XPost: alt.philosophy.zen, alt.society.liberalism, alt.society.kindness   
   XPost: talk.politics.theory   
   From: hollywoodlee@gmail.com   
      
   NYC XYZ wrote:   
   > Hollywood Lee wrote:   
   >>   
   >> Gak.  It may be visceral.  It may be unmediated by conceptual thinking.   
   >>   But "truth"?  Pure Bushido bullshit.   
   >   
   >   
   > So you think Bushido is a corruption of Zen?   
      
   You would have to ask a zennie.  From my perspective Bushido is to   
   Buddhism what Rapture theology is to the Sermon on the Mount.   
   Corruption hardly describes the foul stench.   
      
      
   >   
   > I've long wondered how Zen can be applied to something like murder.   
      
   Banish all dualisms you don't like, such as good/evil, life/death and   
   substitute in a strict code of obedience and mindless response and you   
   got one mean killin machine, brutha.   
      
      
      
      
   > Did samurai let themselves off the hook by rationalizing that it wasn't   
   > personal?   
      
   "In D. T. Suzuki's highly influential and praised Zen and Japanese   
   Culture, published in 1959 by Princeton University, he wrote:   
      
        The sword is generally associated with killing, and most of us   
   wonder how it can come into connection with Zen, which is a school of   
   Buddhism teaching the gospel of love and mercy. The fact is that the art   
   of swordsmanship distinguishes between the sword that kills and the   
   sword that gives life. The one that is used by a technician cannot go   
   any further than killing, for he never appeals to the sword unless he   
   intends to kill. The case is altogether different with the one who is   
   compelled to lift the sword. For it is really not he but the sword   
   itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do harm to anybody,   
   but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the   
   sword performs automatically its function of justice, with is the   
   function of mercy…the swordsman turns into an artist of the first grade,   
   engaged in producing a work of genuine originality."   
      
   F'n bullshit for the stupid and easily led.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)