Brian Victoria
Brian Andre Victoria (born 1939) is an American educator, Doctor of Philosophy, writer and Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect. He has published numerous works on the relationship of religion to violence, with a focus on the relationship between Buddhism and Japanese militarism around World War II. Education. 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. Vietnam era. Victoria was a war protester during the Vietnam War. Affiliation. 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. He has also been Yehan Numata Distinguished Visiting Professor, Buddhist Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa 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. Since 2013, he a Fellow at 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. Zen at War. 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. The criticisms have focused on Victoria's portrayals of D. T. Suzuki, Kōdō Sawaki, and Tsunesaburō Makiguchi. 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: