Eastern Philosophy From Inside Asia: Takahiro Mitsui

The only method I have ever used is to dive deep. Diving deep and the Western idea of transcendence look like movements in opposite directions, one downward and one upward, yet the difference goes beyond direction. Their structures are entirely different, because diving deep requires that the opposition of subject and object, which is to say separation itself, be dissolved.

To keep diving is simply to keep performing acts of dissolution day after day. Transcendence sets a goal, the single absolute summit, but the practice of dissolution has no end, because there is no goal to reach, no ideal, no guiding principle. There is no linear line of growth at all, only the condition of abiding somewhere nonlinear. What remains is to keep diving for as long as you live, and the diving itself becomes life.

I believe that Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism each, at their origin, held one question: "What will you do after you awaken?" How you act then is the energy, the source, that truly changes the world.

To put it plainly, awakening is not the goal. The moment you reach it, your real life finally begins.

Japanese culture's outreach so far has not been to present Japan from the inside. It has always been fixed on the premise of a gaze from outside, a perspective that answers so-called "Orientalism." To the images of "mystical," "serene" and "exotic" that Orientalism supplied, we should have presented the real Japan, so that mutual understanding would not be reduced to something hollow. Instead Japan too packaged its culture to match those images and offered it as healing.

Yet from about the time the Second World War began, terms such as Eastern thought and Eastern philosophy were put forward in Japan in various forms. Until then the view of "the East" had been only the view from the Western side, which held overwhelming power, and no one agreed with or sided with it. Through some occasion, Japan's own problems were extended to the East, and Japanese took up the viewpoint of the East and began to make a variety of claims. D. T. Suzuki of Zen is the typical figure, and he argues constantly from many angles in Eastern consciousness.

Problems of this kind cannot be solved unless we build a way of thinking from place into our own thought. Put at its starkest, there can be no universal on a global plane.

And here there is nothing universal, no West and no East, nothing at all except "you yourself," stripped of ornament. This is where I feel the future.

On this premise, let me go further. Why do I keep mentioning Wang Yangming and speaking of the importance of Yangming learning? By ordinary reckoning, Confucianism is the least understood tradition in the Western world: unlike Buddhism it is barely familiar, and only mistaken images of it have spread.

But remember: even Zen, now absorbed into global mindfulness, was regarded in the West only a century ago as something suspect and met with strong resistance. We have been living witnesses to how completely that changed in a single century. Who can say for certain that Confucianism, born in China and immensely influential in Japan, will not become a global current too?

When I explain this briefly to English-speaking readers, I say that one "exists in the flow," a subject-based way of putting it. … The language structure above is involved, and since English demands a subject when I explain, it is true that Japanese thought tends not to get across.

So I advocate not transcendence but diving deep. Yet this is not something anyone can do today or tomorrow. That is why Project 2049 is built on a long-term plan, as a way of delivering thought that connects to my future and to yours, and of delivering it fresh. Just as produce shipped straight from the farm has become ordinary, I believe that one's own words must now travel straight from where they grow.

Simply inhabit your everyday life with attentiveness. That is your own distinct life. Recognizing this elementary truth is the first step out of the contemporary trap—abandoning comparisons with others, letting go of the pursuit of conventional success, and living out your own destiny.

Your life is not my life.

In the original theory of yin and yang, the two are never separate; their power lies in their inseparability. It is crucial to understand that in and yo are not two distinct parts. The easiest way to grasp this is through the relation between inhaling and exhaling in breath. Only because you breathe out deeply can you take a fresh breath in.

What we truly need to look at is daily life. I will stress this as often as it takes, because the world's problems are reflected in daily life, and people who cannot solve them there will never solve them in the estranged realm called "the world."

Here the definitions "I, an Easterner" and "you, a Westerner" are meaningless. Even people born and raised in the Western world are reacting strongly against this established method.

That is why I am not selling a newsletter. I am selling time in which a relationship grows. What I always hope as I write is that, in a world full of noise, the time you spend reading this newsletter can be quiet and rich, a time to face yourself.