Returning to the Original Substance of the Mind｜Knowledge and Skill Are Only a Means

There was an age when the accumulation of knowledge and skill was absolute. Looking back over the 160 years since Meiji, it was a rational means of gaining position, securing a career and building a better life. But human beings are frail, and whatever becomes chronic, good or bad, makes us lose sight of the reason behind it. The means quietly became the end, and once the acquisition of knowledge and skill had turned into an end in itself, it began to degrade the quality of each person’s life. So people lose the meaning of life and wander, and it all ends in the confusion of being tossed back and forth by the currents of the age.

This is exactly the age, and the world, that we are facing now. A great many people have lost sight of the meaning of life, can no longer cling to the values they inherited, and cannot even see where the road ahead might lie.

Behind this, no doubt, lie the many phenomena said to make up the greatest turning point in human history. But if we do not look for the cause there alone, and step back to a wider vantage, it seems to me the last sign that the history of modern Japan since Meiji has reached its limit.

Seen this way, what we must do is not let our eyes be captured by the problems clamored over day after day. It is to find a clue in how those who came before us lived in times like these.

In fact, looking back over Japanese history, there have been many times of turmoil when people lost the meaning of their lives, and each time they renamed their hopeless world “the Latter Days of the Law” or something like it, proclaimed the end, and began to live more for pleasure, more for the instant. But were their lives rewarded for it? As those who came before us tell us through history, that is out of the question.

If so, now that knowledge and skill, the very skeleton of modernity, have lost their force, what should we teach, and what should we learn, so that it leads human beings toward a better future? We should think about this once more.

For my part, I have learned a great deal from Japanese Yangmingism, which descends from Wang Yangming, and above all I have been powerfully shaped by the thought of Masahiro Yasuoka, which I keep facing every day. Along the way I found, in Wang Yangming’s Instructions for Practical Living, a passage that speaks of exactly what lies beyond the confusion of this age.

They are words Wang Yangming spoke against a long-standing misconception of what the learning of the sages in Confucianism was. First, in Zhu Xi learning, the Neo-Confucianism built on Zhu Xi from the Song dynasty onward, Confucius and the other sages were revered as godlike beings who excelled in knowledge and skill, and were split off and set outside ourselves. Here a dualism hardened into a relationship. Those who studied believed they had to move toward that outer point, acquire outer knowledge and skill, and reach the same place as the sages, and in fact that is what they were taught.

Since the institutions of Confucian education in China at the time were built on this structure, each age of life had its step on the staircase toward the sage, and on each step one learned, digested and mastered knowledge and skill before going out into society. Yet the result was that governance fell into disorder, people’s hearts fell into disorder, war followed war, confusion reached its height, and people lost both the meaning and the purpose of life.

Against this, Wang Yangming, in the Ming dynasty, said plainly that all of it had happened because the learning of the sages, as it had been taught, was framed from a mistaken point of view.

Put simply, the root is to return to the original substance of the mind (心の本体), which all of us share. It comes down to this one thing. Knowledge and skill were never the question in the learning of the sages. The learning of the sages is the return to the original substance of the mind that everyone always holds in common, and it is for this that learning exists, that teaching exists, that study exists. That is what Wang Yangming taught.

Everyone knows that people have aptitudes. But when it comes to how to make use of them, most people turn the matter upside down. Because they think on the footing of Zhu Xi learning, they hand their aptitude over to society, leave knowledge and skill outside themselves, and set the standard of judgment outside as well.

Acquiring the knowledge and skill that suit one’s aptitude certainly matters, but what truly matters is whether one knows what it is for and where it is heading. To acquire them merely to gain social status, or to stand above others and look down on them, is not learning, because it leads away from the original substance of the mind. Now that the worship of academic credentials has been exposed as a castle built on sand, the call for real learning will slowly grow.

Rather, knowledge and skill are indispensable precisely for returning to the original substance of the mind, that is, the original substance of one’s own mind, and they are never more than a means. The end is to return to the original substance of the mind and to live from that place. This is the teaching of the sages.

Since the modern era began, and still today, this inverted way of thinking has spread until no one is able to doubt it. In the end everyone has fallen into utter confusion, understands nothing, and no longer even knows what they are doing in the first place. When the overwhelming majority do not know what they are doing, how on earth are we to make the nation, society, the world or humanity any better? It is strange in the extreme, yet for some reason no one asks it.

Meanwhile the world keeps accelerating furiously, as if abandoning people, and every day vast numbers are shaken off. Now, asking once more what learning is bears directly on survival. And for us, it will likely be the last chance.