Tracking Bodhidharma (40 page)

The Soga clan thus embraced Sima Dadeng's Mahayana Buddhism even before its widely heralded introduction to Japan by way of Korea in) 538. But it is clear that the transmission of Buddhist culture originated at Emperor Wu's court.

Emperor Wu's brand of Imperial-Way Buddhism, including the bodhisattva ideal and the Mahayana doctrines of “Buddha nature,” were transmitted to Japan during the time when Emperor Wu most fervently and publically embraced these ideas. This was the same time period when Bodhidharma may have lived in the city of Tianchang north of Nanjing, and when his disciple Sengfu lived at Kaishan Temple.

The divinity of Japanese emperors, their “god” status at the center of the Japanese
kokutai
and the Yamato spirit, must be seen to be at least partly as a result of the Soga clan's embrace of the Imperial-Way Buddhism of Emperor Wu and the “Buddhist” exaltation of the Japanese ruler that started with Prince Shotoku. In China, Korea, and then Japan, Buddhism was not just a religion of home-leaving monks, but the ideology of ruling circles as well. In Japan, Imperial-Way Buddhism was first seen by the Soga clan with an eye to how imperial power could maintain “harmony” among the warring clans, and thereafter to make sure that the populace would obey their emperor. Once power is obtained, “harmony” is needed to maintain it.

Nara, Japan's ancient capital, remains today as a foremost site of ancient Japanese culture. Within Nara Prefecture is Todai Temple, an immense wooden structure that was first built around the year 752 and was the center of Imperial-Way Buddhism in early Japan. That temple, from its inception, has symbolized Buddhist ideology's protection of the Japanese state.

Reflecting on this information, I finally solve a puzzle whose answer had long eluded me. I've always wondered why it was that Zen finally took root in Japan only many centuries after it was popular in China.
Japan started importing Buddhism around the time Bodhidharma lived, in the early sixth century, but Zen was not established in that country until seven centuries later. Korea and Vietnam, on the other hand, embraced Bodhidharma's Zen quite early during its historical development in China. According to Zen tradition, a disciple of Zen's Third Chinese Ancestor named Sengcan transmitted Zen to Vietnam before the year 600, while Korean Zen claims to have been established when a Korean disciple of Zen's Fourth Ancestor Daoxin returned to his native land. The big difference between the time of the acceptance of Zen in Japan and in those other countries now does not appear to be an accident of history. The difference stems from the fact that from its earliest introduction in Japan, Buddhism was used to serve the interests of the state. Bodhidharma's Zen, with its antimetaphysical, anti-imperial outlook, and its avoidance of emperors, was antithetical to this political role and may not have taken root in Japan for this reason. In Japan, Buddhism has served the needs of the state from the time of its introduction into that country. Zen, by the thirteenth century, was a political pawn in Chinese politics. It was then that Japan could accept it into the special Japanese “polity.”

 

FIGURE 16. Emperor Wu's Imperial Buddhism was
transmitted to Japan via two routes:
1) Directly by Sima Dadeng in the year 522
2) Via the Korean Baekje Kingdom in 538

Becoming part of the Buddhist clergy of Imperial-Way Buddhism, whether in Japan or China, could not be the quick “accepting Jesus into your heart” approach, the simple act of “directly observing mind.”
It instead was a path that demanded scriptural study, especially of the Lotus Sutra, the Nirvana Sutra, and other Buddhist scriptures. Sects of Buddhism that used such sutras as the basis for their teachings were acceptable to Japan's ruling elite, and subsequently those sects flourished in Japan. Sutras that exalted bodhisattvas were exploited to enhance the prestige of ruling circles, and especially a bodhisattva sovereign, not unlike Emperor Wu.

Zen finally took root in Japan when it had evolved in China to become a fully orthodox, Imperial-Way Zen. It was only after Zen had degenerated to a point where it was compatible with and fully integrated into China's imperial system that it was also acceptable to Japan. In the thirteenth century, when Zen was studied and transmitted to Japan by Japanese monks who visited the Chinese region around Hangzhou, that area was the very center of Chinese imperial power, and Imperial Zen was its central ideology. The Five Mountains System of late Song dynasty (around 1200 CE) Chinese Zen, a system whereby Chinese Zen was administered by five central and imperially established Zen monasteries around Hangzhou Bay, served as a model for a similar system devised in Kyoto after that city became Japan's capital.

Certain of the founders of Zen in Japan seem to be aware of the problem that Imperial Zen posed, and attempted to avoid its “imperial sway.” The nominal founder of Soto Zen in Japan, Eihei Dogen, is known to have avoided contact with the shogunate, the warrior rulers that exercised political power behind the façade of the emperor's throne. As it spread in Japan, Zen became more and more the handmaiden of the state. Zen's embrace of militarism during World War II is simply the culmination of Zen's evolution in Japan.

Japan's Soga clan successfully used Emperor Wu's brand of Buddhism, but not Bodhidharma's Zen, to help them consolidate imperial rule. Later, the Soga clan lost power, but the doctrine of the emperor's divinity that would in modern times underlie the creation of militant Japanism and
kokutai
had become a permanent part of the Japanese emperor's mystical identity. This essentially Buddhist identity set the stage for the emperor's mystical political position from the time of Prince Shotoku until modern times.

Since its introduction fourteen hundred years ago, Buddhism has played a critical role in Japan's view of itself. All Buddhist sects in Japan
have acknowledged the role their religion must play in “protecting the country.” Buddhism, in both the court of Emperor Wu as well as on the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan, was not just a religion, but also a tool for the spreading of feudal ideology and propaganda.

Of all the Buddhist sects in Japan, it was perhaps the Nichiren School that embraced the imperial Buddhist mythology of the country most fervently. This school of Buddhism was based on the teachings of the Japanese monk Nichiren (1222–1282). It was an offshoot of the Pure Land Buddhist school that originated at Huiyuan's East Woods Temple aside Mount Lu, the temple I could see from my perch high on that mountain. Ironically, this was the same temple where Huiyuan penned the words “a monk does not bow to a king.”

Using the Lotus Sutra as the basis of his philosophy, Nichiren was devoted to an extreme version of the “bodhisattva ideal.” Nichiren thought himself to be a supreme bodhisattva, or even a Buddha. Based on hazy passages of the Lotus Sutra that were interpreted as prophesies, the Nichiren sect saw a divine “Buddhist” hand behind Japan's uniqueness, its
kokutai.

My search of the Chinese Internet turned up a particularly interesting article. A Chinese scholar named He Jinsong has researched and written about the role that Japanese Buddhists played in the occupation of China during World War II. According to Professor He, many Buddhist sects provided the “spiritual” propaganda that accompanied occupation. He quotes statistics from Japanese historical sources that show that the most fervent of all the Buddhist sects supporting Japan's imperial policy was the Nichiren. But he points out and offers statistics that reveal that all the sects of Japanese Buddhism established or took control of a total of 266 temples in the state of Manchukuo, Chinese Manchuria, during Japan's occupation of that region. Among these, the two Zen sects of Soto and Rinzai together accounted for the administration of 45 temples. In a phrase that is oddly reminiscent of accounts of foreign “comfort women” that were forced to serve Japan's military troops as prostitutes, such temples were tasked to cater to the “spiritual needs” of the occupying Japanese forces. That Japanese Zen clerics were directly involved in the running of Zen temples in occupied Manchuria, and subsequently in occupied China, is a thought painful to consider.

Another article on China's Internet is perhaps even more surprising.

One of the adherents of the Nichiren sect was the Japanese World War II general leading Japan's forces in Manchuria, a lifelong military man named Kanji Ishiwara. Ishiwara saw Japan's conquest of North China as a step in the fulfillment of a Lotus Sutra prophesy that he believed foretold an era of cataclysmic war in which Japan would be ascendant, followed by a thousand years of peace. Ishiwara planned, created a pretext for, and commanded Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. His policies set the stage for the invasion of the rest of China in 1937. Ishiwara believed in the need for an alliance between Japan, China, and other Asian countries to oppose Soviet Communism. After that menace was dealt with, he thought, the East Asian alliance could take on America and rid the world of the pernicious threat of liberal democracy.

The Nichiren sect to which Ishiwara belonged is highly controversial even in Japanese Buddhist circles, for it claims an absolutist position with respect to Buddhist truth, denouncing all other Buddhist sects as false. This absolutist position, combined with the belief that Japan's emperor embodied the ideal of the transcendent bodhisattva, represents a truly bizarre interpretation of Buddhist teachings.

That the Lotus Sutra, a scripture that Emperor Wu transmitted to Japan, ultimately became a tool of war ideology is clearly revealed in another passage of Brian Victoria's
Zen at War
. In discussing the rise of Imperial-Way Buddhism in Japan, Victoria quotes the principles set forth by the Nichiren Buddhist sect during the World War II era as follows:

Tragically, it would therefore appear that Emperor Wu's Imperial-Way Buddhism directly sowed the seeds that would lead to the exaltation of Japan's divine emperor. It was Emperor Wu who skillfully fused Buddhism with Confucianism into a heady metaphysical mixture of imperial divinity, a strange irony whereby a home-abiding emperor became the most exalted of spiritual beings.

But even more ironic is the sobering fact that the Nanjing Massacre occurred directly atop the site of Emperor Wu's ancient palace, the place where Imperial-Way Buddhism reached its zenith, and from where it was transported to the Land of the Rising Sun. Emperor Wu himself transferred a metaphysical Imperial-Way Buddhism to Japan that would, so many centuries later, provide the metaphysical theories justifying imperial war against China. The idea that Buddhist doctrines originated in Emperor Wu's court and were transmitted from there to Japan, then came back many centuries later armed with bayonets to commit mass murder and rape on the precise grounds of its origin, is a dark and shocking idea. Nevertheless, I propose that the awful events that occurred in 1937 and 1938 in and around Nanjing throw a spotlight on the final act of a drama that started when a real figure named Bodhidharma met Emperor Wu. The drama that started with an obscure event in an ancient court in China continued not just in the village of Long Reed, across the Yang-tse River some miles away where Emperor Wu's court stood, but on the very streets that now lie atop Wu's forgotten home. The Rape of Nanjing transpired above the place where Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu allegedly met. The meeting has more meaning than even Zen masters in the world today can remember or imagine.

Nanjing City's agony was one of many large stages for this tragedy. But one small stage was Long Reed Village, the place where Bodhidharma purportedly sought refuge from Emperor Wu's Imperial-Way court.

On June 15, 1938, according to what the cook Shao told me, Japanese occupiers killed monks at Long Reed Temple in the course of destroying it. There are reports that monks were killed at other temples during the invasion and the seven-year Japanese occupation of the area, so Shao's story of these occurrences can't be dismissed as implausible. Moreover, on the Web I've found accounts of Long Reed Village's destruction in Chinese records. Articles describe the burning of Long Reed Village
itself. On that particular June night in 1938, Japanese imperial troops garrisoned at Xi Chang Gate, a place a few kilometers from Long Reed, invaded the village on intelligence reports that someone in the Chinese resistance forces was operating from there. Once the area was surrounded, a signal shot was fired, and then three invading columns of troops marched on the village. A massacre ensued. Eye-witness reports say that the entire main street of the village was turned into a “sea of fire.” Many who hid in their homes to avoid gunfire died in the conflagration. On that night, it appears, Changlu Temple was also destroyed. It may be that monks were killed along with other civilians. Japanese troops knew that resistance fighters sometimes masqueraded as monks, so Buddhist clergy could be subject to the same brutal treatment as civilians who were suspected of fighting against the Japanese occupation.