More zenned against than zenning?

In religious ethics today, we came up against one of the toughest chapters in Buddhist history - the symbiosis of samurai warrior culture and Zen in medieval Japan (and later). Our source was Winston Kings's Zen and the Way of the Sword, which provides a relatively value-neutral account of the historic synergies of Zen and samurai life, then blows its top over some claims from D. T. Suzuki's famous Zen and Japanese Culture (1959). Here are two Suzuki quotes worth reading and gasping over:

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 only by a [mere] technician cannot go any further than killing. The case is altogether different with the one who is compelled to lift the sword. For it is not he but the sword itself that does the killing. He has 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, which is the function of mercy. This is the kind of sword Christ is said to have brought among us. (145, qtd. 186)

A man who has thoroughly mastered art does not use the sword, and the opponent kills himself; when a man uses the sword he makes it serve to give life to others. (166, qtd. 185)

King can hardly contain his indignation at this, which seems to him a sort of lobotomization of conscience. As you can imagine, we had quite a time discussing these passages, too! I didn't tell students about the ways in which Suzuki, the most important writer for the understanding of Zen in America for decades, is now seen by scholars. (I was lucky enough to be at the panel in 1991 - at my first AAR! - where Robert H. Sharf fired the first salvo in the Suzuki/Kyoto School wars.) Instead I pointed out ways in which Suzuki's account of Zen - even in passages like these - is continuous with things we've discussed from other Buddhist traditions (like dana in Theravada), and insisted we need to face the difficult question: is samurai Zen a bastardization and travesty of Buddhism or the elaboration of a potential there all along?

It's not that I think (as King worries) that Zen is a moral void, compatible with almost any form of life - indeed I had students read Zen Action/Zen Person, Thomas Kasulis' sympathetic account of Zen ethics, before we read King. And it's not that Christianity's getting a free ride in my class - it's divine command ethics next. But this week's texts reminded me of Ch'an master Lin Chi's advice:

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

In that case at least, the victim would be killing himself, and gladly.