Generated Imperial Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’S Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics (2009)

H-Buddhism Ives, Chris

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, January 15, 2019

My interest in Buddhism began in the early 1970s, when many of us were curious about higher states of consciousness and I heard about this thing called Zen. In January 1974, during my sophomore year at Williams College, I took a one-month “winter study” course with the chaplain, John Eusden, which featured zazen in his living room each weekday morning followed by cross-country skiing on the College’s golf course in the afternoon. As I recall, we read Shunryu Suzuki’sZen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and in the months that followed I read Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen and several of D. T. Suzuki’s books.

I was a Psychology and Religion major, intrigued by the approach of R. D. Laing and questions surrounding psychosis, mysticism, and altered states of consciousness. Friends and I read Carlos Castaneda’s books as they came out, as well as Joseph Chilton Pearce’s The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and Andrew Weil’s The Natural Mind. In my junior year I dropped the Religion major but continued reading the few books on Buddhism that were available in English then, including Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. In August of 1974, after working most of the summer in a cement factory near Albany, I headed west, hitchhiking and using a Greyhound bus pass to spend a few days in Boulder in the midst of the emergence of the Naropa Institute—at that time inclusive of Trungpa’s followers, Ram Dass and his followers, and Alan Ginsberg and others in the School of Disembodied Poets—followed by backpacking in Yosemite, on the beach strip of Olympic National Park, and in the Canadian Rockies.

Back at Williams, while continuing to do zazen and going on a couple of jaunts to places like Eido- roshi’s New York Zendo Shōbō-ji, I also started practicing kung fu. I was on financial aid and had never travelled overseas, so I decided in my senior year that I would go to Japan to practice Zen and the martial arts for a few years and then travel around the world before starting mental health work and most likely a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology back in the United States. I got a job teaching English in a small town south of Osaka, and after a year of teaching there, studying Japanese intensively, and exploring Buddhist sites in western Japan, I moved up to Kyoto in 1977.

My main connection to the Zen world in Kyoto was through a Williams friend who, while studying abroad there several years earlier, had participated in the F.A.S. Society, a lay Zen practice-study group that was started by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi in one of the sub-temples of Myōshinji, the head temple of a major strand of Rinzai Zen. I starting participating in weekly gatherings on Saturday evening and doing sesshin retreats with them several times a year. I became intrigued by Hisamatsu’s notion of F.A.S.: awakening to theF ormless Self, standing in the standpoint ofa ll humankind, and creating history suprahistorically. Here was a Zen approach that was critical of nationalism and advocated prophetic critique by awakened people in history but not of history. (For

I agreed, and this began an extended process of translating for him and, while meeting with him at his home about the translations, relentlessly asking him questions about Zen. Over the next three years, while practicing Zen with F.A.S, translating for Abe, and working as an English teacher in Kyoto, I collaborated with Prof. Tokiwa Gishin of Hanazono University to translate some of Hisamatsu’s writings, including talks he had given on theRinzai-roku (The Record of Linji), which was a core text for me in my study and practice of Zen. At that time I also learned classical Japanese and studied briefly with Nishitani Keiji at the offices of The Eastern Buddhist at Ōtani University. In 1980 Abe retired from Nara University of Education and took a position at the Claremont Graduate School, primarily to continue interreligious dialogue with Whiteheadian process thinker John Cobb and other Christian and Jewish theologians. After Abe arrived in Claremont, he asked Tom Kasulis and me to help him do a new translation of Nishida Kitarō’sZen no kenkyū (which Yale University Press published as An Inquiry into the Good in 1990).

In 1981, eager to head to southern California to help Abe and Bill LaFleur (still at UCLA then) establish in Los Angeles an institute for the study of Japanese religion and culture, I followed Abe to Claremont and enrolled as an M.A. student in the Philosophy of Religion program there. Though the institute never materialized and after my second year Abe left to the University of Hawaii, I was able to study Dōgen and Nishida with Abe for two years at Claremont. After Abe left I took a semester off and travelled through India and Nepal, visiting Buddhist and Hindu sites, and then returned to Claremont for several more years of studying philosophy of religion and process thought with Cobb, David Ray Griffin, John Hick, John Hutchison, and others. While finishing up my coursework and looking ahead to my qualifying exams and dissertation, Cobb, a constructive theologian with core ethical concerns, said, “Why don’t you write a Zen social ethic?” That became my dissertation project, with support from Frank Cook, who was still teaching at U.C. Riverside.

Soon after I moved up in 1987 to Tacoma, Washington, to take a position at the University of Puget Sound, I defended the dissertation, and it was later published as Zen Awakening and Society (1992). Around that time, with Cobb I co-edited The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (1990) and then edited a follow-up volume Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist- Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe (1995). A few years later Tokiwa and I published our translation of Hisamatsu’s talks on theRinzai-roku as Critical Sermons of the Zen Tradition: Hisamatsu's Talks on Linji (2002).

Much of my earliest work in Buddhist Studies was colored by Hisamatsu and Abe’s representation of Zen, about which I came to harbor doubts as I delved deeper into actual Zen history in Japan as opposed to Abe’s largely idealized, ahistorical representation, the center of which is Abe’s claim that awakening to emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā) immediately equips the person with wisdom and compassion, and upon this moral transformation one makes vows and acts skillfully to liberate others in a kind of intuitive ethic. (At this point, though I continue to feel immense gratitude for Abe’s mentoring, I would relish a chance to rework my dissertation book, Zen Awakening and Society.)

As part of my shift to a more historical and critical approach in my work on Zen and ethics, during my

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Ives, Chris. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571738/ives-chris Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism first few years of teaching at the University of Puget Sound I started reading Ichikawa Hakugen (1902-1986), a Rinzai priest and Hanazono University professor who was a rare post-war voice raising questions about Zen ethics in relation to Zen support for the Japanese state during WWII. Reading Ichikawa led me to focus less on ideal Zen ethics as portrayed in texts by traditional and modern Zen thinkers and more on actual Zen ethics as lived at various moments in Japanese history. Contrary to the sorts of claims that Abe and others have made about the ethical fruits of Zen meditative experience, Ichikawa argues that the Zen epistemology—especially it’s purported non-dual mode of experiencing things without any sense of separation or discrimination—actually subverts ethics, at least by undermining one’s ability to maintain critical distance from the social and political status quo and criticize it. For this and other reasons, Zen historically has succumbed to what Ichikawa terms “accommodationism” (junnō-shugi).

My work on Ichikawa’s standpoint and Zen nationalism from the Meiji Restoration (1868) through the end of WWII generated Imperial Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics (2009). In this book I diverged from Ichikawa’s main argument that Zen nationalism derived primarily from Zen ways of experiencing and from Brian Victoria’s argument that it derived from the traditional chumminess between Zen and the samurai and argued that while Zen’s epistemology and the “unity of Zen and sword” kenzen-ichinyo( ) did play a role, the main causal factor was something more banal: institutional self-interest as Zen leaders, in a modern instance of “Buddhism for the protection of the realm” (gokoku Bukkyō), collaborated with political and military leaders to promote the war effort and thereby protect the state and, by extension, protect the Dharma (gohō). In the book I also offered a view of overall Zen ethics that diverged from some of the arguments I had made in Zen Awakening and Society. I recently revised and expanded that view in “Ethics in Zen,” my contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics (2018), arguing among other things that Buddhist precepts played almost no role in actual Zen ethics in Japanese history.

While pursuing this scholarship, I found homes in the Buddhism Section, Japanese Religions Group, and the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection Group of the American Academy of Religion, as well as in the Association for Asian Studies and the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, on whose editorial board the journal’s founders—Chuck Prebish and Damien Keown—had asked me to serve.

As part of my ongoing work on Buddhist ethics, while pursuing this research and writing on Zen nationalism I also read Buddhist writings on environmental issues. Over the past decade, this has generated a series of articles and the beginnings of a book on Buddhism and environmental ethics. This work has been supported by my participation not only in AAR groups focused on Buddhism but in the AAR’s Religion and Ecology Group and in the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

A few years ago, as I entered the last decade of my teaching and watched as the climate crisis, social divisiveness, and violence worsened around me, I found myself thinking that while I would continue writing scholarly articles, my monograph on Buddhism and environmental ethics would likely be my last scholarly book, and that going forward it would be a waste and an ethical lapse not to draw on my expertise and craft books that would speak to contemporary issues.

Around that time I started writing a book for use in one of my courses and for a broader audience. Growing up in rural northwestern Connecticut, I spent much of my youth in the woods—exploring, fishing, and playing with my brothers and friends. My father was the local Boy Scout master, so I

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Ives, Chris. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571738/ives-chris Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism also spent a lot of time going for hikes and camping, and this led to a lifelong love of hiking and backpacking in the various places where I’ve lived over the years. In conjunction with a course I’ve been teaching on pilgrimage in several religious traditions, I decided to craft a manuscript that pulls together my experiences and practices on the trail, pilgrimage traditions to sacred mountains, and certain facets of Zen and other forms of Buddhism. In large part I wrote this book for myself, to clarify what it is that I do and experience when out in the backcountry. I also wrote this book for others, and not only fellow hikers but those who long to connect more deeply to nature as nature and to simplify their lives. This book will be published in 2018 by Wisdom Publications asZen on the Trail: Hiking as Pilgrimage.

I have also started writing a book that draws from Buddhist resources to sketch a way of living in the face of the climate crisis, a way of being and acting that is free from materialism, freneticism, and distraction and supports our collaboration with others to address the causes of the crisis. This book draws in part from programs I’ve been teaching at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies over the past decade.

Though this constructive work does not fall within the parameters of academic Buddhist Studies, it feels more rewarding and enjoyable (and valuable) at this point in my career and this moment in time.