friesian.com/divebomb.htm
"In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is taught by Krishna that it is his dharma as a warrior to fight the righteous battle with his cousins and kill them, and that if he kills them without passion or expectation, practicing karmayoga, he can achieve salvation even while he does this. A similar mix of purposes, religious and martial, though with major differences, can be found centuries later with the samurai warrior class of Japan, and with the militaristic ideology that later developed in modern Japan.
Although fighting battles and killing enemies would seem to violate the Buddha-dharma, specifically the Precept of the Buddha not to kill, an apparent violation that has troubled many over the years, certain samurai, and later the modern military, ultimately could see themselves as fulfilling a Buddhist purpose in what they did, even in the horrors of World War II in the Pacific. The code of the samurai, later called bushidô, the "Way of the Warrior," was in no way a religious duty like Arjuna's dharma, but a connection between religion and battle was made through the way in which Zen Buddhism wedded Buddhist purposes to both the Taoist practice of an art or a craft and, in a historical tradition dominated by a military class, the Japanese "martial arts."
While the most important modern political application of karmayoga has been Mahâtmâ Gandhi's Satyagraha, "non-violent resistance," which inspired Martin Luther King's conduct of the civil rights movement in the United States, the mix of Zen and bushidô arguably contributed to the aggression and war crimes of Japan during the "China Incident" and the Pacific War. The ultimate lesson, as we shall see, is one about the nature of morality."