ZEN AT WAR by BRIAN DAIZEN VICTORIA

Author:BRIAN DAIZEN VICTORIA
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published: 2019-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Another prominent member of this lineage, Maezumi Hakuyu Taizan (1930–95), founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, had this to say about Daiun:

Daiun Harada Roshi was a Zen master of rare breadth and accomplishment in twentieth-century Japan .... He became abbot of Hosshinji and during the next forty years, until his death in 1961, made the monastery famous as a rigorous Zen training center, known for its harsh climate, its strict discipline, and its abbot’s keen Zen eye.29

Daiun was also one of the most committed Zen supporters of Japan’s military actions. If, as Kapleau claims, Daiun “revitalized” Zen, he did so by creating something he called “war Zen” (sensō Zen) as early as 1915, at the time of Japan’s entry into World War I. It was in this year that he published A Primer on the Practice of Zen (Sanzen no Kaitei), of which “War Zen” was the eleventh chapter.

The first subsection of this chapter was entitled “The Entire Universe Is at War.” For Daiun there was nothing strange about Japan being at war, for “if you look at all phenomena in the universe you will see that there is nothing which is not at war.”30 In the natural world, for example, plum seeds try to conquer the world for plums, while rice grains try to conquer the world for rice. The human world is the same, with politicians struggling with one another to conquer the political world, and merchants struggling with one another to conquer the business world.

Buddhism is not exempt from this type of struggle, according to Daiun, for Buddha Shakyamuni himself had conquered demons in the course of rea-

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.