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| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
i'd like to point out that in my rantings concerning religion, i do not include buddhism in that rant. i know next to nothing about buddhism, mostly because it minds its own business and doesn't seem to cause anybody any strife. ive only ever seen it "fight" for just causes. |
Eh, Zen Buddhism was used as an integral part of Japanese militarism and nationalism in Japan's imperial phase up through WWII:
| quote: | But Zen [Buddhism] has had strong ties to militarism -- indeed so strong, that the leaders of one of the largest denominations in Japan have remorsefully compared their former religious fanaticism during Japan's brutal expansionism in the 1930's and 40's to today's murderously militant Islamists.
...From its beginnings in Japan, Zen has been associated with the warrior culture established by the early shoguns. But the extent of its involvement in World War II has stayed mostly submerged until recently. Many people in the United States and Europe know Zen's indirect traces through the poetry of the Beats or the quietist aura of contemporary architecture and clothing.
Even John Dower, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of modern Japan at M.I.T., whose early interest in Japan was kindled by Zen-inspired architecture, said that Mr. Victoria's works had opened his eyes to ''how Zen violated Buddhism's teachings about compassion and nonviolence.''
...Both of Mr. Victoria's books peel back layers of the career of D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950's and remains the best-known Japanese advocate of Zen in the West. In 1938, however, Mr. Suzuki used his prestige as a scholar in Japan to assert that Zen's ''ascetic tendency'' teaches the Japanese soldier ''that to go straight forward and crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.''
''What Brian Victoria has written is mostly right,'' said Jiun Kubota, the third patriarch of Sanbo-kyodan, a small Zen group outside Tokyo that has also issued an apology. ''I dare say that Zen was used as the spiritual backbone of the military army and navies during the war.''
...''In Islam, as in the holy wars of Christianity, there is a promise of eternal life,'' Mr. Victoria said in an interview. ''In Zen, there was the promise that there was no difference between life and death, so you really haven't lost anything.'' |
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...n=&pagewanted=1
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