Resumo de Buddha''s Fighting Soldiers

Buddha with fangs and claws is an unexpected image, if
only because religions so often express themselves as benign. Actually,
however, they are also belligerent and can often be detected flexing
their muscles. Among such examples are Japan''s monastic warriors,
Buddha''s soldiers, fighting their way through the Heian (794-1185) and
Kamakura (1185-1333) periods.

We see them in many an early text and scroll. In "The
Heike Story" they descend from their heights on Mount. Hiei and fall
upon Kiyomizu temple below, and we hear the Emperor Go-Shirakawa''s
lament that the three things beyond his control are the Kamo River, the
roll of the dice, and "the mountain clerics."

Their ferocity was often such that, in the words of
the author of this interestingly deconstructive study of these military
groups: "One might even argue that religious beliefs have as often been
used to condone violence as to condemn it."

Indeed, he continues: "Buddhism in Japan seems no
different from Christianity in Europe . . . or Islam in Minor Asia,
neither do Japanese monastic warriors appear any different from
European crusaders or Spanish Moors."

This is the import of his argument -- that the
military monks were soldiers, just as were the samurai, but that their
true role has been obscured and in some part constructed.

There are reasons for this. Among these is the modern
notion that religion and politics should be separate, though this was
by no means the case in earlier ages. At the same time there is the
notion that Buddhism was going through a degenerate age during which it
failed to rein in the bellicose.

Among the results is that those who armed themselves
and fought in the name of temples must be relegated to historical
obscurity. Sources have been lost or are rarely consulted, and scholars
and historians have made a number of sweeping generalizations,
concerning just who these "holy" samurai were. As though to conceal a
lack of knowledge, a neologism was fabricated in the 14th century and
the temple roughneck was subsumed into the image of the sohei, the holy warrior.

"In short," says the author, "the view of monastic
warriors as something fundamentally different from other warriors is
based more on the constructs of the observer than on the societal
circumstances in which those figures actually lived."

An example, fully outlined in the text, is the most
famous of the sohei, the military warrior Saito Musashibo Benkei
(1155-1189). It was he who taught the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune
(1159-1189) how to use his sword. He then followed Yoshitsune in battle
after battle. His exemplary devotion has won him high popular regard
and he lives on in a variety of products, including brands of sake,
Benkei dolls, manga, and the names of pachinko parlors.

He is, at the same time, a construct, molded by the
social pressures of later generations. Not only are the sohei to be
denigrated as "evil" monks and used by politicians right up to the
Meiji Era (1857-1912), but one of their number is to be rehabilitated
by his display of military loyalty. It is perhaps this double standard
that has ensured Benkei''s useful popularity.

Interesting as this account is, it will mostly appeal
to other scholars (who will doubtless be more attentive after having
read it) and to students of history. Students of criticism, among whom
I number myself, will find its major interest to be in its
demonstration of the techniques of deconstruction -- a critique of
those concepts and hierarchies that are essential to traditional
criteria but which, nevertheless, achieve their status only by
repressing other elements that are then "forgotten."

In giving us this class act demonstration of the
deconstructive theories of Jacques Derrida et al., Mikael Adolphson
here offers a picture of the destruction of the Buddhist mercenaries,
the erection of the white-washeand the rise of a purely
cardboard Benkei.

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