agility, such as leaping great distances. Though there
is no suggestion that Bodhidharma performed martial
feats, including him in this tradition makes clear that
his skills placed him outside the exegetical or ritual
spheres of the monastery and more firmly within a fa-
miliar Chinese tradition of religious eccentrics. Such
an image was readily amenable to later martial tradi-
tions, particularly in Japan. The few works attributed
to Bodhidharma give no indication of a concern with
martial practices. Furthermore, as argued above, the
Shaolin martial arts traditions bore only incidental re-
lation to Chan Buddhist teachings.
While not detracting from the martial skill that
many achieve in these arts, there remains the question
of whether these achievements and the views of the
modes and objectives of Zen practice that inform them
accurately reflect Buddhist monastic practices in Japan
or China now or in the past. In general, they do not.
At best they represent successful adaptations of certain
Buddhist meditative techniques to martial practices,
and at worst they impart an aura of mystification that
has less to do with Buddhism than with commercial-
ization, nationalism, or self-promotion.
The rise of Japanese martial arts as they are known
today only began to take shape in the closing decades
of the nineteenth century following the collapse of the
Tokugawa shogunate. The year 1868 marked the be-
ginning of a thoroughgoing cultural revolution in
Japan when the newly installed Meiji government
sought to erase hundreds of years of local and state cul-
ture organized around a pervasive network of Buddhist
temples and monks, and to replace this cultural sub-
strate with the “rational” organs of the modern state.
Temples were burned, images destroyed, and monks
returned to lay status under the guise of destroying feu-
dal superstition. State Shinto was declared the em-
bodiment of the true spirit of the Japanese people and
was, by definition, nonreligious, having been purified
of the superstitious elements that had seeped into it
due to the long presence of Buddhism in Japan. How-
ever, because “the spirit of the Japanese people” was
somewhat ambiguous in meaning, an issue of great
concern to the new national leadership was how to cul-
tivate that spirit without religious institutions.
At this point the Zen Buddhists and particularly
their secularized apologists were able to reenter the
public discourse. Reinventing themselves as the em-
bodiment of a distinctly Japanese form of rational
modernity and the custodians of a spiritual practice
free of religious superstition, they were able to inject
such notions as no-mind (mushin), here generally un-
derstood as the sublimation of the self to the people
(the state), into the physical training curriculums of
Japan’s schools. Moving into the twentieth century,
these physical training curriculums took on an in-
creasingly martial aspect and were highly amenable to
the Japanese nationalism that was then emerging. Iron-
ically, many of the notions put forward by these Zen
advocates were in fact drawn more from Chinese
Daoist and Confucian sources than they were from
Buddhist traditions, specifically certain breathing prac-
tices and notions of self-sacrifice within an encom-
passing social hierarchy. Zen monks had been the
primary conduits of such ideas into Japan as early as
the twelfth century. Around the beginning of the twen-
tieth century the suffix do,from the Chinese dao(way),
replaced many of the more mundane categorical
Japanese terms for the martial arts. This revised vo-
cabulary, including the terms judo(way of gentleness),
kendo(way of the sword), and budo(martial way), was
clearly intended to impart a spiritual significance not
present in words denoting technique or art (-jutsu).
D. T. SUZUKI (1870–1966), writing in English,
emerged in the mid-twentieth century as the person
most responsible for introducing these interpretations
of Zen and its relation to the martial arts, among other
themes, to the English-speaking world. Significantly,
he was not a Zen priest but a scholar trained in the
“science of religion” during an eleven-year stay in the
United States under the tutelage of Paul Carus
(1852–1919). During these years, Suzuki was exposed
to the writings of William James on pure experience
and Rudolph Otto on the nature of religion, and the
influence of their ideas can be seen in his psychologi-
cal interpretations of Zen Buddhism and the martial
arts. Little wonder, then, that Suzuki’s writings on Zen
have struck many Westerners as exotic, and at the same
time somehow familiar, drawing as they do on con-
temporary Western notions of religion and psychol-
ogy. It should not be overlooked, however, that
Suzuki’s writings before World War II often revealed
a distinctly nationalist slant. The Zen mind of pure ex-
perience was frequently represented as a unique ca-
pacity of the Japanese spirit, ultimately inaccessible to
non-Japanese. Though the contradictory notion of a
universal potential to experience the Zen mind can be
found throughout his writings, this theme became pro-
nounced only in his postwar writings. Suzuki did more
to shape popular conceptions of Zen in the twentieth
century than anyone else. However, much of his rep-
resentation of Buddhism constitutes what must beMARTIALARTS