Zen at War: Integral Theory on Modern Japanese Religion and Politics, William Kelly (original) (raw)
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Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber
Bill Kelly received his Ph.D in communication studies at the University of New Mexico and his dissertation focused on Japan-US relations. From 2002 to 2014, he was a lecturer in the communication studies department at UCLA. His academic articles have appeared in Public Relations Review, China Media Research, The Global Intercultural Communication Reader, and_Intercultural Mirrors_. Kelly is the author of A New World Arising: Culture and Political Economy in Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic Civilizations.
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Integral Theory on Modern Japanese Religion and Politics
William Kelly
Integral theory reflects the progressive perspective that became prominent at the time of the Enlightenment in the West.
My interest is in seeing to what degree Western spiritual perspectives can account for the experience of non-Western peoples with very different histories and cultures. Integral theory claims to provide a universal understanding of history that will enable us to orient ourselves with regard to all cultures and civilizations. It also asserts that people at a higher level of consciousness can make sense of the reality of those at a less advanced stage. So it becomes very important to accurately determine the level of consciousness of members of different groups. In this essay, I will examine Japanese religion and politics and see whether integral theory can orient us as we try to understand the role of religion in modern Japan and, in particular, during the time of ultranationalism and war.
Although I will focus on the Zen world, the Zen masters are not the most accessible sources for examining the relation between modern Japanese religion and politics. Instead, I will examine the thought and experience of the Kyoto School, a part of the Zen world that reveals much about the qualities of Japanese modern and wartime consciousness. Most of these philosophers had a profound appreciation for Zen as a philosophy/practice and a great reverence for the Japanese spiritual and aesthetic traditions. A look at their work can give us a basis for tentatively evaluating whether Western progressive approaches such as integral theory can help us orient ourselves to this Japanese historical reality.
The Progressive View of History
Integral theory offers a philosophy of history that gets to the bottom of the differences in ways of thinking between members of different groups. It sees international tension as the result of differences in level of maturity that can be mitigated through human development. When people reach the same level of personal development, the potential for conflict among nations is greatly reduced.
In the integral approach, all cultures are viewed as going on the same fundamental journey. There are stages of historical development that are similar to the ancient, premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. The focus is on people's level of consciousness which reflects a society's stage of development. When similar levels of development are achieved, a convergence of cultures occurs. Then cultural patterns are interpreted in similar ways so that there is no basic incompatibility between them. For example, an ethnocentric approach to religion at the mythic stage gives way to a universal view at the rational level, alleviating sources of conflict that had once existed between traditional and modern societies. This often happens when nations have modernized.
Integral theory reflects the progressive perspective that became prominent at the time of the Enlightenment in the West. For progressives, Western civilization is the advance guard, the first to experience the higher stages of development. At present, this means there are more Western people at the rational and postmodern stages in comparison to the rest of the world. Nations, as they develop economically, advance culturally in ways that bring them closer to the modern West. Greater individualism, democratic government, liberal freedoms, and a cosmopolitan outlook are all part of the package that distinguishes the rational level of consciousness. They are signposts that modernity has been attained.
Wilber is explicitly taking a progressive approach to history when he says that earlier stages of history are transcended and included in the succeeding stage as consciousness evolves. The rational consciousness is higher than the mythic one and capable of making judgments about mythic consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case. Wilber is also quite clear that the resolution of international conflict requires addressing the overcoming of differences in levels of consciousness, not cultural differences. Yet, non-Western peoples have challenged the accuracy of this philosophy, sometimes even leading to war. The Second World War with Japan was the first and most terrible example of such a collision of ideas.
The Case of Japan
Japan was the West's first great modern opponent and its experience tells us much about the ways in which consciousness has developed in the non-Western world. Integral theory touches on the trajectory of Japanese religion and politics, since, in The Religion of Tomorrow (2017), Wilber makes some observations about how Japan's stage of development affected the way leading Zen masters thought and acted during the war.
Wilber maintains that these Zen teachers supported Japanese nationalism during the World War II era due to the continued strength of hierarchy, role conformity, and ethnocentric attitudes within their society. Most of these Zen masters could not, despite their spiritual skill and awakening, reach a level of personal development that would enable them to experience oneness with all beings. Their experience of unity consciousness was limited to members of the same ethnic group as mythic consciousness held back their personal maturation.
You may ask whether these Zen masters were really enlightened. Wilber points out that these highly respected Zen priests were certified by their tradition for having met all the criteria; what evidence is there to show they were not enlightened? For Wilber, this is also great proof of the lack of correlation between one's spiritual state (awakening) and one's personal growth (maturity), which depends on the developmental stage of one's society.
Japanese Identity in the Modern World
Japanese thought has tended to be focused more on particular things than on universal matters that require logical modes of discussion. Although there is no question that Japan did not excel at systematic philosophy and abstract ideas for most of its history, in the 20th century, a dramatic change occurred. The Kyoto philosophers under the leadership of Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945) set out to explain Japanese Buddhist thought in Western philosophical terms as part of Japan's attempt to modernize and find a place within the contemporary world. Their accomplishments put to rest any ideas about Japanese aversion to logic and abstract thought, proving to be highly proficient in academic philosophy.
The vast changes that Japanese culture experienced due to the encounter with Western imperialism resulted in a trauma of great proportions. In Japan's modern experience, what took Western people centuries to go through was experienced within decades. Dislocation, losing one's bearings, and entering a world of great uncertainty ruled by others made it urgent to construct a new national identity. The emperor system provided the one anchor of solid identity in a world of unceasing change and unprecedented novelty. The emperor took on a political role as he was assigned sovereignty over the people and became divine. Mythologies were then built up around the imperial family as well as the Japanese nation and people.
Japanese rational consciousness became much stronger as modern science and technology were quickly mastered and an industrial economy was built in a short number of years. However, in the area of values, a mythic orientation gained strength, and in the 1930s government and public turned strongly against Western ways, emphasizing the superiority of the traditional culture. The nationalists rejected the notion that modernization would lead Japan to converge with the West. Their aspiration was for Japan to overcome modernity, to break Western political and cultural dominance, and to offer the imperial system as a model for other nations.
The Kyoto philosophers, despite their mastery of Western philosophy, lined up with Japanese nationalism. Can this be attributed to their acceptance of the mythic understanding of religion and politics that characterized the level of Japanese personal development at the time? In fact, Nishida, the leading Kyoto philosopher, was favorable toward the imperial family for being the symbol of Japan's becoming a unified nation that had taken its place in the modern world. He also found the myth of the imperial family and the founding of the nation to be essential. Yet, he was Japan's greatest modern philosopher and brought Japanese philosophy into dialogue with the other leading world philosophies.
To make sense of prewar Japanese nationalism, it is important to see what was at stake for Nishida, the Kyoto philosophers, and the Zen world. Japan's war had two aspects. On the one hand, it was a war of aggression whose driving force was the army. Japan had become an imperialist power and it imposed unequal treaties on Korea and China at the same time it was pressuring the Western powers to get rid of the unequal treaties they had forced Japan to accept. If imperialism were the full explanation of why the country was at war, then Japanese nationalists were ethnocentric.
But many Japanese nationalists did not defend their cause in military or even economic terms. They appealed to the liberation of Asia and to Japan's taking its place in a new plural world order. These were the ideas that captured many Japanese people's hearts and minds, and they were central to the Kyoto school's support for the war. Nishida's strategy was to influence the military away from a policy of aggression against East-Asian countries toward one more in line with the spiritual ideals he believed that Japan stood for. Most of the Kyoto philosophers thought that Japanese spirituality could renew a world corrupted by Western materialism, where self-interest and competitiveness had long been dominant.
They wanted Japan to fulfill its vocation as a nation by taking advantage of this opportunity to create an East-Asian zone where higher spiritual values could be realized. Many Japanese were outraged at the Western colonization of East Asia, and believed that Japan's growing military might required it to stand up to Western colonialism. Japanese people appeared to embody the rise of Asia. After all, the first great event of the twentieth century for Asians was Japan's victory over Russia in 1904. During the Pacific War, Japan's efforts to throw out the Western colonizers from Asia gave the independence movements some of the momentum which led to their eventual success.
Japanese spiritual elites took a nationalistic stance against the Western powers. They did not see themselves as ethnocentric; their desire was for justice. From a Western liberal perspective, though, the tragedy of the Pacific War is due to Japan's embrace of militarism. For Wilber, the problem is that Japanese consciousness was still at the mythic level.
Levels of Consciousness
I find it most persuasive to see modern Japanese and Western people at the same level of consciousness, each treating the nation state with an almost religious reverence. These nations were, and still are, fully committed to a world system in which the nation state is the vehicle of their aspirations, furthering their national interest is the supreme goal, and power is the dominant currency. This is the modern consciousness whose institutional formation can be traced back to the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 that ended the religious wars and brought the nation-state system into being. It was in this era that morality and politics were also decisively separated in Western international relations.
My claim is not that modern nation states have never chosen a moral path over one that served the interest of the national ego. There may be such instances but they have been few. The problem with the mythic versus rational contrast is that a moral distinction is also made: ethnocentric versus universal. Wilber's notion that wartime Japan was at the mythic stage while implying the US was at the rational ego stage doesn't hold up.
US-Japan wartime actions as expressed through popular culture as well as academic writing are thoroughly and skillfully analyzed by John Dower in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986). Dower calls the Pacific War a “race war” and demonstrates how “stereotyped and often blatantly racist thinking contributed to poor military planning and intelligence, atrocious behavior, and the adoption of exterminationist policies.” The dehumanization of the Other made it much easier to perpetrate not only the well-known Japanese atrocities on the battlefield but also for the US government to make Japanese civilian populations deliberate targets of conventional and nuclear attacks. Dower also shows that the images of the Other were archetypes that characterize unequal human relations in general and go back several centuries in both cases.
The Western Allies pictured Japanese as subhuman, as apes and vermin, or as childish, primitive, and mentally and emotionally defective. These images remind us of the Yellow Peril sentiment around the turn of the twentieth century, which itself suggests stereotypes of nonwhite peoples during the era of empire and colonization that extend even to ancient times. On the other hand, the Japanese imagination viewed Americans and Europeans as monsters, devils, and demons, and relied on the notion of “proper place” to justify their conception of hierarchy in which they were the leading race. The idea of “proper place” goes back to the Confucian classics originally from China, There were also appeals to ideals of purity, which come out of the Shinto purification rituals. And the idea of the outsider as devil is a traditional one; however, it is a two-sided image in which the outsider may either bring good or evil.
Although it is understandable why the Japanese spiritual elites supported the anti-imperialist cause, their naivete about Japanese government policy is striking, since Japan's record of colonization over the previous decades was unambiguous. John Maraldo, the co-editor of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (1994), an indispensable resource, gives us needed perspective by comparing Japan's prewar mission to bring freedom and prosperity to East Asia with that of the postwar United States.
The US mission was to create a new world order to bring all people together to achieve humanity's universal aspirations. It would do this by bringing peace and prosperity to the “underdeveloped world.” Maraldo expresses this popular sentiment in the following terms that echo prewar Japan: “America is a superior nation incorporating various ethnic groups, that, by virtue of its moral sense of justice and economic and military strength, has a duty to advance and protect its values globally.” You only have to substitute “Japan” for “America,” “spiritual development” for “economic development,” and “race” for “nation.”
Yet there is great Western reluctance to seeing imperial Japan and its level of consciousness as similar to that of its wartime opponents and of America today. The Second World War is viewed as fought in the name of freedom and democracy against a totalitarian foe known for its brutality and ruthlessness. But as I have shown, much more was going on, which is part of a broader issue: what Western filters have made it difficult to perceive the peoples of Asia and Islam?
Keiji Nishitani on Japanese Religion and Politics
Why do many Western people, including those with a spiritual outlook, have difficulties understanding “Eastern” histories and cultures? Since conditioning, education, and media on the Eastern civilizations tends to be somewhat uniform and quite pervasive, it often takes unfamiliar sources of information for people to question their perceptions. Here I will bring us closer to prewar Japanese spiritual perspectives by describing what Keiji Nishitani (1900-1990), a very accomplished and influential Kyoto philosopher, wrote about nationalism and spoke about the war. His example brings out many sides of the Japanese religious and political experience from the overall perspective of the Zen world. In the final section, I will compare the Zen outlook in the most general terms with that of the Enlightenment, in particular, the version offered by integral theory.
Nishitani was a prominent political thinker in the prewar era who largely stopped writing about politics after the war. His postwar work Religion and Nothingness (1961), translated into English in 1982, was very positively received in the West. The gravity and relevance of his message that modern civilization was engulfed in nihilism which could only be overcome by the salvational Eastern concept of absolute nothingness struck a chord.
Nishitani's prewar writings on political philosophy when coupled with his wartime statements are a puzzle. During the postwar period, he said his motive for writing a notable early work on political philosophy was to “open up a path within thought that might overcome from within the ideas of ultranationalism that were taking control at the time.” Nishitani equates globality with spirituality and asserts that the nation's relation to globality is through negating itself, transcending itself, that is, as a non-ego, which is its true subjectivity. This conception of the nation as non-ego overcomes the Western worldview based on reason, making a place for the Eastern outlook in the world, especially found in Japan, that is based on practice.
Western thought views the world as an object and perceives reality from the outside, whereas the Eastern orientation takes us further. It brings together at the surface through practice what lies at the depths of all thought, while not losing its interpretive power. “Such practices can be performed by anyone but exhausted by no one. They can be understood to perfection by anyone in an instant, yet contain within themselves unlimited potential for further insight.” Nishitani makes extraordinary claims for the Japanese worldview that has arisen from such religious practice. It surpasses the scholarship and arts of all other countries and belongs to a culture that Japan can hold up proudly to the world and to human culture.
For Nishitani, modernity resulted in the decline of Japan's spiritual tradition and the weakening of its moral energy, leaving a spiritual void. His hope is not to return to the past but to make use of tradition to create new possibilities. Modernity's worldview has become fragmented so that religion, science, and culture are in conflict with each other. This modern dilemma is not just that of the West but of Japan as well; since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan, too, has become modern, driven by external imperatives but also by powerful inner motives. Modernity's key challenge is for religion to find a ground for culture, history, and ethics on the one hand and science on the other so that an integrated worldview comes into being.
From late 1941 until late 1942, a well-known Japanese journal published three discussions among four Kyoto philosophers that centered on the theme: “Japan and the Standpoint of World History.” In the postwar era, their comments were denounced for glorifying war and justifying Japanese fascism. In the case of Nishitani, critics have singled out his particular assertion that only the Allied Western powers were imperialists, not the Axis powers including Japan. Nishitani said Japan's role as a world-historical race was to raise up the peoples of East Asia, overthrow Western imperialism, and bring into existence a new world order. In addition, Japan deserved to be designated the leading or superior race by virtue of the achievements of its people.
Nishitani's political writings, especially when viewed in light of his wartime utterances, were taken as undemocractic by the Allied Occupation Forces, and he was purged. Yet, it is very difficult to connect many of the things Nishitani wrote against nationalism with his wartime statements. How could he have had believed that the Japanese government might actually carry out its “world-historical” role by means of war?
It is not easy to put the pieces together. Nishitani was part of a group that had been in consultation with the navy during the war in an attempt to control the ultranationalist army. The hard-right supporters of the Imperial Way saw Nishitani and the Kyoto philosophers as too cosmopolitan and not sufficiently nationalist. In contrast, after the war Nishitani was excoriated by the dominant left for providing intellectual respectability to Japanese imperialism and fascism. But his attempts to revision Christianity and Buddhism have resonated among scholars and continue to do so.
The Zen World and the Enlightenment
My treatment of Nishitani's philosophy enables us to see just where the Kyoto school's interpretation of history diverges not just from that of integral theory but from the Enlightenment in general. Nishitani's approach, like that of the Kyoto School generally, is not progressive. For him, the modern world is experiencing a disintegration of the very basis of a worldview. A worldview is people's understanding of their place in the world and with the world, and modern people don't know how to conceive of themselves.
Here we are at the heart of Nishitani's argument against the progressive outlook: religion expresses our core need to transcend our humanity by surrendering it to what is Absolute. In other words, religion underlies a worldview that allows the coexistence and interaction of the good, beautiful, and true which affirm our humanity and science which is neutral toward it.
Wilber equates premodern societies with mythic consciousness. In Up from Eden, (1981), his earliest detailed work on the philosophy of history, he distinguished at the religious level between the exoteric religion adhered to by the vast majority and the esoteric religion practiced by the spiritual adepts and great teachers of the past. The crucial distinction is that the religion of the spiritual elites, in Wilber's view, appears to have had little impact on the society as a whole. He continues to uphold this view. Therefore, he would reject Nishitani's equation of premodern Japan with the Buddhist culture and its ideal of absolute nothingness as well as his attempts to place the aesthetic attainment associated with Zen spiritual awakening square in the midst of Japanese tradition.
In terms of personal advancement, Wilber assigns scientific knowledge a central role that is consistent with common Enlightenment critiques of religion. Science provides truth in the form of objective knowledge, whereas religion has reflected the relative ignorance of its time. Modern people have now ways of experiencing the forms of this world that were unavailable to the people of earlier eras. So their experience of relative truth is far richer. Since Wilber does not negate this world in favor of a higher transcendent realm, this is an important point.
Let's be clear. Nishitani is not opposed to science and does not recommend a return to medieval times. His aim is to recover the spiritual traditions so they can serve as a catalyst for building a new religious worldview. But Wilber makes large claims for the role of science in the renewal of religion that Nishitani does not make. Wilber is saying that through the integration of scientific facts, religions can add to their teachings, thereby making them relevant in the present era. There is no need, as Nishitani believes, to relegate the scientific and materialist worldview to a less exalted position in order to make way for a revived spirituality. The scientific and spiritual worldview are compatible as long as the scientific standpoint is not conceived in a narrow and exclusionary manner.
Wilber's long-range optimism is reflected in his belief that humanity is gradually evolving toward a society with a more spiritual outlook in which ordinary people are beginning to practice the higher teachings for the first time in human history. But Nishitani does not share Wilber's optimism. The challenge of the modern world to overcome nihilism was not being met during his lifetime. Nishitani saw the need for an existential reckoning with the obstacles to the realization of absolute nothingness in the modern age. Humanism and science were unable to guide us in the overcoming of nihilism. A great danger was that the widespread technological manipulation and control of things was turning the world into an object, the expression of an extreme dualistic consciousness.
In contrast, Wilber does not question modernity at such a basic level. His progressive outlook views the advance of science and technology in overall positive terms. He is not sympathetic to existential philosophers like Heidegger (with whom Nishitani studied) who see our times as especially perilous, the question of technology looming over us.
This does not mean that Wilber and Nishitani do not have striking points of agreement, notably with regard to nihilism. Wilber agrees that Western culture has lost contact with the traditions that provided its own ways of Waking Up. “It has no ultimate Truth as a North Star to guide its overall actions, which means, ultimately, it has no idea where it is actually heading.” And it expects technological progress to deal with any major issues that arise. Nishitani assents to what Wilber is saying but they differ on what constitutes the way out. In this regard, they are very far apart.
To conclude, starting with some brief remarks by Ken Wilber on Zen at War, I have gone on to explore the relationship between modern Japan and the West with special reference to the Zen world. One key point is that we need to see both Japan and the West as modern if we are to understand the Second World War and the level of consciousness of leading practitioners and philosophers within Zen. Wilber's contention that the Zen masters were trapped in a mythic consciousness does not get us very far. In line with my treating each side as being at a largely similar level of consciousness, I have also contrasted the Kyoto philosophy with the Enlightenment outlook of integral theory. For me, it is vital that Eastern thought is valued, not just as a relic of ancient times, but as part of a living culture. So I have brought to light the example of the Zen world at the time of war to provide a broader outlook than the one to which we are accustomed. It also needs a seat at the table.
NOTE
An important source is John Maraldo and James Heisig, (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, 1994.
I have also discussed the Kyoto School and Japanese nationalism in my book, A New World Arising: Culture and Political Economy in Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic Civilizations, 2024.