Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

To counter the influence of the British games ethic, officials continually
devised new ways to more closely identify martial arts with symbols of
imperial ideology, especially the religious symbols of State Shintô. In the
1920s, police began inspecting martial art training halls to ensure that they
were equipped with Shintô altars (kamidana [49]) enshrining officially designated
Shintô deities. In 1931 the roof over the ring for professional sumô
wrestling matches was redesigned to resemble Shintô architecture. In 1936
the Ministry of Education issued an order requiring Shintô altars in all public
school martial art training halls. New rules of martial art etiquette appeared
that required students to begin and to end each workout by paying
obeisance to the altars. By the 1930s, martial art training halls had commonly
become known as dôjô [50], a word that previously had denoted religious
chapels. Finally, many Tokugawa-period martial art treatises (including
formerly secret texts such as Gorin no sho [51], 1643; Ittôsai sensei
kenpô sho [52], 1664; and Kenpô Seikun sensei sôden [53], 1686) were
published in popular editions (e.g., Hayakawa et al. 1915). Esoteric vocabulary
that originally referred to specific physical techniques was borrowed
from these texts and given new generic psychological interpretations
to explain the correct mental attitude during practice. These religious symbols
and psychological vocabulary helped to disguise the newness of the
new elements and gave the entire ideological enterprise an aura of antiquity
in a manner similar to what Eric Hobsbawm has termed “the reinvention
of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
During this same period when martial arts were acquiring religious
connotations, Japanese Zen Buddhism was introduced to the West as a secularized
“pure experience” that, while not itself dependent on religious rituals
or dogmas, nonetheless underlies all religious feeling and all aspects of
Japanese culture. Most of all, Zen was identified with bushidô and with
Japanese intrepidity in the face of death. D. T. Suzuki [54] (1870–1966), the
person most responsible for promoting this psychological interpretation of
Zen, was not a Zen priest but a university-trained intellectual who spent
eleven years from 1897 to 1908 in the United States studying the “Science of
Religion” advocated by a German émigré named Paul Carus (1852–1919).
Writing in English for a Western audience, Suzuki developed a new interpretation
of Zen that combined the notion of pure experience first discussed
by William James (1842–1910) with the irrational intuition and feeling that
the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had identified
as the essence of religion. Suzuki’s numerous writings illustrate these Western
ideas by recounting episodes in the hagiographies of Chinese and Japanese
Zen monks and, in so doing, present Zen simultaneously as being a universal
human experience and, paradoxically, as Japan’s unique cultural
heritage (see Sharf 1995; James 1912; Schleiermacher 1988, 102).
482 Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan