Zen and the Art of Divebombing (2016)
There is something basically confused about this article. To consider one passage:<p><i>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 &quot;silent teaching&quot; 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:</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>Gutei heard about the boy&#x27;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]</i><p><i>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 &quot;no finger&quot; 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&#x27;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.</i><p>(1) The author writes &quot;...the names in the story are in Japanese...&quot;, but this is a totally absurd statement. The whole story was written in Buddhist Chinese, and was brought over to Japan that way, and read in Buddhist Chinese in Japan. When the translator of the story <i>into English</i> chose to transliterate the names with Japanese pronunciations, it was just an arbitrary choice; they could just as well have transliterated them with Chinese pronunciations. (Then we would have to ask, which ones? Chinese pronunciation has changed greatly in the last 800 years.)<p>(2) The author writes of this story that &quot;...it can be expected to be little else if emulated in any way by subsequent teachers.&quot; but they present no evidence to show that this ever actually occurred. To the best of my knowledge, Zen priests and monks did not cut off novice&#x27;s fingers.<p>(3) The presence of one story like this -- or even a hundred -- in the folklore of Buddhism offers <i>no support at all</i> for the idea that Buddhism in Japan or China offers some unique spur to warfare. There are many more such cruel folk stories in the non-Buddhist folklore of these countries. This leads to an important area of omission for the other: syncretism. Unlike in the West, exclusive adherence to one religion was never the norm in East Asia, where most people participated in rites and practices derived from the native folk religion -- Shinto in Japan -- as well as Buddhism.<p>For many hundreds of years, Buddhist sects in Japan administered the Shinto shrines as well as the Buddhist temples, and Buddhist temples today still celebrate Shinto holidays, like 7-5-3.<p>It is entirely unlikely that Chinese Buddhism was the inspiration for the reverent character of obedience in Japan. Long before Buddhism, Japan settled into a certain kind of stable relationship with authority. Despite all the turmoil and internal warfare, the emperor was never overthrown and the imperial family today is the same family that was the imperial family 2500 years ago (long before Buddhism entered the country). Such continuity is reflective of certain deliberate choices, and reverence for authority is one of them.<p>One difficulty that faces Western people in considering Zen in Japan, is a tendency to attribute to Buddhism in Japan a level of power and authority that it never had, in analogy with the Catholic Church. The author makes this mistake.