[summary by Angie Weicekauskas, '93]
Japanese Buddhism also emphasized the transience of the phenomenal world. But the Japanese attitude toward this transience is very different from the Indian. The Japanese disposition is to lay a greater emphasis upon sensible, concrete events, intuitively apprehended, than upon universals. It is in direct contrast to the characteristic Indian reaction to the world of change, which is to reject it in favor of an ultimate reality, a transcendent Absolute in which the mind can find refuge from the ceaseless flux of observed phenomena. The Japanese reaction is rather to accept, even to welcome, the fluidity and impermanence of the phenomenal world.
This way of thinking, far from positing a changeless Absolute, regards the phenomenal world itself as the Absolute and explicitly rejects the recognition of any ultimate reality beyond or above it. What is widely known among post-Meiji philosophers in the last century as the "theory that the phenomenal is actually the real" has deep roots in Japanese tradition.
Master Dogen, the thirteenth-century thinker who is said to have founded the Soto-Zen sect, asserts the transience of things as strongly as any Indian Buddhist. "Time flies more swiftly than an arrow and life is more transient than dew. We cannot call back a single day that has passed." But his emphasis is positive, not negative: "A man may live as the slave of the senses for one hundred years but if he lives one day upholding the Good Law, it will favorably influence his coming life for many years." And Dogen stresses the primacy of the phenomenal world: "We ought to love and respect this life and this body, since it is through this life and this body that we have the opportunity to practice the Law and make known the power of the Buddha. Accordingly, righteous practice for one day is the Seed of Buddhahood, of the righteous action of All the Buddhas."(23)
What we see and experience is thus recognized as itself the ultimate reality. There is no greater reality, changeless and invisible; there is nothing to be apprehended that is not already exposed to us.(24) For Master Dogen, impermanence is itself the absolute state, and this impermanence is not to be rejected but to be valued. "Impermanence is the Buddhahood....(25) The impermanence of grass, trees, and forests is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the person's body and mind is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the country and scenery is verily the Buddhahood."(26)
In other places Dogen says: "Death and life are the very life of the Buddha," and "These mountains, rivers and earth are all the See of Buddhahood." In the Lotus Sutra, Dogen finds the same vein of thought: "Concerning the Lotus Sutra . . . the cry of a monkey is drowned in the sound of a rapid river. [Even] these are preaching this sutra, this above all." He who attains the purport of this sutra, says the Master, will discern the preaching of the doctrine even in the voices at an auction sale, for even in the mundane world "our Buddha's voice and form [are] in all the sounds of the rapid river and colors of the ridge." (27)
One is reminded of the words of the Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o: "The voice of the rapids is verily the wide long tongue [of the Buddha]. The color of the mountains is no other than [his] pure chaste body." This way of thinking is Japanese Zen Buddhism. In the words of Master Muju, "Mountains, rivers, earth, there is not a thing that is not real."(28)
Starting from such a viewpoint, Dogen gives to some phrases of Indian Buddhist scriptures interpretations that are essentially different from the original meaning. There is a phrase in the Mahaparinirvana-sutra that goes as follows: "He who desires to know the meaning of Buddhahood should survey the time and wait for the occasion to come. If the time comes, the Buddhahood will be revealed of itself."(29) To this concept of Buddhahood as something possible and accessible, Dogen gives a characteristic twist. He reads the phrase "survey of time" as "make a survey in terms of time," and the phrase "if the time comes" as "the time has already come." His interpretation of the original passage becomes, in this way, something like the following:
Buddhahood is time. He who wants to know Buddhahood may know it by knowing time as it is revealed to us. And as time is something in which we are already immersed, Buddhahood also is not something that is to be sought in the future but is something that is realized where we are.(30)
We see here Dogen's effort to free himself from the idealistic viewpoint held by some of the Indian Mahayana Buddhists. In Dogen's unique philosophy of time, "all being is time'';(3l) the ever-changing, incessant temporal flux is identified with ultimate Being itself.
Again and again Dogen emphasizes that the true reality is not static but dynamic. "It is a heretical doctrine," says Dogen, "to think the mind mobile and the essence of things static. It is a heretical doctrine to think that the essence is crystal clear and the appearance changeable."(32) Again, "It is a heretical doctrine to think that in essence water does not run, and the tree does not pass through vicissitude. The Buddha's way consists in the form that exists and the conditions that exist. The bloom of flowers and the fall of leaves are the conditions that exist. And yet unwise people think that in the world of essence there should be no bloom of flowers and no fall of leaves."(33)
Dogen criticizes the Chinese Zen Buddhist Ta-hui (1089-1163), who taught that mind and essence are not caught up in the world of birth and death. According to Dogen, Ta-hui was wrong in teaching that "the mind is solely perception and conceptualization, and the essence is pure and tranquil."(34) Here again a static way of thinking is rejected, and this rejection makes Dogen's emphasis very different from anything which Indian or Chinese Buddhism has prepared us for.
This characteristic willingness to accept the phenomenal world as given and to live contentedly in it is not confined to Buddhism in Japan. It appears in-modern Shintoism as well. The founder of the Konko sect teaches: "Whether alive or dead, you should regard the heaven and earth as your own habitation."(35) And as Dogen criticized and metamorphosed Chinese Zen, so Jinsai Ito (1627-1705) changed the form of Chinese neo-Confucianism. To Jinsai, the true reality of both earth and heaven is strongly active in a way which we would call evolutionary. Nothing but eternal development exists. Jinsai completely denies what is called death.
The Book of Changes (I Ching) says, "the great virtue of heaven and earth is called life." It means that living without ceasing is nothing but the way of heaven and earth. And in the way of heaven and earth there is no death, but life, there is no divergence, but convergence. That is because the way of heaven and earth is one with life. Though the bodies of ancestors may perish, their spirits are inherited by their posterity, whose spirits are again inherited by their own posterity. When life thus evolves, without ceasing, into eternity, it may rightly be said that no one dies.(36)
According to Jinsai the world of reality is nothing but change and action, and action is in itself good. "Stillness is the end of motion, while evil is the change of good; and good is a kind of life, while evil is a kind of death. It is not that these two opposites are generated together, but they are all one with life."(37)
Jinsai Ito's younger contemporary Ogiu Sorai, though a rival of Jinsai's, admires the latter's activities as "the supreme knowledge of a thousand years," and denounces the static character of the Chinese School of Li. In fact it can be said that all of the characteristically Japanese scholars believe in phenomena as the fundamental mode of existence. They unanimously reject the quietism of the neo-Confucianists of the Sung period.(38)
The way of thinking that recognizes absolute significance in the temporary, phenomenal world seems to be culturally related to the traditional Japanese love of nature. The Japanese love mountains, rivers, flowers, birds, grass and trees, and represent them in the patterns of their kimonos; they are fond of the delicacies of the season, keeping edibles in their natural form as much as possible in cooking. Within the house, flowers are arranged in a vase and dwarf trees are placed in the alcove, flowers and birds are engraved in the transom and painted on the sliding screen, and in the garden miniature mountains, streams and lakes are created. Japanese literature is deeply involved with nature and treats it with warm affection. Typical are the essays in the Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi), which describes the beauties of the seasons. The loving concern with the particularities of nature is familiar to us through Japanese art; it is just as marked in Japanese poetry. If the poems on nature were to be removed from the collections of Japanese poems, how many would be left? Haiku, the characteristic Japanese seventeen-syllable short poems, are unthinkable apart from natural objects and the changing seasons, but the differences in attitude are as instructive as the similarities. Here is a poem by Master Dogen:
Flowers are in spring, cuckoos in summer,In autumn is the moon, and in winter
The pallid glimmer of snow.
The meaning of the above poem is very close to that of the Chinese verse by Wu-men Hui-k'ai:
A hundred flowers are in spring, in autumn is the moon,
In summer is the cool wind, the snow is in winter;
If nothing is on the mind to afflict a man,
That is his best season.
Similar as the poems are, the Japanese substitution of "cuckoos" for the Chinese "cool wind" has produced an entirely different effect. Both cuckoos and cool wind are sensible phenomena, but while the wind gives the sense of indefinite, remote boundlessness, the cuckoos give an impression that is limited, almost cosy.
An even better example is the poem composed on his deathbed by Ryokan:
For a memento of my existenceWhat shall I leave (I need not leave anything)?
Flowers in the spring, cuckoos in the summer
And maple leaves
In the autumn.
"Maple leaves" are felt to be far closer to ourselves than "the moon," which Wu-men chose to associate with autumn. Enjoyment of nature is common to both China and Japan, but whereas the Chinese prefer the boundless and distant, the Japanese prefer the simple and compact. Dogen took a Spartan attitude toward human desires, but he had a tender heart for seasonal beauties:
The peach blossoms beginTo bloom in the breeze of the spring;
Not a shadow of doubt
On the branches and leaves is left.
Though I know that I shall meet
The autumn moon again,
How sleepless I remain
On this moonlit night.
What is the origin of this tendency of the Japanese to grasp the absolute in terms of the world as it exists in time? Probably in the mildness of the weather, the benign character of the landscape, and the rapid and conspicuous change of seasons. Since Nature appears to be relatively benevolent to man he can love it rather than abhor it. Nature, as it changes in time, is thought of as at one with man, not hostile to him. Man feels congenial to his world, he has no grudge against it. This is at least a partial explanation for what is a basic tendency in Japanese thought.
Whatever its source, this willingness to accept the human being's situation in time has many manifestations in Japanese philosophy. Most of the Buddhist sects in Japan teach that doctrines should always be made "a propos of the time." Later Mahayana Buddhism employs the concept of the Three Times, the three periods which follow the demise of Lord Buddha. The first thousand years is called the Period of the Perfect Law, when the religion of the Buddha was genuinely and perfectly practiced. The second thousand years is the Period of the Copied Law, when the religion of the Buddha was practiced only in limiting the practices of the sages and monks of the past. The last period, the Period of the Latter Law, is seen as a time of open degeneration.
These ideas took deep root in Japan. The idea, in particular, of the third, degenerate age penetrated deep into the core of the doctrines of various sects. These admitted that they were in the age of degeneration, but instead of exhorting a return to the Perfect, or even the Copied Law, they claimed that the exigencies of the time should be considered and religious doctrines made suitable to them. The sects even vied in claiming the superiority of their respective sutras (or doctrines) because they were most suited to the corruption of the age. Nichiren, the Buddhist prophet, claimed that one could be saved only by the spiritual power of the Lotus Sutra, whose gospel he alone was entitled to spread. The corruption of the age is no handicap: "The Adoration of the Lotus of the Perfect Truth shall prevail beyond the coming ages of ten thousand years, nay eternally in the future." It is indeed an advantage:
Is it not true that one hundred years' training in a heavenly paradise does not compare with one day's work in the earthly world, and that all service to the Truth during the two thousand years of the ages of the Perfect Law and the Copied Law is inferior to that done in the one span of time in the age of the Latter Law? All these differences are due, not to Nichiren's own wisdom, but to the virtues inherent in the times. Flowers bloom in the spring, and fruits are ripe in the autumn; it is hot in summer and cold in winter. Is it not time that makes these differences?(39)
Nichiren here welcomes the processes of time, even if they bring corruption; he sees them as an opportunity for service to the truth. Time provides the opportunity for a turning point from degeneration to regeneration.
Nichiren laid special emphasis upon the particularity and specificity of the truth of humanity. The Japanese unfriendliness for universals is plain in this passage:
The learning of just one word or one phrase of the Right Law, if only it accords with the time and the propensity of the learner, would lead him to the attainment of the Way. The mastery of a thousand scriptures and ten thousand theories, if they should not accord with the time and the propensity of the one who masters them would lead him nowhere.(40)
Nichiren evaluates doctrines by five standards, all specific in character. These are: the teaching of the sutra, the spiritual endowments of the learner (what he calls the "propensity"), the country in which the doctrine is practiced, and the temporal order of circumstances affecting the practice of the doctrine. Saicho, an ancient Buddhist teacher, also regarded the time and the country as important factors, but it was Nichiren who established them as basic principles, presented in a clear and distinct form. Such a method of evaluation of religious truth in terms of social and individual particularities, would hardly be found in the Buddhist thought of India or China. It is clear that even where India and Japan have shared a set of religious assumptions, the characteristic national habits of thought have led to entirely different conceptions both of Time and of Ultimate Reality.
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