Tracking Bodhidharma Read online

  Sugimoto’s reference to mu comes from an old story associated with Zen Master Zhaozhou, the ancient teacher at the Cypress Grove Monastery. That’s the same place where I gave the lecture about American Zen I mentioned earlier. Penetrating the mu gate is a form of Zen study originally from China but now employed mainly in Japan and elsewhere as part of Zen spiritual training. Sugimoto, in a strange and twisted way, used this central Zen koan (story) as a rationale for emperor worship.

  Other things Victoria reveals in Zen at War are also shocking. During the 1930s, an Imperial-Way faction of radical young Japanese army officers assassinated high-ranking officials who tried to control them. One of these young radicals, Aizawa Saburo, regarded his Zen training, the study of the Buddha Dharma itself, as a means of training for giving up his ego and “sacrificing himself for his country.” According to Victoria’s account in his book Zen War Stories, on August 12, 1935, Aizawa assassinated the politically moderate Major General Nagata Tetsuzan in the latter’s Tokyo office using a sword and afterward expressed shame that he didn’t dispatch his victim with a single stroke, like in some romantic Zen samurai legend.

  Victoria’s research demonstrates that Zen and Buddhist support for the war effort generally was not piecemeal, half-hearted, or exceptional but with a few minor exceptions nearly universal and marked by great enthusiasm. The war was not simply a national project to be supported by patriotic Buddhists but was a projection of Japan’s self-proclaimed unique and authentic “True Buddhism” onto the world stage. War apologists in that country argued that the world must be led, by means of war, to appreciate Japan’s uniquely authentic Buddhism, which they claimed was the only true Buddhism in the world.

  Through these and other examples, Victoria’s book Zen at War (and subsequent writings by Victoria and others) show convincingly that Japanese Zen institutions, teachers, philosophers, and self-proclaimed Buddhist individual soldiers and monks played key roles in promoting and supporting Japan’s war of aggression against China and other countries.

  Buddhists widely quoted two Buddhist scriptures to help provide a doctrinal basis for Buddhist militarism. Prominent members of Japan’s Nichiren Buddhist sect, a major Japanese Buddhist organization that bases its teachings on a scripture called the Lotus Sutra, embraced Imperial-Way Buddhism by name. They formed the Association for the Practice of Imperial-Way Buddhism. The association claimed the following:Imperial-Way Buddhism utilizes the exquisite truth of the Lotus Sutra to reveal the majestic essence of the national polity [national identity]. Exalting the true spirit of Mahayana Buddhism is a teaching which reverently supports the emperor’s work ... that is to say, Imperial-Way Buddhism is the condensed expression of the divine unity of Sovereign and Buddha.

  Victoria writes that Sugimoto cited from a text called the Nirvana Sutra, a well-known Buddhist scripture. He quotes Sugimoto as writing of the need for “protecting the true Dharma by grasping swords and other weapons.” Sugimoto then claimed that “the highest and only true Dharma in the world exists within the emperor.”

  Even before Victoria’s first book unleashed a wave of controversy and self-examination in both Western and Japanese Zen circles, I had long wondered about the appearance of martial training and even combat as part of the Zen tradition. This association is clearly seen at Shaolin Temple, the purported home of Chinese Zen, which is also the home of the Chinese martial arts. Shaolin Temple and its promoters also claim that Chinese kong fu (martial arts) came from Bodhidharma himself, who taught such martial skills to monks between periods of meditation.

  In a similar fashion, Japanese Zen is widely associated with the famous feudal samurai, swordsmen who often steeled themselves for battle with Zen meditation. The samurai’s counterparts in the Japanese imperial army employed rhetorical Zen-like ideas like the “emptiness of self and other” to rationalize killing. The idea of “Bushido,” which means “Way of the Warrior,” was infused with “Zen.”

  The biggest incongruence of Zen’s being caught up with militarism is apparent when one considers the religion’s much-vaunted Bodhisattva Path. That path is constantly emphasized by teachers at Zen temples and Zen centers, as well as by teachers in the Tibetan and other Mahayana Buddhist traditions. The ideal can be likened to a personal orientation to do good. People who vow to follow the Bodhisattva Path orient their lives and goals to fulfill the Bodhisattva ideal of helping all beings, an ideal expressed in a special vow taken by all aspiring bodhisattvas, The Bodhisattva Vow, recited at all Zen temples and centers in the world, goes like this in its basic translation into English:Though the many beings are numberless, I vow to save them,

  Though delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them,

  Though the Dharma Gates are numberless, I vow to enter them,

  Though Buddha’s Way is unattainable, I vow to embody it fully.

  Without seriously questioning it, for decades I considered the Bodhisattva Vow to be a highly commendable, if not ultimate, orientation for good. It certainly conveys a grand and laudable commitment. I deeply appreciated that Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, brought this vision to America’s shores from Japan and set up a community motivated by such a noble sentiment. A passage in one of Shunryu Suzuki’s lectures encapsulates the absolute devotion and confidence that Mahayana Buddhists invest in the Bodhisattva Path: “Even if the sun were to rise in the West, the bodhisattva has only one way.”

  It was only after reading Brian Victoria’s book that my views on the Bodhisattva Path developed some foundational cracks. Victoria’s research convincingly demonstrates that Japanese Zen, during the war period, saw no contradiction between its Bodhisattva Path and the path of war. My previous assumption, which was that “honest Buddhists” in Japan must have opposed the war effort there, was based on entirely erroneous assumptions. By and large, Japanese Buddhists, including Zen Buddhists, saw the war effort as an attempt to spread “true Buddhism” to the rest of East Asia and the world. The idea that that Japanese Buddhists were forced to decide between maintaining Buddhist beliefs or supporting the war effort is a false dichotomy. The war effort in Japan was, to most Buddhists there, an attempt to give “true” Buddhism to people in other benighted countries that didn’t grasp Japan’s true Buddhist doctrines. Victoria’s research shows that the Japanese Buddhist teachers who transmitted Zen to U.S. audiences, despite claims to the contrary, did indeed support Japan’s war effort. Many of those Zen teachers were enthusiastic supporters of Japanese nationalist sentiment and militarism.

  For these and other reasons, I had to face the fact that I didn’t really understand the whole Zen picture, at least as I had learned it from teachers in the United States. I had already begun studying early Zen texts from China and was becoming aware that the Zen story was far more complicated and nuanced than I had theretofore understood.

  How is it that in modern times a religion that proclaims such noble bodhisattva-style rhetoric, and is often described not just as one sect of Buddhism but as the “crown jewel” of the religion itself, could have developed such strong ties to militarism and violence? Most important, could anything that had embraced the evident fascism described in Victoria’s books be considered part of genuine Buddhism or even understood as rational?

  My doubts peaked when I participated in a three-week intensive meditation session at San Francisco Zen Center in 2001. At that time I had already read Victoria’s book. I rationalized that even if the Japanese tradition had for a certain period strayed from Buddhist ideals, the U.S. branch of the tradition had the good sense to remain true to ideals of nonviolence and antimilitarism. The United States, after all, has no emperor to be exalted, so how can Chinese or Japanese emperor worship enter the picture there?

  Yet there was a tension around the whole issue, and this tension bubbled up on the last day of the meditation period when I had visions of Japanese Buddhist monks being transformed into soldiers and doing banzai charges against the American and Chinese armies. I decided to s
tart doing a lot more personal research into Zen, its origins, and its real meaning.

  FROM GUANGZHOU TO SHAOGUAN

  The bus is full of people. Most of the passengers are young, perhaps workers from the many factories in Southern China that have closed due to the recent economic recession. Perhaps they are returning to visit their relatives or are simply traveling to someplace new to try to make a new start during tough economic times.

  For the first hour or so north of Guangzhou, we pass through flatlands of semitropical rice paddy culture, farmlands interspersed with hills and vegetable gardens surrounded by banana palms. Then we enter the hilly terrain typical of much of South China, with steep bluffs of greenery surrounded by low-lying terraced fields. In ancient times this area was called Ling Nan, meaning “south of the mountain range,” and the residents in this region, populations not far removed from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian areas, are a little shorter and darker than northerners. Northerners once dismissively called them “barbarians” and exiled disgraced court officials to this area as punishment.

  It was one such “barbarian,” a spiritual successor of Bodhidharma six generations removed from him, who should be examined to understand what Bodhidharma’s Zen came to mean in China. I first mentioned him during my visit to Guangxiao Temple, and now we’ll stop at his teaching seat to look at his life in a little more detail.

  10. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor

  THE PLATFORM SUTRA of the Sixth Ancestor is the text that records a famous sermon and ordination ceremony performed by Huineng, Zen’s famous “Sixth Ancestor.” It tells a story about how this sixth teacher in Bodhidharma’s teaching lineage, as an illiterate and impoverished young man on the outskirts of society, understood and then came to represent Zen’s most essential insights. His famous story served to solidly shoehorn Zen into the Chinese mindset. As an illiterate, Huineng had no way to read Buddhist scriptures, and thus his knowledge is connected to the idea of a Zen “outside the scriptural teaching.” Buddhism came to China from India along with a mountain of scriptural works. One way to view the Zen sect is that it was a practical Chinese reaction to the mountain of literature that Buddhism developed over preceding centuries. Zen was China’s reaction to Buddhism’s universe of literature and metaphysics, a reaction that said, “Great, now could you boil the whole thing down to something manageable, preferably a phrase or two?”

  The fact that Huineng began his spiritual quest as an impoverished boy with no social status also conveys the Mahayana (which, again, means “Great Vehicle”) idea of extending the Buddha’s teaching to everyone, not just the privileged, the rich, and the literate.

  The Platform Sutra also narrates a ceremony where Huineng provided Chinese Zen a key innovation called the Signless Precepts. In this ceremony, home-leaving monks and lay people take the same religious vows. The ceremony departs from tradition by asking the vow takers to seek Buddha in their own minds. They are asked to remain true not to some external system of rules or metaphysics but instead to the awakening that comes from observing the nature of consciousness itself. Because there are no symbols or metaphysical ideas that can mediate this inward turning of attention, Huineng’s precepts are called “signless.”

  In the ceremony, Huineng states, “Wisdom is only found by observing mind, why waste effort seeking metaphysical ideas?” ,

  The Signless Precepts followed logically from Bodhidharma’s emphasis on meditation and “observing” and not following the teachings of the religious establishment and metaphysical doctrines taught by organized Buddhism.

  The Signless Precepts ordination ceremony Huineng conducted was likely performed outside during daytime, because the number of people taking part seems to have been very large indeed. Chinese historians have pointed out that such large public ordination ceremonies were fairly common in ancient times, with participants numbering in the thousands. The Platform Sutra’s ceremony was apparently just such a grand convocation.

  As important as the Platform Sutra is to Chinese Zen, I’ve found that properly translating that work into English is problematic. Translations of this “sutra” have long suffered from this problem. The tricky part is translating words like signless, a key word that echoes the origins of Zen in Buddha’s legendary teaching at Vulture Peak, in a way that makes sense to Westerners while remaining true to the original meaning. Many translators use the term formless instead of signless. But I think the word formless falls short, since it implies that there is something that has no form. Signlessness, on the other hand, is what is found in things just as they are.

  11. Nashua Temple: The Sixth Ancestor Huineng’s Dharma Seat

  THE SHAOGUAN BUS STATION lies on the east side of the Zhe River in downtown Shaoguan City. I emerge into the clear fall day and walk down the steps to the boulevard next to the river. There I hail a taxi to travel the six miles or so to Nanhua Temple, outside the city’s southeast corner. The first indication of the temple is a broad cement plaza that sits in front of its entrance gate. I direct my taxi past the front of the plaza and then to turn left on a small road that passes some shops selling giant sticks of incense and souvenirs for the many pilgrims who come here. The taxi lets me out by an electronic gate where the attendant on the other side, seeing me with luggage, pushes the button to open the apparatus. He then invites me to come into the guardhouse for a cup of tea. While he calls the monk in charge, named Guo Zhi (pronounced Guo-jer), I drink Iron Kwan Yin tea and watch flashy scenes of Chinese opera on the guardhouse TV set. Presently a monk appears and motions me to follow him. A short distance away through a grove of trees and across a large pond rests the newly completed Nanhua Temple Guesthouse. It is a big building indeed and built in traditional Chinese architectural style, with a paved courtyard surrounded on three sides by imposing wings of the building.

  Nanhua Temple was established in the year 502. It existed before Huineng came here and gained fame as a Zen master. The place still has a special position of importance in Bodhidharma’s tradition. Moreover, the place promises to reveal, in the next few days, an important aspect of Emperor Wu’s influence on Chinese culture. I’ve arrived in time for the annual Water and Land Festival, a traditional event directly traced to Emperor Wu and with important implications for understanding the object of my trip.

  I’m led to my accommodations. Set amid the quiet trees of a hill near Nanhua Temple, the guesthouse is a comfortable if somewhat overbearing building. But the environment around the place is serene, broken only by occasional construction noises nearby where a new guest meditation hall is in the making. A long covered walkway stretches up the hill through the trees leading to the temple proper.

  My guide Guo Zhi doesn’t seem too overjoyed to see me. I don’t know if this is just his personality or whether he’s simply bored with dealing with visitors. At China’s most famous temples, there’s an endless stream of tourists showing up to disrupt the spiritual practice of the occupants. Now, while preparations for the Water and Land Festival are in full swing, it’s especially understandable that he may be impatient. Everyone is probably overworked and stressed out, even here at a Zen temple.

  Emperor Wu, the same emperor famous for meeting Bodhidharma, created the Water and Land Ceremony that is at the heart of the festival. Most Zen students know that Wu built many Buddhist temples and promoted Buddhist scriptural study, but the full impact Emperor Wu had on Chinese history is still not well-known. This important part of Bodhidharma’s story offers colorful sights and sounds that stretch from Emperor Wu’s time until today.

  Chinese Buddhist tradition says that Emperor Wu started the Water and Land Ceremony after having a dream in which a monk advised him to call on spirits in the higher realms to assist those who suffer in the lower realms of existence. At the emperor’s request, the ceremony was designed by a monk named Baozhi, one of the most famous of Emperor Wu’s Buddhist teachers. It was first held at Jinshan Temple, a very old temple near Zhenzhou City in Jiangsu Province, east of Nanji
ng. Jinshan Temple still exists and is very active today.

  The ceremony is a highly elaborate and expensive undertaking in which Buddhist monks do prayers and rituals that beseech gods and bodhisattvas in the higher realms to journey into the lower realms to give succor to the inhabitants there. The Buddhist “Six Paths” of existence figure into the ceremony. Those paths, comprised of different realms of beings, include the (1) heavenly or godly realm, (2) the realm of asuras (highly evolved beings), (3) the human realm, (4) the animal realm, (5) the “hungry ghost” realm, and (6) the hell realm. Days of purifications, special offerings, and rituals lead up to the biggest ceremonies on the final day of the festival. That day, things get especially interesting.

  Lots of people come to the temple to take part in the grand event or just to see the spectacle. Previously when I’ve witnessed this ceremony in China, I’ve noticed people from the lay Buddhist community taking an active support role for the proceedings, performing all types of services like preparing vegetarian banquets, making decorations and floats for a parade, playing music, and so on. Guo Zhi tells me that the main ceremonies will occur tomorrow. Yet many activities are already under way.

  Guo Zhi leaves me to my own devices with instructions about where and how to join other lay people for meals at the temple dining hall. He promises to give me a tour later, but right now he’s preoccupied with other jobs.