Emptiness, Variety and Power
TLS October 1 2010 from Katherine Wharton's review of Buddhist Warfare , edited by Michael K. Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer: Violent purges and insurgencies have occurred in all eras, with or without religious incitement. Yet there is something uniquely chilling about religious texts that justify or even aim to cultivate murder. For instance, the seventeenth-century Zen Master Takuan writes as follows: The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. None of them are possessed of a mind that has any substantiality. As each of them is of emptiness and has no "mind", the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword and the "I" who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning. This is an application of the central Buddhist teaching of no-...