Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated in 1961 from Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. He trained at the Sōtō Zen monastery of Eihei-ji and holds a M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the Sōtō Zen–affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University.[2]
Vietnam era
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Victoria has taught Japanese language and culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Creighton University, and Bucknell University in the United States and lectured in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland. He was a Senior Lecturer in the Centre in Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.[4] He has also been Yehan Numata Distinguished Visiting Professor, Buddhist Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu.
From 2005 to 2013, he was a professor of Japanese Studies and director of the Antioch Education Abroad “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH.[2] Since 2013, he is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.[5]
First published in 1997, Zen at War is based on the work of Japanese scholars and Victoria's own studies of original Japanese documents. It describes the influence of state policy on Japanese Buddhism before and during WWII and conversely the influence of Zen philosophy on the Japanese military. The book has been hailed as a major contribution to a previously unexamined aspect of Japanese religious history, and criticized for imposing anachronistic values when evaluating the words and deeds of the time.
Criticisms
There are a number of criticisms directed at Victoria's methodology in critiquing a number of individuals. Most prominently in Zen at War, but also in subsequent articles.[6] The criticisms have focused on Victoria's portrayals of D. T. Suzuki, Kōdō Sawaki, and Tsunesaburō Makiguchi.[7][8][9][10][11]
Henry Schliff of the University of Colorado, in reviewing the essay compilation Buddhist Warfare, cites the methodology of Victoria's essay, “A Buddhological Critique of 'Soldier-Zen' in Wartime Japan", as the one major flaw in the book:
Rather this essay struck me as incongruous with every other essay in the text in terms of methodology. To use Victoria’s own words, he has “left the realm of ‘objective scholarship’ to pursue a partisan agenda”. True to this claim, the bulk of Victoria’s article traces a trajectory of progressively essentialist language that by implication would invalidate not only the heterodoxical views expressed by Zen militarists during World War II but also nullifies many orthodox systems of Mahāyānist philosophy that developed in Northern India, Nepal, and Tibet...Victoria’s presentation speaks rather as a categorical indictment of the whole of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Analogically, this would be like a Dominican priest arguing that all Catholics regardless of their historical, cultural, or doctrinal orientation had fundamentally misunderstood the concept of the Holy Spirit. The methodological error appears in Victoria’s argument when he attempts to use militant Zen in the context of wartime Japan to illustrate what he sees as pervasive doctrinal errors throughout the history of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This reformist approach noticeably contrasts with the other essays in Buddhist Warfare, which consistently maintains a high level of academic rigor regardless of any subjective biases.[12]
Works
Books
外人であり、禅坊主であり… [A foreigner, and a Zen priest] (in Japanese). San-ichi Shobo. 1971. ASINB000J9HRNK.
Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2020. ISBN 978-1538131664.
Articles
"When God(s) and Buddhas Go to War." In War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So. 2003. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pages 91–118. ISBN978-0742523913
^Tsujimura, Shinobu (3 September 2004). "Zen War Stories, by Brian Daizen Victoria". Social Science Japan Journal. 7 (2): 286–289. doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyh032.
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