Comments

December 31, 2007 at 11:56 am

(1) Eric says:

Interesting. I might check this book out. My understanding had been that it was State Shinto rather than Buddhism that was driving the militaristic Japanese ideology at the time. The Japanese government was actually in the process of separating practice of Buddhism and Shinto and deemphasizing Buddhism in favor of Shinto - http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/shinto/history/history_4.shtml

I suppose that didn’t preclude Buddhists from being complicit in the Imperial war machine, but I never thought Buddhism had an extensive role.

The fact that westerners find Buddhism to be this harmless, pacifistic religion has always baffled me. Buddhist countries’ histories are every bit as bloodstained as those of Christian Europe or the Muslim Middle East. Nor have Buddhists been inherently more religiously tolerant than Christians. Buddhist Japanese were just as likely to crucify Christians as were to burn witches at the stake. A cursory glance at Tibetan history indicates that the place spent almost as much time at war as it did at peace.

January 1, 2008 at 1:14 pm

(2) JonJ says:

Historically, I think one could (tentatively) make the generalization that Buddhists in Asian countries were seldom concerned with revolutionary attacks on the political system; their focus was elsewhere. Thus, royal personages and military governments which we Westerners (of today) would be disgusted by were tolerated fairly well by most Asian Buddhists (though some were also in opposition).

This is regarded by Western Buddhists today as a failing of the Asian Buddhist tradition. Fortunately, unlike most religions, since it is not wedded to “faith-based” dogmas, Buddhism is flexible enough to make such changes. (I don’t regard Buddhism as essentially a religion.) And Asian Buddhists are also changing in this direction, as can be seen by the monks in Myanmar and the Vietnamese monks in the 1960s.

January 1, 2008 at 1:45 pm

(3) Gotweirdness says:

Another thing to keep in mind is that when Buddhism spread into the rest of Asia from India, most of those countries already had indigenous religious systems. Most the indigenous religions in Asian countries are usually a form of animism (spirits or ancestor worship) very similar to North, Central, and South American Indian systems. Buddhism doesn’t necessarily require a belief in a deity so was absorbed into the various Asian systems of spirit or ancestor worship without much trouble.