BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 263would aid the nation in its efforts toward modernization. At the same time,
borrowing a page from the social Darwinists, they insisted that the turmoil of
Japanese history, including the recent Shinto suppression of Buddhism, had
ensured that only the fittest and most developed expressions ofBuddhism had
survived on Japanese soil. The obvious contradictions in these two positions
they reconciled by appealing to a Japanese version of the racism rampant in
the West at the time. The Japanese, they insisted, had a unique talent for com-
bining refined aesthetic/religious sensitivity with ruthless courage, and thus
had managed to remain true to the inner essence ofBuddhism while simulta-
neously taking it to a heightened pitch.
Zen priests, such as Kosen Soon (1816-92) and his student Shaku Soen
(1859-1919), insisted that Rinzai Zen in particular, when stripped of its insti-
tutional forms, embodied the essence ofBuddhism with a purity matched
nowhere else. This essence consisted of a direct experience attained through a
radically empirical and scientific inquiry into the true nature of things. In fact,
the total stripping away of all conventionalities was in and of itself Zen. Thus
the New Rinzai took the more iconoclastic side of Zen and made it represent
the whole tradition, while dismissing as historical baggage the institutional
forms that had balanced that iconoclasm and formed its reason for being. To
answer Western charges of the effeminacy of Oriental culture, these priests
also insisted on Zen's ties with the bushido code of manly self-sacrifice, disci-
pline, and single-minded fearlessness. Thus their vision of Zen was the ulti-
mate expression both of the spirit of Buddhism and of the unique strengths of
the Japanese race. As a political creed, New Rinzai answered Japan's need for a
national ethos, immune to Western criticisms, that would support the national
war effort and justifY the disregard of conventional morality in its political de-
signs on its spiritually "effete" neighbors. As the movement developed, its ad-
vocates began to view themselves as guardians of the primary essence of all
world spirituality, and Japan as the vanguard of the spiritual regeneration of
the human race. It is no accident that the primary exponent of Zen to the
West in the twentieth century, D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), was a student of this
movement.
The books and courses offered by the New Buddhists were so successful
that government ideologues began to reassess Buddhism's role in Japanese his-
tory. As a result, they came to glorifY the Rinzai contribution to the Way of
the Warrior and the Muromachi aesthetic as signs ofJapan's innate racial and
cultural superiority. Rinzai monks were called on to teach the Zen aesthetic
to members of the society as a way of fostering national pride, and to teach
meditation as a way of instilling the single.:.. minded "no-mindedness" of the
Way of the Warrior-not only to soldiers, but to all whose total commitment·
would be needed to support the war effort. Monks from all Buddhist schools. were also called on to justifY militarism as a spiritual duty by teaching that the
"bodies and hearts broken by war" were a noble sacrifice to a greater cause.
The monks, aside from a handful of pacifists, did not refuse.
Until its collapse during World War II, the militaristic policy was a stun-
ning success. Nevertheless, it created severe dislocations in Japanese society,
which, as always, led to new religious movements centered on charismatic