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Uncover the historical truth about Buddhist warrior monks with this informative and enlightening book.
Film, television and popular fiction have long exploited the image of the serene Buddhist monk who is master of the deadly craft of hand-to-hand combat. While these media overly romanticize the relationship between a philosophy of non-violence and the art of fighting, When Buddhists Attack: The Curious Relationship Between Zen and the Martial Arts shows this link to be nevertheless real, even natural.
Exploring the origins of Buddhism and the ethos of the Japanese samurai, university professor and martial arts practitioner Jeffrey Mann traces the close connection between the Buddhist way of compassion and the way of the warrior. This zen book serves as a basic introduction to the history, philosophy, and current practice of Zen as it relates to the Japanese martial arts. It examines the elements of Zen that have found a place in budo—the martial way—such as zazen, mushin, zanshin and fudoshin, then goes on to discuss the ethics and practice of budo as modern sport.
Offering insights into how qualities integral to the true martial artist are interwoven with this ancient religious philosophy, this Buddhism book will help practitioners reconnect to an authentic spiritual discipline of the martial arts.
- Sales Rank: #798037 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Tuttle Publishing
- Published on: 2012-10-10
- Released on: 2012-10-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.50" h x .80" w x 5.00" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"This rich and accessible introduction explores one of the more complex aspects of Buddhist culture." —Publishers Weekly
"The great Zen master Hakuin contended that a samurai could accomplish in a few days of Zen practice what would take a monk a hundred days. His reasoning was that monks generally assume they have years to devote to Zen, while warriors are well aware of impending death, so warriors will throw themselves into practice with a far greater sense of urgency than monks. That being said, the relationship between martial arts and Zen has been greatly exaggerated, especially in the West. In When Buddhists Attack, Jeffrey K. Mann unpacks the facts and fiction." —Shambhala Sun
"What does a religion known for teaching non-violence have to do with martial arts disciplines designed to cripple or kill? A great deal, it turns out. … By offering insights into how the qualities of a true martial artist are linked with ancient religious philosophy, Mann hopes to help other practitioners reconnect to an authentic spiritual discipline of the martial arts." —Newswise.com
"If you've ever wanted to understand the true role Zen Buddhism plays in the martial arts, then look no further." —Patrick McCarthy, from the foreword
"Mann's book…illustrates the intertwining of martial arts and Zen. Mann deftly braids the physical and the spiritual into a strong rope for the serious student to ascend. This book has simplicity and yet heft—it is brilliant." —Kris Wilder, author of The Way of Kata and The Little Black Book of Violence
"This book clearly shows us how the Japanese Budo spirit is related to religion. Specifically, the author explains the concept of mushin very well, a principle to which we Japanese attribute much importance in overcoming various difficulties."—Katsumi Shimane, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Senshu University 3rd Dan Karatedo, Jodo
"I would like to congratulate the author on this book, which is based on both experience and research. I recommend it to all traditional martial artists and anyone interested in Japanese culture." —Tetsuji Nakamura, 6th Dan, International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karate-Do Federation Vice Chief Instructor
"…an interesting and very informative overview of Zen Buddhism and its relation to martial arts. Dr. Mann's perspective as an academic and passionate practitioner of martial arts gives the work a personal tone and energy…It will appeal to avid practitioners of martial arts as well as to anyone interested in the development of Buddhism and its relation to Japanese culture." —Charlene P. E. Burns, Ph.D. Professor, Dept. of Philosophy & Religious Studies University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
About the Author
Jeffrey K. Mann earned his doctorate in Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and is currently Chair of the Religious Studies Department at Susquehanna University. In addition, he has served as a Visiting Professor of Religion at Senshu University in Ikuta, Japan. A longtime student of Japanese martial arts, he has trained and competed in karate throughout North America, Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines. He is instructor of the Susquehanna Goju-ryu Karate-do Club, a school affi liated with the International Okinawan Goju-ryu Karate-do Federation
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
best book on the subject yet
By Zach Zinn
There are alot of books on Zen and the Martial Arts, but none are like this.
From things like the precise meaning of the term Dukkha, to historical context of Zen, and most importantly to the apparent contradiction of "fighting Buddhists" Professor Mann simply goes light years beyond what other books on this subject cover.
This book has many layers. In here you will fin history, Buddhist philosophy (which Mann actually understands with considerable depth), martial practice. Suffice to say, this is a way above average book, and I think it will probably become a classic on the subject, in fact i'm tempted to say it' going to be an authoritative source in the future when new martial artists are looking for an in depth book on the subject.
One of the best things about this book is that Professor Mann takes the time to accurately explain some basic concepts of Buddhism, and in quite a skillful way - as a Buddhist I found his explanations clearer than many books purporting to simply be on Buddhism. I imagine someone with no real exposure to Buddhism would benefit from this section not only in reading the rest of the book, but as a general introduction to some tricky concepts like Anatta, Anicca, and Dukkha.
This is a not a feel-good book of slogans or surface examination, it's an actual examining of the subject matter from someone who has direct experience of Zen, of martial arts, and the history of both. Pick this up and read it, if you are really interested in Zen and it's relationship to martial arts (i'd argue that the book goes beyond just Zen in places too), this book will only be of benefit to you.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Though flowers blossom in the spring, when the autumn frost comes the leaves always drop and the trees wither.
By Konrei
Jeffrey K. Mann is a Doctor of Religious Studies who has spent much time studying the Japanese martial arts. He has also investigated Zen practice and the history of Zen, and WHEN BUDDHISTS ATTACK (an intriguing title) is subtitled THE CURIOUS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ZEN AND THE MARTIAL ARTS. (I suppose WHEN ZENJI ATTACK would have been too esoteric a title.)
WHEN BUDDHISTS ATTACK put me in mind of the many pop-culture references to Zen and to martial arts that have (for better or worse) permeated Western culture. Does anyone really think that feeding their dog ZEN PUPPY DOG TREATS is going to make the dog more mindful? I was reminded of Mr. Miyagi's response when Daniel-San asked, "I always thought karate came from Buddhist temples and stuff" in The Karate Kid: "You too much TV."
Regardless of the fact that a cookbook entitled THE ZEN OF ITALIAN FOOD is in print, the complex interrelationship between Zen and the martial arts deserves responsible investigation. After all, the Buddha himself was of the Hindu Kshatriya Warrior Caste. Mann spends a little too much time in the early pages of the book recounting the legends surrounding the Buddha's birth and life. As an ordained senior Zen student, I have yet to meet a Zen teacher, Oriental or Occidental, who accepts the story of the Buddha's life literally in the same sense that many Christians accept the canonical gospels as providing the facts of Jesus' life.
Very little is known about the Buddha, actually, beyond the bare facts that he was born, lived, preached, and died approximately 2600 years ago. Tradition provides a smattering of place names for these occurrences, and many scholars believe that some of the Buddha's actual words were preserved in The Dhammapada, but by the time the Buddha's story was committed to paper centuries had passed since his death. Thus, the teachings became overlaid with a sediment of interpretation and cultural assimilation as Buddhism spread out of India and across east Asia.
Buddhism was traditionally brought out of India to China by a man named Bodhidharma, otherwise known as "The Blue Eyed Monk." Janet Jiryu Abels in Making Zen Your Own: Giving Life to Twelve Key Golden Age Ancestors, describes in some detail that Bodhidharma was the gifted son of a local king in southern India. Mann claims he was Persian. In a book full of footnotes and a glossary of foreign terms, Mann fails to footnote this factoid, which flies in the face of conventional information. I'm intensely curious to know where Mann found that out.
Be that as it may, Mann (along with everyone else who has written about Bodhidharma) consigns most of the "known facts" about the 26th Indian Patriarch/1st Chinese Patriarch of Zen to the Legend category, including Bodhidharma's introduction of green tea to China, and especially Bodhidharma's invention or patronage of Chinese martial arts among the monks he taught. Whatever the true source, there was some intermingling of martial arts with Zen (or Ch'an) in China, even in the earliest days, primarily because of the nature of Zen in China. Unlike India, where monks could wander freely as Dharma teachers year-round subsisting on begging for food, the Chinese climate encouraged at least the seasonal establishment of settled communities of monks. Structured opportunities to learn and/or perfect a skill early on became a feature of Zen training, whether that skill was unarmed combat, carpentry, agriculture, music, viniculture, cooking, or clearing the snow from the monastery path or chopping and carrying wood for the woodstoves. This emphasis on Zen-in-work was transmitted to the Japanese who aesthetically perfected it as Bonsai culture, Ikebana, the Tea Ceremony, archery, calligraphy and gardening. To be sure, these activities themselves are not Zen, but the manner in which the participant carries them out may be.
Mann posits that Zen was heavily influenced by Confucian virtue ethics, and this is true in an overarching cultural sense. Zen Koans are direct outgrowths of Confucian legal holdings and are in fact called "cases." But scholars are more and more convinced that Zen grew out of a synthesis between Taoists (who were rejecting the rigid hierarchical structure of Confucian thought in favor of a more organic view of life and human society) and Chinese Buddhists whose own roots were those of the openminded Buddha, a man who had rejected caste in his teachings.
Mann is at his best when describing the attraction Zen held for the Japanese Samurai. Quite a number of aging Samurai shaved their heads and donned the robe toward the ends of their lives in order to seek perhaps an inner peace that eluded them as warriors. Indeed, a philosophy that trains the mind to focus on life's immediacy in this moment, would be very attractive to a class of men whose life's task was to die at any moment in the service of their masters. Even today, it is not unexpected for a Zen student to write a haiku to be shared with the Sangha on an auspicious occasion much as Samurai did, particularly before their deaths; likewise, certain Zen rituals practiced today are heavily marked by the Samurai influence: In the ritual known as Shuso Hossen or Dharma Combat, the student to be challenged is given a symbolic sword which has a role in the ceremony. But it is not expected that Zen students must adopt a martial art as part of their ongoing Zen inquiry. Neither is it expected that a student of Budo adopt Zen practice as part of their training. The two approaches do not rely on each other, though, for individuals, they may compliment each other.
This warrior legacy seems strange for a philosophy/religion that teaches ahimsa. The word "nonviolence" is often used to translate ahimsa, but ahimsa is more than just the (negative) absence of violence, it is the (positive) propagation of compassionate action. Most Buddhists (even the Samurai in their day) practice ahimsa to a greater or lesser extent. Very few people become identified with ahimsa, however, (the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi being the two most famous), largely because ahimsa is not a behavior that can be enforced (the very word "enforced" is antithetical to ahimsa). Hence, most Buddhist teachers promote compassion-in-action in the hope that the evolving student will find his or her way to ahimsa. Warrior monks such as Takuan and Taisen Deshimaru are illustrative of this mixed legacy.
I had a great inner debate while reading Mann's chapter on "Zen, Budo, and Ethics." Although through much of the book Mann maintains that Zen and Budo are cousins, in this particular chapter they become kissing (or more accurately, killing) cousins. Mann makes this error, in part, because he relies too heavily on the writings of D.T. Suzuki, to whom everything Japanese was Zen. (In truth, there are a number of Buddhist sects in Japan, of which Zen is the smallest; and there is Shinto.) D.T. Suzuki, it must be pointed out, was a lay student of Soyen Shaku, the first Japanese Zen Master to visit America in 1893. Suzuki was never ordained by Shaku, and D.T. Suzuki's writings are, if relatively gifted, almost exclusively primed for the Western intellect. Trying to understand Zen by reading D.T. Suzuki is like trying to taste the dinner by eating the fork.
Mann also errs in misunderstanding Zen only "as a special transmission *outside the scriptures* (emphasis his)" saying further that "Zen itself is prone to considerable ethical liberty," and stating, "Admittedly, Rinzai Zen places more emphasis on no-self than the precepts."
Really? "Admittedly?" Who admits? I have never yet met a Zen teacher, Denkai, Sensei or Roshi, that has relegated the Zen Precepts to a secondary or even tertiary place. If anything, the teachers I have been exposed to, either in person or through study, have uniformly and universally treated the precepts as preeminent in Zen practice. The Precepts are the pathways to actualizing The Eightfold Path and recognizing the Four Noble Truths. Zazen and Koan practice are the tools a Zen student uses to understand the Precepts.
That there are Zen teachers (and Mann quotes several) who disavow the Precepts is not a reflection on Zen, it is a reflection on those teachers, who, titled or not, did not embody the Precepts in their own lives, and thus mutated Zen into something else. D.T. Suzuki's quote: "When your mind functions with nature...you are not responsible for whatever deeds you commit, and consequently no course of karma is attached to them...who blames the wind when it leaves havoc in its wake?" is philosophical garbage. When Mankind acts according to its *true nature* (as understood in Buddhism), such acts create karma (regardless of Suzuki's comment), and those acts do *not* create havoc. A man is expected to be a man and act like one. A man is not a breeze.
Likewise, a quoted comment by Omori Sogen Roshi, a Japanese nationalist of World War II, says more about the Roshi than it does about Zen: "...one [who] forgets his biological origins and characteristics...[forgets] the current reality: 'Eat or be eaten!'...[these are] the great lessons...from Budo." Omori Sogen is a man who may be wearing the robe and bearing the title, but he is a racist and a killer who has lost himself in the very duality and delusion the Buddha preached must be overcome.
Although I disagree with Mann that these teachings constitute a kind of Dark Side to Zen, it is helpful to have them as reference points, if for no other reason than to highlight what Zen is not. At least it allowed me to engage with this book in a way I might otherwise not have. Hence, I've given WHEN BUDDHISTS ATTACK five stars even though I believe that Mann's grasp of Zen is far less thorough than his grasp of Budo.
So, Zen and Budo? It is, it isn't, it's both and it's neither.
In the end, the thesis of Mann's fine book can be summed up by the Buddha's words from the Parinirvana Sutra:
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Cuts through delusion perfectly
By Goran Powell
While I liked the book's title and cover, I was a little apprehensive it might be just another retelling and glorification of the ever-popular samurai code. It didn't take long to put my fears to rest. This is far, far more.
With a concise and informative introduction to Buddhism and Zen, Jeffrey Mann offers a clear and balanced insight into the origins of the Zen and its delicate relationship the martial arts. Drawing widely on expert sources and his own experience in karate and Zazen, he presents a vivid picture of Zanchin (awareness) and a deep understanding of Mushin - the tricky concept of `no-mind'.
He also shows where other spiritual and philosophical disciplines like Taoism and Confucianism influence the martial arts, and explores the whole question of how strong the link between Zen and martial arts is in reality. He even ventures into the difficult territory of Zen and Japanese war crimes and offers a well balanced view on this difficult subject. Best of all, as a theology professor, he is in a unique position to comment on the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western spirituality, and does so with great authority.
If you are in any way interested in the spiritual aspect of your art, and in particular how and why Zen links to it, buy this book. It is the latest and in my opinion the best on the subject to date and a vital addition to the thinking martial artist's library.
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