I had only just sent off the last pages of this article on war, when the terrible news arrived of a fresh iniquity committed against the Russian people by those men who, crazed by power and lacking any sense of responsibility, have assumed the right to dispose of them.  Again those coarse and servile slaves of slaves – the various generals – decked out in a variety of motley garments, have (either to distinguish themselves, or to spite one another, or to earn the right to add another little star, decoration, or ribbon, to their ridiculous and ostentatious dress, or from sheer stupidity and carelessness) destroyed thousands of those honorable, kindly, laborious working men who provide them with food, and destroyed them with terrible sufferings.  Once again this iniquity not only fails to make its perpetrators reflect or repent, but they only tell us how still more men and still more families (both Russian and Japanese) may be killed, mutilated, or ruined with the greatest speed.

More than this, those guilty of these evil deeds, wishing to prepare people for still more of them, do not confess (what is evident to everybody) that, even from their patriotic military point of view, the Russians have suffered a shameful defeat.  Instead, they even try to instill into frivolous minds a belief that those unfortunate Russian peasants have performed a heroic feat, since those who could not run away were killed and those who did run away remained alive.  Those peasants were led into a trap like cattle into a slaughterhouse, and several thousand were killed and maimed simply because one general did not understand what another general had said.

The drowning of many peaceful Japanese by one of those terrible, immoral, cruel men, extolled as generals and admirals, is also described as a great and valorous achievement that must gladden the hearts of the Russian people.  And in all the papers this horrible incitement to murder appears:

“Let the two thousand Russians killed on the Yalu, together with the maimed Retvizán, her sister ships, and our lost torpedo-boats, teach our cruisers what devastating destruction they must wreak upon the shores of base Japan.  She has sent her soldiers to shed Russian blood and no mercy must be shown her.  It is impossible to sentimentalize now; it would be sinful.  We must fight!  We must deal such heavy blows that their memory will freeze the treacherous hearts of the Japanese.  Now is the time for our cruisers to put to sea and reduce their towns to ashes, and to rush like a terrible calamity along their beautiful shores.”

“There has been enough of sentimentality!”  So the frightful work goes on: looting, violence, murder, hypocrisy, theft, and, above all, the most fearful deceit and the perversion of both the Christian and the Buddhist religions.

The Czar, the man chiefly responsible, continues to hold reviews of his troops, thanks them, rewards and encourages them, and issues an edict calling up the reserves.  Again and again his loyal subjects humbly lay their possessions and their lives at the feet of their adored monarch, but these are only words.  In reality, desiring to distinguish themselves before each other in actual deeds, they tear fathers and breadwinners away from orphaned families and prepare them for slaughter.  And the worse the position of the Russians becomes, the more unconscionably do the journalists lie, converting shameful defeats into victories, conscious that no one will contradict them, and quietly gathering in money from subscriptions and the sales of their papers.  The more money and labor is spent on the war, the more do all the chiefs and contractors steal, knowing that no one will expose them since everyone is doing the same.  The military, trained for murder, and having spent decades in a school of brutality, coarseness, and idleness, rejoices (poor fellows) because, besides getting an increase in pay, the casualties among their superiors create vacancies for them.  Christian ministers continue to incite men to the greatest of crimes, hypocritically calling upon God to help in the work of war; and instead of condemning the pastor who, cross in hand and at the very scene of the crime, encourages men to murder, they justify and acclaim him. 

The same thing goes on in Japan.  The benighted Japanese fling themselves into murder with even greater ardor because of their victories, imitating all that is worst in Europe.  The Mikado also holds reviews and bestows rewards.  Different generals boast themselves, imagining that they have acquired Western culture by having learned to kill.  Their poor unfortunate laboring people, torn from their useful work and from their families, groan as ours do.  Their journalists tell lies and rejoice at an increased circulation.  And probably (for where murder is acclaimed as heroism, every vice is bound to flourish) all the commanders and contractors make money.  Nor do the Japanese theologians and religious teachers lag behind our European ones.  As their military men are up to date in the technique of armaments, so are their theologians up to date in the technique of deception and hypocrisy – not merely tolerating but also justifying murder, which Buddha forbade.

The learned Buddhist Soyen-Shaku, who rules over eight hundred monasteries, explains that though Buddha forbade manslaughter, he also said that he could not be at peace until all beings are united in the infinitely loving heart of all things, and that to bring the discordant into harmony it is necessary to fight and kill people.[8]

It is as though the Christian and the Buddhist teachings of the oneness of the human spirit, the brotherhood of man, love, compassion, and the inviolability of human life, had never existed.  Men already enlightened by the truth, both Japanese and Russian, fly at one another like wild beasts and worse than wild beasts, with the sole desire to destroy as many lives as possible.  Thousands of unfortunates already groan and writhe in cruel suffering and die in agony in Japanese and Russian field hospitals, asking themselves in perplexity why this fearful thing was done to them.  Other thousands are rotting in the earth or on the earth, or floating in the sea, bloated and decomposing.  And tens of thousands of fathers, mothers, wives, and children weep for the breadwinners who have perished so uselessly.

But all this is not enough, and more and more fresh victims are continually being prepared.  The chief concern of the Russian organizers of the slaughter is that the supply of cannon-fodder (three thousand men a day doomed to destruction) should not cease for a single day.  The Japanese are similarly preoccupied.  The locusts are being driven into the river incessantly, so that the later comers may pass over the bodies of the drowned…

When will it end?  When will the deceived people come to themselves and say, “Well, go yourselves, you heartless and godless czars, mikados, ministers, metropolitans, abbots, generals, editors, and contractors, or whatever you are called.  Go yourselves and face the shells and bullets!  We don’t want to go, and won’t go.  Leave us in peace to plough, sow, build, and feed you, our parasites!”  To say that would be so natural now in Russia, amid the weeping and wailing of hundreds of thousands of mothers, wives, and children from whom their breadwinners – the so-called reservists – are being taken.  Those same reservists are, for the most part, able to read.  They know what the Far East is.  And they know that the war is carried on not for anything at all necessary for the Russian people, but on account of dealings in some alien “leased land” (as they call it) where it seemed advantageous to some contractors to build a railway and engage in other affairs for profit.  They also know, or can know, that they will be killed like sheep in a slaughter-house, for the Japanese have the newest and most perfect instruments of murder and we have not, for the Russian authorities who are sending our people to death did not think in time of procuring such weapons as the Japanese have.  Knowing all this, it would be so natural to say, “Go yourselves, you who started this affair, all of you to whom the war seems necessary and who justify it!  You go and expose yourselves to the Japanese bullets and torpedoes.  We will no longer go, because it is not only unnecessary for us, but we cannot understand why it should be necessary for anyone.”

But they do not say this.  They go, and will go, and cannot but go, as long as they fear that which destroys the body, and not that which destroys both body and soul.

“Whether they will kill or mutilate us in some Chinnampos or whatever they are called, where we are being driven, is uncertain,” they argue.  “Perhaps we may get away alive, and even with rewards and glory, like those sailors who are being so feted all over Russia just now because the Japanese bombs and bullets hit someone else instead of them.  But if we refuse, we shall certainly be put in prison, starved, beaten, and exiled to the province of Yakútsk, or perhaps even killed immediately.” And so they go with despair in their hearts, leaving their wives and children and their rational lives.

Yesterday I met a reservist accompanied by his mother and his wife.  They were all three riding in a cart.  He was rather tipsy, and his wife’s face was swollen with weeping.  He addressed me:

“Good-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!  I’m off to the Far East.”

“What!  Are you going to fight?”

“Well, someone has to fight!”

“No one should fight!”

He considered.  “But what can I do?  Where can I escape to?”

I saw that he understood me and had understood that the affair on which he was being sent was a bad one.

“Where can I escape to?”  It is the precise expression of the mental condition that is rendered in the official and journalistic world by the words: “For the Faith, the Czar, and the Fatherland!”  Those who go to suffering and death, abandoning their hungry families, say what they feel: “Where can I escape to?”  Those who sit in safety in their luxurious palaces say that all Russians are ready to lay down their lives for their adored monarch, and for the glory and greatness of Russia.

Yesterday I received two letters, one after the other, from a peasant I know.  This was the first:

Dear Lëv Nikoláevich:

Well, today I have received the official announcement summoning me to serve, and tomorrow I must present myself at the place appointed.  That is all, and then to the Far East to meet Japanese bullets.

I will not tell you of my own and my family’s grief, for you will not fail to understand all the horror of my position and of war.  You have painfully realized that long ago and understand it all.  I have all the time wished to come to see you and talk with you.  I wrote you a long letter in which I described the torments of my soul, but I had not had time to make a clean copy of it when I received this summons.  What is my wife to do now with our four children?  Of course you, being an old man, cannot do anything for my family yourself, but you might ask some one of your friends to visit them, just for the sake of a walk.  If my wife finds herself unable to bear the agony of her helplessness with all the children, and makes up her mind to go to you for help and advice, I beg you earnestly to receive her and console her.  Though she does not know you personally, she believes in you, and that means a great deal.

I cannot resist the summons, but I say beforehand that not one Japanese family shall be orphaned by me.  O God, how dreadful all this is!  How grievous and painful it is to abandon all that one lives by and with which one is concerned.

The second letter was this:

Kind Lëv Nikoláevich:

Only one day of actual service has passed, but I have already lived through an eternity of most desperate torments.  From eight o’clock in the morning until nine in the evening we were crowded and pushed about in the barrack yard like a herd of cattle.  The comedy of a medical examination was repeated three times, and all who reported themselves ill did not receive even ten minutes’ attention before they were marked “fit.”  When we, two thousand fit men, were driven from the military commander’s at the barracks, a crowd of relations, mothers, and wives with children in their arms, stretched out for nearly a kilometer along the road.  You should have seen how they clung to their sons and husbands and fathers, and heard how desperately they wailed as they did so!  Usually I behave with restraint and can control my feelings, but I could not hold out this time, and I too wept!  (In journalistic language this is expressed by, “The patriotic emotion displayed was immense.”)  How can one measure the wholesale woe that is now spreading over almost a third of the world?  And we, we are now food for cannon, which in the near future will be offered up in sacrifice to a God of revenge and horror…

I am quite unable to maintain my inner balance.  Oh, how I hate myself for this double-mindedness, which prevents my serving one Lord and God…

That man does not yet believe sufficiently that what destroys the body is not terrible, but that is terrible which destroys both body and soul.  And so he cannot refuse the service.  But yet, while leaving his family he promises in advance that not one Japanese family shall be orphaned through him.  He believes in the chief law of God, the law of all religions: to do to others as you wish them to do to you.  And in our time there are not thousands but millions of men who more or less consciously recognize that law – not Christians only, but Buddhists, Muslims, Confucians, and Brahmins as well.

True heroes really exist – not those who are now feted because, having wished to kill others, they themselves escaped – but true heroes who are now confined in prisons and in the province of Yakútsk for having categorically refused to enter the ranks of the murderers, and have preferred martyrdom to the renunciation of the law of Christ.  There are also men like the one who wrote to me, and who will go but will not kill.  And even the majority who go without thinking, or trying not to think, of what they are doing, feel in the depths of their souls that they are doing wrong to obey the authorities, who tear men from their work and their families and send them needlessly to slaughter – a thing repugnant to their souls and to their faith.  They only go because they are so entangled on all sides that they exclaim, “Where can I escape to?”

And those who remain at home not only feel but also know this, and express it.  Yesterday on the high road I met some peasants returning from Túla.  One of them, walking beside his empty cart, was reading a leaflet.

“What is that?” I asked.  “A telegram?”

He stopped.  “This is yesterday’s, but I have today’s as well.”

He took another out of his pocket.  We stopped and I read it.

“You should have seen what it was like at the station yesterday,” he said.  “It was terrible.  Wives and children, more than a thousand of them, were all crying and sobbing.  They surrounded the train but could not board it.  Even strangers looking on were in tears.  One Túla woman cried out and died on the spot.  She had five children.  The children were shoved into different asylums, but the father was sent on all the same…  And what do we want with this Manchuria, or whatever it is called?  We have much land of our own.  And what a lot of people have been killed and what a lot of money wasted…”

Yes, the people’s attitude to war is quite different now from what it used to be, even in ‘77.[9]  People never reacted then as they do now.

The papers write that at receptions of the Czar (who is travelling about Russia to hypnotize the people who are being sent off to slaughter) indescribable enthusiasm is shown among the populace.  In reality, something quite different is happening.  One hears on all sides reports of how in one place three reservists hung themselves, and in another two more.  One hears how a woman whose husband had been taken brought her three children to the recruiting office and left them there, while another woman hanged herself in the yard of the military commander’s home.  Everyone is dissatisfied, gloomy, and embittered.  People no longer react to the words, “For the Faith, the Czar, and the Fatherland!” the national anthem, and shouts of “Hurrah!” as they used to do.  A war of a different kind, a struggling consciousness of the wrongfulness and sin of the thing to which men are being called, is taking place.

Yes, the great strife of our time is not that now taking place between the Japanese and the Russians, nor that which may blaze up between the White and the Yellow races.  It is not the strife carried on by torpedoes, bullets, and bombs, but that spiritual strife which has unceasingly gone on, and is now going on, between the enlightened consciousness of mankind, which is now awaiting its manifestation, and the darkness and oppression which surrounds and burdens mankind.

Christ yearned in expectation in his own time, and said, “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish that it were already kindled.”  (Luke 12:49)  What Christ longed for is being accomplished.  The fire is kindling.  Let us not check it, but promote it.

April 30th, 1904

[8] In his article it is said: “The triune world is my own possession.  All things therein are my children…  All are but reflections of myself.  They are all from the one source…  All partake of the one body.  Therefore I cannot be at rest until every being, even the smallest possible fragment of existence, is settled down to its proper appointment…

“This is the position taken by the Buddha, and we, his humble followers, are but to walk in his wake.

“Why then do we fight at all?

“Because the world is not as it ought to be.  Because there are here so many perverted creatures, so many wayward thoughts, so many ill-directed hearts due to ignorant subjectivity.  For this reason Buddhists are never tired of combating all the products of ignorance, and their fight must be continued to the bitter end.  They will give no quarter.  They will mercilessly destroy the very root from which arises the misery of this life.  To accomplish this they will never be afraid of sacrificing their lives…”

The quotation continues (as such discourses do among us) with confused reflections about self-sacrifice, the absence of malice, the transmigration of souls, and much else – all merely to conceal Buddha’s clear and simple command not to kill.

It is further said: “The hand that is raised to strike, and the eye that is fixed to take aim, do not belong to the individual but are the instruments utilized by the Source, which stands above our transient existence.”  (From The Open Court, May 1904.  Buddhist Views of War, by the Right Rev. Soyen-Shaku.)

[9] Translator’s note – The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8.