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Zen and Marxism (Zen to Marukushizumu 禅とマルキシズム) is a 1956 essay by Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦. This working English translation follows the text reproduced in volume 2 of Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū 市川白弦著作集 (1993), pp. 293–312.

Japanese original: 禅とマルキシズム

Contents

I. Before Ideology

II. Zen as Ideology (Part One)

III. Zen as Ideology (Part Two)

IV. Human Self-Alienation and Its Recovery

Translation

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I. Before Ideology

Feuerbach reduces the essence of religion to the essence of humanity. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual person. (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”)

A disciple named Huichao (Echō 慧超) once asked Qingliang Wenyi (Seiryō Bun'eki 清涼文益), a Zen monk of the late Tang and Five Dynasties period: “I, Huichao, ask you: What is Buddha?” The master replied, “You are Huichao.” (Blue Cliff Record, Hekiganroku 碧巌録, Case 7.)

This exchange recalls Feuerbach (1804–1872), who reduced the essence of religion to humanity. Feuerbach believed that, through religion, human beings take a roundabout path back to their own essence. In this instance, however, Huichao had not placed Buddha outside himself in the form of what is commonly called self-alienation. There is a certain confidence in his declaration, “I, Huichao, ask you.” Nor was it upon being told, “You are Huichao,” that he became conscious of a path by which the essence of religion might be reduced to humanity. Such a question had never arisen in the first place. Nor did the master say anything like, “The essence of Buddha is your own essence”—

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—there was nothing of that sort in his reply. One can find plenty of such statements in books. Huichao and Qingliang are not inhabiting a world of mere meanings. Hence the expression, “A phrase before words.” There is also the expression “pouring ink into a black lacquer bucket” (Shudenshō 種電鈔). Such a thing cannot be grasped by the tentacles of objectifying logic. Dōgen describes Qingliang’s response as direct and unhesitating. “You are Huichao”: heaven and earth are of a single piece. At the very point where meaning shines forth, this exchange calls for a direct apprehension of the whole activity of selflessness, beyond the foundations of meaning.

There was a monastery administrator named Ze under Qingliang. Since he had never participated in Zen practice with the master, Qingliang asked why. Ze replied that he had previously awakened under Master Qinglin. Invited to explain, he reported asking, “What is Buddha?” and receiving the answer, “The fire-boy comes seeking fire” (heitei dōji rai guhō 丙丁童子来求火). Qingliang told him that he was mistaken and asked him to explain further. Ze reasoned that the cyclical signs hei and tei belong to fire: for a child of fire to seek fire means that, though he is originally Buddha, he has been seeking Buddha outside himself. The seeker himself, he concluded, is Buddha. Qingliang again said that he was mistaken. Dissatisfied, Ze packed up and left. Qingliang told the disciples that it was a pity: if Ze returned he might be saved, but otherwise there was little hope. As Ze travelled, he reflected that so esteemed a master would not have deceived him lightly and resolved to return for instruction. Qingliang invited him to ask the question again. “What is Buddha?” Ze asked. Qingliang replied with the very same words: “The fire-boy comes seeking fire!” At those words, Ze attained great enlightenment. This is not merely a hermeneutic exchange in which faith is interpreted as human self-alienation, the love of God as the love of humanity’s own essence, or theology as anthropology.

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Ascending the teaching hall, the master said: “Upon this lump of red flesh there is a true person of no rank, who constantly enters and departs through the faces of all of you. Those who have not yet verified this, look! Look!” A monk came forward and asked, “What is this true person of no rank?” The master descended from his meditation seat, seized the monk, and demanded, “Speak! Speak!” The monk hesitated. The master pushed him away, saying, “What a dried stick of shit this true person of no rank is!” He then returned to his quarters. (Record of Linji, Rinzairoku 臨済録.)

This might appear to regard human nature as something “inherent in each individual person,” but that is not actually the case. “Outside the mind there is no dharma, and within, too, nothing can be apprehended.” A humanism that simply affirms the human being as something inherent within the individual is not Zen. When asked about the true person's original face, the Tang monk Xiangyan Zhixian (Kyōgen Chikan 香厳智閑) replied, “The eyes inside a monkey.” This is a creation that takes place where the very ground upon which humanity, a central concept of modern thought, is established has been emptied. “On the peak that penetrates the mystery, there is no human being. Outside the mind there is no dharma; before one's eyes, green mountains fill the view.” If the “true person of no rank” were merely an abstraction inherent in the individual, that vigorous activity and freedom could never have emerged—the freedom that caused even Huangbo, Linji's master, to exclaim, “You madman! Have you come here to stroke the tiger's whiskers?” In the Zen life expressed through such phrases as “Be the master wherever you stand” and “Seek true understanding and go freely throughout the world,” there is little basis for Marx's characterisation of religion as an illusory sun revolving around human beings until they begin to revolve around themselves, as the halo surrounding a vale of tears, or as the sigh of the oppressed creature. Marx continues the statement quoted at the beginning of this essay by writing that, in its reality, the human essence is the ensemble of social relations. Marxism does not recognise, alongside the human essence conceived as an abstraction and the human essence understood in its social reality—or, more precisely, at a level that transcends both—the “person” (hito 人) that constitutes Zen's fundamental experience.

A monk named Ding arrived and asked about the essential meaning of the Buddha-Dharma. The master came down from his seat and struck him; when Ding bowed—

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—he suddenly attained great enlightenment. (Rinzairoku 臨済録.)

It is clear that an awakening of this kind is not an “ideology” understood as part of a superstructure conditioned by the material circumstances of social life—that is, by the economic structure of a particular historical period, which constitutes its actual foundation. Around the middle of the Tang dynasty, there lived the Zen master Yaoshan Weiyan (Yakusan Igen 薬山惟儼), near Lake Dongting. Since he rarely gave sermons, the monastery administrator urged him: “Everyone has long been hoping to hear your teaching. Please give a sermon.” The master replied, “In that case, ring the bell to summon everyone.” When the bell sounded and the assembly gathered, Yaoshan ascended the teaching seat. He remained silent for a while, then descended and returned to his quarters. Astonished, the administrator hurried after him. “Master, I thought you had agreed to my request. Why did you say nothing?” Yaoshan replied, “There are masters of the scriptures and masters of the treatises. Why should it be surprising that I have not preached the Dharma?” (Book of Serenity, Shōyōroku 従容録, Case 7.) Dōgen commented, “Before any of you reached the Dharma hall, you had already received thirty blows.”

A monk asked the master in the teaching hall, “What is the essential meaning of the Buddha-Dharma?” The master raised his fly-whisk. The monk shouted; the master struck him. Another monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of the Buddha-Dharma?” Again the master raised his fly-whisk. The monk shouted; the master shouted in return. The monk hesitated; the master struck him. (Record of Linji, Rinzairoku 臨済録.)

In such an encounter, every ideology resembles a snowflake falling into a white-hot furnace. “Recognise the person who plays with light and shadow.” That is to say, grasp the subject who forms ideology. As the ancients said, “The moment you describe it as resembling something, you miss the mark.” Simply look within yourself. What else could there be? Yet there is no end to what may be said. The subject that endlessly rejects ideology is also the subject that endlessly produces ideology.

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II. Zen as Ideology (Part One)

The only way in which human beings can recover their humanity, their essential being, is through “the fundamental overcoming of all religious representations and a resolute, rightful return—not to God, but to humanity themselves.” (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England)

Zen realises the fundamental overcoming of all religious representations and this resolute, rightful return—not to God but to humanity itself—not in the form of the proletariat struggling to overcome human self-alienation, that is, poverty and enslavement, or in the form of proletarian humanism (although I think it would be one-sided to say that it cannot also take these forms), but in the form of kyakka shōko 脚下照顧, looking beneath one’s own feet—that is, transcending humanity at its very foundation.

The master instructed the assembly: “I do not delight in hearing even the single word ‘Buddha.’” (Record of Zhaozhou, Jōshūroku 趙州録)

“If you seek Buddha, you will be seized by the Buddha-demon. […] Look instead to the person who exercises mastery over circumstances; this is the profound meaning of all buddhas.” (Record of Linji, Rinzairoku 臨済録)

Feuerbach “begins from the fact of religious self-alienation, that is, the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular world.” (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”)

“The human world was made neither by gods nor by demons. It was made by ordinary people living just down the street—”

“Recognise the person who plays with light and shadow. This is the source of all buddhas. Everywhere, practitioners of the Way, is the place to which you return.” (Rinzairoku 臨済録)

For a Zen practitioner, heaven and the world beyond are like leaves used to quiet a crying child, or a mirage (kagerō カゲロウ). Instead, if one apprehends the “person” who chases the mirage, this actual world itself becomes the real world, worthy of living in.

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—ordinary people. Even if the world they have made is hard to live in, there is no other country to which we can move. If there were, it would be a country of inhuman beings, and that country would surely be even harder to live in than the human world. (Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura 草枕)

“You who come here from every direction are all intent on seeking Buddha, seeking the Dharma, seeking liberation, and seeking to escape the three realms. Fools! If you leave the three realms, where do you propose to go?” (Rinzairoku 臨済録)

Religion has been called an “inverted consciousness of the world” (Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”). But where could such an “inversion” be found in the world expressed in Su Dongpo’s lines, “Having arrived and returned, there is nothing extraordinary: Mount Lu is mist and rain; the Zhejiang River is the tide”? Lenin wrote in a letter to Gorky that the helplessness of the exploited in their struggle against the exploiters inevitably leads to belief in a better life in the hereafter. Yet in a society likewise marked by class exploitation, Zen consciously rejected belief in another world. The duplication of the world through a religious reflection of reality, whereby “the real foundation rises above itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm,” not only failed to occur in this instance within the same medieval status society: it was actively rejected.

“The religious reflection of the real world can disappear only when the practical relations of everyday life present themselves to people as transparent, rational relations with one another and with nature. The form of the social life-process—that is, the process of material production—casts off its mystical veil only when it becomes the product of freely associated human beings, subject to their conscious, planned control.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, part 1, chapter 1, section 4)

Yet in a world where the practical relationships of everyday life have not come to disclose to everyone transparent, rational relations among human beings and with nature—in other words, in a medieval society that had not liberated all human beings from self-alienation or brought all the means of production into common ownership and planned use—

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—this religious reflection was nevertheless extensively forestalled by Zen practitioners. At least in this respect, one may say that Zen did not possess the character of an opium of the people.

III. Zen as Ideology (Part Two)

Zen as ideology becomes a social problem not primarily in its metaphysical aspects but in its contact with the actual everyday lives of the people. The question is what attitude Zen practitioners, as embodiments of Zen—or Zen institutions—adopt in their words and actions, grounded in their views of the world and of life, concerning human relationships and the principles governing how one should conduct oneself.

“Distinguish the limits of your station and know your nature. […] The willow is green; the flower is red.” (Suzuki Shōsan, Mōanjō 盲安杖.)

“The subtlety of morality begins in that which has neither sound nor scent and culminates in the three hundred rules of propriety and the three thousand forms of decorum. At their culmination, these return to what has neither sound nor scent. […] This is called the mutual presence of light and darkness.” (Imakita Kōsen, Zenkai ichiran 禅海一瀾.)

“Even if you serve a bad master and have nowhere to escape, do not blame the master. Consider it the karmic cause of your own deeds in a previous existence. […] Many suffer morning and evening throughout their lives through illness, blindness, or destitution. Whose fault is such suffering? It is entirely one’s own. […] Let go of everything and enter the path of loyalty and filial piety.” (Mōanjō 盲安杖.)

“The Buddhist Way lies beneath each person’s feet. There is nothing for it but to forget oneself and become wholly one with the thing at hand. ‘In the land of Japan, where the way of lord and subject shines clearly, may it remain unmoved for ten thousand generations’: this is a poem by the Meiji emperor. Take it deeply to heart. There is no Zen apart from loyalty and filial piety.” (Iida Tōin, Kaian kokugo teishōroku 槐安国語提唱録.)

Insofar as supporting and reinforcing the ethical relationships of feudal status society arose voluntarily from a Zen foundation, Zen practitioners—

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—would naturally encourage active conduct along these lines.

Absent-minded Zen is out of the question. One must sit in meditation with complete concentration, feeling as though Mount Fuji were rising straight into the sky above the Eastern Sea—or, to go further, as though the entire earth were one's meditation cushion and one stood alone between heaven and earth. One need only sit in this spirit. What is the purpose of seated meditation? It is to embody the unsurpassed Way, attain great and thorough enlightenment, cultivate the power of concentration, and acquire the freedom to act wherever one finds oneself. The unsurpassed Way is the great Way of Vimalakīrti; great enlightenment means awakening to that Way; and acquiring freedom of action wherever one finds oneself means that Japanese people should abide and act as Japanese people. (Harada Sogaku, Nihon seishin to Daijō Zen 日本精神と大乗禅.)

If the goal of national education is to die for the sovereign and to devote oneself selflessly to his service, that goal cannot be fully realised unless every imperial subject, through study and training in their respective sphere of work, strives to embody this wondrous activity free from contrivance. (Itō Kōan, Takuan oshō to kyōiku 沢庵和尚と教育.)

There is a saying that every tree is known by its fruit. The essence of Zen, which transcends conventional society and ideology, has borne precisely this kind of fruit through the ideology of ordinary mind.

Once religion has taken shape, it always contains traditional elements; and tradition, it goes without saying, constitutes a powerful conservative force within the realm of ideology. (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.)

There is a view that whatever is done in the Zen state of no-mind is always fresh and new in substance, even when it appears from the outside to repeat the same action. This is expressed in the saying, “Each time it is raised, it is new.” There is truth in this understanding. Yet herein lies the fundamental possibility that creative Zen may become habitual, conventional, and conservative. Even established customs, when one enters into them and acts accordingly, have their own distinctive appeal; this becomes an attraction in itself. The principle that tradition must be inherited through creativity was forgotten. Rather than carrying forward something living in a living form, people attempted to inherit it in a dead form. Within the realm of ideology, it is only natural that such conservatism should come to serve class domination, uncritically and of its own accord.

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The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas. In other words, the class that constitutes the dominant material power in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual power. The class that controls the means of material production also controls the means of intellectual production; consequently, the ideas of those who lack access to the means of intellectual production are, in general, subordinated to that class. (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.)

Perhaps it would be reading too much into things to suggest that the imperialist project of world domination, whose supposed “ethical” summit was the ideal of hakkō ichiu 八紘一宇 (“eight corners of the world under one roof”), found its religious reflection in the determination to sit in meditation with complete concentration, using the entire earth as one's meditation cushion. In a political system that united religious rites and government, national defence and warfare could be clothed in religious forms. Under such circumstances, it was far from uncommon for people to experience religious guilt if they could not completely surrender their private interests and devote their lives to submission before the solemn authority of the state. There were those who devoted considerable thought to the emperor's “character of nothingness,” to the profound significance of the one-emperor-and-all-subjects system as an embodiment of “one is many,” and to the moral spirit of the “holy war.”

It is said that ours is a generation whose feelings were worn away by war until we became incapable of crying. Perhaps that is true. Yet when I think of the emperor and of the many people who died for him, I am ashamed to admit that my voice trembles involuntarily. When I drink with a veteran pilot who barely escaped death and now lives peacefully as a salaried employee, I sometimes find myself unable to sleep that night. The faces of dead comrades appear before my eyes, making sleep even more impossible. (Murakami Hyōe, “Senchūha wa kō kangaeru” 戦中派はこう考える.)

To live is a joy and a hope. It is also suffering and disappointment. There are various ways of responding to suffering and disappointment, but what is sought as a lasting and fundamental response is a way of life that enables one to face even the worst circumstances of human existence with equanimity.

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In such circumstances, there is one path that may be followed by those who do not believe in a transcendent absolute or a world beyond this one. It is a way of living in which one abandons the standpoint of clinging firmly to particular desires, hopes, or obligations and striving relentlessly to fulfil them. Instead, one accepts each situation as it presents itself and becomes completely one with it. Like colourless dew that appears green upon a willow and red upon a flower, or a mirror that reflects the morning in the morning and the night at night, one neither rejects what comes nor pursues what departs. Wherever one lives becomes home; in sadness, one makes sadness one's master, and in loneliness, loneliness becomes one's master. It is an attitude of living in a cosmic affirmation—a universal “Yes.”

“When one becomes wholly one with the thing itself and forgets oneself, one understands that everyone is of one piece with heaven and earth. What more could one desire? To desire is always to lack something and to be tormented. The popular verse ‘Looking upward, how many things lie beyond one’s reach’ recognises the error of the desire to look above one’s station. ‘Put on your straw hat and live according to your own heart’ recognises the abundance of one’s own lot and the possibility of dwelling in it peacefully.” (Iida Tōin, previously cited.)

Actual society is a world of distinctions based on status and class. To entangle love and hatred in this world of distinctions, intensifying consciousness of the individual ego, can only increase dissatisfaction and agitation. Hence the proposal to accept distinctions as distinctions, without rejecting them or becoming engulfed in them. In this way, the troubled mind may subside and one may experience a different breeze even amid suffering. [The final figurative expression in the Japanese requires further verification.]

“To ignore distinctions and make mountains and rivers, noble and lowly, all one would amount to a denial of cause and effect; the splendour of the world would disappear and it would become desolate. What is needed is the correct within the partial—that is, equality amid distinctions. If one falls into attachment to any single position, one fails. Originally, these are all waves upon water. […] Keep the mind like water and leave it to circumstances whether it takes a square or round form.” (Iida Tōin, previously cited; a clause in the source quotation remains uncertain.)

In this way there emerged a philosophy of noncontention and accommodation, expressed in such sayings as “Give rise to the mind without abiding anywhere” (Diamond Sūtra, Kongōkyō 金剛経); “When not a single thought arises, the myriad things are without fault” (Faith in Mind, Shinjinmei 信心銘); and “The highest goodness is like water; precisely because it does not contend, it is without fault” (Daodejing, Rōshi Dōtokukyō 老子道徳経).

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Zen, having rejected the order of the world beyond, opened a path toward accepting directly the order of this world. Rather than earthly status determining the status of the soul in heaven, the order of nature, viewed from a religious and metaphysical perspective, came to sanctify the order of human society. Or, more precisely, the order of human society discovered its own religious and metaphysical reflection in the order of nature and thereby sanctified itself. In this way, a cosmology emerged that provided the underlying structure for what might be called Asian tolerance—or Asian peace of mind.

“First: Harmony is to be valued, and the absence of contentiousness is to be made fundamental. […] Third: When you receive an imperial command, obey it reverently. The ruler is heaven, and the ministers are earth. Heaven covers and earth supports. Thus the four seasons proceed in proper order, and the myriad energies circulate freely. If earth should attempt to cover heaven, destruction would necessarily follow. Therefore, what the ruler commands, the ministers obey; where those above lead, those below follow. Consequently, when receiving an imperial command, obey it reverently. Failure to do so will bring ruin upon oneself.” (Seventeen-Article Constitution, Jūshichijō kenpō 十七条憲法.)

The direction taken by young men departing for the battlefield, who struggled to resolve the problem of life and death through devotion to the emperor and the willingness to leave their bodies upon the grass or beneath the waters, followed an inclination established in the distant past.

There is another way of approaching life: the life of detached insight. This involves adopting a standpoint concerned with the ultimate meaning or highest value of human existence, comprehensively contemplating and critically assessing the fundamental character and tendencies of historical reality, and living one's life in accordance with that understanding. Those called philosophers and sages are practitioners of such a life. To the extent that people attempt to examine life comprehensively and fundamentally, and to live according to that insight, they must inevitably adopt, to some degree, a position of detachment. Amid the feverish everyday existence driven relentlessly by time, it is the wisdom of the accomplished person that opens a refreshing perspective upon life. The wisdom of great affirmation, which deepens our appreciation of living and purifies suffering, and the wisdom of detached insight are two aspects of the profound worldview developed in the East.

Yet the path of detached insight almost invariably ends in observing the realities of the world from a position above them. Society—

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—social and political evils, and the practical effort to correct them and realise a better world, are regarded with the same detachment. The result is a way of protecting one’s own life without dirtying one’s hands. This does not mean simply allowing society’s contradictions and irrationalities to stand as good. Rather, the goals and plans intended to remedy them are deemed inadequate, and even action aimed at change is seen as tainted by worldly attachment and therefore in need of fundamental purification. The masses’ gathering and use of wisdom and energy to build a free and peaceful world is certainly not nonsense, and it undoubtedly has worldly value. Yet such action is held unworthy of anyone genuinely devoted to the Way: it is judged a product of deluded attachment, an activity stained by defilements. What must be upheld is the thoroughness and purity of theory and practice. This immovable conviction is the detached perspective of the accomplished person. By combining a subjective rejection of social evil with an objective acceptance of it, one may serve the exploitative structures of political power while safeguarding the dignity and tranquillity of one’s own existence. Here is what Ichikawa calls kanzen shumi 完全趣味, invoking Lukács’s description of an abandonment of action that is “lofty in appearance but cowardly in reality.” [The rendering of 完全趣味 and the Lukács reference require source verification.]

We have examined philosophies of both active and passive cooperation with political power. These two positions, however, are not necessarily distinct. Depending on changes in social circumstances, one may readily give rise to the other.

“Religious sentiment is itself a social product.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.)

The worldview derived from the Book of Changes (Ekikyō 易経), which for so long informed the consciousness and conduct of Zen practitioners, was a broadly moral cosmology that understood the order of nature and the order of human society through common principles. It was probably shaped, to a greater or lesser extent, by the so-called Asiatic stagnation grounded in the Asiatic mode of production. Leaving further consideration of this dimension for another occasion, let us examine the individual social relationships of Zen practitioners.

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The position occupied by an individual Zen practitioner within the domestic and international structures of power of their age; their proximity and relationship to the centres of power; and the social circles they inhabit in connection with those circumstances—all these determine the form of their life. That form of life, in turn, constrains their sensibilities, morality, political orientation, and other characteristics. A distinctive feature of ideology is precisely that this structure of relationships, correspondences, and constraints is not fully and transparently recognised. Consequently, judgements and actions that appear entirely autonomous to Zen practitioners themselves are, in reality, generally conditioned by the network of social relationships in which they are situated. Differences of opinion that supposedly ought to be resolved through discussion frequently prove extraordinarily difficult to overcome because the parties involved belong to different networks or systems of social relations. These structural differences often condition the differences in their reasoning. Changing one's way of thinking may therefore require dismantling one's existing social relationships and reorganising them along different lines. Yet doing so may threaten to destroy one's established way of life. A partly unconscious anxiety about this possibility, together with the inertia of everyday existence, determines and hardens people's ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting.

IV. Human Self-Alienation and Its Recovery

“In its reality, the human essence is the ensemble of social relations.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.)

We live in a society of competitive private ownership which, having freed us as individuals from the restraints of feudal society, has cast us out into a world where we live protected and simultaneously bound by countless restrictions constructed to maintain and strengthen this social system. Under individual “freedom” and responsibility, we are thrown into competition for the limited means of happiness. It is as if, during a five-minute stop, we were trying to board an impossibly overcrowded train together with Rikidōzan’s fellow wrestlers—

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—and men with infantile paralysis, all jostling toward the same entrance, the same window. If the proper entrance is blocked, one must slip in through a window, or even climb onto the roof and cling to the doors. Were we to take care of our appearance, respect etiquette, and observe the virtue of modesty, the departure time would come and every train would leave us behind. Such is the transportation hell in which we seem to live. For another person to board is for me to be left behind; for me to board is for another to be left behind. While we consider how this contradiction might rationally be resolved, the departure bell rings; the plans of those waiting for us at our destination collapse. The misfortune does not end with us alone. Nearly everyone crowded here shares these circumstances.

Day after day, from morning until night, there is an endless succession of examinations and tests. It is not merely youth that is excluded; humanity itself may be driven out. For in order to pass these fierce examinations, one cannot afford to concern oneself with friendship. A classmate's failure may become the very source of one's own good fortune. One longs to gain an advantage over the others. Before an examination, students pretend not to know things they actually know and refuse to help their friends. If a classmate misses the train on examination day, or happens to fall ill, that may prove advantageous. One student confessed, “I wished my friends would die.” Is this not literally hell? It is terrifying. What would happen if a young person who had developed such a terrifying disposition entered the University of Tokyo, became an even more frightening demon during company entrance examinations, and then carried these habits into society, eventually coming to wish misfortune upon others? (Honda Akira, Gendai no seishun 現代の青春.)

I once heard about the difficulties faced by a homeroom teacher responsible for advising students seeking employment. In the classroom, students had learned that the Constitution must be defended without compromise. Yet when taking an employment examination, they were advised not to say so too explicitly. Whatever political party they actually supported, if asked, they would be better off naming the conservative party. The teacher was troubled by having to offer such contradictory advice. The same can be said of my own—

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—experience. In a society where a school principal could be dismissed for misreading the Imperial Rescript at a ceremony, and a teacher on night duty could commit suicide after a portrait of the emperor was destroyed in a fire, I did not utter a single word of protest. Not only that: although I knew the war was an unclean war, I cooperated with the so-called “holy war.” Far from observing the precept against false speech, I manipulated the language of distorted scholarship. I could not even dream of possessing the freedom expressed in the Record of Linji: “When you wish to go, go; when you wish to sit, sit” (Rinzairoku 臨済録). Reports indicate, however, that similar forms of falsehood existed in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, particularly in connection with the cult of Stalin and the rewriting of history. The American writer Mark Twain remarked, with considerable irony, that God had bestowed upon his countrymen three incomparable gifts: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the good sense never to exercise either freedom. But the “God” who bestowed that good sense was presumably the machinery of state power. The police become the limits of what one is permitted to recognise.

Writing about theft, the author Ōta Yōko 大田洋子 recalled the wartime food shortages:

I was not particularly resourceful, and in Tokyo I went hungry every day, sometimes weeping at mealtimes. I would obtain small portions of food that other people had bought on the black market. Sometimes, taking advantage of the rain, I would crouch beside a path through a field, conceal my face behind an umbrella, and steal several bunches of spinach. Even then, it was said that people who stole crops from farmers' fields could be subjected to corporal punishment. But I was living near the daikon fields of Nerima, and on rainy nights I would pull large radishes from the ground. By that time I had ceased to be a respectable human being. I was quite unconcerned at the thought of being detained, since life in a cell would probably be little different from life outside.

A young man suffering from illness gave stark expression to the pain and ugliness of living.

Family — Iwamoto Toshio 岩本敏夫

If only this child were not here—

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If only Father and Mother weren't here—

Father as father, Mother as mother, Child as child,

Each thinking this way,

Now

Only suffocating hatred

In this same house

They live together.

Such mutual hostility would probably lose most of the conditions necessary for its emergence if a comprehensive system of social security were established and the necessities of life were as abundant as air. This would be an instance of the Buddhist principle that, when the necessary conditions are absent, a phenomenon cannot arise (en ketsu fushō 縁欠不生). The scarcity of nature—and especially the scarcity produced by society—awakens and intensifies human self-centredness, exclusiveness, distrust, and competition. There is an expression about diverting water toward one's own rice field. In earlier times, farmers living on opposite banks of a river might face one another with suspicion and hostility during a drought. Yet once the rain came, they would abandon their confrontation and depart. Such scenes could formerly be observed in rural Japan. Hobbes, a proponent of the view that human nature is evil, argued that people need only examine themselves to recognise that human beings are not naturally sociable animals. At night, we lock our doors; even when at home, we lock our valuables in safes. Locking the door reveals what we think of our fellow citizens, while locking the safe reveals what we think of our own children and servants. But it is doubtful whether such conditions have existed in every age.

“When the Great Way prevailed, all under heaven was held in common. The worthy and capable were selected, trust was cultivated, and harmonious relations maintained. Thus people did not regard only their own parents as parents, nor only their own children as children. The elderly had support in their final years, adults had useful employment, children had the opportunity to grow, and widowers, widows, orphans, the childless, the disabled, and the sick all received care. […] Thus conspiracies did not arise, nor did theft—

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—or disorder arose. People left their outer doors open instead of closing them. This was called the Great Community.” (Book of Rites, Raiki 礼記, “Liyun,” chapter 9.)

Perhaps this represents a recollection of primitive communism. Why does what Feuerbach calls “human self-alienation”—the projection of one's own essence outside oneself—arise in the first place? It seems that competitive society based on private ownership contains within its structure some of the conditions that explain this phenomenon. Human beings under modern capitalism resemble commuters trapped in an endless transportation nightmare, or farmers who have become accustomed to guarding their vegetables at night behind barbed-wire fences against thieves. Certainly, it remains necessary to urge people who have long lived under such conditions to trust one another, refrain from pushing others aside, and abandon attachment to the self. Yet to imagine that such exhortations alone can be effective is utopian.

We have already seen that Zen's fundamental experience transcends ideology, but that when it takes concrete form as ideology, it has tended (a) to affirm the existing circumstances in which individuals find themselves and (b) to encourage service to society's structures of power. Nevertheless, accepting one's present circumstances without resistance is not necessarily blameworthy. Such acceptance can be connected with some of the deepest and most beautiful wisdom of human existence. It is for this reason that Ozaki Hotsumi's Zen-inspired contemplation, expressed in the words “Love is like a falling star,” touches the human heart. “When calamity comes, it is best to encounter calamity. When the time to die arrives, it is best to die. This is the wonderful method of escaping calamity.” (Ryōkan 良寛.) In this spirit of detached acceptance, Ozaki created and experienced the depth and beauty of human life. The assertion that what is needed is not a philosophy of interpretation but a philosophy of transformation seems to me to be the statement of Marx the revolutionary rather than Marx the human being.

Yet human life is not an uninterrupted series of the worst conceivable circumstances, with not even a millimetre of room for change. Finding a way to live peacefully amid what truly cannot be altered remains important for the latitude and well-being of everyday life. But to—

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—live solely by this attitude, and recommend it to everyone in every circumstance, even where conditions can be changed, is properly called a deviation. To go further and produce a Zen apologetic that actively serves a mystified system of exploitation is a dreadful deviation. I believe this results from grasping Zen’s fundamental subject, “nothingness,” solely in its passive and accommodating aspect: like air or water, it has no shape but takes every shape, no colour but assumes every colour. Thinking increasingly through such comparisons, one eventually lets the metaphors govern thought, leaving aside the creative and formative power of nothingness to refuse, criticise, and resist. Capitalist society, which takes material profit-seeking as the motive force of social organisation and turns everything—even human beings—into commodities and material or instrumental human resources, is fundamentally incompatible with the radically subjective spirit of Zen. Yet Zen practitioners failed to develop the scientific understanding needed for the fundamental transformation of this system and the construction of society. They consequently confused the distinctions and equalities found in natural phenomena, in the natural sciences, in hierarchical social arrangements, and in different personal circumstances and forms of peace of mind, under the standpoint of “nonduality” between matter and mind, nature and humanity. Falling into false equality and false discrimination, they ultimately produced an unprincipled, benighted Zen that served fascism and cooperated with war. As the Inscription on Faith in Mind (Shinjinmei 信心銘) says, “If there is the slightest difference, heaven and earth are far apart.”

Zen practice means rejecting every idol, including the cult of individual personality; abandoning regrets about the past and anxieties about the future; and devoting oneself wholeheartedly to shaping life in the present. That life must contribute, directly or indirectly, to the realisation of a genuinely human society in which “each lives for all, and all live for each.” Zen practice consists in penetrating the emptiness of attachment to self through the creation of such a life. In this sense, Zen's fundamental subject constitutes the underlying ground of human living—not only the everyday activities expressed in the saying “When you encounter tea, drink tea; when you encounter rice, eat rice”—

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—but also the underlying ground of struggles against war and for independence and liberation. The Zen saying about cultivating one’s own field and preparing and eating one’s rice (Book of Serenity, Shōyōroku 従容録, Case 21) concerns a life directly joined to society’s material foundation. To devote oneself wholly to such productive life is also to form oneself through ideas aimed at transforming the ideological superstructure and the social order.

In Zen monasteries, collective activity directed toward the environment and its transformation is called samu 作務, or work practice. What overcomes the unhappy combination of pure intentions with impoverished or even contradictory results is the practical attitude expressed in such work. This is not a poetic attitude but a prosaic one: a lucid, constructive spirit that breaks through subjective absorption and intoxication through rational, experimental engagement with its objects. When such a spirit acts upon society and political institutions as historically constituted environments, seeking to cultivate and reconstruct them, the world toward which it ultimately strives is, in accordance with Zen's fundamental qualities of selflessness, nonpossession, and autonomy, a borderless world society organised through free communism.

“Once the truth of the world beyond has vanished, it is history’s task to establish the truth of this world. After the sacred form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, the first task of philosophy in the service of history is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven thereby becomes the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology the criticism of politics.” (Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.”)

In my view, to establish the truth of this world after the disappearance of the truth of the beyond is to overcome religious faith in another world and to realise a society of free communism, in which all people are emancipated from exploitation and oppression as well as from the ego of exclusive self-attachment. In the direct and indirect activities of everyday life, this requires that one fully participate in sitting when sitting, in walking when walking, and in each task when engaged in it, as Tōrei Enji 東嶺円慈 teaches in Shūmon mujintō ron 宗門無尽灯論—relinquishing regret and anxious anticipation and emptying attachment to self. The fact that even Stalin—

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—could apparently not truly become “his own master” (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) is neither so harmless nor so trivial that it can be dismissed as merely one of the “birthmarks” of the old social order. Put differently, we must find a way for Ozaki Hotsumi’s Zen equanimity to permeate the activity of establishing a Buddha land in the sense just described. What is called “practice amid activity” (dōchū no kufū 動中の工夫), superior to “practice amid stillness” (jōchū no kufū 静中の工夫)—seated meditation in a quiet place—must mean diligence in precisely this kind of life. It entails arousing the aspiration for enlightenment (bodaishin 菩提心) to establish a Buddha land and recognising that one must “shoulder sentient beings as a heavy burden,” while oneself being among those sentient beings. Since Zen has already rejected “the sacred form of human self-alienation,” what remains is to recognise and overcome its profane forms through an investigation of one’s own fundamental concern (koji kyūmei 己事究明) that empties egoism.

“To leave flowers to the wind and birds to their proper time is also the meritorious work of giving. […] To set out boats and provide bridges is likewise the perfection of giving. If one truly studies giving, both accepting the body and relinquishing the body are acts of giving. Cultivating fields and engaging in productive occupations are, from the outset, nothing other than giving.” (Dōgen, “Bodaisatta shishōbō” 菩提薩埵四摂法)

The Zen master Yongming Qian (Eimei Sen 永明潜) addressed the assembly: “The Buddha-Dharma is plainly manifest. Why do you not understand it? If you wish to understand the Buddha-Dharma, ask Zhang San and Li Si. If you wish to understand worldly affairs, inquire in the monasteries of the ancient buddhas.” (*Zenmon kōan taisei* 禅門公案大成)The Zen master Yongming Qian addressed the assembly: “The Buddha-Dharma is plainly manifest. Why do you fail to understand it? If you want to understand the Buddha-Dharma, inquire of Zhang San and Li Si [ordinary people]. If you want to understand worldly affairs, inquire in the monasteries of the ancient buddhas.” (Zenmon kōan taisei 禅門公案大成.)

What unity of practice and theory must we develop in order to establish a modern way of learning Zen from the working masses, and learning the principles of society from Zen communities? I welcome instruction from all quarters.

Source Note

This translation is based on Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, “Zen to Marukushizumu” 禅とマルキシズム (1956), as reproduced in Ichikawa Hakugen chosakushū 市川白弦著作集, vol. 2, Zen to gendai shisō 禅と現代思想 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1993), 293–312. The original publication venue has not been established in this edition. The Japanese transcription and this translation are working scholarly texts; historical quotations and some character-level readings remain subject to further collation. Original printed paragraph and page divisions have been retained where recoverable.

How to Cite this Text

Ichikawa Hakugen (1956). “Zen and Marxism” (Zen to Marukushizumu 禅とマルキシズム). Translated and annotated by James Mark Shields. The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 12 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/IH56ZTM-T.