What we see in this passage is the notion that someone who does not worry about death also has a certain
skill that follows from this. The man is certified in the sword by Maser Yagyû just because of this state of mind, not because of any actual instruction. There was also a samurai saying, that "he who leaves his house intending to live will die; and he who leaves his house intending to die, will live." There is a Taoist expectation in this that, by the "doing" of life, death will result, but by the "not-doing" of life (the "doing" of death), life will result. This was actually the frame of mind of many of the naval pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor. When they returned successfully to their aircraft carriers, many pilots were astonished that they had survived. All they had thought about was dying and had not considered surviving. That they both survived and succeeded in their mission could then be ascribed to the skill that their determination to die had given them. Not skill in the sword, to be sure, but skill in modern "martial arts" like torpedoing and divebombing -- the divebomber pilots who called themselves "Hell Divers" after an American movie starring Wallace Beery and Clark Gable (
Hell Divers, 1932). Somewhat miraculous results from not-doing are already expected in the
Tao Te Ching, which says, "Heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will fall" [XXXII:72]. So the intention to die can easily to be thought not to be without its reward.
The Pearl Harbor attack and several months of subsequent actions were very successful, but eventually many Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen went off intending to die, and did, without even achieving military success thereby. Actually, this was no more than what was expected by the architect of the Pearl Harbor strike, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (1884-1943), who did not believe in suicidal attacks and had no illusions about Japan's ability to win a protracted war with the United States. He almost seemed to be expecting and welcoming death by the time he was shot down and killed in 1943. When it became clear that Japan was losing the war, however, the response of the Japanese military seemed to be that they were losing just because the men were not intending to die with enough spiritual purity. The introduction of the
kamikaze () suicide pilots in 1944 would have gladdened the heart of the earlier Yamamoto, Tsunetomo, who, it seems, would have relished such senseless acts of pointlessly throwing away lives for the Emperor. Of course, the 20th century military was still rather hoping for some success from these tactics, and was perfectly willing to see 100,000 Japanese soldiers, and a similar number of civilians, die in the defense of Okinawa, long after the war was known to be lost, just to
discourage the invasion of Japan. Discourage it they did; so President
Truman dropped atomic bombs, killing another couple hundred thousand Japanese, and received the Japanese surrender on the same terms they could have gotten a year earlier.
The 20th century fruit of blind obedience and the love of death was thus ugly and sordid almost beyond comprehension. And this is not even to take into account Japanese atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war -- incidents like the horrific "Rape of Nanking" -- often motivated by racism and by contempt for those who ignominiously surrendered rather than "throwing away" their lives in senseless but virtuous death.
The brutality of the Japanese military, which was visited upon its own people as well as on prisoners and civilians, itself has antecedents in Zen. It has already been noted that the "silent teaching" may actually be expressed by beatings, and that the Zen meditation hall is a place where someone sitting
zazen can be struck and beaten just to keep them awake. And we have the following story:
Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy would raise his finger.
Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away. Gutei called and stopped him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei raised up his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened. [Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, pp.169-170]
We may stipulate that enlightenment is well worth a finger, and that Gutei was a great enough Zen master to know that so bloody and permanent an expedient would be effective -- and it is a nice thought that the boy has "no finger" to raise up. But for ordinary fallible humans, this would be an appalling act of brutality and child abuse, and it can be expected to be little else if emulated in any way by subsequent teachers. Just as disturbing is the circumstance that, although the names in the story are in Japanese, it is actually a
Chinese story, from Tao-yüan's collection. This makes for a very dangerous precedent once it gets into a tradition, the Japanese one, where positive reasons to value violence, for its art, arise.
