Chapter 8 Japan 337watery grave, or whether he goes to the mountain and the only shroud for his
lifeless body is the mountain grass” (Bellah 1957:93).
But samurai could not become full Zen monks except, as they often did, in
retirement. One might suppose there was insuperable conflict between the life
devoted to meditation and the activism of the warrior’s life, and indeed
Yoshida Kenko wrote critically of the monk Shinkai that
he was wont to sit all day long pondering on his latter end; this is no doubt
a very suitable attitude for a recluse but by no means so for a warrior. For
so he would have to neglect his military duties and the way of loyalty and
filial piety, and he must on the contrary be constantly busy with his affairs
both public and private. But whenever he has a little spare time to himself
and can be quiet he should not fail to revert to this question of death and
reflect carefully on it. (Bellah 1957:92)
Something that can be identified as “Zen culture” emerged from these spar-
tan, martial, and Buddhist values. It included a valuation of death, a romantici-
zation of the withered, the cold, the lonely; the tea ceremony for its simplicity;
sumi-e painting for its monochromatic abstraction, austerity, and tranquility; the
severe Zen landscape of rocks, gravel, and natural arrangements; and the self-
abnegation of the Zen monkhood. All this is far from the hedonism and desire
for plunder usually associated with warrior cultures; the samurai warrior, like
the Buddhist monk, lived a life of selfless devotion to his ideals.
The Practice of Zen
Zen rejected the popular Buddhist views that salvation can come from faith
in a savior (Amida Buddha) or a magical book (the Lotus Sutra) or recitation of
mantras like the nembutsu, and it returned to an older Buddhist view that
enlightenment can only happen through the focused, committed effort of the
seeker. Two concepts from very early Indian Buddhism became central fea-
tures of Zen. From the writings of Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250) the doctrine of sun-
yata, or emptiness, urges recognition that nothing has origination, dissipation,
permanence—nothing has existence in and of itself. This is true as well for fun-
damental Buddhist doctrines, which, to use modern language, he “decon-
structed”: karma, self (atman), the fully enlightened one, and nirvana. This view
was wedded to a second ancient tradition, the practice of rigorous meditation
(dhyana, from which derives the Chinese term, Chan, and the Japanese Zen).
On what does one meditate? Not on the image of Buddha, not on the Lotus
Sutra, not on the nembutsu, but on emptiness itself. The goal remains attain-
ment of Buddhahood, but what Buddhahood might be is, of course, the prob-
lem. According to the seventeenth-century Diamond-Hard Wisdom of Mind, by
Suzuki Shosan, “What we call Buddhahood is the fact that all things are origi-
nally empty. Fundamentally, there is no me, no you, no Dharma, no Buddha.
Buddhahood is complete separation from everything, letting go and being free”
(Braverman 1994:29).