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WorkKaiten Nukariya

The Religion of the Samurai

A Sōtō Zen priest's reply, written in English in 1913, to Western scholars who called Buddhism pessimistic.

by Kaiten Nukariya256 passages held

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Original title
The Religion of the Samurai: A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan
First published
(aged 46)
Original language
English

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Overview

Western scholars of Kaiten Nukariya's day knew Buddhism mainly from the Pāli texts of the older Southern school, and many of them called it pessimistic or nihilistic. Nukariya, a Sōtō Zen priest who taught at Keiō and at the Sōtō school's college in Tokyo, wrote this book in English to show them the other Buddhism, the Mahāyāna, through Zen. Zen, as he presents it, refuses the authority of any scripture, treats the Buddha as a predecessor to be equalled rather than a superhuman founder, reads the universe itself as its scripture, and finds the Buddha as a universal spirit in every life. The Sōtō school had sent him abroad in 1911 for three years to study religion in America and Europe; he lectured in Hawaii and San Francisco on the way, and Luzac in London issued the book in 1913 as the fourth volume of its Oriental Religions Series. He wrote for a modern reader. He sets Zen beside the theory of evolution, and gives a section to Hugo Münsterberg, the German-born Harvard psychologist, disputing his claim that only a timeless life of the will has value. The title carries a second argument: that Zen reached Japan as the faith of the warrior class, shaped the Hōjō regents who governed for the shoguns in the thirteenth century, and had revived since the Russo-Japanese War as the ideal for the rising generation. Nukariya came home in 1914, became the first president of Komazawa University in 1925, and wrote a large history of Zen thought in Japanese. Routledge reissued the book in 2005.

Key concepts

What is the difference between Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna in this book?

Nukariya uses Hīnayāna, the lesser vehicle, for the older Southern Buddhism known to Western scholars from the Pāli texts, and Mahāyāna, the greater vehicle, for the Northern Buddhism of China and Japan, to which Zen belongs. In his account the first entered by the doctrine of transience and read life as misery; the second reads the same change as the working of a living whole.

What does Nukariya mean by Universal Life?

Universal Life is his name for the Buddha understood not as a person but as the creative spirit at work in everything. It is not a blind force: it knows, feels and wills, and every being shows it, as the poet has his song and so do the nightingale, the cricket and the stream. To be alive and to be spiritual are, for him, the same thing.

What is enlightened consciousness?

Enlightened consciousness is the direct experience of the Universal Life within oneself: life felt as purposive and self-directing, knowing, feeling and willing as one. Nukariya insists it is not an intellectual insight that can be argued into, but something experienced, which is why Zen points to practice rather than doctrine. Through it, he says, the Buddha dwells in the individual mind.

What is the law of balance?

The law of balance is Nukariya's answer to the pessimists: nature puts everything in pairs, ebb against flood, growth against decay, light against shade, so that no good comes without its opposite and no evil without its counterweight. Life consists in conflict, between social ties and the love of freedom, and its value lies in that tension, not in escaping it.

What are the five ranks and the ten pictures of the cow?

They are two schemes for the stages of Zen training that Nukariya sets side by side at the end of the book. The ten pictures follow a herdsman searching for a lost cow, finding its tracks, catching and taming it, then forgetting it; the cow stands for the true self. The five ranks, from turning to merit beyond merit, mark the same progress in abstract terms.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Universe Is the Scripture

Zen masters called the holy books waste paper. What a religion reads instead, once it has set its own scriptures aside, is the first thing Nukariya has to explain to Western readers.

Nukariya presents Zen as unique among religions in declaring its scriptures no more than waste paper, and he is frank that the Mahāyāna sutras were composed long after the Buddha. What replaces them is a sutra equal in size to the whole world: the sun rising in the east, the mountain high, the sea deep, facts so familiar they escape notice. Great men, he argues, from Newton to Kant, were readers of nature rather than of books, and the old Chan theme of the sermon preached by inanimate things says the same.

  • scriptural authority
  • textual criticism
  • nature
  • mahayana
  • buddhism
  • religious history
  • zen history

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Buddha in Everything Living

Western scholars read Buddhism as a gospel of despair at change and suffering. Whether change can instead be the ground of hope, and the Buddha a life running through everything, is Nukariya's reply.

For Nukariya the Buddha is not a figure in a pantheon but the universal life and spirit at work in all things, still creating. Change, which the ancient Hindus mourned, is for Zen the condition of growth and hope. Human beings are neither good-natured nor bad-natured but Buddha-natured: a robber and a sage share the same source, and the bad are the good still in the egg. Against the pessimists he sets a law of balance, and a rule for living: do your best and leave the rest to providence.

  • universal life
  • buddha-nature
  • impermanence
  • suffering
  • happiness
  • desire
  • immortality
  • human nature
  • moral psychology
  • ethics
  • virtue
  • idealism
  • appearance and reality

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Meditation and the Warrior

The title claims Zen as the faith of Japan's warrior class. What sitting meditation trains in a person, and why it suited men who had to face death, is the book's practical case.

Nukariya describes zazen step by step, from breathing to letting idle thoughts go, and claims it destroys selfishness, which throws shadows on life as a body throws a shadow before the sun. Enlightenment is an insight into the real self, not an intellectual opinion. The samurai and the Zen monk, he argues, shared honest poverty, manliness and composure in the face of death: a Chinese master threatened with beheading by invading soldiers sat down calmly and composed a verse, and the Hōjō regents lived like monks.

  • enlightenment
  • meditation
  • zen practice
  • self-mastery
  • death
  • mind
  • perception
  • religious practice
  • zen
  • zen buddhism

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Within this work

passages held
256
distinct concepts
472
by passages held, corpus-wide
#292

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “buddha-nature” and “enlightenment”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
buddha-natureenlightenment10
enlightenmentmeditation6
buddha-naturezen4
enlightenmentzen4
enlightenmentzen buddhism4
meditationzen4
meditationzen buddhism4
buddha-naturenature3
buddha-naturehuman nature2
buddha-naturemeditation2
enlightenmentnature2
naturezen2
buddha-naturezen history1
enlightenmenthuman nature1
enlightenmentzen history1
meditationzen history1
naturezen buddhism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1913 The Religion of the Samurai (The Religion of the Samurai: A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan) you are here EN
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