My talk today is of a rather unsual sort for me. My own study deals largely with the texts of early Japanese Zen Buddhism. I rarely look at texts beyond the 13th century, and I rarely look up from my texts to ask what I am doing -- to brood over what my more learned colleagues call "methodology". Particularly in recent years, my study has been almost entirely given over to the translation and annotation of medieval texts, a work so laborious and dry that I hesitate to speak of it even with my colleagues, let alone inflict it on an innocent audience. So today, I shall try something altogether different -- venturing out of the 13th into the 20th century, and putting aside my philology to brood about methodology. In short, I shall be speaking of things I don't know about. If you find that a disappointing prospect, you may at least take some solace in the knowledge that the things I do know about are much less interesting than the things I don't.

As my rather silly title suggests, I want to tell you a war story. It concerns a modern (or perhaps "postmodern") conflict over the nature of Zen Buddhism as we've come to know it in America. It is, in a sense, two stories: one, that we might call a "clockwise" narrative of how the past has got us into this war; the other, a "counter-clockwise" tale of how the past is used as a kind of weapon in the war. I became interested in this story recently because of two questions. One of them, I've been hearing for some years now from my wife. "Why is it", she says, "that, although Zen is so popular in America, you can't write a popular book about Zen?" This question seems to occur most often during discussions of our family finances and clearly has a particular rhetorical thrust; hence, like our family finances, I've been in the habit of ignoring it. The second question came more recently from a friend of mine who studies Tibetan Buddhism. "Why is it", she asked, "that you Zen Buddhist scholars are becoming so hostile to Zen?"

Only a little brooding made me recognize that the two questions probably answer each other: I can't write a popular book because I'm hostile; I'm hostile because I can't write the book. That's the short form of this lecture; for the rest, I want to explore how my situation came about.

My wife, of course, is right: Zen is popular. It's arguably the best-known form of Buddhism in America and Japan's most successful intellectual export. Thousands of people practice it; millions more have read of it; and almost everyone (at least in California) seems to have heard about (if not themselves heard) the "sound of one hand clapping", or "Zen and the art of this or that". My friend is also right about the academic hostility toward Zen. People like me, who make their living in the university talking about the "sound of one hand clapping", have an obvious vested interest in the public success of Zen. Yet, in recent years, some people like me have begun attacking the popular Zen teachings as a fraud, as a cheap Japanese imitation of the real thing, dumped on an unsuspecting American public.

This is the little war that I want to talk about --what I'm calling the "Revenge of the West". For advertising purposes, I've given my title a tone of intergallactic import; but I'm really talking about a more mundane kind of import and a more worldly sort of struggle -- something closer to an intellectual "trade war" and perhaps a spiritual "turf war".

First, I want to tell a "clockwise" Zen story, to suggest that wars of foreign trade and spiritual turf are not just modern failings but are present in Zen from its origins. According to legend, the origins of Zen in China can be traced to the arrival, in the sixth century CE, of the Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. This monk, we're told, taught a radical brand of Buddhism that criticized all Buddhist dogma and rejected all Buddhist ritual in favor of what was called a "direct pointing" at the fact that everybody is by nature spiritually complete, without need of religion. Needless to say, Bodhidharma's revolutionary message didn't sit well with the learned Buddhist establishment invested in its dogma and ritual; indeed, so annoyed were the scholars with his message, and so jealous of his popular success, that one of them -- another famous Indian monk named Bodhiruci -- poisoned him.

Zen begins, then, in legends of combat. Notice that, in this first Zen war, the protagonists are both Indians. At first glance, it would seem that the Chinese were merely innocent bystanders in a struggle of foreign origin (rather like the sixteenth-century Japanese watching the struggles between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries). Still, when we remember that we're dealing here with a Chinese story about the founding of a Chinese Buddhist movement, the two Indians may better be seen as symbolic surrogates in an indigenous conflict -- literary "foreign mercenaries", so to speak, brought in to fight in a Chinese Buddhist civil war.

That the story uses these two Indian monks as surrogates is not merely literary embellishment. The founding of the Zen movement in China was in part a "war of independence" from the norms of the imported Indian Buddhism. It's no accident that the jealous poisoner of Bodhidharma, Bodhiruci, was a famous translator of Indian Buddhist texts; or that the image of Bodhidharma as revolutionary hero and martyr was developed, in the seventh and eighth centuries, in the period just after the most famous of all the translators, Hsüan-tsang, had returned from his "journey to west" to spread the latest treatises of Indian Buddhist theology and question some of the trends of Chinese Buddhism that were building up to Zen.

That the evil poisoner was an Indian, then, is hardly surprising. But notice that his innocent victim is not depicted as a Chinese patriot. As Buddhists seeking to justify themselves to the Buddhist community, the early apologists for Zen who first told the story of Bodhidharma couldn't afford wholly to break with India and abandon the authority of the sacred homeland of the Buddha. Thus they cloaked their movement in the robe of an Indian monk and accounted for his radical brand of Buddhism by claiming that he was heir to an esoteric understanding of the faith, handed down in secret by a line of Indian "patriarchs" since the days of the Buddha himself, "outside" the textual tradition of the scholars.

This resort to the authority of a lineage of patriarchs was a fateful move; for it committed the Zen movement to an historical vision of the true church that was in tension with its anti-establishment rhetoric and its egalitarian message of universal salvation. Thus, the price of victory in the movement's war of independence was a deep structual division in its religious identity -- a "war" (to put it in Pauline terms) "within its members" between the "willing spirit" and the "weak flesh" of the faith. The "spirit" was willing to make those revolutionary spiritual claims for Zen that are now so famous -- that Zen is not a "religion" in any ordinary sense but simply a reminder of, a "pointing" at, a timeless truth about us all that transcends history and precedes historical religion. Yet the "flesh" remained deeply embedded in time, not just through the brute fact that its spiritual "pointing" was embodied in a particular history but through the presence of a particular instinct for history in the very body of the faith.

The story of Bodhidharma may be mere legend, but the legend has been part of the remembered past of Zen history for centuries. It remains in memory as a founding myth, continuing to symbolize, and itself to generate, the tradition's internal tension between its universal, trans-historical message and its deep historical commitments. Thus, for example, when Zen was introduced into Japan in the Kamakura period, it advertised itself as both the "Buddha Mind school" and the "Bodhidharma school". The former name celebrated the school's good news that everyone was possessed of the enlightened buddha mind and needed only to recognize it; the latter name expressed the conviction that, in order recognize it, one had to belong to the elite spiritual lineage of the founder. Again, in Japan's early modern Edo period, when the famed Zen master Hakuin launched the reforms that have given us modern Rinzai Zen, he emphasized a universal call to the direct witness of the buddha mind, yet limited that witness to those who had mastered the enigmatic sayings of the ancient patriarchs recorded in the Zen kôan literature. Thus, the practice of Zen became the study of its past, and the recorded sayings of the patriarchs became the curriculum of a highly formalized monastic training that we can still see in Japan today.

In premodern times, then -- and within the walls of the monastery even today -- Zen ideas and Zen tradition have been bound together in a sacred lineage of masters supposed to embody Zen wisdom. Still, the tension between the timeless and the temporal has remained, and in modern times the two have tended to break apart and to fall out as enemies in warfare between Zen philosophy and history. The conditions for the modern Zen wars were laid in Japan by the arrival from the West of Commodore Perry and the subsequent Meiji Restoration. In the aftermath of the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism as a "foreign" religion, and in the midst of the Meiji drive to create a modern, international nation, Japanese Buddhism was faced with the need to defend itself in schizophrenic terms -- to define itself both as central to the historic national experience and as international and modern. For Zen Buddhism, with its long history of balancing universal truth with particular tradition, such schizophrenia came almost naturally.

The first move was to put Bodhidharma's message into modern Western philosophical terms. This was the work primarily of the so-called "Kyoto school" associated with famous philosopher Nishida Kitarô and his followers, and especially of Nishida's close friend and fellow Zen student D.T. Suzuki, the man primarily responsible for the introduction of Zen to the West. The Kyoto school interpreted the Zen notion of the buddha mind through the modern Western epistemological ideal of "pure experience" -- a kind of direct awareness of ultimate reality that preceded all conceptualization and transcended all intellectualization as philosophy or formalization as religion. The school liked to talk about the content of this experience as "emptiness", or "ultimate nothingness", in contrast to the less ultimate "being" of Western metaphysics.

The contrast with the West served to identify Zen with Japan. Since the essence of Zen was simply this epistemological emptiness, Zen was in principle the most universal of truths, by definition free from all linguistic and cultural determination. Yet, historically speaking, the discovery of this truth, and the development of a culture based upon it, was an Asian accomplishment. Though the work had begun with Zen in China, it had reached its full flowering in the traditional culture of Japan, with its asthetics of "emptiness" expressed in flower arrangements, rock gardens, tea ceremony, and the like, and its ethics of "no thought" perfected in the prereflective, selfless action of the samurai.

This is, more or less, the sort of Zen we've come to know in America, largely through the extensive English writings of D.T. Suzuki and his many admirers, both East and West. This is the sort of Zen that has lately come under attack by some American academics, largely through criticism of Suzuki and the Kyoto School.

What were perhaps the first significant shots of the second Zen war were exchanged soon after the war in the Pacific. In this opening skirmish, from the early 1950's, the famous Chinese scholar Hu Shih called into question Suzuki's transcendental Zen experience and called instead for a sober textual study of early Zen as the product of Chinese intellectual history. Thus, history and philosophy were ranged against each other in a struggle for control of Zen. On the surface, Hu Shih's position was an historian's criticism of a philosopher's timeless object; just below the surface, it was a Chinese nationalist's attempt to reclaim spiritual territory lost to Japan.

Hu Shih's preference for history over philosophy was partly a function of his particular nationalist agenda: as Buddhists in an imperial Japan, Suzuki and the Kyoto school had chosen an aggressive international approach capable of advertising Japanese Zen as universal truth; Hu Shih, whose modern China had little room for Buddhism or time for expansionist dreams, sought rather to domesticate Zen on the medieval margins of a revived Chinese tradition -- to put it safely in the past as a "distant mirror" of the power of native Chinese tradition to withstand the invasions of foreign ideological forces.

The debate between Suzuki and Hu Shih might thus seem to be a matter of internal Asian intellectual politics; but, like so much in modern Asian politics, it was performed before an American audience. The debate was carried out in English and published in the journal Philosophy East and West, an organ of the University of Hawaii's East-West Center and America's westernmost outpost in the territorial expansion of Western philosophy to the Asian continent. Both debaters were students of Western thought and had spent formative years in America. Both positions in the debate spoke to, and in the language of, modern Western scholarship: the one to religious philosophy; the other to intellectual history.

The audience for the debate largely sided with Suzuki. Not surprisingly, most Americans (who of course never read Philosophy East and West) tended to prefer Suzuki's timeless truths to Hu Shih's medieval past, his idealized Zen Japan to Hu Shih's remembered Chinese tradition. Given the longstanding American weakness for a timeless Orient (and the postwar shift in America's Pacific alliances), this may have been inevitable. In any case, Suzuki's style of Zen went on to boom in America, spreading from the beats in the '50s, hippies in the '60s and "self-realization" movements of the '70s to become the frequent feature of pop psychology and "new age" California culture and the earnest interlocutor in comparative philosophy and Buddhist-Christian dialogue that we see today.

But alliances can cool and even timeless truths grow stale. And today, amidst the new world acceptance of Zen as new age philosophy, we see a new world revival, in much more strident terms, of Hu Shih's doubts about Suzuki's Zen. The attack has come on several fronts, from the "high ground" of intellectual argument to the swampy "bottom lands" of political correctness.

At the "upper end", so to speak, we find philosophical distrust of the very notion of a "pure Zen experience" supposed to transcend, or precede, cultural and linguistic determination, as well as theoretical misgivings about the adequacy of any attempt to abstract the "spiritual essence" of a cultural tradition. Somewhat lower come arguments directed at the specific claims of the Kyoto school: historical questions about the degree to which such claims are actually representative of, or central to, the premodern Zen tradition; doubts about the legitimacy of packaging this tradition in the idiom of modern Western philosophy, psychology and religion; and charges of "reverse Orientalism" in the construction of a characteristically Asian spirituality. And finally, at the bottom, we find ad hominem attacks on the representatives of the Kyoto school themselves. Here we see expressions of moral shock at their arrogance in claiming privileged access to the Zen spiritual experience they expound, and rude reminders that they were not themselves ordained Zen masters qualified to speak for the tradition. Then, lowest of all -- somewhere down below the belt -- come political charges that many of them were supporters of, or at least complicit in, Japan's imperialism and its military adventures in Asia.

Why would Western academics at the end of the twentieth century want to attack the Zen teachings of prewar figures like Suzuki and the Kyoto school? One proximate cause is not far to seek. Questions about the politics of the Kyoto school have a long postwar history in Japan and have recently been taken up again as the country remembers the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. From this perspective, the Western attack is just an offshore echo of a domestic argument. In the domestic argument, the politics are real and clear: they belong to the ongoing struggle over the interpretation of Japan's war experience and the felt need among Japanese liberals to expose the ideological roots of militant nationalism. In Japanese Buddhist circles, the critique of the Kyoto school is only part of a larger effort -- reflected in the academic development known as "Critical Buddhism" (hihan bukkyô) or in the Zen "human rights" (jinken) movement -- to challenge the ethical complacency of the Buddhist establishment and its support for the status quo.

Perhaps, then, we're simply lending our voices to the Japanese liberal cause, taking sides as uninvited mercenaries in a Japanese civil struggle. To be sure, like all Japan's former opponents in the Pacific War, we do have a certain vested interest in the struggle. We harbor a certain paranoia about Japan's lingering nationalistic ambitions (and, like all paranoids, probably take a certain glee in finding evidence to confirm our suspicions). It's difficult, however, to believe that our interest here has much really to do with the support of liberal causes. If it did, we'd surely be more sympathetic to a movement like Critical Buddhism, which is itself a powerful and far-ranging repudiation of Kyoto school ideas. But we have not made friends with the enemy of our enemy. Instead, most of us have tended to keep a cool scholarly distance from its efforts to construct an account of the faith that might provide religious rationale for social reform, preferring to dismiss its normative vision of Buddhist tradition as theologically motivated and historically suspect -- in effect, a latter-day liberal version of the old Meiji-period quest for a universal Buddhism that produced people like Suzuki himself.

This apparent disdain for reform no less than reactionary versions of Buddhist thought suggests that our hostility toward the Kyoto school has more to do with philosophy than with politics -- not with the school's particular Zen philosophy but with the fact that it treated Zen as a philosophy. It also suggests that our "Zen bashing" at the end of the twentieth century, whatever else it may be, can be read as a form of "white backlash" against an Asiatic invasion of our Western intellectual economy.

The intellectual economy of Western Buddhist studies was built on a colonial model of Oriental scholarship that appropriated the raw materials of ancient Asian texts, fabricated from them a polished Western academic account of the religion, and sold it to a world market. In the ideal case of colonial India, where there were no living Buddhists to resist, this was easy to do. In Japan, which had managed to maintain some national integrity through the colonial period, and which still had a living Buddhist tradition, it has proved much more problematic. Rather, Japanese Buddhists quickly appropriated the Western academic technology of philosophy and religious studies, polished their own accounts of the faith, and sold them us.

Thus, by the time academic Zen studies began in the West during the 1970s, its object had already been defined by the ideas of people like Suzuki and, indeed, was already spreading in the West as a viable spiritual vision. Many of us, in fact, who took up academic Zen studies did so because we were attracted to that vision. But, once in the academy, we had to resist the impulse to go native, distance ourselves from the vision, and redefine the object in our own scholarly terms. In this, Suzuki's old anti-Buddhist enemy, Hu Shih, became our friend.

Hu Shih's voice may have been muffled by the Zen boom in America; but in Japan, postwar scholarship took up his project to reconstruct the early history of Zen from the textual record. When academic Zen studies began to develop in American universities during the '70s, it imitated this postwar Japanese model, in order to distance itself from the modern Zen of the masses and lay claim to the unpeopled Asia of the ancient texts. The model won us a place in the academy as proper Buddhologists, but of course our learned monographs on the ancient texts did nothing to stem the flood tide of Zen ideas into American culture.

From the start, then, Western Zen studies was antagonistic to Suzuki's philosophical style and tended to dismiss it as, at best, irrelevant, at worst, an annoying obstacle to the proper historical understanding of Zen thought. As Western Zen studies has come of age and grown more confident of its own voice, this dismissal seems to be developing towards open aggression.

The new, more aggressive attack on Suzuki's Zen can be seen in part as a reflex of the fact that Zen studies has come of age in a postmodern academic environment. The postwar Japanese scholarship copied by American Zen academics was based on a "modernist" ideal of historical objectivity that sought to rule out of bounds normative judgments about the validity of Zen claims or the authenticity of Zen experience. The question of the inner states of the Zen masters was banished beyond the purview of the responsible historian of the Zen documentary record.

In recent years, as Zen scholars have begun to learn the finer arts of suspicion from their postmodern peers in Western humanities, they have come to question some of the assumptions of their postwar Japanese model and to rethink their own initial enthusiasms for the reconstruction of the textual history of Zen ideas. But this has hardly revived Suzuki's timeless Zen. On the contrary, as Zen ideas have come increasingly to be seen as ideology, as the rhetorical tools of control and manipulation, as the elite silencing of the voices of popular culture, and so on, the very suggestion that such ideas might express a spiritual experience (let alone a philosophical truth) has come itself to be seen as a reactionary political gesture. If our reintroduction of subjectivity into historical narrative has permitted us to imagine once again the inner states of the Zen masters, we can no longer imagine their enlightened insights but only their mundane motives. In this sense, the philosophical claims of the Kyoto school may be modern, but the human impulses we see behind them are, if not quite timeless, ancient and unchanging.

The dark suspicions of human motive and political agenda used to tear down the giants of modern Japanese Zen thought, like the charges of facism and racism brought against Heidegger, Eliade, and other giants of modern Europe, are expressions of a general tendency in recent humanities to level the high points and peak experiences of received tradition and bring history down to its lowest common denominators. In Zen terms, this tendency has turned Bodhidharma's egalitarian message on its head: it's not that we are just like the Buddha and Patriarchs and need only to recognize it, but that the Buddha and Patriarchs are just like us but refuse to acknowledge it. Of course, once we're all on the same historical level of mundane motive and political agenda, we may well begin to wonder about the politics behind not only the ideas of Suzuki and the Zen masters but our own suspicions about them.

In answer, then, to my friend's question, if, among Western Buddhist scholars, Zen scholars seem unusually hostile these days, it may be because we alone in Buddhist studies have found ourselves at least as much the colonized as the colonizer -- that we alone have never succeeded in using our technical knowledge of exotic ancient languages and obscure old books to keep control of the production and marketing of our Buddhism; that (at least until very recently, with the rise of Vipassana and the stardom of the Dalai Lama) we alone have been forced into competition with a living form of Buddhism that has learned to speak for itself in modern philosophical and pyschological terms to a modern Western audience. Like Hu Shih before us, we have sought to fight off the forces of Buddhist philosophy with the technology of modern Western historiography and now, as the technology improves, with the newer weapons (the "smart bombs", if you will) of the postmodern academic arsenal.

If we were to look at ourselves through the sights of those weapons, I suspect our suspicions of Suzuki's politics and our historicizing of his ideas would begin to look rather like diversions, serving to draw attention off to Asia from the real hostilities here at home. The real hostilities have less to do with the lean of Suzuki's Japanese politics than with his status as the First Patriarch of Zen in the West, less to do with what he had to say than with the fact that he was a Japanese Buddhist with something to say, an upstart Asiatic who mastered his master's speech and made us listen. Like the First Patriarch Bodhidharma, a barbarian who defied the Chinese Buddhist scholars by telling the Chinese people what they wanted to hear, he has to be poisoned.