Brian Andre Victoria (born 1939)[1] is an American educator, Doctor of Philosophy, writer and Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect.
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.
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.
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.