stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

32 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Such behavior would surely not have surprised Zen priest and
scholar D. T. Suzuki, nor was it inconsistent with the attitudes of
“enlightened” Zen masters in general:
With his oft-pictured gentle and sagacious appearance of
later years, Suzuki is revered among many in the West as a
true man of Zen. Yet he wrote that “religion should, first of
all, seek to preserve the existence of the state,” followed by
the assertion that the Chinese were “unruly heathens” whom
Japan should punish “in the name of the religion.” Zen master
Harada Sogaku, highly praised in the English writings of
Philip Kapleau, Maezumi Taizan, and others, was also
quoted by Hakugen [a Rinzai Zen priest and scholar teaching
at Hanazono University in Kyoto]. In 1939 he wrote: “[If ordered
to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is
the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment].
The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest
reaches of the holy war [now under way]” (Victoria,
1997).
Daizen Victoria, quoted immediately above, is himself no unsympathetic
outsider, but is rather a practicing Soto Zen Buddhist
priest.
As Suzuki’s own “fully enlightened Zen master,” Soen/Soyen/
So-on—who had earlier attended the 1893 Parliament of Religions
(Fields, 1992)—put it:
[A]s a means of bringing into harmony those things which
are incompatible, killing and war are necessary (in Victoria,
1997).
The Rinzai Zen master Nantembo (1839 – 1925) would certainly
have agreed:
There is no bodhisattva practice superior to the compassionate
taking of life (in Victoria, 2003).
Likewise for the sagely Omori Sogen, “lauded as the ‘greatest
Zen master of modern times,’ whose very life is ‘worthy to be considered
a masterpiece of Zen art’”:
Instead of a master concerned with the “life-giving sword” ...
of Zen, we encounter someone who from the 1920s took an
active part in the ultra-right’s agenda to eliminate parlia-