108 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
- Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible. A History of
Anarchism (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. 61. - Many of the more anarchistic stories correspond to the early age
of Chinese Zen (Chan) which corresponds to the Tang period (618–
907). This age has been construed by Zen anarchists, from Uchiyama
Gudo to John Clark as a golden era in which the antiauthoritari-
an spirit of Zen is fully expressed, as I have argued elsewhere (see
Galvan-Alvarez, Enrique, “Meditative Revolutions? Orientalism and
History in the Western Buddhist Anarchist Tradition in Enlightened
Anarchism, Forthcoming). A representative cycle of stories about
the Zen of this period is the collection of koan of Rinzai patriarch
Linji, see Fuller Sasaki, Ruth, trans., The Record of Linji (Honolulu,
University of Hawai’i Press: 2009). - Discourses that construct meditation as an inherently progressive
tool that might even be indispensable to social revolution can be found
across Western Zen anarchist writings. These include Snyder’s char-
acterization of meditation as having “nation-shaking implications”
(“Buddhist Anarchism”), Warner’s implicit construction of Zen and
zazen as a form “inner anarchy” (pp. 28–30) or Thornley’s statement
that “Zenarchy is the Social Order which springs from Meditation”
(p. 13). These attempts to “meditate the state away” obscure the
history of practices like zazen being used to support the state and
further its ends as Brian Victoria’s work demonstrates and fails to an-
swer how the mere practice of Buddhist meditation has so far failed
to produce an anarchist society despite being widely practiced across
the history and geography of Buddhism. See Victoria, Brian Daizen.
Zen at War. (Oxford: Rowman and Littleman Publishers, 2006). - In finding Zen the most anarchist of Buddhisms, Zen anarchists
collude with a certain Zen Buddhist discourse that presents Zen as
the superior and ultimate form of Buddhism. Whereas this excep-
tionalist discourse is common across Buddhist traditions, which
often competed against each other and unfailingly presented them-
selves as the best option, incorporating it to a Buddhist anarchism
is problematic. Presenting Zen unmediated as the “Apotheosis of
Buddhism” (Marshall p. 61) or asserting that “it did not degenerate
into superstition [unlike other forms of Buddhism]” are ahistorical
claims that ignore the power struggles and politics at work in the
self-legitimation of Zen. For an account of the political implications