210 Nananda

           Eleanor emailed.

The master had been admitted to the hospital for an inflamed gall bladder and pancreas. He had been in pain for four days and when he had then become very ill Eleanor had rushed him to the emergency ward. Doctors discovered that gall stones blocked his duodenum. Laparoscopic surgery to remove his gall bladder had been scheduled for Monday. Since I knew that everyone in the sangha had to work I wondered if anyone could be present; so when my only class was over at noon I drove to the hospital where I found Nananda in the waiting room.

We hugged.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

"Thank you."

The master had just been rolled into surgery.

"Two hours."

"Oh."

Nananda was on her way to the cafeteria for lunch and she invited me to accompany her. Though we had practiced together at several workshops and sessins at Heartmind I hardly knew her.

Nananda asked what I had been doing.

"The usual," I said.

I explained that my days had been full of family, teaching, practice, and writing.

For two hours we talked—

Ten times longer than all of our previous conversation combined.

"Writing?" Nananda inquired.

"Yes."

"What have you been writing?"

"A book."

"About what?"

I explained that I was writing about my personal experience of Buddhism and Buddhist practice and that most of the book was about the master and my five years at Heartmind Temple.

"That sounds interesting," Nananda said.

"Well…."

I did not quite know how to respond to that.

I smiled.

"Will your book make him famous or infamous?" Nananda asked.

Nananda grinned.

"Neither I suspect."

Hope.

Nananda explained that although the master was in her opinion one of the very best Zen teachers in America most books by Zen students about their teachers were unrealistic, too worshipful, and that they presented a false picture of the struggle most Zen students go through.

"Where do students get such unrealistic expectations of their teachers?" Nananda asked.

"From the literature!" I exclaimed.

"I suppose."

"From the legend," I said.

"Yes."

"Absolutely."

"Yes."

Nananda agreed.

"My book isn't like that," I said.

"Oh?"

"It's not an exposé," I said, "but it is mainly about my conflict with my teacher."

Nananda grinned.

"I quarreled with Kudo," she said.

Nananda described how on one occasion they had been yelling at each other.

"Face to face," she said.

To illustrate she leaned forward until her face was just eight inches from my own.

"Like this!" Nananda exclaimed.

I smiled.

I recognized the gesture.

Yes.

I was very familiar with it.

The master.

"I threatened to leave and never come back," Nananda explained.

Nananda paused.

"He told me to go ahead."

I waited.

"I told him that if he said that three times I would."

I laughed.

"It sounds like marriage," I said.

Nananda nodded.

"Yes," she said. "Without the fun."

I smiled.

"He said it twice," Nananda said, "then said he understood."

I nodded.

"But I did leave for a time," Nananda explained, "and I took a six-week retreat."

I thought.

"He and I didn't yell," I said.

"No?"

"We disagreed."

"About what?" Nananda inquired.

"The practice journal mainly," I explained, "his verbal abuse."

Nananda nodded.

"He insisted that I was not as fulfilled and happy as I felt," I said.

I waited.

"If he thought that," Nananda said, "then there's at least a grain of truth in it."

I smiled.

"Our relationship made me unhappy so I quit," I explained.

"Oh."

"But he begged me to come back."

"Really?"

I nodded.

"Yes."

"Really?" Nananda asked again.

I nodded.

"He asked me to come in to talk with him about it and when I did he warned me and he threatened me and he demanded and commanded and then finally he just begged and cried."

"Really?" Nananda asked.

"Yes."

Nananda explained that usually when a student experiences conflict with his teacher the student thinks it is he himself who is wrong because he believes or has been led to believe that his teacher is always right; and because all of his fellow students seem from the outside to be doing fine the student thinks the problem is his own and that he has failed.

I listened.

"But that is a misunderstanding," Nananda said. "That is not really the case."

I thought.

"It's not like that at the temple," I said.

"No?" Nananda asked.

"No."

I explained that at the core of the sangha was a tiny group of students and that it was obvious in practice group meetings and in other ways that everyone at the temple had problems.

Nananda asked how things seemed once I returned to the temple and to practice with the master.

I explained that our differences remained unresolved but that for the most part it seemed okay.

"Then," I said, "the business with his secrets occurred."

I waited.

"I really don't know much about that," Nananda said.

I waited.

"Tell me," Nananda said.

I summarized.

I explained that in a small group meeting the master had mentioned just in passing that there were a couple of things in his life that he could not tell just anybody because public knowledge of them would ruin his reputation and that this had not made sense to me.

"I wanted to know if secrecy to protect reputation is the Way," I said.

Nananda smiled.

"I probed," I said. "I was curious."

"Yes."

I told my story.

I explained that the master had told me of his sexual relationship with Nananda, that he had then also told me that I could do whatever I wanted with the information, that I had told my wife and others of it, and that I had then mentioned in my practice journal that I had done so.

"He popped his cork," I said.

Nananda smiled.

"He expelled me from the temple and excommunicated me."

"I suppose that hurt," Nananda said.

I thought.

"No," I said, "not really."

"No?"

"I trusted his judgment," I said.

It was true.

"I was concerned about his health."

"Yes."

I explained that if our relationship caused him anxiety that endangered his health and the master thought it best to end our relationship I had already decided that I would just accept it.

For a few moments we sat silent.

I waited.

"What do you think he was really upset about?" Nananda asked.

I considered again.

"I don't know," I said. "It still doesn't make sense to me."

Nananda waited.

"I was a student one hundred percent," I said.

It had felt that way.

Yes.

"Did he say why in your meeting?" Nananda asked.

I nodded.

"He said it was gossip and triangulation."

"And—"

"I think it was the first time I had ever heard the word triangulation. He said a student who had a problem with the teacher should speak only to the teacher about it and that if a student asked another student about the problem he should be told only to ask the teacher."

"You understand the harm of talking behind a person's back."

"Of course."

Yes.

I nodded.

"Yes," I said. "It wasn't like that.

"How so?"

I summarized.

Nothing was ever said behind the master's back that we students had not said to his face. Up until the business of his secrets in his relationship with Nananda the master had not emphasized confidentiality. He had encouraged us to talk with one another about our practice, to help one another, and he had praised us for doing so. So far as I knew the issue of confidentiality had really never arisen until the mention of his concern over his reputation. The master had known for over two years that I was writing a book. My last entry in my journal before the master expelled me, I told Nananda, was the question of whether it would mean the end of our relationship if I included the secret about her in my book. I had emailed my journal to him just before Sunday zazen and service and in our practice group meeting the master had begun by saying he had just read a student journal and felt a twist in his intestines.

"I suspected it was mine," I said. "I didn't know."

I thought.

"But I think he would have remained my teacher if Eleanor had not encouraged him to withdraw from a teaching relationship that was causing him stress and endangering his health."

"What did Eleanor know about it?"

I laughed.

"I don't know," I said. "But I did not object."

I paused.

"It was confusing."

"Yes."

"I had to trust his decision."

"Yes."

"I was present during the episode of diverticulitis."

"Yes."

"I did not want another of those," I said. "I thought he might die."

"Yes."

I concluded.

"He called me in to talk the next Friday and withdrew from our relationship, expelled me from the temple, forbade me from attending the board meeting, and excommunicated me."

"Ha!"

Nananda laughed loudly.

"Ha!"

I grinned.

Nananda seemed to find the conclusion to my story hilarious.

This comforted me.

"When we quarreled," Nananda said, "he permitted me to come only to zazen and service."

"Oh."

"Not for any other reason," she explained.

Nananda laughed.

"Mine was total," I said.

Nananda laughed.

"Ha!"

I explained.

"I heard from friends that at the board meeting he read from the precepts and said that I had violated them but that is just hearsay. He did not do anything like that in my presence."

"Which precepts?" Nananda asked.

Hmm.

"I don't really know," I said.

Nananda waited.

"Right speech I think—triangulation and gossip."

Nananda considered.

"Do you think you had done anything wrong?" she asked.

"No."

"Not even a little guilty?"

"No."

"But you don't feel hurt?"

No.

I shook my head.

No.

"It wasn't like that," I said.

No.

I tried again to explain.

Hmm.

"I trusted him and I was concerned about his health and besides—"

I paused.

"Yes?"

"Our other conflicts had become wearying," I said. "It felt right to me, too."

We were silent.

"It felt best to accept it and go forward," I added.

We were silent.

"But it wasn't a secret," Nananda said finally. "Others knew."

I listened.

"So I wonder why it got so out of proportion in his mind?"

"I don't know," I said.

I continued.

"He told me that he had told Eleanor about it, too, and then he told me that he wanted me to talk with Eleanor about his past sexual relationship with you. That sounded really weird to me. It was too confusing. I was supposed to go to Eleanor and say I wanted to talk with her about your intimate relationship with him? I couldn't broach a subject like that. To what end? I hardly knew Eleanor and I didn't even know if you knew that he had told people. I had no idea now what was a secret and what wasn't, what was confidential and what wasn't, what was private and what wasn't, and I had already told others about it yet he seemed now to want to contain it. It was way too confusing for me so I just ignored his request."

Nananda thought.

"I wonder if he was worried about my finding out that he had told people about it."

"I don't know."

"That makes sense," Nananda said.

"Maybe."

"Then it was me he was trying to protect."

"Maybe."

"And himself since now he felt guilty about telling others without telling me."

"I don't know."

"I think that's probably it."

"I don't know."

"Secrecy always has a sickness about it," Nananda said.

"Yes," I said.

"It's not good," she said.

"No."

I thought.

"Kudo told me that, too," I said. "That further confused me."

We sat and we thought.

I waited.

"In my years as a Zen teacher," Nananda said, "no student has ever told me anything really intimate, private, or confidential."

"Really?" I asked.

I was thinking of the many intimate confessions of my writing students at the college.

"Yes."

"I wouldn't know about that," I said.

"It's true."

I explained to Nananda that I had told the master more than once that he was free to repeat to others anything I told or wrote to him, that I had nothing left to hide, and that until this story of her and him the master had never told me anything in dokusan that he had not also told me in my journal or in group discussion.

Nothing special.

Criticism.

"Nothing he ever told me seemed confidential until the end," I said.

Nananda thought.

"I tell my students that I discuss them with other Zen teachers," Nananda said.

Consultation.

Yes.

I did it at my job.

But—

"What about Zen students discussing their Zen teacher?"

I wondered.

Nananda said that the question of privacy and confidentiality in dokusan had been a big issue at national meetings of Zen teachers. Did it apply to the teacher only or also to the student? Was it relative or absolute? Could some things be revealed and not others or what?

"Where should the line be drawn?" Nananda wondered.

"Yes."

I explained that all of those questions had become difficult. Confidentiality had never before been an issue at the temple, I told Nananda, and it arose only after the master had told me about him and her and I had told others and then wondered about putting it in my book.

"But it wasn't a secret," Nananda said again.

"I guess not."

"No."

Nananda explained that what little she knew of my situation she had learned only from the emails and that she knew almost nothing of the larger context of what was going on. No one had told her anything of what had happened leading up to the emails about me and my expulsion.

"And nobody told me anything about what happened to you after," Nananda said.

I filled her in.

The hospital—

My visits—

His invitation—

Our talk—

"He invited me to come back to practice."

"Did you?"

"I've been just three or four times," I said.

"Why?"

"There were conditions on my return," I explained.

"Like what?"

"I'd have to work on my dark side," I said.

"Yes."

"I'd have to acknowledge that I was not as happy and as fulfilled as I felt."

I paused.

"Yes."

I thought.

"We had not resolved our differences," I explained, "and his health was still an issue."

Nananda nodded.

"I knew the same old questions would come up again in my practice with him."

"What questions?"

"Well—"

"Yes?"

"He never answered my question about whether protecting reputation is the Way."

Nananda grinned.

"You know what his answer to that would be now don't you?" Nananda asked.

"What?" I asked.

"No!"

"But that is not what he said."

"Really?"

"No."

Nananda looked puzzled.

"No."

There was too much to report.

Too complicated.

"No."

Nananda waited.

"Given all that has happened the past two years and his health the way it is," I said finally, "I'm afraid that it would seem just plain malicious to ask him that same question again."

Nananda thought.

"It sounds like you'll need to write another chapter to your book," she said.

Nananda smiled.

"I've already written it," I said.

"Really?"

"Yes," I said.

"It sounds like a good book," Nananda said.

Time passed.

Talk.

Her name was called.

I waited.

Nananda returned with a grin.

I smiled.

"It all went just as planned!"

"Good."

Nananda had learned that despite the scar tissue from previous surgeries doctors had been able to remove the master's gall bladder with small laparoscopic incisions instead of a big cut.

His surgeon was pleased.

"Good."

The master might be home soon.

"Good."

Nananda would sit with the master in recovery.

"Thank you," Nananda said.

We hugged.

"Thank you," I said.

We bowed.

I drove home and told Ruth all that had transpired.

"Good!"

Eternal return.

209 Reading

In the books I loaned Ryan I had found much to consider. I was still intrigued by the Tibetan path that for thirty years my friend Billy had traveled. I had just read Dragon Thunder, the memoir by Diana Mukpo, Trungpa's widow. Trungpa's marital infidelity and sexual conduct are legend; but his widow writes that Trungpa remained indifferent to her own occasional casual affairs only until she fell in love.

"Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha but he was also a man," she explains, "and like some men he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs…[and he] sometimes worried that he was losing me."

Jealousy—

Fear—

Mukpo never completed the preliminary practices normally demanded by the Vajrayana path and on one occasion, "conflicted" by the master being "both husband and guru," she abandoned a yoga practice to which she objected that it required her to visualize him as her teacher.

"He screamed at me," she writes, "and started pounding his hand."

"Go back," he insisted.

She did.

I was familiar with Trungpa's infidelity, his use of illicit drugs, his alcoholism, his addiction to tobacco, his unpredictable behavior in general, but it felt important to me to learn from his wife also of his jealousy, his worry, his depression, his anger, his infatuation with celebrity, wealth, ceremony, excess, and pomp, and his neglect of his wife and children.

Mukpo:

I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I needed desperately to rest at night. With people coming in all night long and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby.

Not long before his final illness and his death Mukpo told her husband that their situation was "terrible," "really awful," that he was getting "completely crazy," that he was getting "out of control," that he was a drunk, and that by his drinking he was killing himself.

"With that," she writes, "he tried to hit me but he missed."

Missed.

The intention to harm.

However—

Mukpo witnessed her husband kill a scorpion he discovered in his son's room. She says but for that single exception his commitment to nonviolence never wavered and she cites a talk her husband delivered on the subject of self-deception.

Trungpa:

You cannot by any means for any religious reasons or for any spiritual or metaphysical reasons step on an ant or kill your mosquitoes at all…. You cannot destroy life. We have to respect everybody. You cannot make a random judgment on that at all…. You can't act on your desires alone. You have to think, contemplate….

"That is Buddhism," says Trungpa. "That is the rule."

Yes.

Billy objected.

The first four passages I cited, he said, illustrated the honesty of Mukpo.

Yes.

I agreed.

"Like her teacher," Billy insisted, "she hides nothing."

So it seemed.

Billy emailed two statements by Mukpo in praise of Trungpa.

The first in part—

I now realize that the immediate chaos, though painful and excruciatingly real, was a passing confusion. I find that what endures is the big picture, the vast vision that Rinpoche communicated.

The second in part—

As the model of sanity and compassion in my life, he continues to guide me. Throughout my life, I continue to question myself as to how he would want me to handle one situation or another. He is no longer outside of me, so when I turn to him, I turn to my own wakefulness.

This made me nervous.

Had I been unfair to my friend's root guru?

It worried me.

I replied.

I explained that from the little I knew of Trungpa through his books and second- and third-hand reports it seemed the Rinpoche had astonished and energized just about everybody around him in creative and compassionate ways. An explosion of creativity seemed to occur in almost everyone who came in touch with him—in me, too, and I had only read his books. Trungpa did not lack for students and friends who bear witness to his inspiration, to his virtue, and to his enlightened activity. But I explained that in my book I thought it important to mention, too, the ordinary human and male qualities that he possessed. The way Mukpo remembered her husband and teacher in the two passages Billy cited, I told him, were the way I remembered my own family and friends. The chaos and confusion had passed, I had forgiven them all their faults, I had forgiven everybody everything, and I felt able to see the mystery, power, and beauty of the larger pattern and bigger picture.

Repentance.

"I hope that family and friends will be able to forgive me for all the stupid, cruel things I did."

Religion.

Billy thanked me for my clarification.

Language.

"My hope and aspiration is the same as yours," he added.

Understanding.

Peace.

Love.

In his Secret of the Vajra World Reginald Ray summarized the mind required of a disciple; and though Ray offered a number of qualifications it was difficult for me not to apply the five requirements listed by Ray to the long difficult struggle I endured with the master.

To wit:

1  One must respect one's teacher.

2  One must give up any attitude of criticism toward the teacher.

3  Any doubts must be regarded as one's own mistaken projections.

4  One must accept the master's version of reality.

5  Failure to regard the master in the right way will generate bad karma.

Touché!

The Four Reliances of the Buddha and Sosan Davis these were most definitely not.

1  Submit.

2  Submit.

3  Submit.

4  Submit.

5  Or else.

I could easily understand how the requirements listed by Ray would be onerous for a woman, like Mukpo, whose teacher was also her husband. It seemed her duties in the marriage would be little different from those demanded of wives whose husbands were Christian fundamentalists.

Love, honor, and—

Obey.

Yet I had over the years like many husbands significantly improved the fruit of my marital karma by adopting in my relationship with my wife Ruth the attitude recommended.

Yes.

Ruth was usually right.

Submit.

In his exposition of the Tibetan way Ray caused me to reconsider my objection to what I had long considered the master's neglect of the third truth, the cessation of suffering, and his seeming obsession with the first and second truths, suffering and its origin. Ray explains that in Tibetan practice the bodhisattva renounces individual liberation.

This liberation involves realizing that the game of ego is a battle that can never be won. The practitioner comes to see that no matter how hard he or she tries, the image of the self carried around in one's head will never be actualized. In short, one will never achieve samsaric happiness. [It] is an experience of certainty—one sees and one knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that suffering touches every moment of phenomenal experience and that no amount of struggle is going to change that fact. This realization is devastating…. [T]here is no way out.

Understood.

Yet, despite this impossibility of samsaric happiness and the inevitability of pain and suffering, for the mahayana bodhisattva nonviolence and pacification are enlightened activity.

Ray:

From an enlightened perspective, things as they operate in the world work in an inherently peaceful way. This means that there is room for everything to occur in its own manner, apart from judgments or evaluations. The karma of pacifying accommodates everything, understands its appropriateness, and acknowledges its right to be—as an expression of karma. The karma of pacifying reveals that there is actually no such thing as problems, obstacles, or enemies, and that the aggression of ego against such supposed negativities is entirely beside the point and unnecessary.

Yes.

But it was from the third and fourth books that I profited most.

The Rape of Nanking—Iris Chang.

Horror.

Zen at War—Brian Victoria.

Religion.

Denial.

In The Rape of Nanking historian Iris Chang employs intellect, inquiry, reason, "discriminative thinking," the faculty of mind which according to the master is "good only for building bridges" and is anathema to Zen Buddhists in general, to identify, document, and classify the monstrous varieties of torture and murder perpetrated in Nanking by the Japanese army in the year immediately preceding WW II—live burial, mutilation, death by fire, death by ice, death by dog.

Chang:

The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi—special needles with handles on them—in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes.

At Nanking, in "the forgotten holocaust of the second world war," at least 260000 and perhaps as many as 350000 Chinese noncombatants were murdered, thousands only after first suffering unimaginable horror.

Chang:

[A] pregnant woman began to fight for her life, clawing desperately at a soldier who tried to drag her away from the group to rape her. Nobody helped her, and in the end the soldier killed her, ripping open her belly with his bayonet and jerking out not only her intestines but a squirming fetus.

Chang documents worse—

Much worse.

Chang argues that for Asians the Second World War began not in 1939 but in 1931 when Japan occupied Manchuria as the first step toward military domination of East Asia. Its method was a ruthless and sophisticated "military machine" in the service of a "master race mentality."  

Did Zen Buddhists in general oppose and resist it?

No.

To the contrary most supported and defended it.

Indeed—

Encouraged it.

The fine work of academic discourse Zen at War by ordained Soto Zen priest Brian Daizen Victoria is a deconstruction of institutional Buddhism in Japan and a scathing indictment of its complicity in centuries of militarism, nationalism, racism, imperialism, atrocity, and war which culminate in the Rape of Nanking and in WW2. In his book Victoria names the Buddhist scholars, monks, and "fully realized" and "enlightened" masters who reconciled Zen with Japanese imperialism, many of whom, following defeat in 1945, then recanted almost overnight yet resisted full disclosure. Their failure is not simply that they were unable to deter Japan from conquest, murder, and war.

It is that they were enthusiasts.

Zealots.

Had I not already experienced an overwhelming personal and subjective encounter with the dharma and the buddha I do not believe that my practice would have survived this book.

Victoria suggests that Zen's almost categorical repudiation of language, thinking, inquiry, reason, logic, analysis, and criticism and its emphasis upon authority, harmony, loyalty, submission, silence, obedience, and discipline contributed to its accommodation to nationalism, patriotism, and militarism.

Victoria:

[T]he development of an irresistible attack spirit became paramount. A critical part of this spirit was absolute and unquestioning obedience to one's superiors, who acted on behalf of the emperor. Through training, this spirit of obedience had to transcend mere habit and become instinctive, unthinking.

[W]ho better to do the [training] than Confucian-influenced Zen monks with their ethical system that emphasized unquestioning, selfless loyalty to one's superiors?

Victoria documents how Japanese Buddhists interpreted terms and concepts central to Buddhism and to Zen—"sutra," "precept," "virtue," "emptiness," "no self," "no soul," "no birth," "no death," "renunciation," "nonthinking," "relativity," "subjectivity," "no right," "no wrong," "intention," "karma," "compassion," "concentration," "skillful means," "peace," "harmony," "bodhisattva"—and the practice of Buddhism itself in ways that excused, encouraged, condoned, justified, and glorified the killing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.

War.

"Did Buddhism really offer doctrinal justification for war?" Victoria asks.

"Yes," he answers.

Thus "skillful means" meant that depending upon the specific circumstances the bodhisattva could violate a precept in the short term in order to save another being in the long term.

Thus "just war."

The first step was to identify inferiors; and the Lotus Sutra, to cite just one of the texts used to do so, provided a description of the human beings who had earned the fruit of karma.

[A]nyone slandering this scripture or those who uphold it will be stricken with blindness, leprosy, missing teeth, ugly lips, flat noses, crooked limbs, tuberculosis, evil tumors, stinking and dirty bodies, and more, for life after life.

Karma.

People get just what they deserve.

Justice.

They earn it.

Therefore it is permissible to ignore and to neglect them.

To let them suffer.

Die.

Besides, the victims really have "no self," "no soul," they are little more than phantoms, "empty," "nothing," and life itself is but a dream; ultimately there is really "no birth," "no death," no moral absolute, "no right," really "no wrong"; so from this point it is a relatively simple matter to understand that even killing such hinin, "nonhumans," is an act of "pity" and "compassion" performed by the "bodhisattva" soldier in a state of samadhi, "concentration," a being equally "selfless," "soulless," "empty," with the holy "intention" to spare these victims further "suffering," to afford them the opportunity of a better life in their next "reincarnation," and to bring "peace," "harmony," and "love" to the world.

It is a rationalization endemic to all nations and to all religions.

Killing for peace—

Killing for truth—

Killing for humanity—

Killing for god—

Killing ad nauseam.

Victoria believes that the Chan and Zen tradition fostered an atmosphere which condoned violence and he cites the legends involving the amputation of a disciple's arm, the severing of a boy's finger, the physical blows by fist and staff, the same stories of abuse that had troubled me. Victoria acknowledges that the instructional purpose of such a method is to awaken the disciple from delusion and to free him from dependence upon anyone.

"Nevertheless"—

It provided the link that facilitated the connection made between Zen and the sword in feudal Japan and in turn between Zen and total war in modern Japan.

The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself.  

Victoria believes that these assumptions must be "closely examined and challenged" and he cites the conclusions of D.T. Suzuki who before the war had supported the Buddhist argument for it but after the war acknowledged, at least in part, his error.

Suzuki:

With satori [enlightenment] alone, it is impossible [for Zen priests] to shoulder their responsibilities as leaders of society. Not only is it impossible, but it is conceited of them to imagine they could do so…. With regard to disputes in the ordinary world, it is necessary to employ intellectual discrimination.

Thinking.

Victoria cites similar conclusions by Soto Zen scholar Hakamaya Noriaki, who argues that in Zen the idea of "harmony" is often employed as a means to "stifle internal dissent."

Hakamaya:

One must never allow oneself to be reduced to a mere physical entity. Instead, the intellect must be used to its utmost to clearly distinguish what is right, and words used to their utmost to criticize what is wrong. I believe this is the way in which faith becomes an activity opposed to war.

Thinking.

Zen priests and Zen practitioners were sometimes able in Japan to overcome resistance to military service by teaching the idea that there is something more precious than life.

Is there something more precious than life?

In his book Victoria also documents the fact that there were Buddhists in Japan who did oppose the forces of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and war and remained committed to the more universal understanding of the principles of nonviolence and compassion.

I conclude my discussion of Zen at War with the words of just one.

Kondo Genko:

War is an activity in which people kill each other. Whether it be friend or foe, the killing of people is monstrous. There is nothing more sinful in this world than the killing of people.

Thinking.

Thinking.

Yes.

These four books and the three reviews of my own book by my wife and my friends Billy and Ryan still occupied many of my thoughts when on Thursday I received more bad news of the master.