The Present Is Dear Because It Ends

In speaking of the spiritual culture of the Japanese, the concept of "mujo" cannot be avoided. Mujo, impermanence, comes from the Buddhist truth that all things change and never stay, and it was originally treated as a stern recognition of reality. The Japanese, however, did not take this Buddhist concept as a cold ending or a break. They internalized it as a sense of beauty and of salvation.

The cherry blossoms of spring are the typical case. They are a symbol of Japanese culture, and their beauty dwells less in "being in bloom" than in "soon falling." In petals that dance quietly on the wind just after full bloom and settle on the ground, we feel some kind of calm and assent. This is wholly unlike a longing for "eternal life." At its root lies a view of life and death in which the present is dear because it ends. The Japanese view of life and death once began from thinking about death.

The influence of this sensitivity to mujo on the Japanese view of life and death is immeasurable. We grieve a death, yet actively feel in it a natural cycle and meaning, and accept it. … In any case, there is philosophical depth in an attitude that does not try to conquer death, that holds the brilliance of life to stand out because death exists, and that lives having accepted death first. When death is accepted, life stands out vividly.

In Murasaki Shikibu's famous Tale of Genji, the life of Hikaru Genji, who attains the height of glory, is gradually covered over by decline and parting. What matters is that his fall is never drawn as a "tragedy." … How, then, did the Japanese of old see a course that we might call tragic? It is wrapped in mono no aware, "the feeling and acceptance that all things change."

An extreme example: Japanese villages once had a custom called obasute, "abandoning the old woman." It is handed down in countless traditions, and as early as the Konjaku Monogatari-shu (1120) and the Uji Shui Monogatari (1212-1221), and in folktales across the land that took various shapes, it has been told. This is the folktale of Obasute-yama. A son abandons his aged mother on a mountain. It is said to have been quite widely practiced to keep the village alive. … But we must not overlook that the long retelling of this story by the Japanese rests on a deep sensitivity to death and age, and on a community's anguish.

What matters is that the tradition of Obasute-yama is not simply a tale of contempt for the old. In many versions, as the son carries his mother up to abandon her, he is saved by her wisdom and love. She breaks branches to leave a trail so that he will not lose his way home, or prays for him up to the last moment of her death. Such scenes show that the story is not a simple and cruel one of discarding the old because they are no longer useful. It is more a mirror that confronts us with the root questions, what is "age" and what is "living," and for the son it was also a rite of passage, asking him to overcome it and resolve to live on in village society.

The name Obasute-yama itself is said to come from Mount Kamuriki in Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture. This place has long been known as a place where the moon looks beautiful, and "the moon of Obasute" (the moon over Obasute-yama) has been sung in waka since old times. Matsuo Basho too, in his Sarashina Kiko, expressed deep feeling for the scene. What is striking is that Obasute-yama, a place meant for "abandoning," was at the same time sung as a symbol of "a beautiful landscape."

Here the aesthetic peculiar to the Japanese shows strongly: the thought that beauty dwells precisely within sorrow. It is a place where people are abandoned, yet the moon that rises there is precious, and a kind of sublimity dwells in the loneliness. It can be called a miniature of the Japanese view of life and death, where sacrilege and reverence, despair and hope live together, and I think it is a philosophical theme from which there is still very much to learn today.

This story has been told for so long not to shun age, I think, but so that we do not forget what age is and how heavy a life is. Japan now faces a super-aged society, a first for the world, and yet the questions "what is age?" and "how heavy is a life?" are treated as meaningless and thrown out.

In such hardship, what the culture of old Japan teaches is the view that there is real value and beauty even in "ending" and "breaking." Perhaps it is the softness of heart with which to live life affirmatively, even in a harsh reality.

Thinking along these lines brings me to a fundamental question: what was I born into this world to do? In my view of life and death, I believe in reincarnation, as is common in Japan, yet I also believe that before taking up residence on this earth, the human soul makes its own decision to be born into a particular era, place, and family. One might say that the soul deliberately chooses those historical circumstances and that place in order to fulfill its mission.

We begin by knowing our own limits, and reckon backward from those limits to how we will live our life.

Living with the end in mind was once a vital Japanese virtue. The Japanese of the past were able to live their lives cleanly and to the full precisely because they kept the end in view. Samurai and Zen understood each other so deeply because both knew that everything begins from thinking of the end. This is the fruit of Zen.

Just as life begins to shine when we hold death in mind, our possibilities begin to shine when we know our limits.

To my mind, the reason modernity lost the tension between inside and outside, drifting into separation even though every people once possessed the craft of keeping them inseparable, cannot be separated from the modern drive to avert our eyes from death. When we try not to think of death, life itself dries up — because losing the tension between life and death, which are inseparable, weakens the unseen kekkai of the community at the same stroke.

Shinran spent his life breaking the existing communal illusion in thought by negation. He brought to nothing the commonplace Pure Land that was the premise of the Pure Land teaching, raised the essence of the Pure Land from there, and, not placing the Pure Land in death, set it again between life and death.

The Pure Land is not the far shore. It is a place from which one can look over both life and death. This is how Shinran redefined it.