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11：自己鍛練

池田光穂

11


                            Self-Discipline

The Self-disciplines of one culture are always likely to seem
irrelevancies to observers from another country. The disciplinary
techniques themselves are clear enough, but why go to all the trouble?
Why voluntarily hang yourself from hooks, or concentrate on your navel,
or never spend your capital? Why concentrate on one of these austerities
and demand no control at all over some impulses which to the outsider
are truly important and in need of training? When the observer belongs
to a country which does not teach technical methods of self-discipline
and is set down in the midst of a people who place great reliance upon
them, the possibility of misunderstanding is at its height.

In the United States technical and traditional methods of
self-discipline are relatively undeveloped. The American assumption is
that a man, having sized up what is possible in his personal life, will
discipline himself, if that is necessary, to attain a chosen goal.
Whether he does or not, depends on his ambition, or his conscience, or
his ‘instinct of workmanship,’ as Veblen called it. He may accept a
Stoic regime in order to play on a football team, or give up all
relaxations to train himself as a musician, or to make a success of his
business. He may eschew evil and frivolity because of his conscience.
But in the United States self-discipline itself, as a technical
training, is not a thing to learn like arithmetic quite apart from its
application in a particular instance. Such techniques, when they do
occur in the United States, are taught by certain European cult-leaders
or by Swamis who teach inventions made in India. Even the religious
self-disciplines of meditation and prayer, as they were taught and
practiced by Saint Theresa or Saint John of the Cross, have barely
survived in the United States.

The Japanese assumption, however, is that a boy taking his middle school
examinations, or a man playing in a fencing match, or a person merely
living the life of an aristocrat, needs a self-training quite apart from
learning the specific things that will be required of him when he is
tested. No matter what facts he has crammed for his examination, no
matter how expert his sword thrusts, no matter how meticulous his
punctilio, he needs to lay aside his books and his sword and his public
appearances and undergo a special kind of training. Not all Japanese
submit to esoteric training, of course, but, even for those who do not,
the phraseology and the practice of self-discipline have a recognized
place in life. Japanese of all classes judge themselves and others in
terms of a whole set of concepts which depend upon their notion of
generalized technical self-control and self-governance.

Their concepts of self-discipline can be schematically divided into
those which give competence and those which give something more. This
something more I shall call expertness. The two are divided in Japan and
aim at accomplishing a different result in the human psyche and have a
different rationale and are recognized by different signs. Many
instances of the first type, self-disciplinary competence, have already
been described. The Army officer who said of his men who had been
engaged in peacetime maneuvers for sixty hours with only ten-minute
opportunities for sleep, that ‘they know how to sleep; they need
training in how to stay awake,’ was, in spite of what seem to us extreme
demands, aiming only at competent behavior. He was stating a
well-accepted principle of Japanese psychic economy that the will should
be supreme over the almost infinitely teachable body and that the body
itself does not have laws of well-being which a man ignores at his own
cost. The whole Japanese theory of ‘human feelings’ rests on this
assumption. When it is a matter of the really serious affairs of life,
the demands of the body, no matter how essential to health, no matter
how approved and cultivated as things apart, should be drastically
subordinated. No matter at what price of self-discipline, a man should
manifest the Japanese Spirit.

It does violence, however, to Japanese assumptions to phrase their
position in this way. For ‘at the price of whatever self-discipline’
means in ordinary American usage almost the same thing as ‘at the price
of whatever self-sacrifice.’ Often too it means ‘at the price of
whatever personal frustration.’ The American theory of
discipline—whether imposed from the outside or introjected as a
censoring conscience—is that from childhood men and women have to be
socialized by discipline, either freely accepted or imposed by
authority. This is a frustration. The individual resents this
curtailment of his wishes. He has to sacrifice, and inevitable
aggressive emotions are awakened within him. This view is not only that
of many professional psychologists in America. It is also the philosophy
within which each generation is brought up by parents in the home, and
the psychologists’ analysis has therefore a great deal of truth in our
own society. A child ‘has to’ be put to bed at a certain hour, and he
learns from his parents’ attitude that going to bed is a frustration. In
countless homes he shows his resentment in a nightly battle royal. He is
already a young indoctrinated American who regards sleeping as something
a person ‘has to’ do and he kicks against the pricks. His mother rules,
too, that there are certain things he ‘has to’ eat. It may be oatmeal or
spinach or bread or orange juice, but the American child learns to raise
a protest against foods he ‘has to’ eat. Food that is ‘good for’ him he
concludes is not food that tastes good. This is an American convention
that is foreign in Japan, as it is also in some Western nations like
Greece. In the United States, becoming adult means emancipation from
food frustrations. A grown-up person can eat the food that tastes good
instead of the food that is good for him.

These ideas about sleep and food, however, are small in comparison with
the whole Occidental concept of self-sacrifice. It is standard Western
doctrine that parents make great sacrifices for their children, wives
sacrifice their careers for their husbands, husbands sacrifice their
freedom to become breadwinners. It is hard for Americans to conceive
that in some societies men and women do not recognize the necessity of
self-sacrifice. It is nevertheless true. In such societies people say
that parents naturally find their children delightful, that women prefer
marriage to any other course, and that a man earning his family’s
support is pursuing his favorite occupation as a hunter or a gardener.
Why talk of self-sacrifice? When society stresses these interpretations
and allows people to live according to them, the notion of
self-sacrifice may hardly be recognized.

In other cultures all those things a person does for other people at
such ‘sacrifice’ in the United States are considered as reciprocal
exchanges. They are either investments which will later be repaid or
they are returns for value already received. In such countries even the
relations between father and son may be treated in this way, and what
the father does for the son during the boy’s early life, the son will do
for the father during the old man’s later life and after his death.
Every business relation too is a folk contract, which, while it often
ensures equivalence in kind, just as commonly binds one party to protect
and the other to serve. If the benefits on both sides are regarded as
advantages, neither party regards his duties as a sacrifice.

The sanction behind services to others in Japan is of course
reciprocity, both in kind and in hierarchal exchange of complementary
responsibilities. The moral position of self-sacrifice is therefore very
different from that in the United States. The Japanese have always
objected specifically to the teachings of Christian missionaries about
sacrifice. They argue that a good man should not think of what he does
for others as frustrating to himself. ‘When we do the things you call
self-sacrifice,’ a Japanese said to me, ‘it is because we wish to give
or because it is good to give. We are not sorry for ourselves. No matter
how many things we actually give up for others, we do not think that
this giving elevates us spiritually or that we should be “rewarded” for
it.’ A people who have organized their lives around such elaborate
reciprocal obligations as the Japanese naturally find self-sacrifice
irrelevant. They push themselves to the limit to fulfill extreme
obligations, but the traditional sanction of reciprocity prevents them
from feeling the self-pity and self-righteousness that arises so easily
in more individualistic and competitive countries.

Americans, in order to understand ordinary self-disciplinary practices
in Japan, therefore, have to do a kind of surgical operation on our idea
of ‘self-discipline.’ We have to cut away the accretions of
‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘frustration’ that have clustered around the
concept in our culture. In Japan one disciplines oneself to be a good
player, and the Japanese attitude is that one undergoes the training
with no more consciousness of sacrifice than a man who plays bridge. Of
course the training is strict, but that is inherent in the nature of
things. The young child is born happy but without the capacity to ‘savor
life.’ Only through mental training (or self-discipline; _shuyo_) can a
man or woman gain the power to live fully and to ‘get the taste’ of
life. The phrase is usually translated ‘only so can he enjoy life.’
Self-discipline ‘builds up the belly (the seat of control)’; it enlarges
life.

‘Competent’ self-discipline in Japan has this rationale that it improves
a man’s conduct of his own life. Any impatience he may feel while he is
new in the training will pass, they say, for eventually he will enjoy
it—or give it up. An apprentice tends properly to his business, a boy
learns _judo_ (jujitsu), a young wife adjusts to the demands of her
mother-in-law; it is quite understood that in the first stages of
training, the man or woman unused to the new requirements may wish to be
free of this shuyo. Their fathers may talk to them and say, ‘What do you
wish? Some training is necessary to savor life. If you give this up and
do not train yourself at all, you will be unhappy as a natural
consequence. And if these natural consequences should occur, I should
not be inclined to protect you against public opinion.’ Shuyo, in the
phrase they use so often, polishes away ‘the rust of the body.’ It makes
a man a bright sharp sword, which is, of course, what he desires to be.

All this stress on how self-discipline leads to one’s own advantage does
not mean that the extreme acts the Japanese code often requires are not
truly serious frustrations, and that such frustrations do not lead to
aggressive impulses. This distinction is one which Americans understand
in games and sports. The bridge champion does not complain of the
self-sacrifice that has been required of him to learn to play well; he
does not label as ‘frustrations’ the hours he has had to put in in order
to become an expert. Nevertheless, physicians say that in some cases the
great attention necessary when a man is playing either for high stakes
or for a championship, is not unrelated to stomach ulcers and excessive
bodily tensions. The same thing happens to people in Japan. But the
sanction of reciprocity, and the Japanese conviction that
self-discipline is to one’s own advantage, make many acts seem easy to
them which seem insupportable to Americans. They pay much closer
attention to behaving competently and they allow themselves fewer alibis
than Americans. They do not so often project their dissatisfactions with
life upon scapegoats, and they do not so often indulge in self-pity
because they have somehow or other not got what Americans call average
happiness. They have been trained to pay much closer attention to the
‘rust of the body’ than is common among Americans.

Beyond and above ‘competent’ self-discipline, there is also the plane of
‘expertness.’ Japanese techniques of this latter sort have not been made
very intelligible to Western readers by Japanese authors who have
written about them, and Occidental scholars who have made a specialty of
this subject have often been very cavalier about them. Sometimes they
have called them ‘eccentricities.’ One French scholar writes that they
are all ‘in defiance of common sense,’ and that the greatest of all
disciplinary sects, the Zen cult, is ‘a tissue of solemn nonsense.’ The
purposes their techniques are intended to accomplish, however, are not
impenetrable, and the whole subject throws a considerable light on
Japanese psychic economy.

A long series of Japanese words name the state of mind the expert in
self-discipline is supposed to achieve. Some of these terms are used for
actors, some for religious devotees, some for fencers, some for public
speakers, some for painters, some for masters of the tea ceremony. They
all have the same general meaning, and I shall use only the word _muga_,
which is the word used in the flourishing upper-class cult of Zen
Buddhism. The description of this state of expertness is that it denotes
those experiences, whether secular or religious, when ‘there is no
break, not even the thickness of a hair’ between a man’s will and his
act. A discharge of electricity passes directly from the positive to the
negative pole. In people who have not attained expertness, there is, as
it were, a non-conducting screen which stands between the will and the
act. They call this the ‘observing self,’ the ‘interfering self,’ and
when this has been removed by special kinds of training the expert loses
all sense that ‘I am doing it.’ The circuit runs free. The act is
effortless. It is ‘one-pointed.’ The deed completely reproduces the
picture the actor had drawn of it in his mind.

The most ordinary people seek this kind of ‘expertness’ in Japan. Sir
Charles Eliot, the great English authority on Buddhism, tells of a
schoolgirl who applied

    to a well-known missionary in Tokyo and said that she wished to
    become a Christian. When questioned as to her reasons she
    replied that her great desire was to go up in an aeroplane. On
    being invited to explain the connection between aeroplanes and
    Christianity, she replied that she had been told that before she
    went up in an aeroplane she must have a very calm and
    well-regulated mind and that this kind of mind was only acquired
    by religious training. She thought that among the religions
    Christianity was probably the best and so she came to ask for
    teaching.[1]

The Japanese not only connect Christianity and airplanes; they connect
training for ‘a calm and well-regulated mind’ with an examination in
pedagogy or with speech-making or with a statesman’s career. Technical
training for one-pointedness seems to them an unquestioned advantage in
almost any undertaking.

Many civilizations have developed techniques of this kind, but the
Japanese goals and methods have a marked character all their own. This
is especially interesting because many of the techniques are derived
from India where they are known as Yoga. Japanese techniques of
self-hypnotism, concentration, and control of the senses still show
kinship with Indian practices. There is similar emphasis on emptying the
mind, on immobility of the body, on ten thousands of repetitions of the
same phrase, on fixing the attention on a chosen symbol. Even the
terminology used in India is still recognizable. Beyond these bare bones
of the cult, however, the Japanese version has little in common with the
Hindu.

Yoga in India is an extreme cult of asceticism. It is a way of obtaining
release from the round of reincarnation. Man has no salvation except
this release, _nirvana_, and the obstacle in his path is human desire.
These desires can be eliminated by starving them out, by insulting them,
and by courting self-torture. Through these means a man may reach
sainthood and achieve spirituality and union with the divine. Yoga is a
way of renouncing the world of the flesh and of escaping the treadmill
of human futility. It is also a way of laying hold of spiritual powers.
The journey toward one’s goal is the faster the more extreme the
asceticism.

Such philosophy is alien in Japan. Even though Japan is a great Buddhist
nation, ideas of transmigration and of nirvana have never been a part of
the Buddhist faith of the people. These doctrines are personally
accepted by some Buddhist priests, but they have never affected folkways
or popular thought. No animal or insect is spared in Japan because
killing it would kill a transmigrated human soul, and Japanese funeral
ceremonies and birth rituals are innocent of any notions of a round of
reincarnations. Transmigration is not a Japanese pattern of thought. The
idea of nirvana, too, not only means nothing to the general public but
the priesthoods themselves modify it out of existence. Priestly scholars
declare that a man who has been ‘enlightened’ (_satori_) is already in
nirvana; nirvana is here and now in the midst of time, and a man ‘sees
nirvana’ in a pine tree and a wild bird. The Japanese have always been
uninterested in fantasies of a world of the hereafter. Their mythology
tells of gods but not of the life of the dead. They have even rejected
Buddhist ideas of differential rewards and punishments after death. Any
man, the least farmer, becomes a Buddha when he dies; the very word for
the family memorial tablets in the household shrine is ‘the Buddhas.’ No
other Buddhist country uses such language, and when a nation speaks so
boldly of its ordinary dead, it is quite understandable that it does not
picture any such difficult goal as attainment of nirvana. A man who
becomes a Buddha anyway need not set himself to attain the goal of
absolute surcease by lifelong mortification of the flesh.

Just as alien in Japan is the doctrine that the flesh and the spirit are
irreconcilable. Yoga is a technique to eliminate desire, and desire has
its seat in the flesh. But the Japanese do not have this dogma. ‘Human
feelings’ are not of the Evil One, and it is a part of wisdom to enjoy
the pleasures of the senses. The one condition is that they be
sacrificed to the serious duties of life. This tenet is carried to its
logical extreme in the Japanese handling of the Yoga cult: not only are
all self-tortures eliminated but the cult in Japan is not even one of
asceticism. Even the ‘Enlightened’ in their retreats, though they were
called hermits, commonly established themselves in comfort with their
wives and children in charming spots in the country. The companionship
of their wives and even the birth of subsequent children were regarded
as entirely compatible with their sanctity. In the most popular of all
Buddhist sects priests marry anyway and raise families; Japan has never
found it easy to accept the theory that the spirit and the flesh are
incompatible. The saintliness of the ‘enlightened’ consisted in their
self-disciplinary meditations and in their simplification of life. It
did not consist in wearing unclean clothing or shutting one’s eyes to
the beauties of nature or one’s ears to the beauty of stringed
instruments. Their saints might fill their days with the composition of
elegant verses, the ritual of tea ceremony and ‘viewings’ of the moon
and the cherry blossoms. The Zen cult even directs its devotees to avoid
‘the three insufficiencies: insufficiency of clothing, of food, and of
sleep.’

The final tenet of Yoga philosophy is also alien in Japan: that the
techniques of mysticism which it teaches transport the practitioner to
ecstatic union with the Universe. Wherever the techniques of mysticism
have been practiced in the world, whether by primitive peoples or by
Mohammedan dervishes or by Indian Yogis or by medieval Christians, those
who practice them have almost universally agreed, whatever their creed,
that they become ‘one with the divine,’ that they experience ecstasy
‘not of this world.’ The Japanese have the techniques of mysticism
without the mysticism. This does not mean that they do not achieve
trance. They do. But they regard even trance as a technique which trains
a man in ‘one-pointedness.’ They do not describe it as ecstasy. The Zen
cult does not even say, as mystics in other countries do, that the five
senses are in abeyance in trance; they say that the ‘six’ senses are
brought by this technique to a condition of extraordinary acuteness. The
sixth sense is located in the mind, and training makes it supreme over
the ordinary five, but taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing are given
their own special training during trance. It is one of the exercises of
group Zen to perceive soundless footsteps and be able to follow them
accurately as they pass from one place to another or to discriminate
tempting odors of food—purposely introduced—without breaking trance.
Smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting ‘help the sixth sense,’
and one learns in this state to make ‘every sense alert.’

This is very unusual training in any cult of extra-sensory experience.
Even in trance such a Zen practitioner does not try to get outside of
himself, but in the phrase Nietzsche uses of the ancient Greeks, ‘to
remain what he is and retain his civic name.’ There are many vivid
statements of this view of the matter among the sayings of the great
Japanese Buddhist teachers. One of the best is that of Dogen, the great
thirteenth century founder of the Soto cult of Zen, which is still the
largest and most influential of the Zen cults. Speaking of his own
enlightenment (satori), he said, ‘I recognized only that my eyes were
horizontal above my perpendicular nose. . . . There is nothing
mysterious (in Zen experience). Time passes as it is natural, the sun
rising in the east and the moon setting in the west.’[2] Nor do Zen
writings allow that trance experience gives power other than
self-disciplined human power; ‘Yoga claims that various supernatural
powers can be acquired by meditation,’ a Japanese Buddhist writes, ‘but
Zen does not make any such absurd claims.’[3]

The Japanese thus wipe the slate clean of the assumptions on which Yoga
practices are based in India. Japan, with a vital love of finitude which
reminds one of the ancient Greeks, understands the technical practices
of Yoga as being a self-training in perfection, a means whereby a man
may obtain that ‘expertness’ in which there is not the thickness of a
hair between a man and his deed. It is a training in efficiency. It is a
training in self-reliance. Its rewards are here and now, for it enables
a man to meet any situation with exactly the right expenditure of
effort, neither too much nor too little, and it gives him control of his
otherwise wayward mind so that neither physical danger from outside nor
passion from within can dislodge him.

Such training is of course just as valuable for a warrior as for a
priest, and it was precisely the warriors of Japan who made the Zen cult
their own. One can hardly find elsewhere than in Japan techniques of
mysticism pursued without the reward of the consummating mystic
experience and appropriated by warriors to train them for hand-to-hand
combat. Yet this has been true from the earliest period of Zen influence
in Japan. The great book by the Japanese founder, Eisai, in the twelfth
century was called _The Protection of the State by the Propagation of
Zen_, and Zen has trained warriors, statesmen, fencers, and university
students to achieve quite mundane goals. As Sir Charles Eliot says,
nothing in the history of the Zen cult in China gave any indication of
the future that awaited it as a military discipline in Japan. ‘Zen has
become as decidedly Japanese as tea ceremonies or Noh plays. It might
have been supposed that in a troubled period like the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries this contemplative and mystic doctrine, which finds
truth not in scripture but in the immediate experience of the human
mind, would have flourished in monastic harbours of refuge among those
who had left the storms of the world, but not that it would have been
accepted as the favourite rule of life for the military class. Yet such
it became.’[4]

Many Japanese sects, both Buddhist and Shintoist, have laid great
emphasis on mystic techniques of contemplation, self-hypnotism, and
trance. Some of them, however, claim the result of this training as
evidences of the grace of God and base their philosophy on _tariki_,
‘help of another,’ i.e., of a gracious god. Some of them, of which Zen
is the paramount example, rely only on ‘self-help,’ _jiriki_. The
potential strength, they teach, lies only within oneself, and only by
one’s own efforts can one increase it. Japanese samurai found this
entirely congenial, and whether as monks, statesmen, or educators—for
they served in all these rôles—they used the Zen techniques to buttress
a rugged individualism. Zen teachings were excessively explicit. ‘Zen
seeks only the light man can find in himself. It tolerates no hindrance
to this seeking. Clear every obstacle out of your way. . . . If on your
way you meet Buddha, kill him! If you meet the Patriarchs, kill them! If
you meet the Saints, kill them all. That is the only way of reaching
salvation.’[5]

He who seeks after truth must take nothing at second hand, no teaching
of the Buddha, no scriptures, no theology. ‘The twelve chapters of the
Buddhist canon are a scrap of paper.’ One may with profit study them,
but they have nothing to do with the lightning flash in one’s own soul
which is all that gives Enlightenment. In a Zen book of dialogues a
novice asks a Zen priest to expound the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good
Law. The priest gave him a brilliant exposition, and the listener said
witheringly, ‘Why, I thought Zen priests disdained texts, theories, and
systems of logical explanations.’ ‘Zen,’ returned the priest, ‘does not
consist in knowing nothing, but in the belief that _to know_ is outside
of all texts, of all documents. You did not tell me you wanted _to
know_, but only that you wished an explanation of the text.’[6]

The traditional training given by Zen teachers was intended to teach
novices how ‘to know.’ The training might be physical or it might be
mental, but it must be finally validated in the inner consciousness of
the learner. Zen training of the fencer illustrates this well. The
fencer, of course, has to learn and constantly practice the proper sword
thrusts, but his proficiency in these belongs in the field of mere
‘competence.’ In addition he must learn to be _muga_. He is made to
stand first on the level floor, concentrating on the few inches of
surface which support his body. This tiny surface of standing room is
gradually raised till he has learned to stand as easily on a four-foot
pillar as in a court yard. When he is perfectly secure on that pillar,
he ‘knows.’ His mind will no longer betray him by dizziness and fear of
falling.

This Japanese use of pillar-standing transforms the familiar Western
medieval austerity of Saint Simeon Stylites into a purposeful
self-discipline. It is no longer an austerity. All kinds of physical
exercises in Japan, whether of the Zen cult, or the common practices of
the peasant villages, undergo this kind of transformation. In many
places of the world diving into freezing water and standing under
mountain waterfalls, are standard austerities, sometimes to mortify the
flesh, sometimes to obtain pity from the gods, sometimes to induce
trance. The favorite Japanese cold-austerity was standing or sitting in
an ice-cold waterfall before dawn, or dousing oneself three times during
a winter night with icy water. But the object was to train one’s
conscious self till one no longer noticed the discomfort. A devotee’s
purpose was to train himself to continue his meditation without
interruption. When neither the cold shock of the water nor the shivering
of the body in the cold dawn registered in his consciousness he was
‘expert.’ There was no other reward.

Mental training had to be equally self-appropriated. A man might
associate himself with a teacher, but the teacher could not ‘teach’ in
the Occidental sense, because nothing a novice learned from any source
outside himself was of any importance. The teacher might hold
discussions with the novice, but he did not lead him gently into a new
intellectual realm. The teacher was considered to be most helpful when
he was most rude. If, without warning, the master broke the tea bowl the
novice was raising to his lips, or tripped him, or struck his knuckles
with a brass rod, the shock might galvanize him into sudden insight. It
broke through his complacency. The monkish books are filled with
incidents of this kind.

The most favored technique for inducing the novice’s desperate attempt
‘to know’ were the _koan_, literally ‘the problems.’ There are said to
be seventeen hundred of these problems, and the anecdote books make
nothing of a man’s devoting seven years to the solution of one of them.
They are not meant to have rational solutions. One is ‘To conceive the
clapping of one hand.’ Another is ‘To feel the yearning for one’s mother
before one’s own conception.’ Others are, ‘Who is carrying one’s
lifeless body?’ ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ ‘All things return
into One; where does this last return?’ Such Zen problems as these were
used in China before the twelfth or thirteenth century, and Japan
adopted these techniques along with the cult. On the continent, however,
they did not survive. In Japan they are a most important part of
training in ‘expertness.’ Zen handbooks treat them with extreme
seriousness. ‘Koan enshrine the dilemma of life.’ A man who is pondering
one, they say, reaches an impasse like ‘a pursued rat that has run up a
blind tunnel,’ he is like a man ‘with a ball of red-hot iron stuck in
his throat,’ he is ‘a mosquito trying to bite a lump of iron.’ He is
beside himself and redoubles his efforts. Finally the screen of his
‘observing self’ between his mind and his problem falls aside; with the
swiftness of a flash of lightning the two—mind and problem—come to
terms. He ‘knows.’

After these descriptions of bow-string-taut mental effort it is an
anticlimax to search the incident books for great truths gained with all
this expenditure. Nangaku, for instance, spent eight years on the
problem, ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ At last he understood.
His words were: ‘Even when one affirms that there is something here, one
omits the whole.’ Nevertheless, there is a general pattern in the
revelations. It is suggested in the lines of dialogue:

_Novice:_ How shall I escape from the Wheel of Birth and Death?

_Master:_ Who puts you under restraint? (i.e., binds you to this Wheel.)

What they learn, they say, is, in the famous Chinese phrase, that they
‘were looking for an ox when they were riding on one.’ They learn that
‘What is necessary is not the net and the trap but the fish or the
animal these instruments were meant to catch.’ They learn, that is, in
Occidental phraseology, that both horns of the dilemma are irrelevant.
They learn that goals may be attained with present means if the eyes of
the spirit are opened. Anything is possible, and with no help from
anyone but oneself.

The significance of the koan does not lie in the truths these seekers
after truth discover, which are the world-wide truths of the mystics. It
lies in the way the Japanese conceive the search for truth.

The koan are called ‘bricks with which to knock upon the door.’ ‘The
door’ is in the wall built around unenlightened human nature, which
worries about whether present means are sufficient and fantasies to
itself a cloud of watchful witnesses who will allot praise or blame. It
is the wall of _haji_ (shame) which is so real to all Japanese. Once the
brick has battered down the door and it has fallen open, one is in free
air and one throws away the brick. One does not go on solving more koan.
The lesson has been learned and the Japanese dilemma of virtue has been
solved. They have thrown themselves with desperate intensity against an
impasse; for ‘the sake of the training’ they have become as ‘mosquitoes
biting a lump of iron.’ In the end they have learned that there is no
impasse—no impasse between gimu and giri, either, or between giri and
human feelings, between righteousness and giri. They have found a way
out. They are free and for the first time they can fully ‘taste’ life.
They are muga. Their training in ‘expertness’ has been successfully
achieved.

Suzuki, the great authority on Zen Buddhism, describes muga as ‘ecstasy
with no sense of _I am doing it_,’ ‘effortlessness.’[7] The ‘observing
self’ is eliminated; a man ‘loses himself,’ that is, he ceases to be a
spectator of his acts. Suzuki says: ‘With the awaking of consciousness,
the will is split into two: . . . actor and observer. Conflict is
inevitable, for the actor(-self) wants to be free from the limitations’
of the observer-self. Therefore in Enlightenment the disciple discovers
that there is no observer-self, ‘no soul entity as an unknown or
unknowable quantity.’[8] Nothing remains but the goal and the act that
accomplishes it. The student of human behavior could rephrase this
statement to refer more particularly to Japanese culture. As a child a
person is drastically trained to observe his own acts and to judge them
in the light of what people will say; his observer-self is terribly
vulnerable. To deliver himself up to the ecstasy of his soul, he
eliminates this vulnerable self. He ceases to feel that ‘_he_ is doing
it.’ He then feels himself trained in his soul in the same way that the
novice in fencing feels himself trained to stand without fear of falling
on the four-foot pillar.

The painter, the poet, the public speaker and the warrior use this
training in muga similarly. They acquire, not Infinitude, but a clear
undisturbed perception of finite beauty or adjustment of means and ends
so that they can use just the right amount of effort, ‘no more and no
less,’ to achieve their goal.

Even a person who has undergone no training at all may have a sort of
muga experience. When a man watching Noh or Kabuki plays completely
loses himself in the spectacle, he too is said to lose his observing
self. The palms of his hands become wet. He feels ‘the sweat of muga.’ A
bombing pilot approaching his goal has ‘the sweat of muga’ before he
releases his bombs. ‘_He_ is not doing it.’ There is no observer-self
left in his consciousness. An anti-aircraft gunner, lost to all the
world beside, is said similarly to have ‘the sweat of muga’ and to have
eliminated the observer-self. The idea is that in all such cases people
in this condition are at the top of their form.

Such concepts are eloquent testimony to the heavy burden the Japanese
make out of self-watchfulness and self-surveillance. They are free and
efficient, they say, when these restraints are gone. Whereas Americans
identify their observer-selves with the rational principle within them
and pride themselves in crises on ‘keeping their wits about them,’ the
Japanese feel that a millstone has fallen from around their necks when
they deliver themselves up to the ecstasy of their souls and forget the
restraints self-watchfulness imposes. As we have seen, their culture
dins the need for circumspection into their souls, and the Japanese have
countered by declaring that there is a more efficient plane of human
consciousness where this burden falls away.

The most extreme form in which the Japanese state this tenet, at least
to the ears of an Occidental, is the way they supremely approve of the
man ‘who lives as already dead.’ The literal Western translation would
be ‘the living corpse,’ and in all Occidental languages ‘the living
corpse’ is an expression of horror. It is the phrase by which we say
that a man’s self has died and left his body encumbering the earth. No
vital principle is left in him. The Japanese use ‘living as one already
dead’ to mean that one lives on the plane of ‘expertness.’ It is used in
common everyday exhortation. To encourage a boy who is worrying about
his final examinations from middle school, a man will say, ‘Take them as
one already dead and you will pass them easily.’ To encourage someone
who is undertaking an important business deal, a friend will say, ‘Be as
one already dead.’ When a man goes through a great soul crisis and
cannot see his way ahead, he quite commonly emerges with the resolve to
live ‘as one already dead.’ The great Christian leader Kagawa, since
VJ-Day made a member of the House of Lords, says in his fictionalized
autobiography: ‘Like a man bewitched by an evil spirit he spent every
day in his room weeping. His fits of sobbing verged on hysteria. His
agony lasted for a month and a half but life finally gained the
victory. . . . He would live endued with the strength of death. . . . He
would enter into the conflict as one already dead. . . . He decided to
become a Christian.’[9] During the war Japanese soldiers said, ‘I
resolve to live as one already dead and thus repay _ko-on_ to the
Emperor,’ and this covered such behavior as conducting one’s own funeral
before embarking, pledging one’s body ‘to the dust of Iwo Jima,’ and
resolving ‘to fall with the flowers of Burma.’

The philosophy which underlies muga underlies also ‘living as already
dead.’ In this state a man eliminates all self-watchfulness and thus all
fear and circumspection. He becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond
the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action. The
dead are no longer returning _on_; they are free. Therefore to say, ‘I
will live as one already dead’ means a supreme release from conflict. It
means, ‘My energy and attention are free to pass directly to the
fulfillment of my purpose. My observer-self with all its burden of fears
is no longer between me and my goal. With it have gone the sense of
tenseness and strain and the tendency toward depression that troubled my
earlier strivings. Now all things are possible to me.’

In Western phraseology, the Japanese in the practice of muga and of
‘living as one already dead’ eliminate the conscience. What they call
‘the observing-self,’ ‘the interfering self,’ is a censor judging one’s
acts. It points up vividly the difference between Western and Eastern
psychology that when we speak of a conscienceless American we mean a man
who no longer feels the sense of sin which should accompany wrongdoing,
but that when a Japanese uses the equivalent phrase he means a man who
is no longer tense and hindered. The American means a bad man; the
Japanese means a good man, a trained man, a man able to use his
abilities to the utmost. He means a man who can perform the most
difficult and devoted deeds of unselfishness. The great American
sanction for good behavior is guilt; a man who because of a calloused
conscience can no longer feel this has become antisocial. The Japanese
diagram the problem differently. According to their philosophy man in
his inmost soul is good. If his impulse can be directly embodied in his
deed, he acts virtuously and easily. Therefore he undergoes, in
‘expertness,’ self-training to eliminate the self-censorship of shame
(haji). Only then is his ‘sixth sense’ free of hindrance. It is his
supreme release from self-consciousness and conflict.

This Japanese philosophy of self-discipline is abracadabra only so long
as it is separated from their individual life experiences in Japanese
culture. We have already seen how heavily this shame (haji) which they
assign to ‘the observing self’ weighs upon the Japanese, but the true
meaning of their philosophy in their psychic economy is still obscure
without a description of Japanese child-rearing. In any culture
traditional moral sanctions are transmitted to each new generation, not
merely in words, but in all the elders’ attitudes toward their children,
and an outsider can hardly understand any nation’s major stakes in life
without studying the way children are brought up there. Japanese
child-rearing makes clearer many of their national assumptions about
life which we have so far described only at the adult level.

-----

[1] Eliot, Sir Charles, _Japanese Buddhism_, p. 286.

[2] Nukariya, Kaiten, _The Religion of the Samurai_. London, 1913, p.
197.

[3] _Ibid._, p. 194.

[4] Eliot, Sir Charles, _Japanese Buddhism_, p. 186.

[5] Quoted by E. Steinilber-Oberlin, _The Buddhist Sects of Japan_.
London, 1938, p. 143.

[6] _Ibid._, p. 175.

[7] Suzuki, Professor Daisetz Teitaro, _Essays in Zen Buddhism_, vol. 3,
p. 318 (Kyoto, 1927, 1933, 1934).

[8] Quoted by Sir Charles Eliot, _Japanese Buddhism_, p. 401.

[9] Kagawa, Toyohiko, _Before the Dawn_, p. 240.


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