Originally posted by hg
the Omiya Hachimangu definitely has a connection to the warrior traditions,
but the Zen Monasteries which belong to the "five mountains of Zen" there are nearly as old.
I have read the expression "Warrior Zen" somewhere (don't look on the Internet, useless, I already tried),
and it was claimed that this has a connection to the
Warrior Arts in the Kamakura Period and considerable
influence, but it was also claimed that the sects
related to it died out some time ago, or at least
the teachings changed.
The connection between Kamakura warriors and Zen was political, not doctrinal. The Kamakura shogunate (and its successor regime, the Muromachi/Ashikaga shogunate, as well as its successors-to-power, the daimyo) were eager to acquire as many of the symbols and trappings of power and legitimacy as possible. The powers-that-were in the Court had long maintained patronage ties to the major Buddhist institutions in Nara and Mt. Hie (outside Kyoto), and so the new shogunate was naturally interested in something similar. The Zen institutions were new, and in need of patronage, and so they welcomed shogunal sponsorship. Hence the relationship between the shogunate and the Gozan ("Five Mountains") establishment. In other words, bushi interest in Zen had little or nothing to do with religion. For details, see Martin Collcutt's Five Mountains (Harvard, 1981).
In the area of personal religious beliefs: There were a few famous samurai and bugei ryuha during the late medieval and Tokugawa periods (as well as during the modern era) who were deeply into Zen and who drew lessons from it for their bugei practice. But the predominant forms of Buddhism followed by Kamakura bushi were Pure Land and the older Nara sects. The idea of "Warrior Zen" is an old cannard that was born from awareness of the shogunate/Gozan connection (but not of the true nature of the relationship) combined with logical extrapolation from some of the best-known tenets of Zen philosophy. Philosophers like DT Suzuki and historians like George Sansom reasoned that if Zen trivialized the line between life and death, and taught that enlightenment could be had through devotion to one's everyday job with the proper mindset (both of which propositions are, BTW, somewhat dubious), then it ought to have appealed to medieval warriors, whose vocations put them in constant contact with death and forced them to perform acts that ran contrary to traditional Buddhist morality. This is a reasonable surmise, but there's no foundation for it, and the evidence we do have concerning warrior religion points in an entirely different direction.
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602