The Zen they introduced had emerged in response to profound social and economic changes in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Meiji government officials had derided Buddhism as a “corrupt, decadent, antisocial, parasitic, and superstitious creed, inimical to Japan’s need for scientific and technological advancement … a foreign ‘other.’” Government officials appropriated temple estates and dissolved the danka system (which required people to register with a local temple). One Buddhist response to these encroachments was to concede the corruption, but to locate the problem in the institutional trappings that had accumulated around Buddhism and not in Buddhism itself. Buddhism, they argued, was modern, cosmopolitan, humanistic, and socially responsible—when appropriately reformed. Given the university education of its promoters, this project of purification was deeply informed by Western thought, including the anti-clerical critiques of the enlightenment, the romantic celebration of religion as feeling by Schleiermacher, as well as the immanent spirituality of Nietzsche. Sowing one seed of the late twentieth century discourse of being “spiritual, not religious,” this “new Buddhism” of the Meiji period claimed to comprise an unflinching spiritual empiricism—an empiricism not of the material world (that was the West’s province), but of the mind. Its intrepid investigators had gone bravely forth into spiritual realities where Western scientists had not yet tread, in the process anticipating (or so the claim went) key scientific discoveries in physics, astronomy, and psychology.
While the new Buddhism began as a defense against Meiji critique, as Japan defeated China in 1895, Russia in 1905, and pushed further into Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, Zen elites willingly took up the banner of Japanese imperial ideology and ambitions. Celebrating “the way of the samurai” as the very heart of Asian spirituality, reformers proffered Japanese Zen as the most advanced form of the Buddha’s teaching. Japan would restore Buddhism from its degenerated state, thus linking Japan to the rest of East Asia through a missionary project that justified imperialism.
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As a professor of religious studies, I have been insisting to students for well over a decade that not only is it unethical to sequester critical thought from religion and spirituality—there is just no need. That these are false alternatives I still do not doubt. Yet becoming part of the zendo has given me a different sense of the commitment it takes to resist this opposition—whose falseness does not make it disappear. I have found this work difficult as a student in the zendo in ways that I do not find it to be difficult as a teacher in class. In the classroom I have ways of helping students avoid ventriloquating a religious text or practice by creating a middle zone wherein their lives can be engaged and addressed without their having to pretend that the text or practice in question came from no place and no one. When reading Job, for instance, students can draw on what they have learned about suffering in their own life without ignoring the specific nature of ancient Israel’s suffering. Openness to “spiritual” questions does not require them to suspend academic exploration as well as critique. For despite modernity’s claims about itself, critique is not limited to the secular.
Sitting in the zendo, however, I relearn how deep runs the habit of regarding religion as literal—even if, when confronted with the probable historical inaccuracies of Zen lineages (for instance), people can quickly acknowledge that, of course, such “truths” are not probably about something other than historical accuracy. When pushed, people can acknowledge the power of “metaphorical” or “mythical” forms of truth—but people read literally, until they are questioned. In this way, religion still speaks to us. For how we relate to a truth matters more than its propositional content.
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