Zen at War 2.0

The Empire’s New Clothes

In this essay I’d like to do a conceptual overlay of Japanese Buddhism during WW2 and today’s American Buddhism at a time of Genocide in Gaza, by putting them in dialogue with Brian Daizen Victoria’s book, “Zen at War,” originally published in 1997. It is not to be an exacting parallel on all points or conditions, but I felt that we as American Buddhists are at this critical point of being caught on the wrong side of history, and those who are still stonewalling behind their silence will be noted as complicit in this tragedy just as the priests of Japan during their time. In this essay I flow through the topic points to mirror Brian Victoria’s in the book. As he addresses them, so do I.

Brian Daizen Victoria opens the book with a bare and stark statement, that this book is “Dedicated to the victims of religious-inspired fanaticism everywhere.” — For me, I see the Zionism as the new religious fanaticism. The victims are far and wide and not contained to the Palestinian people who have been terrorized, starved, and killed, but all of us who have born witness to such unimaginable cruelty, and even those perpetrators who are killing-off parts of themselves in order to commit these crimes, and those who have made excuses for them. The harmful Karma that flows from this will be deep and long lasting.

Victoria chronicles the Japanese Buddhist involvement with nationalism, militarism, and the imperialist invasions and conquest of sovereign nations based on a notion of ethno-superiority all with the blessing and support of the reigning Buddhist establishment of the time. For me, I feel we are in a similar time, a time when American Buddhism is complicit in the American-Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian people and the aggressive attacks on several neighboring states to create Greater Israel. The complicity comes in form of the demand for silence and inaction from the Buddhist communities and its leading teachers. It comes in the form of the weaponization of the Dharma to suppress the moral outcry of sangha members who are suffering the wounds of bearing witness to some of the most horrific images of carnage and cruelty and sadistic barbarism that we have seen in many of our lifetimes. It came to me early on in the unbridled and overwhelmingly disproportionate response to the attacks on October 7^th, that this was going to be an absolute slaughter of innocents without constraint and when I started to contact leading Buddhist figures, most of them ethnically Jewish, there was either no reply or the arguments behind the scenes were the typical Hasbara talking points (preformed Israeli propaganda). I knew that we were going into a second incarnation of the Japanese Zen of WW2.

“For decades to come, scholars will study how a small, oppressive, foreign regime (Israel), built on a deeply racist and fundamentally violent ideology (Zionism), gained so much control over the foreign and domestic policy of the US, UK, Germany, and several other Western countries, compelling them to ignore the wishes of their own citizens, international law, and even basic morality, to raid their treasuries and attack their own people, all on behalf of that one oppressive foreign regime.” -Craig Mokhiber is the former United Nations Human Rights official and specialist in international human rights, policy, and methodology. He was the director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and resigned in protests of Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinian people stating the it was a “textbook case of Genocide.”

As the images of unimaginable destruction came through my daily feeds through social media, I became more and more heartbroken, more and more desperate for any sort of outcry for basic human rights from this country’s most famous teachers, but nothing. These people whom I looked up to my whole life who have written wonderful books on compassion and who have given talks and retreats about the interconnectedness of all of life, and how the separate, ego-based self is a delusion. But when the moment arose when the interconnected Buddha-heart was called upon to strongly speak out and demand an end to the massacre of innocents, they retreated behind a wall of silence. In my mind, in the moment of moral failure of the American Buddhists, the members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were embodying what I considered what should be the Buddhist response to the atrocities. JVP is deeply committed to non-violence. They are questioning with great scrutiny the causality of what happened on October 7^th and resisting the false demand for the inseparability of Jewish identity with the political ideology of Zionism and the ethno-religious Apartheid state of Israel. The JVP actions were bold, well organized, disciplined, peaceful, and always delivered a clear moral statement of resistance. This is what I had expected from the Buddhist communities. We are students of the self, students of causality, and Karma, we sat for endless hours of meditation that would help us untangle the aspects of our identities with the delusions that created harm. And as the months dragged on with the death-count rising from 10,000 to 20,000 to 30,000 to 40,000 to 50,000 to 60,000 I was getting enflamed with resentment and disgust from the continued silence from these ‘famous’ teachers. I entered sangha chat groups on-line formed by students who had been marginalized and silenced by the dominant Zionist members. I listened to so much suffering, so much pain from these students who were made to feel shame for their honest caring and moral wounded-ness, and I listened to the tactics and strategies being employed to silence them. I heard them myself in a group that was formed to be a Buddhist political action coalition, that I was a key member of, but eventually left in absolute frustration at the Zionist manipulation of the teachings. “We can’t say, ‘Ceasefire’ and “You can’t show the number of dead Palestinian children.” I left my Zen lineage who based their whole identity on socially engaged Buddhism, a group that went to Auschwitz every year for 25 years before this, but when I called out to them, they said, “We don’t take sides,” and, “Well, the Hamas Charter…” or platforming a Buddhist magazine editor who elevated Equanimity over any critical analysis of power in order to justify their utter lack of moral courage, and to have this position unchallenged in any way.

So, returning to the book, I think it is important to note that Brian Victoria was threatened by the Japanese Buddhist hierarchy not to write his book, that he would be stripped of his Priest status, but he did it anyway. We need to call up this defiant courage today. Brian writes in the preface that someone asked him in the conversations after the publishing of the book, “What the hell went wrong?” which spurred him to add a chapter called, “Was It Buddhism?” to the 2^nd edition of the book. I feel we will need to do a similar post-mortem analysis of this moral failure in American Zionist Buddhism as well.

Brian writes, “Yet, if it can be said that something ‘went wrong’ in prewar and wartime Zen, it is important to realize that it will take more than apologies, no matter how heartfelt, to make it ‘right’ again. The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself. Thus, until and unless their assumptions are closely examined and challenged, there is no guarantee that Zen’s future, whether in the East or West, will not once again include support for the mass destruction of human life that is modern warfare.”

I hear no such apologies from any Buddhist organization thus far in reference to their complicity in the American-Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian people. More than 2 years in, I still only hear silence, and the further manipulation of trying to control the narrative. This attempted manipulation will rage on for years to come. What I see mostly is the desire of just wanting it to go by so these Zionist saturated sanghas can get back to business as usual and just pretend that nothing happened. I even saw a Zen community post the Star of David with a rainbow on their social media pages, this during a time when the starvation campaign and death toll was still growing. The tone-deafness of this was shocking to me, especially from one of the oldest Zen institutions in the country, one that has had no statement of humanitarian support for the starving and dying Palestinians at all. That was the moment I knew not to expect any sort of humility or atonement from Zionist Buddhism in America, one that is still pressing for Jewish supremacy in American Buddhism and for Fascist-Zionist domination in the Middle-East.

In Brian’s investigation while researching the book, he summarized the sentiment of many leading Buddhist figures as, “The selflessness” of Zen meant absolute and unquestioning submission to the will and dictates of the emperor. And the purpose of religion was to preserve the state and punish any country or person who dared interfere with its right of self-aggrandizement.” I find a similar attitude toward Zionism and the state of Israel in Buddhism, even though it is convenient in certain circles to heap blame solely on Netanyahu and the members of his sociopathic Cabinet. Both in Japan then and here now, there was the by-pass evasion technique of, ‘Zen priests don’t get involved in politics,’ as an excuse not to take any moral responsibility or to use one’s position and power and platform to try to influence the stopping of the killing of hundreds-of-thousands of innocent people. Then, as now, there is nothing that isn’t political. Neutrality is already taking the side of the oppressors. Silence is consent. In October of 2023, Omar El Akkad posted on X:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

From what I am seeing still in the Buddhist communities, I sadly disagree with this. I see continued resistance and an ongoing fight to control the narrative. I see glacial change, incremental concessions for scraps of acknowledgment. What I imagine the future position will be, that is when they are not hiding from behind their dogged silence, they will continue to not be willing to discuss it, or say that there is no proof that they supported Israel in the Genocide because they made no public statements of that support. This, of course, will be disingenuous. And it will be neither upholding Right Speech/Right Action, nor Right Understanding. It will and is an expression that directly violates the Dharma and the Precepts. In a meeting on the eve of the invasion of Poland, one of Hitler’s advisors asked why he thought he could get away with The Final Solution (Die Endlösung), Hitler was reported to say, “Who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians.” The American Buddhist community wants to just not speak about the annihilation of the Palestinians, during the Genocide or after, in hopes that it will just go away and they can just go back to business as usual, and their moral failure can just fade into the haze of history, just as Türkiye does today regarding the Armenian Genocide.

I grew-up with a romanticized view of Buddhism, peaceful, non-violent, vegetarian, disciplined, moral, gentle, based on a holistic awareness that everything is fragile and that kindness creates waves of goodness that radiate outward and have subtle effects in the world. It wasn’t until I read “Buddhist Warfare” (c. 2010) edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, that I realized that even my beloved Buddhism is vulnerable to getting intertwined with ethno-religious nationalism, racist hatred, and violence. In July of 2013 I saw the cover of TIME magazine with the headline, “The Face of Buddhist Terror,” with the image of the Burmese monk named Wirathu. I was shocked. In 2016, when I had just returned from a trip to Auschwitz, I heard of the mass killings of the Rohingya in Myanmar. I was applauded. These were Buddhists, it is our responsibility as Buddhists to respond to this. Just as it’s white Euro-American’s responsibility to take upon themselves the responsibility of dismantling racism in America and to deeply address the enslavment of Africans and the Genocide of our Native peoples. Just as it is men’s responsibility to seriously take on the dismantling patriarchy and misogyny. Just as it is American Jewish Buddhists’ responsibility to dismantle Zionism and the violence of the Israeli state. I recognize and include the white nationalist Christian Zionists as well, as they make up 60% of Zionists in this country. But as JVP has recognized, Judaism itself is being taken hostage by Israeli and American Zionists and the battle for identity and moral integrity needs to be led by the people of the perpetrator group. Dr. Gabor Maté pointed out in an interview with Tara Brach, it’s impossible not to notice how many Jews there are in American Buddhism. Do you think that has anything to do with the silence coming from these communities? All this to say that American Buddhists are also vulnerable to misusing the Dharma, to getting caught in delusions and manipulating the teachings for insidious means, to support empire and the massive destruction of human life. As Khin Mai Aung writes in reference to Myanmar, “We Must Address Religious Nationalism to Prevent Buddhism from being perverted into a force of evil.” This fits when applied to Zionist dominated Buddhism in America.

John Daido Loori, Roshi (1931-2009) writes of Victoria’s book, “Zen at War is a wake-up call for all Buddhists… that Buddhism is not immune to the kind of distortions that have been used throughout human history… to justify so-called holy war.”

This is our WW2 Japanese Zen moment, we have become them, and we are failing miserably. First the U.N. Charter and all of the Human Rights Laws were violated with impunity, then they came for our Civil Rights, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, then they came for the Dharma itself, and we did nothing. American-Israeli Zionists used the threat of “Antisemitism” as a blunt instrument to demolish democracy, to crush descent, and to bully the entire world into submission, all for the right to commit ethnic cleansing via Genocide while attacking all of its neighbors with missile attacks for homicidal territorial expansionism. They had Divine ordination, after-all, ethnic superiority, they were the am segulah, the ha-am ha-nivhar, “God’s favorite people.” The Japanese had a similar expression, that they were divinely special and had the right to rule others, Hakkō ichiu, which translates to “all the world under one roof” which implied the imperial ideology of a divine mandate to unify the world under Japanese rule. Kokutai is also a concept that means, “national body/essence,” was used to emphasize the unique spiritual origins of the Japanese people and their emperor, which underpinned the idea of their superiority.

Entanglement or enmeshment with power, with empire, and with money and patronage, both in prewar Japan and in American Zionist Buddhism must be drawn into the light and out from the shadows.

Buddhism in Japan had a shaky beginning. Introduced from Korea in the middle of the 6^th Century. The first temples were burned down by locals who were happy with their existing religions. It wasn’t until prince Shōtoku (574-621) embraced Buddhism and financed the building of temples did Buddhism start to flourish in Japan. I lived in Kyoto for the year of 1990, studying Zen at Daitokuji Temple. I visited again in 2023 and had conversations with some local temple priests that I knew from my earlier time there. Each had their own way of raising money to keep the temple going, but most of them had one or two major patrons that kept them afloat. Existence is fragile in Buddhism, and so we attune to the delicate interconnections of how we need to take care of each other, but there is also an awareness that money is power and that power has the power to eliminate you. In America, since the 1980s, Zionist McCarthyism has been the quiet hush that if you criticized Israel or showed any particular sympathy for the Palestinians, your career is over. I don’t know how that reach was so far and wide or how the care for a people who were clearly getting massacred regularly, which is called in Israel, the mowing of the lawn, and with Palestinians continuously expelled from their homes and illegally displaced, brought such backlash from what seemed to be an organization operating in the shadows. The fear-based strategy was successful for decades. This was quiet Authoritarianism for the times, and one of the standard methodologies from the fascist playbooks of history. Japanese fascism was called Shōwa Statism (Kokkashugi, aka: Tennōsei fashizumu, and Nihongata fashizumu) terms that refer to the nationalist ideology support for the empire of Japan. It combined extreme nationalism, traditional conservatism, militaristic imperialism.

We have to include in our parallel analysis with Zionism, the aspect of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. If we recognize Israel as essentially a military base for the American war machine whose sole purpose is to destabilize the entire Middle-East, then we see the corruption of the American political class, either by bullying, bribery, or blackmail, then we see the open allocation of billions of dollars to Israel which was used to buy American weaponry, in a never-ending loop, then we start to see the mechanisms. “Israel has run America’s foreign policy for the last 30 years.” (Jeffrey Sachs).

Robert Aitken, Roshi (1917-2010) writes, “Brian Victoria discloses the incredible intellectual dishonesty of Japanese Buddhists who perverted their religion…we must face this dark side of our history squarely.”

So, let’s talk about intellectual dishonesty in sanghas around the Dharma and how it’s been used to silence dissent and pervert the teachings to be a vehicle for allowing Genocide and protecting Zionist power.

Ironically, this unwillingness to admit culpability spills over, in the case of Zen, even to the Western Dharma descendants of wartime Zen masters. ‘If their master (or master’s master) was a fervent advocate of war and the mass killing it entails, what does this say about the master’s alleged “enlightenment” (or their own)? Facing a situation, how does one go about reconstructing a past that no one wishes to have reconstructed or be reminded of?’ (Brian Victoria, ‘Sawaki Kōdō, Zen in Wartime Japan, The Final Pieces of the Puzzle,’ 2015).

I think a big part of the silence from so many teachers is that they don’t want to be exposed as being a supporter of Genocide, the chances of being confronted and publicly challenged is too high. It’s hard when your brand is ‘compassion’ when you are quietly supporting the killing of 30,000 children in Gaza. It’s far easier and less of a political liability to stay silent while watching and saying to your inner group behind closed doors, let’s just see how this all plays out, or they shouldn’t have attacked us, we have the right to defend ourselves, or If they return all of the hostages and surrender this could end tomorrow. I saw one Zen teacher ‘like’ an article on Instagram that called the starvation in Gaza a hoax. I saw another Zen teacher repost an article on Facebook saying that Now is a good time to bomb Iran. As with the Japanese priests and Zen Masters of the 1940’s, it puts the depth of their understanding into question, their rank, position, credibility, and spiritual and moral authority also comes into question. In the case of the Japanese Buddhist figures who were in support of the war, we have their writings. In American Buddhism, they have been much more careful, not producing much in terms of overt political statements but the strategy this time is just to block and exhaust dissent. The vast imbalance of power only requires the oppressors to calmly wait it out, to disallow any discussions and debate of the humanitarian crimes and human rights violations. It is a power position play. Silence buys time. Time, especially at the rate of daily destruction in Gaza equals getting closer to “finishing the job.’

Thích Nhât Hanh to American-Vietnam war veterans, “You were only the finger that pulled the trigger, there were thousands of other people involved in the decision to create this war and to commit soldiers, including the members of the U.S. Congress, why hold all of the guilt and shame for yourselves.” Thây’s insight into interconnectedness and Karma and how even the smallest acts of denial, evasion, and spiritual by-pass has deep implications that result in the deaths of millions of people. Once we break into this awareness, then yes, we do realize what our Bodhisattva Vow really means, and how passive complicity is anything but neutral and passive. Looking a little closer at the word, Bodhisattva, it is comprised of two Sanskrit words, Bodhi (बोधि), meaning “awakening” or “enlightenment” and Sattva (सत्त्व), meaning “being” as pertaining to a person who has achieved, or is striving towards Bodhi, (‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) Buddhahood. Part of Buddha-mind is the awareness and embodiment of Avalokiteśvara, which translates to, Lord from above who sees the cries of the world.

Through the awareness of the interconnectedness of all of life, if you truly feel the cries of the world, there is no way to sit passively by and watch as 78,000 Palestinians civilians, 30,000 of whom are children, are eviscerated.

Brian Victoria doesn’t exclusively focus on the worst of the historical figures in Japanese Buddhism, he does call out some heroic figures that resisted, like Uchiyama Gudō, Takagi Kemmyō. Sasaki Dōgen, and Mineo Setsudō. There was also a small group of free-thinking Buddhists that formed the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkyō Bukkyō Dōmei). Similarly, it’s important to cite a few of the figures in American Buddhism that took a clear and moral stand from the beginning of the American/Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian people. I’d like to highlight, Alan Hōzan Senauke (1947-2024), Abbott of the Berkeley Zen Center and creator of the Clearview Project. Alan was a mentor of mine who never hesitated in his involvement in situations of Genocide and oppression. He helped me when I was developing a panel discussion on the Rohingya Genocide and he along with Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi created the first petition for Ceasefire in Gaza. Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, founder of Buddhist Global Relief, has been a lighthouse of clear seeing. He has written several articles imploring an end to the killings, and he has been the spiritual authority and guide for many of us. Mary Thanissara, founder of Chattanooga Insight and Sacred Mountain Sangha has written very powerful essays about the Dharma and the Palestinian Genocide. Linda Hess, scholar of Kabir at Stanford University, wrote a deeply moving article investigating her own Jewish identity and resistant to the Genocide. Vince Fakhoury Horn, creator of Buddhist Geeks podcast, Alexandra Cain has written amazing articles, Ereeni Roulakis, Erica Fugger, and Kareem Ghan who created the Palestinian Solidarity Council at Plum Village, the BIPOC/SWANA group at Plum Village who created the ARISE statement, and Majd Mayyasi, also of Plum Village, not to give the wrong impression of Plumb Village, on the whole they have been as resistant to recognizing the atrocities and speaking out as any other Buddhist communities, if not more. Also included in this list are Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad, Lama Rod Owens, Adrina DiFazio, and Maia Duerr, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Kritee Kanko, along with Mushim Patricia Ikeda at East Bay Meditation, and the gang at The Buddhist Peace Fellowship who have been doing an amazing job, and Anuradha Bhagwati of Buddhists for Justice in Palestine. It’s important to mention Mohsen Mahdawi who is the Palestinian Buddhist student from Columbia University that was illegally abducted by the Trump administration. Also, there is the international group based in Holland called, Liberation Circle, all have made very meaningful contributions to the critical discussion and resistance of the obscene obliteration and decimation of human life in Gaza through a Buddhist lens. And most recently, Ghadir Shafie, the Palestinian Buddhist, who wrote a beautiful article called All Beings Deserve to be Free. If I have anything to do with the writing of the Buddhist history of this time, these figures will be praised. It is only a partial list and I need to acknowledge that many of the BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ sangha members, including True North Insight Queer Sangha, are not directly mentioned here but need to be recognized for their passion for liberation and alternative means of resistance and support are often not represented in writing forums such as Substack. I also want to humbly acknowledge with appreciation that this paragraph was edited after critical but caring feedback of my unintentional yet clumsy omission of some of these recognitions/appreciations. This section was never supposed to be a comprehensive list, but just to highlight a few, just as Brian Victoria did in his book.

Brian Victoria also cites Ichikawa Hakugen, a Rinzai priest and scholar, who was a strong advocate of Japan’s imperial invasion of other countries, but later after the war, helped to acknowledge and document the wrong turns Buddhism took during those years. He formulated a list of twelve points that led to the support of Japanese Zen militarism. In a variation, I wondered what the twelve points would be in American Zionist Buddhism that led it astray.

1. The high number of Jewish Zionists in American Buddhism.

2. Zionist money as patrons and benefactors.

3. Zionists in key positions of power, especially in large platform teachers.

4. The cultivation of passivity and kindness, extreme conflict aversion, and a lack of critical analysis made it easy for Zionists to gaslight and manipulate sangha members and bully soft monastics.

5. Fear of retribution. Zionist McCarthyism is real and is part of the general rise of American Fascism. The cry of “antisemitism!” as the blunt instrument that would smash American democracy and any moral resistance to the ethnic cleansing and illegal land grabs in Palestine.

6. Zionism entangled with the U.S. Military Industrial Complex.

7. Jewish/Zionist domination of Buddhism and in the Middle East.

8. The weaponization of the bonding of Judaism, Zionism, and the state of Israel.

9. Hasbara, Chat GPT and the manipulation of the Dharma to misrepresent Right Speech and Right Action for the benefit of the oppressors.

10. White Privilege/White Fragility and the fear of discomfort at looking at one’s own responsibility in systems of oppression.

11. Spiritual Bypassing, false Equanimity, selective compassion, “I’m on the side of peace,” and “All wars are bad.”

12. The marriage of cowardliness and careerism.

I’d like to take a further look at #9, The Manipulation of the Dharma. As Robert Aitken, Roshi stated above, “Brian Victoria discloses the incredible intellectual dishonesty of Japanese Buddhists who perverted their religion…we must face this dark side of our history squarely.” So let’s take a look at how people have argued for repressing the moral outcry from their sanghas. “We can’t take sides.” “We can’t be divisive.” “We can’t cause harm or disharmony in the sangha.” “We can’t use polarizing speech.” “We should stay in not-knowing and bearing witness.” “It’s all just opinions of equal subjectivity.” “We can’t be judgmental.” “We can’t lay blame.” “We can’t be dualistic.” “There are no innocent parties.” “To speak critically of Israel is using harmful speech and puts my family at risk.” Also, the use of false equivalencies, like “Both sides are suffering.” “It’s complicated, both sides have been at war for centuries.” “If you are not an expert you should not speak about these things.” When pressed, they retreat back into Emptiness, like, “Nothing to do, no one to doit, all is the flow of Karma.” I listened to one Zionist Buddhist at Plum Village who wrote a faux sutra painfully twisting the Dharma to suit his protectionist agenda. At times I questioned whether they were operating on an unconscious level, making him not very good teachers nor practitioner, or whether this invented sutra was made of conscious decisions to manipulate and control others, making him a deceptive teacher and weak practitioner. Ilan Pappé has said that there are leading intellectuals in their field that you can learn something from on any other topic, but when it comes to Zionism, they become stupid and resort back to the most ridiculous propaganda statements.

The book then probes the factor of the unquestioning obedience to the emperor and Japanese nationalism. In a similar way, Jewish American Buddhists have had a very difficult time dealing with, or even seeing their own psycho-social conditioning. I found this difficulty very surprising, because as Buddhist students, our practice is to investigate our minds. We eventually come to see many of the aspects that made up our identity are really lies fabricated by the ego-mind as well as outside messaging from family and society. We come to see our own conditioning, from our own experiences and the psychological defense mechanisms, and we see the causes and conditions of social and cultural external factors. As Buddhists we become familiar with the mind-poisons, the thoughts and emotions derived from greed and fear and the delusion of separateness. This in Buddhism is called Wrong Understanding. Wrong understanding leads to Harmful Speech and Action, and aggressive and selfish behavior. But the grip of the stories of Zionism, along with the intentional gaslighting seems to have taken deep root in even the most famous Jewish Buddhist teachers of today. Unrooting the ego and breaking through to a direct experience of the interconnectedness of all of life is the point of our practice. We are also students of Causality, i.e. what is at play here? What came before this event? What were the causes and conditions, both internally and externally? These are the very basic foundations of Buddhism itself, and for so many to be missing it is shocking, even more shocking that the most well-known teachers are missing it. No fixed, separate self, (anattā/anātman) and similarly, the conditions of everything around us are also not solid and unchanging (śūnyatā), which can only lead to the relational interplay and radical interdependence and of all of life (pratītyasumutpāda). To miss this is to miss the whole thing.

So how, when we combine all of these very core understandings of the nature of reality, can it be aligned with a political ideology that is based on creating an ethno-religious Apartheid state that, inherently is violent because it necessarily has to forcibly remove, expel, execute, disposes, wrongfully incarcerate, militarily occupy and corral into, what international scholars have called, an open-air prison (Gaza). What’s more ironic and incongruous with the understanding of interconnectedness is the fact that in DNA, the Palestinian are more semitic than the Ashkenazi Jews who left 2,000 years ago and merged with European peoples, leaving any reference to the original inhabitants of the area to be extremely nominal and insubstantial. So, in actuality, they are killing and displacing more pure aspects of themselves. This kind of delusion and the violence it unleashes is intentional and manipulated. looking deeply at this is Buddhist practice. I can see that Manifest Destiny is a lie and that lie was just a cover for outright settler colonialism that led to the dehumanization and Genocide of Indigenous tribal people in North America and the theft and enslavement of African peoples for outrageous greed. Zionism and Israel is no different.

We need to look deeply into the causality of things, into the mind poisons at play. But the Jewish Buddhist students, or I should say, the Zionist students and teachers can’t seem to break the spell, can’t seem to see either the aspects of mind nor the false narratives that have been spun, even after the death toll numbers and atrocities grew to outrageous amounts. Instead, we saw them hunker down, and block and resist and manipulate to keep any moral outcry silenced. It is the failure of Buddhism in America. Like in Japan at the end of WW2, there will be an attempt to rewrite history. And like in Japan, when Brian Victoria wanted to write his book, he got threats. Israeli propaganda intentionally conflates Judaism and Zionism and the state of Israel for a reason, that of allegiance and fidelity to the state, but Buddhist practice separates all those for a reason, that is to see what is harmful Karma and to stop the intensified flow of that negative Karma.

Japanese Buddhist figures in Victoria’s book, Hayashiya and Shimakage point out, first of all, that the critical aspect of a Buddhist-sanctioned war is that “it gives life to the state.” While admitting that wars are costly in terms of both money and lives, “the most important question is the clear, steadfast continued existence of the state itself.” (Zen at War, Victoria)

American Zionist Buddhism won’t go away, at best it will just be less dominant, just like the Civil War and the KKK have never gone away in America. They are actually in power right now as Trumpism and MAGA. Jeffrey Sachs considers Benjamin Netanyahu to be one of the most dangerous man alive. He is constantly attacking the neighboring states and pushing us dangerously close to a regional nuclear war. American imperialism and Zionist fanaticism are now combined. So, where are the Buddhist voices of opposition? The official death toll in Gaza is +70,000 people, but many academics and UN Special Rapporteurs estimate that number to be closer to 680,000, that included not only direct violent deaths but indirect deaths from war-imposed starvation, lack of medical supplies, and disease.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg wrote, “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”

In Gaza, 30,000 Palestinian children have been killed. Another 25,000 have lost one or more limbs, and another 25,000 have lost one or both parents and now these children are being starved to death. Why doesn’t Rabbi Greenberg’s words apply here? For that matter, why are none of the international laws of human rights laws applicable to Israel?

To modify Craig Mokhiber’s quote, “For decades to come, scholars will study how Zionism was able to take over a peaceful and non-violent religious tradition and transform it, in one generation, into institutions that not only wouldn’t speak out against a Genocide, but demanded that it wouldn’t.” It is shocking to me that the descendants of Thích Nhât Hanh, one of the most important anti-Vietnam activists and representatives of what we now call, Socially Engaged Buddhism, are so corrupted that they refuse to allow any conversations around the wildly grotesque slaughter happening in Palestine, never-mind make any meaningful resistance to it. It’s heartbreaking to witness. Laura Hassler, daughter of Alfred Hassler, the man responsible for bringing Thích Nhât Hanh to America, wrote in an open letter to the Mahasangha of international students of Thích Nhât Hanh and pleaded for action stateing that “Gaza is today’s Vietnam.” It was buried by those in power and not widely distributed. She then submitted it to Lion’s Roar and Tricycle magazines, both refusing to publish it. Plum Village is just an example of the larger pandemic of Zionist controlled Buddhist sanghas in America, but it is especially tragic in my heart/mind because of the legacy of this important Buddhist leader and his relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and their commitment to resist colonialism, militarism, racism, and the destruction of life internationally and the uplift of those suffering under the imposed conditions of poverty. To see his Dharma legacy hijacked is painful to me.

Gabor Maté made a very powerful statement when he asked, “When it really mattered, who sided with justice, and who sided with power?” Dr. Maté called Gaza ‘The Moral issue of our times,’ and said that in each era there is a moral touch point, and where you stood on that issue showed where you stood in the world. In the 19^th Century, there was the question of freedom in Poland. In the 20^th Century, amongst other events, there was the Spanish Civil War. Where you stood on these issues told you where you stood in the world. In the 1960-70’s it was the Vietnam War. But in all these situations, as much as they concentrated on the issue of human morality and human ethics, there was something somewhat different about them in that, at least in these other wars there was a fighting chance, Gaza is just an unbridled slaughter. It is the moral issue of our time.”

The Japanese were also brutal in their conquest of foreign nations. I have to give praise and recognition to Kazuaki Tanahashi, “Kaz” is a Zen teacher, scholar, artist, and peace activist, who went to Nanking, China to make a Bearing Witness retreat for the war crimes committed there. These war atrocities were documented in the book, “The Rape of Nanking, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War 2” by Iris Chang. It is also known as “The Nanjing Massacre,” c.1937, where upwards of 250,000 people were killed. In 2007 Kaz organized an international conference called “Remembering Nanking” to make apology and atonement, to bear witness to where the mind-poisons go if not restrained or countered in any way. Kaz also got warning from the Zen leadership in Japan not to make this recognition, that it would be an embarrassment to Japan, but he did it anyway, as did Brian Victoria with his book. We need this kind of courage today.

The IDF soldiers and illegal settlers are in a similarly confused state, heart poisoned, and cruel beyond imagination. I will take a similar moment of recognition to the Israeli citizens who are in the Palestinian villages trying to protect them, trying to stand between the Palestinian families and the violent militias, soldiers, and settlers. I will recall Brian Victoria’s dedication at the start of the book that read, “to the victims of religious-inspired fanaticism everywhere.’ And when Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel are one inseparable thing, the State of Israel becomes a religion itself which demands unconditional fanaticism. Japan terrorized the entire Pacific rim and the war crimes were horrific. Israel’s regional aggression has witnessed missile attacks into several of its neighboring countries including, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Tunisia, and has occupied and made land grabs in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. Brazen and belligerent acts of aggression in clear violation of International Law. Without America’s military, the largest military in the world, our political cover, and seemingly endless funding for military weaponry and shared technology, Israel wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. The United States is in full partnership with Israel in these crimes.

To reiterate, this essay isn’t about drawing exacting parallels of Japan’s monastic order and the American Buddhist traditions of today, but returning to Craig Mokhiber’s post, after a social tragedy like a war or a Genocide, people want to know, “How did it happen?” How did we get so sucked up into something that this grotesque violence was allowed to occur? For me, the question is, how did a peaceful, nonviolent spiritual tradition like Buddhism get taken over by Zionists that not only allowed a horrific Genocide to happen, but demanded that no outspoken response of condemnation to it either. In Brian Victoria’s book, he is grappling with the same question. This is our WW2 moment in American Buddhism, and historians will be discussing what were the factors that were in place that created the truly heartbreaking and epic fail of this generation. Brian starts his book with the big questions of, ‘How did this happen?’ and finishes with, ‘Was it even Buddhism?’ So, how, even for the most accomplished teachers of the Boomer generation, even with +50 years of practice, were they not able to see past or break through the conditioning of their cultural upbringing. It’s truly a Kōan.

Daiun Harada Roshi (1871-1961) argued that there was nothing strange about Japan being at war, that when looking deeply, all of “the entire universe is at war.” That in the natural world seeds compete with other seeds for existence, and that the human world is no different, individuals and groups struggle against each other for dominance and conquer one another. He even put this to the Buddha conquering the demons in his mind, so, “without plunging into the war arena, it is totally impossible to know the Buddha Dharma.” I just can’t unsee the unsophisticated blind spots of these great Zen masters sometimes. What Harada Roshi is implying is a sort of ‘natural selection’ a domination by the strongest tribe psychology, which in my mind is antithetical to true understanding of the Dharma. The obsessive warring is a direct outcome of delusions of separateness. It is the direct expression of the Mind Poisons, of greed, of hatred, and of delusion that if we don’t kill and dominate others, they will kill and dominate us. The Dharma grew from the mud of this delusion, and I don’t think the Buddha’s teachings gave relevance to Might is Right perception and I also don’t think he was asking his students to quietly stand by while mass atrocities were occurring thinking all is just the natural flow of life, after all, what are the Precepts and the 8-Fold Path asking of us? They are asking for our critical discernment and ethical behavior in navigating skillfully through this field of Hungry Ghosts. The delusion of amassing military power as the only way of security was also at play in Japan as it is today in America-Israel. Rinzai Zen priest, Imai Fukuzan (aka Imakita Kosen) was one of the main proponents of “Warrior Zen.” Complicating this is the fact that military feudal lords were the temple’s original patrons so there was a pressure to confirm the wishes of that money source. They even had depictions of Kannon, (Avalokiteśvara, the Buddha of Compassion), as a military figure. Today’s Israel and WW2 Japan share this delusion of military means toward security in nationalistic militarism. Even after the war, some of the well-known Zen masters of the time still refused to denounce and retract their support for Japan’s military campaign and the carnage and horrors it brought to the entire Pacific region. We know that Siddhartha Gautama left the Sakya tribe, which was the warrior class (Kshatriya Varna), where his father wanted him to be a great General, but he left that all behind, illustrating that military conquest is not the way to Liberation (Vimutti).

“In the postwar years there have only been four declarations addressing war responsibility or complicity by the leaders of traditional Buddhist sects in Japan’s war effort. None of the statements were issued until more than 40 years after the end of the war… Most leading Japanese Buddhist sects remain silent to this day. None of the branches of the Rinzai Zen sect, for example, has formally addressed this crucial issue, which institutional Japanese Buddhism is only beginning to face.” (Victoria, “Zen at War”).

It’s hard for me to think that American Zionist Buddhism will ever get to the point of acknowledgment and atonement even though we preform the ceremony of Futsatsu (Atonement) every full-moon. It will become harder and harder as the months and years pass and the number of dead and dismembered and starved had grown larger and larger without ever evoking a moral outcry from leading American Buddhist figures. They will continue to sit on the teacher’s chair and expound on loving compassion and the interconnectedness of all of life, but it will ring hollow.

Brian Victoria added the extra chapter, “Was It Buddhism?” to his book to address how a Buddhist culture can get so far off track. In doing this he had to take an overview of Buddhism itself. For me, the question is the similar, how, in only one generation, could the basic teaching of this non-violent religion be infiltrated and controlled by Zionists who would refuse to allow any meaning resistance to an active Genocide that America was funding, arming, and giving political cover for? How did the loyalty to a foreign state become so entrenched with Jewish American Buddhists that the very tenants of international law, human rights laws, then the erosion of civil rights and the collapse of American democracy, and then the violation of the Dharma itself in order to maintain protection for a Jewish-Supremacist state that is based on violent dispossession, Apartheid, and military aggression and territorial expansionism into all of its neighboring countries? How, how is it that the most celebrated Buddhist teachers of the Boomer generation were willing to violate the Dharma to allow this Genocide? For me it was a fracture point, a fracture of the belief that the Dharma, that basic human decency was more important than a mental construct of an ethno-religious identity, one that is easily interrogated and found to be false?

To reiterate, this article is not trying to draw exacting overlays to Japan during WW2, America/Israel is not a Buddhist country, and we are not in a direct war. But what I am saying is that American Buddhism is at the moral juncture of either passively supporting a Genocide that we are enabling, or we are resisting it. History will want to know what happened that this beautiful spiritual practice was hollowed out to protect Zionist power.

Brian Victoria continues in “Was It Buddhism?” with a quick overview, Buddha Shakyamuni’s Social Consciousness:

“The basic teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni are well-known, so suffice it to say, there is nothing in either the Four Noble Truths or the Holy Eightfold Path to suggest support for the use of violence, let alone warfare. On the contrary, two admonitions in the Holy Eightfold Path- “right action” and “right livelihood” – clearly indicate the very opposite. Right action promotes moral, honorable, and peaceful conduct. It admonishes the believer to abstain from destroying life, from stealing, from dishonest dealings, and from illegitimate sexual intercourse. Instead, the believer should help others lead peaceful and honorable lives. Right livelihood means that one should abstain from making one’s living through a profession that brings harm to others, such as selling arms and lethal weapons, providing intoxicating drink or poisons, or soldiering, killing animals, or cheating. Instead, one should live in a way that does not cause harm nor do injustices to others. Together with right speech, right action, and right livelihood, form the basis for Buddhist ethical conduct (Sīla). Underlying all Buddhist ethical conduct is a broad conception of universal love and compassion for all living beings, both human and non-human. Thus, based on these fundamental teachings of Shakyamuni, Buddhist adherents could in theory no more participate in that form of mass human slaughter known as “war” than they could purposely take the life of another. Yet ideals and practice often parted ways.”

So, if right action promotes moral, honorable, and peaceful conduct. It admonishes the believer to abstain from destroying life (list of massacres, intentional starvation, ethnic cleansing, and Genocide), from stealing (theft of homes and land), from dishonest dealings (negotiations without representation), and from illegitimate sexual intercourse (raping prisoners, sometimes to death).

Buddhist sutras address war through the Buddha’s direct intervention in conflicts like the Rohini River dispute, recorded in the Dhammapada and Samyutta Nikaya (Paṭhama Rohiṇī Sutta), where he physically halted his clan from war, emphasizing shared humanity and aversion to violence, while also discussing war’s negative karma in texts like the Anguttara Nikaya (e.g., AN 4.233) and addressing warrior ethics in Mahayana texts like the Satyaparivarta Sutra, which allows for compassionate, protective force. In key Sutras:

Dhammapada (Verses 197-199): Recounts the Buddha confronting his warring relatives (Shakyas & Koliyas) over river water, teaching that “Victory breeds enmity, the defeated one sleeps badly” and that all fear death, so one should not harm others.

Samyutta Nikaya (Paṭhama Rohiṇī Sutta) (SN 3.13): Details the same event, showing the Buddha’s physical presence between armies, questioning their purpose and highlighting shared kinship.

Anguttara Nikaya (AN) (e.g., AN 4.233): Discusses the mixed karmic outcomes of war, stating even a ruler’s mixed deeds lead to mixed destinies (heavenly, human, or lower realms).

Mahaparinirvana Sutra (Mahayana): Addresses the role of the warrior (bodhisattva), allowing for compassionate, protective violence as a last resort to save others, a concept echoed in the Satyaparivarta Sutra.

Vassakāra Sutta/Mahaparinibbana Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya): Shows the Buddha advising King Ajātasattu on the “Seven Conditions of Warfare” to prevent the conquest of the Vajjis, though the minister later used this wisdom for war.

Buddha’s Core Message on War was Non-Violence: Emphasizes non-violence (ahimsa) and empathy, urging individuals to see themselves in others. Self-Conquest: The true victory is over oneself, not others. Compassion: Even in conflict, the Mahayana tradition allows for action rooted in compassion to protect the innocent, a radical departure from absolute pacifism.

“Two further aspects of Shakyamuni’s teachings are worthy of mention. First, he was concerned about what we would today call social justice. For example, in the Pali Cakkavattisihanada Sutta of the Digh Nikaya (no.26), Shakyamuni clearly identified poverty as the cause of violence and other social ills.” This sutta/sutra is addressing the causes and conditions of imposed suffering and the eventual conflict that these conditions cause. The Israeli propaganda machine wants all of history to start on October 7^th, 2023, exactly because it doesn’t want to bring into the conversation the utterly brutal dispossession, murder, wrongful incarceration and total occupation of the Palestinians for the last 80 years before October 7^th. Causality is a primary teaching of the Buddha. Inquiry into the False Views and the mind-poisons that produce them are also primary teachings of the Buddha. As Norman Finkelstein has said, “What did you think would happen if you kept people in a concentration camp for their entire lives?” In the Assalayana Sutta (MN 93), the Buddha debates a Brahmin and dismantles his notions of inherent superiority, and thereby obliterating the validity of the caste system, concluding that the primary cause of suffering in the lower castes was a direct result of the cruelty and selfishness of the ruling castes. This is obviously true in Palestine. Zionism is in direct opposition to the Dharma in that Apartheid is the opposite of non-duality and interconnectedness, that domination and dispossession is a direct violation of how harmony, fairness, and interbeing are expressed. The Karma and causality of Israel’s brutality will only create hatred, violence, insecurity and true antisemitism for Israelis and Jews globally. And none of this could have happened without American imperialism as its co-conspirator. The Dharma stands in direct opposition to coercive militarism, to oppressive authoritarianism, to heartless brutalization, and the complete subjugation, ethnic cleansing, and aggressive land theft of the Zionist state.

Chris Hedges has warned that by letting Israel get away with violating every international law, it will have repercussions throughout the globe. And as we’ve seen by the Trump administration’s illegal invasion of Venezuela, any despot with military dominance can freely invade sovereign countries and pilfer its resources with impunity. We hereby regress to the rules of empire and conquest of antiquity. Gaza was rightfully noted as the key moment where empire was exposed and when these wars come spilling into your safe suburban neighborhoods, and our children start dying in unjust invasions, you will suddenly know what Engaged Buddhism is and how the resistance was so important. Part of our commitment to non-violence is to do our best to stop others from doing violence.

“We will do our best to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may make difficulties for us or threaten our safety.” -Thích Nhât Hanh (from the 9^th Mindfulness Training).

The question is of the refusal to speak out in condemnation of empire’s violence, especially if it benefits your particular ethno-religious upbringing, does this demand for silence of yourself and your sangha, qualify as a form of support for Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinian people remains open, but it’s one that should be put under great scrutiny. I will quote Elie Wiesel here in full awareness that he was a rabid Zionist for two reasons. One to show the hypocrisy and double standards when dealing with any previous truth or established international law needs an asterisk after it that says, *except for Israel. The other is to show that silence is itself a political act.

“We must take sides, neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentors, never the tormented.” -Elie Wiesel

Brian Victoria asks, “Thus, the question must be asked, even though it cannot be answered in this book – How is the Zen school to be restored and reconnect to its Buddhist roots? Until this question is satisfactorily answered and acted upon, Zen’s claim to be an authentic expression of the Buddha Dharma must remain in doubt.”

I for one, have no doubt that American Zionist Buddhism has lost its way. Unlike the examples of Japanese Zen priests during WW2 who made public statements of support for Japanese supremacy and the invasion of other countries, American Buddhists understand that, even the most passionate supporters of Israel among them, that this Genocide is unjustifiable, and so to preserve their reputations, they hide behind their demand for silence. What is amazing to me is that the top Buddhist leaders of this generation couldn’t penetrate the brainwashing of a political ideology that cemented their inherent identities with a violent state based on ethnic and religious domination and supremacy and obliteration of another people. Both in the practice of deconstructing the self in order to find the source of the ego, and in relation to the harmful Karma that is being created by such violence. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but in this circumstance, it is the betrayal of the Dharma itself. As after WW2, the world asked, where were the religious leaders during all of this? In this case they cannot say that they didn’t know. So where are you?