Greetings all—I thought that I would send you some notes on the Parkes reading, since we did not get to talk about it much during class on Monday.

In the Parkes article, the author suggests that we look at Japanese literature, movies, and even food as a way to understand Japanese thinking, particularly the religious dimension. This in itself is suggestive, inasmuch as implies the pervasiveness of religious values in Japanese life. Would you think of looking at Burger King or the latest Wu Tang Clan CD to find out about American spirituality? In any case, he begins with Yukio Mishima, the very famous author who, after a failed attempt to incite the Japanese army to rebellion in the name of the emperor, committed seppuku (ritual suicide, disembowelment) in 1970. What made Mishima do such a thing? Parkes gives several ideas, many of which correspond to what we talked about on Wednesday.

1. First of all, we need to keep in mind that it was not the politics that drove Mishima, but rather his philosophy of life, which, ironically, celebrated death as the ultimate spiritual goal. Not any death, but a glorious death that comes about as a result of living fully and dangerously, adhering to principles—in M’s case, an celebration or offering of life for an absolute aesthetic (conveniently using the Emperor and right-wing politics as a cover). Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that death (or its avoidance in everlasting life) is the primary motivating focus of religion; for some, then, to “be intimate with death” (死に親しむ, a favorite line of M) is to confront ultimate questions and, it would seem, conquer them.

2. M was ideologically anti-intellectual, that is, for him true action was action unpolluted by conceptualization and rationalization and constituted the path of truth. What does this mean in the context of a writer, the intellectual personified? Mishima’s stated path was that of bunburyodo 文武両道, or the dual path of art and sword. Although M’s thinking was closer to the rhetoric of what some have called “Japan-ism” (nihonkyo 日本教), it was also (in typical Japanese fashion) imbued with many Buddhist ideas, and his final work—the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility—was set around the Buddhist theme of reincarnation and the question of how our mind or thoughts shapes or even creates our world.

a. Zen too, and much of Buddhist philosophy, sees words, language, intellectualization, rationalization and the like as concealing truth—the goal is to go beyond our limited intellect and grasp things as they exist in themselves, free of our conceptual proliferation. This is known as “mushin 無心” or “no mind” and is fundamental to Japanese arts (haiku, tea) as well as the martial arts.

b. Zen also has a fierce approach to how one might realize this—one time the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, would not teach a disciple until he finally cut off his arm and offered it to him, a sign of his total commitment to the path. This is not a true story, but a rhetorical device indicating that the path is not easy, and in fact requires that you are willing to die—that is, to let the conventional self, the self that you think you are today, die in order to realize the birth of the true self. In this search, according to Zen, even the Buddha must die: “If, on the path to awakening, you meet the Buddha, kill him!” It is in part because of this fearlessness that Zen became so popular among the warriors in Japan.

i. Perhaps the most important Buddhist idea is: NO SELF. What does this mean?

c. Confucian values too find little meaning in individual selfhood, finding instead that the self is derivative, that is, derived from one’s relations within community. So too, as in Zen, it has been argued that Confucian ethics are aesthetic, that is, created anew as the situation evolves rather than discovered as an always-existing or “given from above” set of unchangeable laws.

d. Focus on the body as the site of aesthetic and ritual, no mind-body or soul/material self distinction. Fulfillment through discipline of the body in ritual practice—like zen, tea, pottery, calligraphy, martial arts and the like.

e. Bushido—the code of the warrior. How do the arts of war relate to a philosophy of compassion?

f. Shinto—how does Parkes describe Shinto? Where do we see this in M?

g. What does it mean to speak of an “aesthetic of death”?

See you Wednesday.

Jamie Hubbard