Sun, 04 May 2008
Zen at War
Someone asked a question about the Japanese Zen masters who supprted Japan in the Second World War. If they were enightened, how could they do such a thing? Normally I would side step this question, but tonight I did, for better or worse, and here it is.
Everyone starts meditating with some sort of expectations about it. And when they see long time meditators behaving badly, they have doubts about the value of practice. So they want to know what they can reasonably expect from practice, without any BS. This is a tricky subject to talk about for several reasons. First, because it's difficult to talk about what happens to the mind in meditation because Western languages don't have the framework to discuss it. Second, talking about what happens in meditation can create expectations, and these expectations are obstacles to practice. But, I'll do my best.
One analogy often used for meditation is a pail of muddy water. Normally the mud is stirred up by our daily activity, but if we sit quietly, the mud settles to the bottom, leaving clear water. So this is calming the mind, the first stage of meditation.
Let's extend the analogy by saying that a golden statue is in the pail of water. As the water clears, the statue becomes visible. You don't have to make the statue, the statue was always there, only it was hidden. Similarly, as the mind becomes calm, its real nature becomes apparent. This is glimpsing the real, the second phase of meditation.
You might think, that's the final goal of practice, but it is not. After that, one must apply what one has seen to daily life. This is not any easy or automatic thing, it's quite a difficult practice. Even experienced practitioners make mistakes here and sometimes seem to behave worse than someone who's never practiced. If you judge a person by their worst behavior, certainly it will seem that a long term practitioner has made no progress. But there is a difference. A practitioner will be learning from their mistakes, but a non-practitioner probably will not.
There's another side to this. A practitioner's behavior is guided by their understanding of the precepts. Having some understanding of things as they are does not automatically make your behavior spotless. If you misunderstand the precepts, you're going to have learn them the hard way. So practice and keeping the precepts go hand in hand. This is why the idea that enlightened practitioners are beyond the precepts is false and destructive.
Getting back to the original question, the problem with Japanese Zen masters who supported the war is not that their practice was faulty, it was that their understanding of the precepts was defective. This is not so surprising. People who are kind in everyday life can be blood thirsty when it comes to international relations, shouting "Bomb them back to the stone age!" So many Japanese misunderstood the precepts, and they certainly learned their value the hard way.
So the point is that meditation may be the heart of Zen, but it is not the whole of Zen. You cannot expect meditation practice to do for you what it was not meant to.
