a necessarily
impossible task. If one is to release the arrow, then the arrow will necessarily
need to be released? No? Evidently not.
Familiarity with Ch'an and Taoism,
however, answers the paradox of the instruction. An impossible task is a kind of
kôan, but to do this, to release the arrow without releasing the
arrow,  without purpose or intention,
this is thoroughly explained by something else: It calls for Not-Doing
(Wu-wei), the fundamental principle of Taoism. Taoism is about
actions and already has views about art and practice. The Zen practice of the
"art of archery" combines Taoist theory and Taoist purposes with
Buddhist theory and Buddhist purposes. The Taoist purpose of art is to perfect
an art and achieve beauty. These are purposes wholly alien to Buddhism.
Back in India, the idea that Buddhism might be used to achieve beauty in life
would be absolutely farcical. In India, Buddhist meditation on the transiency of
life might take place at a cremation ground or other places where death and
decay are present and obvious. By the time Buddhism gets to Japan, meditation on
the transiency of life might take place in the presence of blooming Cherry
Trees, whose flowers are indeed transient, but which are certainly far more
pleasant to contemplate than burning or rotting corpses. Herrigel says:
The effortlessness of a performance
for which great strength is needed is a spectacle of whose aesthetic beauty
the East has an exceedingly sensitive and grateful appreciation. [ibid.,
p.27]
But it is not an
"appreciation" that comes from Buddhism. The Buddhist purpose of any
practice, of course, is to achieve enlightenment and Nirvana, the things that
the Buddha "elucidated" above. How are these Buddhist
purposes accomplished through the practice of an art? Or, more specificially,
accomplished through Not-Doing? We can find the answer by asking what is
doing the practice if the artist himself is "not" doing it. As
it happens, Herrigel's archery master says something about this:
Then, one day, after a shot, the
Master made a deep bow and broke off the lessson, "Just then 'It'
shot!" he cried, as I stared at him bewildered...
"What I have said,"
the Master told me severely, "was not praise, only a statement that ought
not to touch you. Nor was my bow meant for you, for you are entirely innocent
of this shot. [ibid., pp.52-53]
When Herrigel achieves not-doing,
he does not release the arrow, but "It" releases the arrow. When
Herrigel asks what "It" might be, he is told, "Once you have
understood that, you will have no further need of me" [p.52].
In Taoist terms, the answer to
what the "It" might be is fairly simple: When we achieve
not-doing, it is the Tao that does whatever is done. But the Tao is not
part of Buddhism -- except perhaps as the Fourth Noble Truth, the
"Way" -- but certainly not as a metaphysical agent. What releases the
arrow for Buddhism?  Well, if the
purpose of Buddhism is to achieve enlightenment, then the purpose of Buddhism is
to become a Buddha. If achieving not-doing means achieving enlightenment, then
it is one's own self as a Buddha that releases the arrow. Of course, in
Buddhism there is no self,
so we cannot really say it is "one's own self" that becomes a Buddha.
What we find instead is that it is one's "Buddha Nature" that
is realized in enlightenment. So we can say that one's Buddha Nature is
"It" and that it is the Buddha Nature that releases the arrow.
Now, Herrigel's teacher does not
discuss the Buddha Nature, so in Zen in the Art of Archery ones never
does learn what "It" is. While the Buddha Nature is commonly discussed
in Mahâyâna Buddhism, and also in Zen (e.g. Bankei), there is a Zen tradition
to avoid the idea as not "tending to edification." Thus the Chinese
master Chao-chou (778-897, Joshu in Japanese) was asked whether a dog had a
Buddha Nature. Since dogs are sentient beings, and all sentient beings can be
reborn as humans and become Buddhas, dogs would ordinarily be said to certainly
have a Buddha Nature. However, Chao-chou answered "Wu!" in Chinese.
This is often translated as "No!" but it is not the ordinary Chinese
negative for "no" or "not" (which would be pu -- in
Wade-Giles, bu in Pinyin -- Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary,
character 5379 [Harvard University Press, 1943, 1972]). Chao-chou uses
Mathew's character 7180, whose meaning is given there as "without;
apart from; none. A negative" [p.1065]. Chao-chou is not really answering
"no" to the question, i.e. to deny that a dog has a Buddha
Nature; he is saying not to ask the question, which is hard to do in one word --
but this is the traditional and reasonable interpretation of his answer. Since
the Japanese pronunciation of wu is mu (hence, the "mu
kôan"), one Japanese author playfully suggested that Chao-chou was simply
making a noise like a cow ("Moo!") and not answering the question at
all. In the "Gateless Gate," the Chinese master Ekai (1183-1260,
Japanese pronunciation), comments with a poem stating the unanswerability of the
question:
Has a dog a Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.
[Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, p.165]
The "silent teaching"
thus may avoid the issue of the Buddha Nature altogether, but if we want to know
what not-doing has to do with Buddhism, it is the Buddha Nature that is
available in place of the Taoist Tao. This ties together Buddhist practice and
Taoist practice and the dual goals of enlightenment and beauty.
Further debates occur about
whether the Buddha Nature is acquired, through practice and the
accumulation of merit, or is original, i.e. inherent in all beings
capable of enlightenment. This question would, of course, be even more irksome
for the likes of Ekai, so we need not consider it any more here, except to give
a characteristic quote from Bankei, whose whole teaching rested on the
"unborn" Buddha-mind, i.e. everyone's original Buddha Nature:
Not a single one of you people at
this meeting is unenlightened. Right now, you're all sitting before me as
Buddhas. Each of you received the Buddha-mind from your mothers when you were
born, and nothing else. This inherited Buddha-mind is beyond any doubt unborn,
with a marvelously bright illuminative wisdom. In the Unborn, all things are
perfectly resolved. [The Unborn, The Life and Teaching of Zen Master Bankei,
1622-1693, translated and with an Introduction by Norman Waddell, North
Point Press, San Francisco, 1984, p.35]
Bankei's statement, "In the
Unborn, all things are perfectly resolved," highlights another aspect to
this. If Buddhist practice can produce beauty, then maybe this world, the place
of birth, disease, old age, and death, is not so bad after all. Maybe we don't
really need to avoid rebirth -- the goal of all Indian religion. Indeed,
the Chinese influence in Ch'an tended to turn Buddhism from a world-denying
religion into a more world-affirming religion. This can be stated in traditional
Buddhist terms. The Buddha himself achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree,
but the Sutta-Pit.aka states clearly that he achieved Nirvana at his
death -- "and rising from the fourth trance, immediately The Blessed One
passed into Nirvana" [Buddhism in Translation, op. cit.,
p.110]. We have a special term for that occasion, the pari-nirvân.a, the
"complete" Nirvana. If the purpose of Buddhist practice is to be free
of sam.sâra, the round of birth and death, then this could only be
accomplished through a parinirvân.a.
On the other hand, was the Buddha
really still suffering after he achieved enlightenment? If not, then he
had achieved Nirvana already and sam.sâra had actually been transformed
into a place without suffering. The metaphysical possibility for this had been
opened in Mahâyâna Buddhism by the Mâdhyamika ("Middle")
School. The greatest philosopher of this school, and possibly the greatest
Buddhist philosopher ever, Nagârjuna (c.150-250), had applied the
Fourfold Negation to most attempts at rational understanding, even to the
difference between Nirvana and sam.sâra, which thus come out neither the
same, nor different, nor both, nor neither. This ambiguity opened the way for
world-affirming Chinese interpretations, and probably for the much more worldly tantrism
of the Vajrayâna stage
of Buddhism even in India. Ch'an, with its Taoist side, was never very
interested in being free of the world, and when it became attached to the
practice of arts and skills, it could even see itself as supremely successful at
participating in worldly affairs. Other schools of Chinese Buddhism, like T'ien
T'ai (Tendai in Japan),
became similarly world affirming, as did some distinctively Japanese schools.
Thus, we often find statements in
East Asian Buddhism that the fruit of enlightenment is to see that life and the
world are just fine the way they are. This is rather astonishing in comparison
to the original message and milieu of Buddhism back in India, but it naturally
reflects both the internal evolution of Buddhist thought and the powerful
influence, once the message arrives in China, of a civilization that no one
would ever mistake for being world-denying, or "otherwordly" in any
sense.
Now, I have been considering the
case of Eugen Herrigel learning the "art of archery"; but there is
something odd about that art. It was not invented in order to shoot at straw
targets, as Herrigal and his teacher do. No, archery had the very practical
purpose of use in hunting, to shoot Bambi, or in war, to shoot people. Indeed,
Herrigel's teacher says, "We master archers say: one shot -- one
life!" [p.31]. Archery is a martial art, i.e. an art of war.
Although archery was originally
the most important martial art in Japan, and shooting targets from horseback is
still a practiced sport, eventually the sword became for the warrior
class of Mediaeval Japan, the samurai, the most imporant weapon, at least
in theory. "The sword is the soul of the samurai" -- though this
became the case mainly during the Edo
Period, when there was rarely real fighting, apart from duels, and when
firearms, which had decided battles in the 16th century, had all been seized and
destroyed. The Edo samurai were required by law to carry two swords, and
no one else was permited to carry more than one short sword (the wakizashi)
for self defense. Today the basic techniques of sword fighting can still be
learned in the sport of kendô (the "way of the sword"), and
the techniques special to using an actual sword can be learned in the martial
art of iaidô (the "art of drawing the sword"). Both of these
disciplines can be considered parts of kenjutsu (the "art of the
sword").
The sword as an art easily fits a
Taoist paradigm, articulated through the kôan of a Chinese master, who
said that before he ever studied Ch'an, he always thought that mountains were
just mountains. Then when he began studying, he found that mountains were not
mountains (a typical Taoist paradox). After long study, he stopped worrying
about this and mountains went back to being mountains again.  This
easily describes the stages of reaching enlightenment through meditation, but it
can also describe the stages of learning an art or skill, not just something
like the sword, but even very humble skills.
For instance, learning to drive an
automobile with a clutch, which cannot be done without some instruction,
actually involves a very simple rule: (1) step on the clutch, (2) put the engine
in gear, and (3) slowly step on the gas pedal and the release the clutch at the
same time. This simple procedure always turns out to be very difficult to
effect. It takes, not more instruction, but just constant practice. Eventually,
it becomes easy, smooth, and natural, and the driver simply forgets about it,
doing it automatically, which is good, since a driver needs to look where he is
going. Learning the use of a sword has an added aspect that a completely
ignorant person can still pick up a sword and, in general, know what to do with
it. Such a person can even be dangerous, since in a fight he will be desperate
and there is no telling what they might do. Someone who receives instruction,
however, is endangered by their own concentration on the techniques they are
learning. They may even be a worse swordsman than the ignorant person, until the
techniques become natural and automatic. This is easily explained by the
circumstance that ignorance is much more like "not-doing" than is the
"doing," effort, and trying of the stage of instruction.
Another humble example also
illustrates the Taoist principle of "No-Mind" (wu-hsin, or wu-xin
in Pinyin), which is the emptiness of thought that results from the not-doing of
the mind. Typing is a skill that anyone can practice, since the identity of the
letters is usually printed on the keys. Anyone can thus sit down and type, by
the "hunt and peck" method, usually using just index fingers. People
can go their whole lives typing like this and doing just fine. On the other
hand, "hunt and peck" can never be all that fast, and anyone might
wish to increase their speed and facility by taking lessons in "touch
typing," where all the fingers are assigned to particular keys. Beginning
instruction, one's typing is certainly much worse than even the slowest
"hunt and peck" typist; and it takes some time to develop ease and
facility with the method. Eventually, however, one's fingers become accustomed
to hitting certain keys, and speeds of 70, 100, or more words-per-minute can be
achieved. A very odd thing may then happen. Years after I had learned to type, I
realized that I had actually forgotten, consciousnessly, where all the
keys were. My fingers would go them them automatically when typing a
word, but if I asked myself, "where is such-and-such a key," it often
took some thought, or looking, to identify where the key was. This loss of
memory, while retaining an automatic skill, is a perfect example of
"No-Mind." With the sword, the ideal was to be able, with thought, to
spontaneously draw, strike, and kill all in the same blinding motion. I think
this is why baseball is popular in Japan -- a game with a great deal of standing
around but where, once the ball is hit, the action proceeds in a flash, and
players who stop to think what to do will certainly commit an "error."
With the sword, there is indeed
little else to really do with it but kill. But war and killing raise the awkward
problem, for anyone in East Asia, that they violate the moral precept of the
Buddha not to kill. This injunction was taken very seriously in the entire
history of Buddhism, and even in Japan it was long believed that fowlers and
fishermen would fall into one of the Buddhist Hells (of which there are many)
because they killed sentient beings. They did not practice what, in the
Eightfold Way, would be called "right livelihood." And besides, if the
purpose of Buddhism is to eradicate suffering, doesn't killing inflict
suffering? But if fowlers and fishermen would fall into Hell for their
professions, what about men whose livelihood involved killing, not just sentient
beings, but human beings? This would mean the samurai. What is going to prevent
them from falling into Hell?
It has now become common to see
the samurai as resorting to Zen to effect their salvation. Thus, in his Zen
and Japanese Culture [1938, Bollingen Series LXIV, Princeton University
Press, 1959], D.T. Suzuki said:
We have the saying in Japan:
"The Tendai is for the royal family, the Shingon for the nobility, the
Zen for the warrior classes, and the Jôdo for the masses." This saying
fitly characterizes each sect of Buddhism in Japan. [p.63]
Actually, it doesn't. One of the
greatest samurai of all, the first Edo Period Shôgun, Tokugawa
Ieyasu, was a patron of Jôdo, or "Pure Land" Buddhism. The
great appeal of Jôdo for a samurai was its teaching that all of us are
hopelessly sinful, all destined for Hell, and that our only chance for salvation
is to rely on the power of the original Vow of the Buddha Amitâbha (Amida
Butsu in Japanese) to cause all beings who call on him to be born into his
Western Paradise, his Pure Land, where they can work out their salvation without
suffering or distractions (like sex -- people are born from lotuses). Invoking
Amida means chanting the "Nembutsu" -- Namu Amida Butsu --
where namu comes from Sanskrit namas, "bowing, obeisance,
adoration."
Jôdo, and the closely related Jôdo
Shin-shu, are still the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan; and so Suzuki's
saying that it is for the "masses" is, as far as that goes, accurate.
But besides a samurai like Ieyasu, and his predecessor Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (who is buried on Amida-yama in Kyôto), we also have a
counterexample to Suzuki in perhaps the greatest Japanese epic, the Heike
Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, c.1240 -- or see the story of
"Hoichi the Earless" in Masaki Kobayashi's classic 1964 movie Kwaidan).
As the fleet of the samurai clan of the Taira is defeated at the battle of Dan-no-ura
by the Minamoto clan
in 1185, and the child emperor Antoku is about to die with his grandmother,
Nii-no-ama, when she jumps with him into the water, she first tells him to face
East, to honor the Sun goddess Amaterasu-ômikami at Ise, and to the West, to
invoke the Buddha Amida and his Pure Land.
She turned her face to the young
sovereign, holding back her tears. "Don't you understand? You became an
Emperor because you obeyed the Ten Good Precepts in your last life, but now an
evil karma holds you fast in its toils. Your good fortune has come to an end.
Turn to the east and say goodbye to the Grand Shrine of Ise, then turn to the
west and repeat the sacred name of Amida Buddha, so that he and his host may
come to escort you to the Pure Land. This county is a land of sorrow; I am
taking you to a happy realm called Paradise." [The Tale of the Heike,
translated by Helen Craig McCullough, Stanford University Press, 1988, p.378]
The Jôdo sect did not yet exist
at this time, but Pure Land practice was widespread. Thus, not only do we find
samurai, like Ieyasu and Hideyoshi, as Pure Land patrons, but also important
persons from the "royal [actually, imperial] family."
In Pure Land practice, the whole
issue of the sinfulness of war and killing is conveniently avoided. People are
expected to sin anyway, so if we must, we don't have to worry about it too much.
All we have to worry about is getting to the Pure Land. This is not just a
Japanese approach. Rebirth into a Buddha Land (there are several besides Amida's)
is also one of the possibilities in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Not as good as
Nirvana, but better than being reborn here.
There were also, however, samurai
who were patrons of Zen. This began with the Hôjô
Regents of the Kamakura
Shoguns, but later one of the most important figures was Oda Nobunaga, the first
local lord, besides Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, who was responsible for the
unification of Japan in the 16th century. The personalities of the three figures
are captured in a parable about how each of them would get a bird to sing:
Nobunaga would say, "Sing, or I'll kill you"; Hideyoshi would
say, "Sing, or I'll make you sing"; and Ieyasu would say, "Sing,
or I'll wait for you to sing." Distinguished by his ruthlessness, Nobunaga
became infamous for burning the Tendai temples on Mt. Hiei, above Kyôto, and he
is buried in a complex of Zen temples, the Daitokuji, in the same city.
How would would Zen enable the
samurai to avoid the sinfulness of their profession? Mainly through the Taoist
expedient of not thinking about it. The "silent teaching" can very
effectively avoid moral issues, including breaches of the precepts, by
dismissing them with all other conceptual and rational issues. Taoism, of
course, expects that by not-doing, by not thinking about moral principles,
things will take care of themselves.
Exterminate benevolence, discard
rectitude [righteousness],
And the people will again be filial...
[Tao Te Ching, translated by D.C. Lau, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 23,
XIX:43]
A version of this also turns up in
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "Peace
of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right
thoughts produce right actions...." [p. 267]." Pirsig apparently
thinks that the right meditative attitude, "peace of mind," will
spontaneously produce right values, thoughts, and actions, without the mediation
of rational examination and analysis -- the kind of thing that Socrates,
whom Pirsig dislikes, might do. This is a version of moral
aestheticism. With Zen, its effects can be tested. Did the mastery of
archery by Eugen Herrigel produce "right values, thoughts, and
actions"? Evidently not, since he returned to Germany and became an
enthusiastic Nazi. Is there anything in Zen and the Art of Archery that
might provide some moral principle prejudicial to things like Naziism? Really,
no. D.T. Suzuki himself, writing in the 1930's, said:
Zen has no special doctrine or
philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except that it tries
to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by means of certain
intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore,
extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral
doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be
found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or
idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism. It is, however, generally
animated with a certain revolutionary spirit, and when things come to a
deadlock -- as they do when we are overloaded with conventionalism, formalism,
or other cognate isms -- Zen asserts itself and proves to be a destructive
force. [ibid., p. 63]
As he was writing,
"fascism" actually meant Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and
"communism" actually meant Josef Stalin. They were all of them,
indeed, a "destructive force" -- they may have been responsible for
the deaths of up on 70 million people. And Suzuki himself appeared to have no
objections to fascism and militarism as they developed in Japan -- recently
examined by Brian Victoria in his Zen at War [Weatherhill, 1997]. Morally
this leaves us with Zen as completely undiscriminating -- morally blind -- which
is not what Taoism, or many Zen masters, would have expected. We might call this
the "Dark Side of the Tao," on analogy with the "Dark Side"
of the Tao-like "Force" in the Star
Wars movies. As it happened, the "silence," or the "dark
side," allowed for the practice of great wrongs and the perpetration of
great evils.
What happened to Taoism, morally,
back in China? Well, nature abhores a vacuum. If the Taoists didn't want to talk
about morality, the Confucians were more than happy to do so. The void of moral
discourse left by Taoism was easily filled by the moral discourse of
Confucianism; and Taoists were largely expected to obey Confucian morality in
their public and private life, enforced by Confucian officials, which is why
Taoist sages often took to the hills as hermits. In Japan something rather
different happened. The samurai would pay little attention to Confucius,
who, after all, had said, "Your job is to govern, not to kill" [Analects,
XII:19]. It was indeed the job of the samurai to kill. Nor was there a class of
Confucian bureaucrats to dominate the government, as in China during the Ming
Dynasty. Japan had gone the opposite way of China, with the military coming
to dominate the country in the Kamakura
Period. What moved to fill the Taoist void of Zen was then the ethos of the
military, of the samurai, namely bushidô, the "Way of the
Warrior." In the feudal system that came to dominate Japan, one's duty was
to one's lord. If he said, "Go kill those fellows," you go kill them.
If he said, "Go kill your family," you go kill them. And if he said,
"Go kill yourself," then you go kill yourself (seppuku, ritual
suicide).
While it is not uncommon to see
statements, in martial arts books or even in samurai movies, that a samurai only
draws his sword in the interest of justice, or only returns an attack that has
been made on him (the "submissive way," judô, ideology derived
from Taoism), the only samurai who had the luxury of acting this way were the rônin,
the "wave men," who were unemployed and so without a master.
They could defend the innocent or do whatever else they liked, as we see in the
classic Kurosawa Akira movies The Seven Samurai (Shichi-nin no Samurai,
1954 -- remade as a Western, the Magnificent Seven, 1960) and Yojimbo
(1961 -- remade as a Western, A Fistful of Dollars, 1964 -- though the
original story seems to have been Dashiell Hammett's "Continental Op"
novel, Red Harvest). There are even stories about a samurai who was the
"master of no sword." In one of those, he was recognized and
challenged by another samurai while they were taking a ferry across a river. He
suggested that they be put off and fight on an island that was coming up. After
they got off the ferry, the "master of no sword" pushed the boat off
but then jumped on himself, calling back, "That is my technique of 'no
sword'," as the challenger was left behind on the island.
But no samurai wanted to be
unemployed. This meant poverty, and the samurai as much as anyone wanted a
family and a position in life. How unpleasant it could be to be a rônin
we see in Masaki Kobayashi's movie Harakiri (1962), where we find that
many unemployed samurai are really reduced to begging. Toshiro Mifune's
character in Yojimbo, like John Belushi in his Saturday Night Live
samurai skits of the 1970's, is dressed very nearly in rags and seems to scratch
himself a lot, from lice or just lack of bathing. Indeed, that is what poverty
is like. With a job and a master, however, a samurai no longer was free to make
his own judgments -- he was expected to do what he was told.
What bushidô was
originally all about is now open to debate. G. Cameron Hurst III argued in
"Death, honor, and loyalty: the bushido ideal" [Philosophy East and
West, Volume XL, No. 4, October 1990, pp.511-527] that 20th century notions
about bushidô mostly have nothing to do with the samurai but are based
on an 1899 book by Nitobe Inazô (1862-1933), Bushidô: The Soul of Japan.
Nitobe was Western educated, knew relatively little about Japanese history, and
even thought that he had coined the word bushidô himself. His ability to
faithfully represent Japanese history, culture, and values is thus sorely in
question. Hurst, on the occasion of the death of Emperor Hirohito
in 1989, noted the hostility to the Emperor, as a possible war criminal, at the
time.
The emotional reaction to the
emperor's death and funeral protocol, as well as discussions with many who are
not Japan specialists, impressed upon me once again the widespread belief that
the behavior of Japanese forces in World War II was conditioned by adherence
to the old samurai code of ethics called bushidô, which emphasized
unflinching loyalty to the emperor, even to the point of willingly sacrificing
one's life, by suicide if necessary. Bushidô in many Western minds, as
represented, for example, in Baron Russell's The Knights of Bushido, is
intimately linked to the rise of Japanese imperialism, kamikaze
attacks, suicide charges, and prisoner-of-war atrocities. That this is a
historical perversion -- that even if there was a modern bushidô that
functioned as a normative ethical code for Japanese tropps, it might in fact
be a modern creation, with no real link to any Japanese traditional set of
ethics, real or imagined -- is seldom considered. [p.512]
While Hurst seems correct that the
20th century idea of bushidô in both Japan and the West is a modern, Meiji
period, creation, and while even traditional Japanese discussions of the duties
of the samurai were largely the creation of the Edo
Period, when more samurai were bureaucrats than warriors, fighting more
duels than battles, nevertheless, I think he is wrong about it being a
"historical perversion" to trace the crimes of the modern Japanese
military back to the samurai. If Hurst merely wants to say that there was never
a unified, recognized, official ideology called "bushidô" in
traditional Japan, then he is certainly right. If he wants to say that the
values and practices that led to the characteristics of later Japanese
militlarism were hotly disputed by many Japanese themselves at the time, he is
certainly right. But if he wants to say that the modern, militaristic versions
of bushidô have "no real link to any Japanese traditional set of
ethics," then I think he is quite wrong. However much a modern creation,
the ideology of bushidô is very much based on real values and tendencies
in Japanese history. Not everyone had to agree about these values and
tendencies for them to exist, any more than all the samurai had to practice Zen
rather than Jôdo, for them to be real antecedents and so real
precedents and sources for the Japanese militarism and war crimes of the 20th
century.
A key point is about the meaning
of "loyalty."  The Confucian
term is chung (zhong in Pinyin). The word, although not
well defined in the Analects, nevertheless appears to mean
"conscientiousness," and is applied to those who "do their best,
to do their duty," where their duty is always, in Confucianism, to do what
is right. That is the Chinese ideal. In Japan, however, most certainly by the
modern period (Meiji through World War II), chung, or chû
in Japanese, had come to mean blind obedience, that "loyal"
persons are supposed to do what they are told, whether it is even right or
wrong. Where in China a truly "loyal" minister might refuse to carry
out the wrongful orders of an Emperor, and gladly pay with his life for
refusing, a martyr to righteousness, in Japan this kind of individual dissent
became intolerable.
The question, then, must be, how
far back does this Japanese interpretation go? When did the ideal of "blind
obedience" become current? Indeed, it became established quite early. A
good clue about this is that we can step right into the middle of the debate
already raging in the 13th century, when the Buddhist monk Nichiren
(1222-1282), founder of a sect now usually known by his name (though previously
as the Hokke or "Lotus" sect), argued vehemently against the
"blind obedience" interpretation of chû, citing the Chinese
Classics:
In the same letter you say:
"To obey one's lord or parents, whether they are right or wrong, is
exemplary behavior, approved by the Buddhas and kami and according with
worldly virtue." Because this is the most important of important matters,
I will not venture to give my own view but will cite original texts. The Classic
of Filial Piety says, "A son must reprove his father, and a minister
must reprove his sovereign." Cheng Hsüan comments, "When a
sovereign or father behaves unjustly and his minister or son does not admonish
him, that will lead to the country's ruin or the family's destruction."
The Hsin-hsü says, "One who does not admonish a ruler's tyranny
is not a loyal retainer. One who does not speak from fear of death is not a
man of courage." ...I can only grieve to see my lord, to whom I am so
deeply indebted, deceived by teachers of an evil Dharma and about to fall into
the evil paths. ["Yorimoto chinjô," Shôwa teihon Nichiren Shônin
ibun 2:1356]
Nichiren himself preached
adherence to the Lotus Sutra above all else, and rebuked the authorities
for their adherence to false doctrines, like Zen, which he called the "work
of devils." He and his successors found themselves at odds with the
authorities over this then and ever since, often exiled or tortured. Nichiren
himself was almost executed. He was arguing against the attitude,
certainly of the authorities themselves, who happened to be the samurai Hôjô
Regents of the Kamakura Shôguns, who expected obedience. So the tension between
Chinese (Confucian) loyalty and Japanese (samurai) loyalty already existed soon
after the samurai had themselves taken over Japanese history -- the effect of
the battle of Dan-no-ura and the establishment of the Shôgunate.
It is noteworthy in this that the
attitude of the authorities, in prefering blind obedience, was nothing
peculiarly Japanese. We don't need a theory of the "Japanese mind" to
explain it. Authority loves obedience, and there are still few politicians,
judges, or policemen even in the United States who would allow, as Martin Luther
King said, that "an unjust law is no law at all." In the German Army,
the saying was, "An order is an order is an order." We find the
ability of authorities to command obedience compromised only through some kind
of institutional check. In China, even after the triumph of the scholar
bureaucrats, there was still an institutional tension between the mandarins and
the Throne itself; and in Mediaeval Europe, all know of the institutional
independence of the Church and of the epic contests for authority between the
Popes and the German Emperors, Kings of England, France, Aragon, etc., etc. But
with only figurehead Emperors, and de facto rulers who were samurai
themselves, Japan no longer possessed, and later would ruthlessly crush, any
institutions or movements that might oppose the absolute authority of the (now
military) government. This circumstance may be obscured by undoubted examples in
Japanese history of betrayal and disobedience, even revolt and insurrection, but
these examples are presented in Japanese history itself as redeemed by the
willingness of the disobedient to die. This makes it all the easier for
the government to crush real dissent and to create, whether in the 17th century
or the 1930's, a totalitarian state.
Later in Japanese history, we get
actual manuals of bushidô, most famously the Hagakure
("Hidden [kakure] [by?] Leaves [ha]," 1716) by Yamamoto
Tsunetomo. Cameron Hurst is concerned to emphasize that many scholars disagreed
with Tsunetomo in his day. Fair enough. But, again, the point is not that
everyone agreed with him, but that we only have to produce some
counterexample to Hurst's statement that there is "no real link to any
Japanese traditional set of ethics" from 20th century bushidô.
Tsunetomo is a "link" and does represent a "Japanese traditional
set of ethics." Tsunetomo also, as it happened, became, on the death of his
lord in 1700, a Zen monk.
Confucius says, "The superior
man [or gentleman] understands righteousness; the small [or mean] man
understands profit" [Analects, IV:16]. Tsunetomo rejects both.
To hate injustice and stand on
righeousness is a difficult thing. Furthermore, to think that being righteous
is the best one can do and to do one's utmost to be righteous will, on the
contrary, bring many mistakes. The Way is in a higher place than
righteousness. This is very difficult to discover, but it is the highest
wisdom. When seen from this standpoint, things like righteousness are rather
shallow. [Hagakure, William Scott Wilson translation, Discus/Avon,
1979, 1981, pp.25-26]
Tsunetomo is not here recommending
a Machiavellian prudence that occasionally must "take the way of evil"
for a good end [The Prince, Daniel Donno translation, Bantam, 1966, 1981,
p.63], that approach would be calculating and Tsunetomo says:
Calculating people are
contemptible. The reason for this is that calculation deals with loss and
gain, and the loss and gain mind never stops. [p.44]
Nor does one go looking for a
righteous lord. Instead, "being a retainer is nothing other than being a
supporter of one's lord, entrusting matters of good and evil to him"
[p.20], i.e. suspending one's own judgment. Indeed:
Nakamo Jin'emon constantly said,
"A person who serves when treated kindly by the master is not a retainer.
But one who serves when the master is being heartless and unreasonable is a
retainer. You should understand this principle well." [p.132]
In other words, whether the lord
is kind or heartless, reasonable or irrational, one is to obey him, and
"matters of good and evil" are left to his judgment. All the retainer
does is obey. "For a warrior there is nothing other than thinking of his
master" [p.23].
So if the samurai thinks neither
of righteousness nor profit, what does he "understand"? The answer is
the real theme of the Hagakure, "The Way of the Samurai is found
in death" [p.17]. A samurai understands death.
Victory and defeat are matters of
the temporary force of circumstances. The way of avoiding shame is different.
It is simply death.
Even if it seems certain that
you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A
real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an
irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. [p.30]
Thus Tsunetomo condemns the famous
"47 Rônin," the retainers of Lord Asano of Akô, who waited a year to
avenge his death (in 1701), not because they defied the Shôgun and killed Lord
Kira in revenge, but just because they waited (see Inagaki Hiroshi's
movie Chushingura, "The Treasury of the Loyal Retainers,"
1962). This was "calculating." What a samurai needs to do is
"constantly hardening one's resolution to die in battle, deliberately
becoming as one aleady dead" [p.33].
The person without previous
resolution to inevitable death makes certain that his death will be in bad
form. but if one is resolved to death beforehand, in what way can he be
dispicable? [p.34]
Concerning martial valor, merit
lies more in dying for one's master than in striking down the enemy. [p.55]
This is a real Todesliebe,
a "love of death" -- for which we have, interestingly, a suitable term
in German. These sentiments easily explain what Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki wrote
in his diary in 1941, after seeing the submarine I-22 leaving Saeki Bay
on the way to join the Pearl Harbor Strike Force at Hitokappu Bay in the Kuriles:
How much damage they will be able
to inflict is not the point. The firm determination not to return alive on the
part of those young lieutenants and ensigns who smilingly embarked on their
ships cannot be praised too much. The spirit of kesshitai
[self-sacrifice] has not changed at all. We can fully rely upon them.
Gordon W. Prange, who quotes this
in At Dawn We Slept [Penguin Books, 1981], says:
One cannot help wondering, if the
amount of damage they could inflict was "not the point," what indeed
was the purpose of training, arming, equipping them, and sending them forth?
[p. 349]
If we answer simply, "the Way
of the Samurai is death," then Cameron Hurst might say we are being
anachronistic; but, indeed, Admiral Ugaki's statement doesn't make any
sense on any consideration of prudence or righteousness. What makes more sense
to us is what George C. Scott says as General George Patton at the beginning of
the 1970 movie Patton:
The idea is not to die for your
country, but to get the other poor, dumb bastards to die for their
country.
So if we want to explain Admiral
Ugaki we have to look for something in Japanese history and culture that exalts
death above prudence or even rationality. But that is certainly there in Hagakure.
Each of the "young lieutenants and ensigns" were at, as Tsunetomo
says, "the point of throwing away one's life for his lord" [p.21],
though the lord in this case had become the Emperor rather than a feudal daimyô.
But there was a bit more. Admiral
Ugaki was really not indifferent to success, and Tsunetomo sometimes lets some
consideration of prudence slip into his maxims. Thus he says, "If a warrior
is not unattached to life and death, he will be of no use whatsoever"
[p.158]. "Use"?! What kind of heresy is this? A warrior is to be
"used" for something besides getting himself killed? Indeed. We see a
different aspect of this in the following long passage:
In the secret principles of Yagyû
Tajima no kami Munenori [1571-1646, founder of the official school of the
sword of the Tokugawa Shôgunate] there is the saying, "There are no
military tactics for a man of great strength." As proof of this, there
was once a certain vassal of the shogun who came to Master Yagyû and asked to
become a disciple. Master Yagyû said, "You seem to be a man who is very
accomplished in some school of martial art. Let us make the master-disciple
contract after I learn the name of the school."
But the man replied, "I
have never practiced one of the martial arts."
Master Yagyû said, "Have
you come to make sport of Tajima no kami? Is my perception amiss in thinking
that you are a teacher to the shogun?" But the man swore to it and Master
Yagyû then asked, "That being so, do you not have some deep
conviction?"
The man replied, "When I
was a child, I once became suddenly aware that a warrior is a man who does not
hold his life in regret. Since I have held that in my heart for many years, it
has become a deep conviction, and today I never think about death. Other than
that I have no special conviction."
Master Yagyû was deeply
impressed and said, "My perceptions were not the least bit awry. The
deepest principle of my military tactics is just that one thing. Up until now,
among all the many hundreds of disciples I have had, there is no one who is
licensed in this deepest principle. It is not necessary for you to take up the
wooden sword [i.e. become a student of the sword]. I will initiate you right
now." And it is said that he promptly handed him the certified scroll.
[pp.163-164]
What we see in this passage is the
notion that someone who does not worry about death also has a certain skill
that follows from this. The man is certified in the sword by Maser Yagyû just
because of this state of mind, not because of any actual instruction. There was
also a samurai saying, that "he who leaves his house intending to live will
die; and he who leaves his house intending to die, will live." There is a
Taoist expectation in this that, by the "doing" of life, death will
result, but by the "not-doing" of life (the "doing" of
death), life will result. This was actually the frame of mind of many of the
naval pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor. When they returned successfully to their
aircraft carriers, many pilots were astonished that they had survived. All they
had thought about was dying and had not considered surviving. That they both
survived and succeeded in their mission could then be ascribed to the skill that
their determination to die had given them. Not skill in the sword, to be sure,
but skill in modern "martial arts" like torpedoing and divebombing --
the divebomber pilots who called themselves "Hell Divers" after an
American movie starring Wallace Beery and Clark Gable (Hell Divers,
1932). Somewhat miraculous results from not-doing are already expected in the Tao
Te Ching, which says, "Heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will
fall" [XXXII:72]. So the intention to die can easily to be thought not to
be without its reward.
The Pearl Harbor attack and
several months of subsequent actions were very successful, but eventually many
Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen went off intending to die, and did,
without even achieving military success thereby. Actually, this was no more than
what was expected by the architect of the Pearl Harbor strike, Admiral Yamamoto
Isoroku (1884-1943), who did not believe in suicidal attacks and had no
illusions about Japan's ability to win a protracted war with the United States.
He almost seemed to be expecting and welcoming death by the time he was shot
down and killed in 1943. When it became clear that Japan was losing the war,
however, the reponse of the Japanese military seemed to be that they were losing
just because the men were not intending to die with enough spiritual purity. The
introduction of the kamikaze suicide pilots in 1944 would have gladdened
the heart of the earlier Yamamoto, Tsunetomo, who, it seems, would have relished
such senseless acts of pointlessly throwing away lives for the Emperor. Of
course, the 20th century military was still rather hoping for some success from
these tactics, and was perfectly willing to see 100,000 Japanese soldiers, and a
similar number of civilians, die in the defense of Okinawa, long after the war
was known to be lost, just to discourage the invasion of Japan.
Discourage it they did; so President Truman
dropped atomic bombs, killing another couple hundred thousand Japanese, and
received the Japanese surrender on the same terms they could have gotten a year
earlier.
The 20th century fruit of blind
obedience and the love of death was thus ugly and sordid almost beyond
comprehension. And this is not even to take into account Japanese atrocities
against civilians and prisoners of war -- incidents like the horrific "Rape
of Nanking" -- often motivated by racism and by contempt for those who
ignominiously surrendered rather than "throwing away" their lives in
senseless but virtuous death.
The brutality of the Japanese
military, which was visited upon its own people as well as on prisoners and
civilians, itself has antecedents in Zen. It has already been noted that the
"silent teaching" may actually be expressed by beatings, and that the
Zen meditation hall is a place where someone sitting zazen can be struck
and beaten just to keep them awake. And we have the following story:
Gutei raised his finger whenever he
was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this
way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy
would raise his finger.
Gutei heard about the boy's
mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away.
Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei
raised up his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened. [Zen
Flesh, Zen Bones, pp.169-170]
We may stipulate that
enlightenment is well worth a finger, and that Gutei was a great enough Zen
master to know that so bloody and permanent an expedient would be effective --
and it is a nice thought that the boy has "no finger" to raise up. But
for ordinary fallible humans, this would be an appalling act of brutality and
child abuse, and it can be expected to be little else if emulated in any way by
subsequent teachers. Just as disturbing is the circumstance that, although the
names in the story are in Japanese, it is actually a Chinese story, from
Tao-yüan's collection. This makes for a very dangerous precedent once it gets
into a tradition, the Japanese one, where positive reasons to value violence,
for its art, arise.
Thus, into the "silence"
of the "Dark Side of the Tao" there rose values and behaviors that
would have been appalling in every imaginable way to Confucius and to the sages
of Taoism, let alone to the saints and ancient teachers of Buddhism. The
aestheticization of brutal violence, which is no less than what we see in any
"martial art," is necessarily offensive to both Confucianism and
Buddhism, and would be an unexpected and unwelcome possibility to Taoism.
A characeristic example of the
aestheticization of violence may be seen in Inagaki Hiroshi's triology of
movies, Musashi Miyamoto (in Japan, 1954), or Samurai (I, II,
& III), when subtitled. Mifune Toshiro plays the famous rônin
Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645), a real but semi-legendary character, supposedly
influenced by the monk Takuan (1573-1645), who is usually considered a
representative of Zen but was actually ordained in Jôdo. In the movies, Musashi
has a friendly rival, Sasaki Kojiro, whom in the end he must reluctantly face
and kill in a duel -- fighting with only an oar and a short sword. Sasaki,
however, is a worthy and noble samurai, who at one point early in the story is
ambushed by a group of bad guys. Musashi hears of this and rushes to his
friend's aid. By the time he arrives, however, all the bad guys have been killed
and Sasaki has already left. When Musashi sees the scene of the fight, with
bodies strewn around, does he exclaim "What carnage!" or anything of
the sort? No. He says, "What art!" It seems that every attacker
had been killed with just one sword stroke, an elegant economy of effort and
demonstration of artistic perfection. Musashi, it is true, it shown becoming
weary of fighting and hates to kill his worthy rival. But he does nevertheless.
A very real life moment of both
senseless death and aesthetic violence took place at the Battle of Midway in
1942. The aircraft carrier Hiryu ("Flying Dragon"), fatally hit
by American divebombers, was burning and sinking. The commander of the carrier
division, gifted Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, decided to go down with the ship
-- a British tradition, to be sure, but fully conformable with bushidô.
Captain Kaku Tomeo of the Hiryu decided to stay with the Admiral, and
Yamaguchi was overheard, by others leaving to abandon ship, saying to him,
"There is such a beautiful moon tonight. Shall we watch it as we
sink?" As it happens, "moon viewing" is a venerable Japanese
custom -- the old castle at Matsumoto even has a special
"moon-viewing-tower." So here we have this ancient aesthetic diversion
calmly anticipated on the burning deck of an aircraft carrier, with exploding
magazines underneath, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So what went wrong here? Simple
enough. Logically, the "silent teaching" is a poor, indeed an empty,
basis for moral judgment. Confucius, not the Tao Te Ching, was correct
about that. Taoism opened itself to misuse, and so did Ch'an, though many people
still have difficulty believing that the "true religion" or the proper
"peace of mind" can actually accompany wrongful, even cruel and
atrocious, actions. But this is the case. It is not to say, on the other hand,
that Taoism and Ch'an are without value. They are of great interest and value --
Taoism corresponds quite nicely to modern theories of spontaneous
order; Ch'an is quite orthodox Buddhism when it comes to the defeat of
reason by enlightenment and Nirvana; and Zen really may help both with archery
and with motorcycle maintenance -- just not as morality. Even real
holiness in religion may be accompanied by moral error. Morality is a matter for
reason, and both religion and aesthetics can be morally judged, regardless of
their own claims, intuitions, or logic. The real lesson is for the Polynomic
Theory of Value, that morality, aesthetics, and religion are about different
things, logically independent systems of value, but that human existence
combines them all. In Buddhist terms, the dharma as a moral teaching
cannot be replaced with an incomprehensible transmission separate from
the texts; and the blind obedience of the samurai, whether practicing Zen or Jôdo,
was neither righteous action nor right livelihood.
Copyright (c) 1999 Kelley
L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights
Reserved
Reproduced gratefully and with
deep appreciation from: http://www.friesian.com
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