Zen at War - Responses

Responses

The book drew a lot of attention, and mixed responses:

Few books in recent years have so deeply influenced the thinking of Buddhists in Japan and elsewhere as Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War (Victoria 1997). The book’s great contribution is that it has succeeded, where others have not, in bringing to public attention the largely unquestioning support of Japanese Buddhists for their nation’s militarism in the years following the Meiji Restoration in 1868 (when Japan opened its borders after nearly 250 years of feudal isolation) up until the end of WWII.

Robert Aitken writes:

All of us owe gratitude to Victoria, to James Heisig, and John Maraldo for their book, Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, and to the scholars who are publishing a series in Zen Quarterly, the English language journal of the Soto Sect, disclosing the collusion of their sect in Japanese expansionism prior to and during World War II. These scholars help us as Western Zen students to make sense of the barest of hints of wartime involvement which we sensed previously, and to come to grips with the dark side of our heritage.

Ton Lathouwers, Chán-teacher in the Netherlands, in relation to "Zen at war" mentions Hisamatsu's impossible question, "What will you do when you cannot do anything, when all your best intentions and great endeavour are invested to no avail whatsoever, when all you do is doomed to fail?", relating it to a statement by Takeo Sato:

The question is not so much: What happened exactly and when. The deeper question - an even impossible question if you don't mind me adding already my personal urgency - is: How, in heaven's name, was this possible that human beings could lose to such a degree their true humanity, that they could lose themeselves?

Read more about this topic:  Zen At War

Famous quotes containing the word responses:

    “Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
    —Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)

    “Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    “The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)