Peace (17 page)

The Bushi or warrior elite were often well educated and knew they contravened the spirit of the long defunct Taika and non-violent Buddhist principles. So they lived by their own code, the Bushido, formulated in the Kamakura period (1185–1333). An early Bushido master stressed learning and military arts as the guiding principles of samurai: “Literature first, and arms next to it. . . They must be cultivated concurrently.”
³²
Like chivalry in medieval Europe, the Bushido can be understood as an attempt to “civilize” militarism, circumscribing while justifying its use. Core Bushido virtues included honor, respect, honesty and loyalty: a Confucianism of swords instead of words. “If you have an opponent, says Bushido, beat him. . . but once you have beaten him, then see to it that you make him your friend.”
³³
Accommodation was vital for the Bushi both for survival and success, seen in the tradition of two leaders of warring factions seeking to let the other write peace terms. “Each considered that the other, knowing that peace would come only from a real accommodation of interests, would write terms acceptable to both sides, a policy most would consider too perilous today.”
³⁴

Bushi lore tells of a sword kept at the Iso no Kami Shrine (modern Nara prefecture) that has “the power to maintain peace in the country.”
³⁵
It was used in a dance aimed at pacifying evil spirits that caused illness to Emperors, upon whose health the Empire's rested. They also painted a figure called Fudo on votive offerings for peace in troubled times, usually depicted with a red face, large eyes, wild hair and a halo of flames. Of all Bushi traditions, however, none is better known today than ceremonial tea drinking. Beside his famous Silver Pavilion, a Shogun of the Ashikaga period (1338–1597) built Japan's first tea room, where he and friends could experience “a few fleeting moments of peace” since, as became the custom throughout the realm, weapons were required to be left outside tea rooms, secular temples.
³⁶
Bushi militarism did keep the Mongols, who had conquered much of mainland Asia, off the Japanese Islands, but European traders who arrived in the sixteenth century to exchange guns for goods were more difficult to resist. Shogun rule was progressively fractured by constant wars between Daimyo, in which samurai were massacred by trigger-pulling peasants enlisted en masse for the first time since the Taika. The weapons ban cited above was issued during the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568–1600) to diffuse this dangerous and destabilizing situation, after its short-lived Shoguns militarily reunified all the Shoen. Many forms of non-armed martial arts, such as Karate, were developed underground so that the demilitarized population would not be totally defenseless. Emboldened by his successful selective demilitarization, the Shogun Hideyoshi (1537–1598) carried out the first foreign
campaign in centuries. He tried to conquer the Korean peninsula with a conscripted army, but his failure resulted in his downfall and a change in military regimes.

Tokugawa Shoguns (1600–1868), with their capital at Edo near modern Tokyo, brought about a slight return of oppressive peace by building on the successes and capitalizing on the failures of their predecessors. Over the course of their extended reign, they enforced the rule of law in the Emperor's name; somewhat demilitarized the Bushido to bolster state bureaucracy; greatly reduced the number of Daimyo, granting them local autonomy for peaceable alignment with central policy; and redistributed the Shoen for political and production purposes. At first, they encouraged economic and cultural exchanges with still-new sets of foreigners, Western ones such as the Portuguese and Dutch, while renewing contacts with China and Korea. Hayashi Razan (early seventeenth century), advisor to Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, was a famed Neo-Confucian scholar who exemplifies the renewed interest in foreign affairs of Japanese culture and statecraft during the early part of this period. “To have the arts of peace,” he wrote, “but not the arts of war, is to lack courage. To have the arts of war, but not the arts of peace, is to lack wisdom.”
³⁷
His house in Edo had a large library and came to be called the Hall of Confucian Learning. Within fifty years, it had become the official Head of State University and, after being relocated to another part of Edo and enlarged, was renamed The School of Prosperous Peace (
Shoheiko
) in 1691. These and other re-integrations of foreign into native culture have led many historians to call this early era the Tokugawa Peace.

By the 1700s, however, foreign influences were once again perceived as threats to native traditions of peace and power. A strict isolationist policy called Sakoku, punishing unauthorized departures from and arrivals to the Japanese islands by death, was enacted to preserve oppressive peace from within by selectively eliminating and channeling intercessions from without. Only the Dutch and Chinese, seen as the most peaceful foreign forces, were permitted to do business from ports at strategic distances from Edo. By the end of the nineteenth century, Tokugawa Shoguns sought to further purge foreign influences by returning to a “pure” Shinto. Religious traditions once skillfully combined to prevent and end violence were displaced by Shinto priests paid to pray for peace. With the Meiji restoration of the Emperor at American instigation and Shoguns' expense in 1868 (see
Chapter 7
), state Shinto was once again used to glorify the Emperor, but this time to justify policies of aggression. After two world wars in which Japan played no small part, the new national Shinto organization issued the following peaceful policy, returning to its roots:

1.  Be grateful to the kami for their blessings and to the ancestors for their beneficence; devote yourselves to shrine ritual with hearts of sincerity, bright and pure.

2.  Serve society and all people; as purveyors of the wishes of the kami, restructure the world and give it substance.

3.  Respect the emperor as mediator of the wishes of the Sun Goddess; be sure to follow his wishes; pray for good fortune for the people of Japan, and of all nations and pray, too, that the world may live in peace and prosperity.
³⁸

4

Monotheistic Peaces: Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Shalom: Peace in the Torah and its Times

The Hebrew word for peace, Shalom, is today a customary Jewish greeting. But the uses of the word in the Torah, which recounts the early history, theology and principles of the Jewish people, are far more complex and are directly related to contemporary concerns. By its narratives alone, the Torah is “a violent book with an obvious bias towards strife” in line with its violent, strife-filled times.
¹
As contexts, however, these narratives foreground the evolution of physical, spiritual, ethical and socio-political contents of Shalom. Caught between the rival powers of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hebrew-speaking nomadic pastoralists of the Patriarchs' generations (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
c
. 2000–1500 BCE) were also at the mercy of nature. Originally from Ur, they set out on foot into the desert for distant Canaan, the Promised Land, after Abraham received a divine order to do so. In a very physical sense, then, Shalom first meant protection from human and elemental hostilities surrounding a people always on the run.

The spiritual covenant with God, by which Abraham's progeny would be plentiful and prosper in the Promised Land with divine protection, was in a way a conditional treaty on the tributary model. For these blessings, full submission and undivided devotion to the deity was required of them. The originality of this “covenant of peace” that God continually renewed with Abraham and his descendents is that it tied a single god to a single group of people exclusively and indefinitely, whereas syncretism and henotheism were then the main modes of religious peacemaking in the
region at the time. Many gods are recognized in the Torah, one of which chooses Abraham's people, giving them and their descendents a unique identity and destiny. In return, they choose this god to be
the
God for them, demoting the rest to idols. Highly anthropomorphized, this God (Yahweh) walks and talks with Abraham, is jealous of other gods, and gets vengefully angry when he is disobeyed. As the search for the Promised Land's peaceful safe-haven continues, Yahweh inflicts atrocities on those standing in the spiritual or logistical way of his people, reinforcing their belief in Yahweh's provident omnipotence and the covenant of peace. For his part, Abraham occasionally takes on the role of diplomat, as in the non-aggression pact made with a Philistine king and his general near Canaan. “Show me,” says the king,”and the country where you are living as an alien the same kindness I have shown you,” a typical description of the guest–host relationship crucial to the survival of migrants in settled lands.
²
Abraham swears to this and offers seven ewes for access to a well, in the vicinity of which he died and where his progeny prospered for a while under his son Isaac. The peoples of all three monotheisms would later trace their peace traditions back to Abraham.

In individual terms, Shalom came to refer to inner peace qualified by health, serenity of mind and spiritual purity from sins such as idolatry. In search of this, Jacob (Isaac's son and last of the Patriarchs) fled from famine to fertile Egypt with his people, where they were eventually enslaved. There, inner Shalom became a means of preserving their faith, identity and lives in the face of ongoing oppression, without which the Jewish faith might not exist today. During the subsequent Exodus from Egypt to Canaan, the ethical principles or laws of Jewish society were made explicit by its leader, the Prophet Moses. As an adopted member of the Pharaoh's court, he had tried to make peace between the enslavers and the enslaved, as well to promote it among the enslaved themselves. When these attempts failed, he tried to negotiate with the Pharaoh for their release. The Pharaoh agreed only when Yahweh wreaked ten plagues upon the Egyptians and, with similar support, Moses and the former slaves subdued the hostile human and natural forces they met with, at great cost of lives and resources. The Ten Commandments revealed to him on the journey were meant not only to promote peace among his people, but also between them and Yahweh, who it was now believed must be punishing them for their wayward ways. The first four renew the exclusive covenant of peace discussed above, prohibiting the worship of other gods or idols and holding Yahweh and the day of worship in the highest esteem. The last six are basic guidelines for living in a stable, unwarlike society, quite the contrary of theirs at the time: not murdering or stealing, nor coveting property or people, and treating parents with respect. The “eye for an eye” doctrine put forth a few passages later complements the
Commandments as a preventative measure, but contradicts them by perpetuating instead of stopping violence in conveying a retaliatory justice confusable with the commendation of conflict. Having barely made it to Canaan, Yahweh called upon Moses to write the traditions his people had passed down orally since before Abraham's time, after which he soon died. Being a “people of the book,” discussed below, further distinguished his religion from those tied to persons or things, and lent a portability and permanence to the instructions for individual and social Shalom that later provided the basis for both socio-political and Messianic Shalom.

The conquest of Canaan (
c
. thirteenth–eleventh centuries BCE) led by Moses' protégé and the most military of the Prophets, Joshua, was a cruel and drawn-out affair despite and because of divine interventions. It was motivated by a belief that the sought-for Shalom was tied to a specific geographical location and a God-given right to occupy it regardless of present residents. Bloody battles between the newcomers and the locals over land, resources and religion continued long after settlement started, though Joshua had “made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live.”
³
Following his death, the settlements were divided among twelve traditional tribes descending from Jacob's twelve sons. These fractious new conditions and the infighting they brought about created a need to redefine Shalom in a more socially cooperative, politically united sense. The religious messages Shalom had carried for more than a millennium thus slowly took on the added dimensions of a socio-political ideal. Mixing legislative, judicial and religious powers, potentates called Judges (
shopetim
) were invested with decision-making authority for and between the twelve tribes, presiding over individual cases and over their collective activities. In the Judges' hands, Shalom came to mean an arrangement or agreement reached by mutual consent, legitimately authorized and justly implemented by established processes. Peace was now associated with power equilibriums conducive to prosperous internal order and strong defences from external threats, as when the Prophet Isaiah later proclaimed “let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me.”
⁴
As Judges consolidated their territorial gains over the course of two centuries, they began to show the same peaceable guest-host parity to strangers as their forefathers had once received in the same region. Simultaneously, attempts began to be made to consolidate previous inner-personal into an inter-personal peace by turning wisdom, generosity, charity and patience into admirable qualities, not yet as substitutes but as additions to the warlike ones of yore.