Debunking the Samurai/Zen myth

A persistent myth in the West is that Zen and the warrior life were inextricably interwoven. You can see plenty of books on the subject.

I remember in college while studying Intl. studies, our text book on Japanese history spent whole chapters on the development of Zen, the growth of Soto, Rinzai and the koans, and the influence on culture. However, when the subject of Pure Land Buddhism came up, the textbook devote one paragraph to it, saying something about how Honen and Shinran appealed to the (read: ignorant and uncultured) masses.

This notion of samurai and zen is really just silly. The concept arose when Orientalists first took an interest in Japanese culture and somehow gravitated toward Zen. Characters like Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵) and his Book of Five Rings captured the imagination of Western readers, the same way that people in the world still imagine the “American Cowboy”.* The belief that all samurai are like Musashi is not unlike the view that all cowboys were like Clint Eastwood.

However, the samurai class in Japan were not uniformly Zen practitioners. I know this from studying about Japan in college, and writing a paper on the decline of the samurai into underpaid bureaucrats in the Tokugawa period. The notion that Zen was for the upper classes and Pure Land for the lower-classes is misleading too.

For example, during the time of Honen, he had a number of samurai followers during the famous Genpei War in Japan between the Heike (平家) and Genji (源氏) clans:**

• Tarō Tadatsuna Amakasu, who fought with the Genji, died in combat with a scarf (okesa) given to him Honen. According to legend, he recited the nembutsu as he died.
• One of Yoshitsune no Minamoto’s warriors, Saburō Tamemori, became a very devout follower of Honen and took the monastic name Songwan. He always carried a letter from Honen in his robes. Legend has it that after his lord Yoshitsune died, he committed seppuku while repeating the nembutsu.
• A famous warrior featured in the famous epic, the Tales of the Heike, Kumagae Naozane, likewise became a follower of Honen.

The last story of Kumagae is particularly interesting. In the Tales of the Heike, he is known for killing the young Heike prince Atsumori at the beach-side battle of Ichi-no-tani. Kumagae had thrown Atsumori from his horse and suddenly realized who he confronted. Kumagae was distraught and didn’t want to kill Atsumori, as Atsumori was the same age as his own son. However, the other Genji soldiers were quickly approaching and Atsumori was clearly doomed, so Kumagae promised to offer prayers to Atsumori before he cut off his head. This story has become a famous scene in Japanese theatre, particularly in Nō.

Later, in other sources, Kumagae made good on his promise and in the long-run became a follower of Honen and his Pure Land Buddhist teachings, and became a monk named Rensei. He was still remorseful for all the people he killed in combat and is deeply moved by Honen’s sincere faith in Amida Buddha. In a real letter preserved from Honen to Rensei (Kumagae), Honen wishes him well and teaches him about Amida Buddha and the nembutsu. He also asks Rensei to look after his aging mother.

But the samurai who followed Pure Land Buddhism were not limited to the Genpei Wars at the end of the 12th century. The Tokugawa family (16th – 19th centuries) were patrons of Honen’s sect, Jodo Shu.*** I have visited the head temple of Jodo Shu, Chion-in (知恩院), back in 2005, and took this picture of the roof tiles:

Notice the three hollyhock leaves in the tiles. This was the crest of the Tokugawa shoguns, and it was known that they often stayed in the temple while visiting the city of Kyoto. Part of our tour in the temple was to see the quarters where the Shogun and his retinue stayed.

This is not an exhaustive look at Buddhism and the samurai class, but this post should help show that image of Samurai-Zen warriors is just that: an image. Some samurai clans were known to be patrons of Zen, such as the Ashikaga Shoguns, but this was not always the case. Even in those cases, the samurai frequently mixed practices. While Kyoto was burning during the Ōnin War, the current shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, was dying in his old age, and began actively reciting Amida Buddha’s name while still maintaining the Rinzai Zen faith he had embraced earlier. I know this to be true because I saw a Japanese documentary featuring the temple of Ginkakuji (Yoshimasa’s temple), where the head priest (a Zen priest) said as such.

The gist of this post is that Buddhism and faith among the samurai was much more complex than what Western textbooks often imply. I suspect it was no different than America today: not all computer technicians are Presbyterian. Not all policemen are Catholic. Somehow though, Westerns scholars in those days often portrayed romanticized images of the samurai and of Zen, often based on bad research. Research has greatly improved in recent years, but sadly the myths remain.

Namuamidabu

* – No joke. Once while in Thailand, a cab driver said to me, “you are American cowboy, huh?”

** – Americans call them the Taira and Minamoto clans, but these names are not used often in Japan. The more poetic names of Heike and Genji are used respectively. In the same way, no one in Japan uses the first name of the Emperor; they use the reign names, just as is done in the British monarchy. Instead of Hirohito, Japanese call him Emperor Shōwa (昭和). The current emperor, Akihito, is called Emperor Heisei (平成). If you call the Emperor’s by their names, it sounds kind of disrespectful, so just use the reign names instead.

*** – Technically, they were actually patrons of the Tendai sect, but patronized Pure Land Buddhism as well to prevent further peasant uprisings.