Przemysław Skrzyński

The article attempts to present the beginnings of the first Buddhist community in Poland, the „Zen Circle”, which crystallized and legalized its activity in the conditions of a state with an undemocratic political system. In the chronological aspect, it is a continuation of the content contained in the article entitled The Realization of the Buddha-dharma in the Construction of Socialist Society. On the Beginnings of the Path to the Legalization of the First Buddhist Community in the People’s Republic of Poland, focusing on the period when the painter Andrzej Urbanowicz (1938–2011) was the leader of the community. This text presents and analyzes the further efforts of Buddhists who, under the leadership of Andrzej Janusz Korbel (1946–2015), developed effective forms of religious and popularizing activity, and led to the registration of the community (1980), despite police and administrative repressions that began almost a decade earlier. In the second part of the article, I pre- sent some possible reasons for the decision taken by the Office for Religious Affairs to enter the „Zen Buddhist Community in Poland – Religious Association” into the register of associations. The lack of preserved documentation containing the formal argumentation of this decision prompts us to formule hypotheses that will be discussed in more detail in the doctoral dissertation being prepared.

The pioneering community of Polish Buddhists called “Zen Circle”, operating in the 1970s, raised well-founded concerns of national public and administrative order bodies. This group, derived mainly from artistic and hippie environments, should be considered one of the most original and radical manifestations of an alternative and contesting culture to the reality of the People’s Republic of Poland. At the same time, the effectiveness of the activities undertaken by the community in the administrative field, led to a precedent situation in which its religious and non-religious activities were legalized. In this article, I reconstruct the administrative efforts made in the first period of community activity (1975–1978), but above all, I analyze the attitudes and motivations of the parties involved in the above-mentioned process: community members, decision-making officials and services responsible for the internal security of the country. Based both on the group’s internal materials and interviews with members, as well as on documents prepared by state bodies, I analyze the process of shaping the identity of the first Polish Buddhists.

As a result of the increased activity of organizations for former prisoners of the concentration and extermination camps, shortly after World War II, the memory of events at KL Auschwitz-Birkenau reached a global scale. In February 1962, an interreligious group of four young people, led by Satō Gyōtsu (1919‒2018) – a monk from a Buddhist order named Nipponzan-Myōhōji (Nichiren tradition) – undertook to march between Hiroshima and Oświęcim. Their purpose was to tell the truth about the crimes committed in both cities and spread the ideas of pacifism and disarmament. Within ten months, they visited 22 countries. The article primarily analyzes the Polish stage of the “Peace March,” based on an analysis of materials written by veterans and former prisoners of the camp in Auschwitz as well as texts published in the daily press. The second part of the article deals with the religious aspect of the “Peace March” in a broader context, discussing the complicity and collective responsibility of religious organizations, including Buddhist, for the drama of World War II. This “Peace March,” according to the author, was a form of confession of repentance and religious redress.