Non-separation (非分離)

The innovation I understand to be the most important piece of Japanese wisdom for the world to come is the philosophy of "non-separation." It is the power to embrace opposites as they are, in their contradiction, without setting them against each other. In the early stages you may use the word "integration" instead of "embrace," but it will surely drift off later, so it is better to understand it as embrace.

Having learned from Japan's great failure, I take the Japanese ability to be thinking in the predicative realm. When one can think from this ground, one is free of separating thought. What is easily mistaken here is that this is not "integration" either. The word is used in "integrative medicine" and elsewhere, but integration is a concept peculiar to the subjective realm, which presupposes separation.

The Japanese language and Japanese thought are in a state of "non-separation," in which the separation of subject and object does not exist at the root, and they take "place" itself as the ground of perception.

Furi (不離), inseparability. In no world is there any separation of inner and outer. To nurture the inner is to nurture the outer, and to nurture the outer is to nurture the inner. It is a very Chinese way of thinking, from a people who hold the ancient wisdom of yin and yang, but Wang Yangming saw that separation was the root cause of human suffering and of the world's disorder, and he never stopped teaching the truth that everything is inseparable.

In the end, doesn't a good human life come down to how we can give ourselves wholly to our own life without losing our way, and live it through to the end? Whatever our circumstances, whatever the course of our life, if we can meet the doubts that arise without losing our footing and give ourselves until the final moment of death to the task that is ours to fulfill — that is the happiest of lives.

Everyone gets this wrong as well: kata is not equal to "form." Kata is the state in which "spirit and form are not separate."

The thoroughness of seeing nothing as separate is the essential form of chanoyu as Rikyu saw it, so in his time there was naturally no concept of chado with this tendency to separation. If anything, chanoyu is the unseparated.

In the martial ways there is the important phrase "heart, technique, body" (shin, gi, tai). Here too, technique arises because heart and body are not separate. Heart, technique and body are not three things apart. Technique is the highest skill that arises where mind and body are one.

What Shinran does here is to put back in its true position of "the non-separation of life and death" the Pure Land that had been one-sidedly made subordinate to the side of death by the "separation of life and death." Shinran took the Pure Land to be here, but such a view of non-separation is something Honen did not have. So though they are both called the Pure Land teaching, Shinran of the True Pure Land school is basically different in kind. Put another way, the Pure Land school of Honen's side is "the Pure Land of separation," and the True Pure Land school of Shinran's side is "the Pure Land of non-separation."

Under Rujing's guidance Dogen reached the state of awakening called "shinjin datsuraku" (身心脱落). The words are not a difficult concept. They mean that the dualistic world of "body" (身) and "mind" (心) is made non-separate by "dropping off" (脱落), the state in which all selfish desire and attachment have fallen away.

People lose themselves when the movement of the mind runs loose. The essence is to keep these loosened movements at the source of one's own mind, and by realizing this through shikan taza, to realize a state in which people do not fall into separation. Then shinjin datsuraku is realized and non-separation is reached.

Inner and outer are not separate. The realizations of introspection must always be put to use for others and for the community, and care for others and for the community should return to one's own introspection.