Such training is of course just as valuable for a warrior as for a priest, and it was precisely the warriors of Japan who made the Zen cult their own. One can hardly find elsewhere than in Japan techniques of mysticism pursued without the reward of the consummating mystic experience and appropriated by warriors to train them for hand-to-hand combat. Yet this has been true from the earliest period of Zen influence in Japan. The great book by the Japanese founder, Ei-sai, in the twelfth century was called The Protection of the State by the Propagation of Zen, and Zen has trained warriors, statesmen, fencers, and university students to achieve quite mundane goals. As Sir Charles Eliot says, nothing in the history of the Zen cult in China gave any indication of the future that awaited it as a military discipline in Japan. ‘Zen has become as decidedly Japanese as tea ceremonies or No plays. It might have been supposed that in a troubled period like the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this contemplative and mystic doctrine, which finds truth not in scripture but in the immediate experience of the human mind, would have flourished in monastic harbours of refuge among those who had left the storms of the world, but not that it would have been accepted as the favourite rule of life for the military class. Yet such it became.’
Many Japanese sects, both Buddhist and Shintoist, have hid great emphasis on mystic techniques of contemplation, self-hypnotism, and trance. Some of them, however, claim the result of this training as evidences of the grace of God and base their philosophy on tariki, ‘help of another,’ i.e., of a gracious god. Some of them, of which Zen is the paramount example, rely only on ‘self-help,’ jiriki. The potential strength, they teach, lies only within oneself, and only by one’s own efforts can one increase it. Japanese samurai found this entirely congenial, and whether as monks, statesmen, or educators – for they served in all these r?les – they used the Zen techniques to buttress a rugged individualism. Zen teachings were excessively explicit. ‘Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself. It tolerates no hindrance to this seeking. Clear every obstacle out of your way ... If on your way you meet Buddha, kill him! If you meet the Patriarchs, kill them! If you meet the Saints, kill them all. That is the only way of reaching salvation.’
He who seeks after truth must take nothing at secondhand, no teaching of the Buddha, no scriptures, no theology. ‘The twelve chapters of the Buddhist canon are a scrap of paper.’ One may with profit study them, but they have nothing to do with the lightning flash in one’s own soul which is all that gives Enlightenment. In a Zen book of dialogues a novice asks a Zen priest to expound the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law. The priest gave him a brilliant exposition, and the listener said witheringly, ‘Why, I thought Zen priests disdained texts, theories, and systems of logical explanations.’ ‘Zen,’ returned the priest, ‘does not consist in knowing nothing, but in the belief that to know is outside of all texts, of all documents. You did not tell me you wanted to know, but only that you wished an explanation of the text.’
The traditional training given by Zen teachers was intended to teach novices how ‘to know.’ The training might be physical or it might be mental, but it must be finally validated in the inner consciousness of the learner. Zen training of the fencer illustrates this well. The fencer, of course, has to learn and constantly practice the proper sword thrusts, but his proficiency in these belongs in the field of mere ‘competence.’ In addition he must learn to be muga. He is made to stand first on the level floor, concentrating on the few inches of surface which support his body. This tiny surface of standing room is gradually raised till he has learned to stand as easily on a four-foot pillar as in a court yard. When he is perfectly secure on that pillar, he ‘knows.’ His mind will no longer betray him by dizziness and fear of falling.