Buddhism in Japan movement to eradicate Buddhism and bring Shinto to ascendancy arose throughout the country due to the strong connections of Buddhism to the Shōguns. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), after a coup in 1868, Japan abandoned its feudal system and opened up to Western modernism. Shinto became the state religion. Within the Buddhist establishment the Western world was seen as a threat as well as a challenge to stand up to. Buddhist institutions had a simple choice: adapt or perish. Rinzai and Soto Zen chose to adapt, trying to modernize Zen in accord with Western insights, while simultaneously maintaining a Japanese
The Tao of Zen to do in this book is vindicate the importance of Taoist thought in the Chinese religious history and displace the notion of Zen Buddhism as a coherent whole. To him, these are very different spiritual systems that only coexist today because of the almost wholly unacknowledged lingering of the original Buddhist colonization of Taoist China. The popularity of Zen today owes much more to its persistent Taoist origins than to Buddhist doctrine. The Tao of Zen The Tao of Zen is a nonfiction book by Ray Grigg, published by Charles E. Tuttle Company in 1994, and reprinted by Alva Press