Wakamatsu on Izutsu
CH 10 The Philosophy of Mind
Buddhism and Depth Psychology: The Unconscious and Mu-consciousness
ISHIKI To RONSHITU (1983; Consciousness and essence) introduced new readers to Toshihiko Izutsu. One of them was Hayao Kawai, who would later participate in Eranos as, in a way, Izutsu's successor. The serialized version of "Ishiki to honshitsu" "made my heart leap as I read it," Kawai wrote in his obituary of Izutsu for the Yomiuri Shinibun. Later in a semi-autobiographical interview, Kawai said that, although it was not his practice to read the same book again, he reread Ishiki to honshitsu several times. "Ishiki to honshitsu was an extremely important book for me," he stated, adding that he was dependent on Izutsu for the expression "depth consciousness."' Though the comment may seem restrained, the statement that he would gladly speak a dozen times on the themes of Ishiki to honshitsu conveys the extremely strong impact that he felt.
That Kawai, an authority on "consciousness," was profoundly moved by izutsu's treatment of "depth consciousness," and the significance of that fact, are probably worth considering. It was a noteworthy event, I believe, not only for any discussion of Hayao Kawai the thinker, but also for depth psychology in Japan, which would mark a major turning point with his arrival on the scene. It was also a portent
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that depth psychology would go beyond being the study of mental states and become an independent discipline as the science of "the psyche" in the true sense. Research within a field advances that field, but, for a fundamental deepening to occur, it must confront, or engage in a dialogue with, other disciplines. This is true not only for scholarship but for religion and the arts as well. The meeting between Izutsu and Kawai had a significance that went well beyond simply being an event in their respective personal histories.
As we saw earlier, the serialization of "Ishiki to honshitsu" began in June 1980 and was completed in February 1982; the book version came out the following year in 1983. A glance at the chronology of Kawai's life shows that this corresponds exactly with the period in which Kawai the psychologist moved beyond that sphere and completed the transfor¬mation into Kawai the thinker. Kawai cultivated dialogues not just with Izutsu but with people in other fields including Shüsaku EndO and the philosopher Yfjirô Nakamura (1925— ). The statement by Kawai himself that the encounter with Izutsu greatly influenced this transforma¬tion is found in Kawai Hayao: shinri ryohoka no tanjo (Hayao Kawai: The genesis of a psychotherapist) by Nobukazu Otsuka, who deepened his acquaintance with Kawai while working at the publishing company, Iwanami Shoten, of which he later became president.2 The following is from a personal communication that Kawai sent to Otsuka.
I've been practicing psychotherapy for a long time, but recently. thanks to Professor Toshihikoj Izutsu, I finally feel that the philosophical background of what I am doing has, to a large extent, become clear. I've been thinking of putting particular emphasis on this point in my writing. I have the feeling that, as philosophical background, Hua Yen philosophy, which has been clarified by Professor Izutsu—and Myoe, too—fits right in with what I am doing.
This letter was sent in January 1987; wai's book on the Buddhist priest Myoe (1173-1232) was published in April of that year, so it was precisely around the time that he was nearing the completion of that work.3 This book, which centers on a dream diary written by Myoe, a priest of the Kegon school (the Japanese equivalent of Hua Yen), deals with the career of this unique mind and the development of his 289 extremely self-aware depth-psychology activities. When discussing the supernatural phenomena that Myoc experienced, Kawai refers not only to Jungs synchronicity but even to Swedenborg. As this indicates, Kawai tries to remove the trappings of priesthood, religious sect and historical period and invite MyOe as an individual thinker and practi¬tioner onto the stage of ideas.
"There is a wooden plaque made of Zelkova hanging in KOzanji," writes Kawai.4 On it Myôe recorded the regulations governing daily monastic life at KOzanji, the temple in the mountains outside of Kyoto that he had founded in 1206, and at the beginning he wrote the phrase Arubekiyowa, "As it should be," this is not a statement that sets a high value on nature in the sense of "things as they are," Kawai notes, but, rather, it clearly reflects Myöe's intention to live existentially, to try to live only in the here and now, not in or for some previous or future existence.' For Kawai, Myoe was Japans first self-aware depth psychologist as well as its first existentialist. When dealing with the thought of Hayao Kawai, this one work cannot he overlooked. Chapter 7, "Mutual Interpenetration." is both a discussion of the ontological boundaries within the Avataipsaka-s'ütra, or Garland SUtra, as well as Kawai's study of Toshihiko Izutsu. In it Kawai cites the lecture Izutsu gave at Eranos, "The Nexus of Ontological Events: A Buddhist View of Reality," which Izutsu later revised and translated into Japanese as "Ji-ji mu ge / ri-ri muge: sonzai kaitai no ato" (The world of 'non-hindrance': After/traces of ontological deconstruction) and in which he describes the world of Kegon/ Hua Yen.'
There are four Domains in Hua Yen, each corresponding to a level of consciousness, Izutsu says.
The shih (사) Domain and the Ii (리) Domain are interchangeable with terms we have seen before; the former is the phenomenal world of ordinary consciousness, and the latter, the noumenal, or perhaps what we might call the pre-phenomenal world, i.e. "the ultimate non-phenomenal dimension of reality, in which all phenomenal things ....re reduced to oneness or nothingness.
There is also a Domain in which shih and ii interpenetrate each other, and another in which shih and shih interpenetrate.
In the mutual interpenetration of shih and Ii, ii (absolute metaphysical Reality) is "a universal and boundless expanse of cosmic energy, . . . homogeneous and undifferentiated," that manifests itself in the form of shih, "seemingly independent and different erties (different, i.e., ontologically distinct from one another) (that] are homogeneously permeated by the same ii."
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The Absolute in Hua Yen is k'ung (공), void, nothingness, ün ata, but sunyata, in its two fundamental aspects, negative and positive, all-nulli¬fying and all-creating,'tm and "the phenomenal or empirical appearance of the one absolute Reality in the form of divergent things in the uni¬verse is known as hsing ch'i (성기), the arising of the Budd ha-Reality,9
The field in which the beings that are born in this way from a single source are able to continue to be separate, individual things is called the Domain of the interpenetration of shih and shih. Every empirical thing mutually forms part of every other empirical thing, that is, they mutually interpenetrate one another, and make up the world.
This is what is known in Hua Yen philosophy as yaan ch'i which
corresponds to the Sanskrit term prattva-samutpada, i.e. interdependent origination. These two principles, the arising of the Buddha-Reality and interdependent origination, Izutsu says, are the basic principles of the Hua Yen world. What must not be forgotten here is that these principles are not just external; they include the immanent as well.
When Kawai read this essay, he writes, he understood the real reason why Myoe sent letters to rocks and islands and why it was significant that Myoe recognized the black dog he saw in a dream as another form of Reality. In the KegonlHua Yen world, the principle behind Ibn 'Arabi's theory of the "unity of existence" is alive in a virtually identical form. What Izutsu attempted to do in the abovementioned essay is to present a view of an ontological world in which these two thought systems would resonate with one another.
The reader understands anew not only that there is a point of contact here between Buddhism and Islam, but also that, already by Myoe's time, Japanese Buddhist thought had risen to a level at which it could pose problems to the world as a 'philosophy." Ibn 'Arabi was born in 116, Myoe in 1173; they were literally contemporaries.
During his time at Eranos, what lzutsu, with a strong sense of purpose, was attempting to do could well be called laying the groundwork that would make it possible to discuss Buddhist thought—Zen, Hua Yen or Yogcara—on the world stage. In his lectures there he dealt with Zen, rather than Zen Buddhism, in other words, with the dynamic
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philosophical system that, since Bodhidharma in the fifth/sixth century, has spread through all parts of the Orient and has been built upon over the course of 1500 years.
Other lectures dealt with the Garland Sutra as a noble intellectual work that expounds an ontology of light, and with Dogen (1200-1253) as a religious philosopher who developed his own theory of time.
The Garland Sutra | The Avataṃsaka-sūtra is one of the major texts of the Huayan school, a branch of Buddhism that flourished in China during the Tang dynasty (618–917)
If he had had the opportunity, Izutsu would probably have devoted a book to Kukai, the philosopher of a higher order of WORD. This sense of purpose would continue right up until the end. His last work was an exploration of the Mahayana Buddhist classic, the Awakening of Faith in the Mahãyana.
On second thought. however, it was Kawai, I believe, who was able to understand izutsu's true intentions and was ready to take the next scholarly leap forward. Kawai saw in Izutsu someone who was carrying on the tradition of Oriental philosophy in the title sense. It is not the author who brings a work to completion; it is the reader. For Izutsu. too, there is no doubt that the encounter with Kawai was a serendipitous event.
After his return from Iran. Izutsu started a study group, which included Hayao Kawai and philosophers Shizuteru Ueda (1926—) and Yoshihiro Nitta (1929- ), primarily to read the philosophy of Kitarö Nishida. Although Kawai makes virtually no mention of this study group. Nobukazu Otsuka writes that he seems to have learned a lot from it.° It is likely that Kawai perceived in Izutsu's works a world beyond the unconscious, one that depth psychology had dimly grasped in its held of vision but whose contours it had thus far been unable to clearly make out. Recall the sentence in "Ishiki to honshitsu": "We must push on to the point at which consciousness goes beyond the nature of consciousness, i.e. to the point at which consciousness ceases to be consciousness.""
In passages like this, Kawai probably got a real sense for "depth consciousness," which was a region that psychology thus far had not yet fathomed.
The unconscious, as Jung and Kawai understand it, is an area that transcends the consciousness of individiuals and is connected to the consciousness of a culture or a historical period. In that sense, Kawal's perception of consciousness was already "superconscious." Jung and Kawai seem to have arrived at Corbin 's mundus irnaginalis from a different direction.
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Izutsu assumes that the linguistic alciva-consciousness is even deeper than the unconscious; it is, he argues, the region in which "Being" turns into "beings. But, for Izutsu, this is not the bottom of depth consciousness. The point at issue vacillates between what Jung calls the "cultural unconscious" and the "universal unconscious" (which Izutsu translates as "collective unconscious"), on the one hand, and the imaginal world, on the other. A "consciousness that goes beyond consciousness," which stores up boundless creative energy, manifests itself in its ultimate reality in depth consciousness. This is the reality that Izutsu calls Mu-consciousness, punning on the Japanese word for "unconscious" muishiki and the philosophical term mu () meaning Nothingness. Mu-consciousness, however, is not consciousness of Nothingness. As the fact that Izutsu also calls it "meta-consciousness" suggests, it is absolute consciousness before Nothingness manifests itself as "essence." Thus, Mu-consciousness cannot be consciously grasped.
A theory of consciousness as part of a new Oriental philosophy will likely be put on a firm footing once efforts have been made to attempt to restructuralize consciousness in an integrated manner in a form that also includes the consciousness that goes beyond consciousness, the consciousness that is not consciousness. And it is precisely there. I believe, that the significance of studying Oriental Consciousness lies, especially for a theory of Oriental consciousness.
When Izutsu writes "Oriental," he is implying something real that spans different dimensions. Similarly, Mu-consciousness, too, does not simply indicate the conscious world of human beings alone. It is not a region that can be caught sight of at the height of human activity but, rather, a place illuminated by the transcendent world. The true nature of con¬sciousness does not become clear only by dealing with its phenomena and structure. Anyone who attempts to study it must necessarily have the experience of seeing "consciousness" from beyond consciousness. Kawai perceived in Izutsu's philosophy the possibility of doing just that.
Mu-consciousness is transcendental Reality, but Izutsu does not end the discussion there. He emphasizes the inseparability of ordinary consciousness and Mu-consciousness: "It is also an obvious and [293]] undeniable fact that it Mu-consciousness is in an intimate and inseparable organic relationship with consciousness in the ordinary sense, not to mention that that very fact is also its most remarkable distinguishing feature for an understanding of consciousness in the various traditions of Oriental thought."
" Endowing the invisible entity of transcendental Reality with a form visible to the phenomenal world is a tradition of Oriental thought.
And the aim of Oriental philosophy, Izutsu believes, is not to describe the transcendental world; it is nothing less than to explain in the phenomenal world how the transcendental world works and what it means. What Izutsu treats as the most remarkable, most immediate and most dynamic form of this is WORD.
In 1983, there was a three-way discussion among Izutsu, Kawai and American psychologist James Hillman.t4
In it, Kawai says that, although his intellectual position is "Jungian," he does not necessarily think in Jung's terms. Given the differences between Eastern and Western culture, in particular, he says, not only is it impossible to apply the language of Jungian psychology directly to Japan: it does not even seem to be the right choice. By "Jungian," he means Jung's language indicating basic attitudes toward the world, including the phenomenal world and the world of consciousness, he goes on to explain, not his support for Jung's methodologies or theories. Moreover, even Jung could not escape being a child of his age. There are places where Jung attempts to express his ideas by modeling them on the so-called natural sciences. I think we ought to be free of such things, he says.
Kokoro (::.), the word Kawai uses to translate "psyche," is an old Japanese word for "mind" or "heart"; depth psychology is a new disci¬pline. In modern Japan. especially, hardly any of the groundwork had been laid to talk about this subject in our own language. The period in which Kawai began to speak publicly was one in which the scholarly language, as it were, was undeveloped. This fact must not be forgotten when thinking about the intellectual history of Japan and the sittia-tion in which Kawai found himself. To translate "spiritual being," he would sometimes use the Japanese word for "soul" or "spirit," tamashii (tL').
This sort of notational convention—writing kokoro (::) for "psyche" and karada (tf) for "body" in kana rather than in charac-ters—seems almost natural to us in Japan today, but, at the time that [294] Kawai was experimenting with terminology, he was criticized in certain quarters for not conveying the essence of tamashii as a technical religious term.
Others complained that such usage was not sufficiently scholarly. Although a baptism of fire such as this is unavoidable for creative thinkers, today, when we can view the situation objectively, his achievements deserve to be properly appreciated. Alluding to critiques of Myôe, Kawai writes, "It is the quality of his religious life that warrants our attention above and beyond a consideration of his contributions to Japanese religious history.
Paradoxically, it is only in this light that MyOe's place in the history of Buddhism in Japan can be properly appreciated." ' Substitute "attitude toward scholarship" for "religious life" and "history of thought" for "history of Buddhism," and this passage becomes an introduction to Hayao Kawai the thinker, himself.
The discovery of technical terms in one's native language and the development of them into a metalanguage—a challenge similar to what Izutsu attempted in "Ishiki to honshitsu"—was what Kawai put into practice for depth psychology. When evaluating others, Izutsu frequently uses expressions such as "personal," "original" and "existential." "Personal" does not connote giving one's own interpretation to an existing concept or idea; one draws the concept into one's own body, thinks about it, considers its universality and explores it thoroughly. "Original" means attempting to speak about an experience or research topic in one's own words. And "existential," as Kawai applied it to Myoe, indicates an attitude toward life in which one stakes one's whole being on something here and now. Although Izutsu left no formal statement about Kawai, it was he who recommended Kawai to Eranos. This fact clearly indicates the esteem he felt for him.
James Hillman had written that "a new angelology of words" will be indispensable from now on.17 In their colloquy, Toshihiko Izutsu remarked that, even though some call Hillman a left-wing Jungian, from what Izutsu himself had heard, Hillman went far beyond the boundaries of the Jungian realm in a conservative sense—indeed, some might even say he had gone too far.S As can be inferred from the phrase an "angelology of words," Hillman does not fit into the category of depth psychologist.
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After the death of Corbin, for a time, Izutsu and Hillman led Eranos. Just as Freud had formed a school and Jung had broken away from it and developed his own, Hillman did not confine himself to the Jungian school but went his own independent way. From this we can detect an attitude toward scholarship and a stance as a thinker that goes beyond mere temperament.
Like Hillman, Izutsu disliked being part of a group. Although Izutsu had great respect for Shinobu Orikuchi, he did not enter his coterie while at Keio but attached himself to Junzaburo Nishiwaki instead.
His inherent dislike of groups may also have influenced the strong sense of incompatibility that Izutsu felt toward the Traditionalist school, Although schools of thought are formed by history,
scholarship itself, Izutsu believed, "must be a solitary activity."
Hillman and Izutsu were directly acquainted with one another, but even setting that fact aside, Hillman's influence on Izutsu rivaled or surpassed that of Jung. As Izutsu says in their three-way conversation, meeting Hillman was a turning point that deepened his interest in Jung and Jungian psychology.
Although no source is cited in "Ishiki to honshitsu," where the phrase occurs, Hillman referred to an angelology of words in a book entitled Re-visioning Psychology, based on a series of lectures he had given.
In the book itself, Hillman hardly ever uses the technical term "re-visioning" in its title, but if a reader misunderstands the original meaning of "vision" there, s/he will lose sight of the issues that Hillman is raising. Every time I read this work, I recall a passage in Kansö (Impressions), Hideo Kobayashi's study of Bergson.
At this point, presumably, the double meaning that Bergson applied to the act of seeing will already be clear. In the past, theologians used the word "vision" in the sense of -seeing God." i.e. the beatific vision, but even though modern science has restricted the same word to the meaning of "the sense of sight," it has been unable to get rid of the old connotations that this word has. That is because the living word has put down roots in reality°
"Vision" is the act of looking at the noumenal world. We have already observed that "seeing" is the most primal form of metaphysical activity. What Hillman explores throughout this work is the contact with the noumenal world, which subsumes the phenomenal world.
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Izutsu translated "words" in "a new angelology of words" using his technical term Kotoba (kotoba), WORD. What Hillman passionately discussed in Re-visioning Psychology is words as angels rather than "the angel aspect of the word." "in short, what Hillman is trying to say is that there is an 'angel aspect' to WORDs; to put it another way, all words have a unique semantic side, which, in addition to the ordinary general sense that each of them has, evokes other-dimensional images.
It is not only a word like 'angel' that, from the outset, signifies an other-dimensional being; even words that signify quite commonplace things like 'tree' or 'mountain' or 'flower' also Ihavel the semantic potential to metamorphose into other-dimensional images."'
Izutsu interprets this semantic side to be what 1-human "calls 'the angel aspect of the word." If "the semantic potential [of words] to metamorphose into other-dimensional images" is their "angel aspect," then, "the meanings that metamorphose into other-dimensional images" are the angels themselves. Carried to its logical conclusion, it would presumably become 'WORD which is angel," which might he more easily understood existentially as the expression "WORD as angel."
Latent in Izutsu's comment is the understanding that angels are in an inseparable relation with the WORD which is Lord, namely the Transcendent. Izutsu "reads" Hillman as dealing not with language but with Being as transcendental Reality.
To speak of an "angelology" is nothing less than to acknowledge the existence of angels. Hillman probably did not doubt the reality of angels, and Izutsu, who discusses the subject, presumably didn't either.
As in the case of Tathagatas and Bodhisattvas, angels, too, are archetypes, "essences." Angels are the will of God. The thoughts of the Transcendent manifest themselves in the world along with the "essences" known as angels.
The "Readings" of Writers
After ishiki to honshitsu, there were writers who responded strongly to Toshihiko izutsu. Those who come to mind are not only Shusaku Endo, Takako Takahashi, Shötaro Yasuoka and other writers with close ties to Catholicism mentioned earlier, but also Keizô Hino, Keizaburo Maruyama, Ryotaro Shiba and Kenzabnro Oe.
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Izutsu's colloquy with Shiba entitled "Nijisseikimatsu no yami to liikari" (Darkness and light at the end of the twentieth centurv) was the last one he ever took pad in, his final opportunity to presew him¬self before the public. --The shock of his sudden and untimely death is emotionally described in Shiba's tribute "Arabesque"— tile title is taken from that of a novel written by Izutsu's wife, Toyoko.1
What makes their colloquy interesting is that in it lutsu personally relates previously untold historical details about himself, such as his relationships with Ibrahim, Musa and ShOmei Okawa that were alluded to ear¬lier, and the fact that he had made serious attempts at a semantics of waka.
But even more noteworthy is the lively way in which he talks to novelist Shiba about the boundaries between the historical world and the synchronic world that seethed within him. The colloquy overflows with passion as he attempts to demolish certain historical and cultural perspectives that had become received opinion.
The conversation between the novelist who wrote Kükai no fukei (Kukai's landscape)24 and the philosopher who dealt with the philoso¬phy of language in Shingon esoteric Buddhism takes an extremely interesting turn in regard to the course of Kukai's life.
When izutsu says that Kükai was familiar with the philosophy of the Neoplatonist Plotinus, Shiba responds by raising the possibility that Kükai was aware of Chris¬tianity. and Izutsu emphatically agrees.
"Not only does a rnetonymic relationship hold true between Platonism and the Shingon esotericism of Kukai in terms of their thought structures, but I think the latter is, in fact, historically related to Greek thought," Izutsu says. Metonymy is a rhetorical term indicating that a strong association exists between two parallel things. What "a metonymic relationship in terms of their thought structures" means is that, although, historically, there was no direct intellectual exchange between Kukai and Plotinus, there is a remarkable structural agreement in their points of view. lzutzu wants to overturn that commonly held view, however; lie believes that the two thought systems actually interacted with one another in the Chinese capital city of Ch'ang-an during the eighth and ninth centuries.
When the Japanese translation of the complete works of Plotinus began to come out in 1986, Izutsu contributed a blurb entitled "I-lirakareta seishin' no shisoka" (The thinker with an "open mind").
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Although Plotinus is called a Neoplatonist, he by no means confined himself within the parameters of Platonic philosophy, in particular, he had a passionate interest in Indian philosophy. The awareness of a primal subjecthood that forms the basis of his thought is clearly yogic. It was also not unrelated to Mahayana Buddhism," Izutsu writes.
"His vision of Being as the mutual permeation of all things,, which he depicts as a sea of light in which everything is brilliantly intermingled, is reminiscent of the sea of the lotus repository world that manifests itself in sagara-mudra-samadhi, Ocean-Imprint-Contemplation [the highest form of contemplation in Mahayana Buddhism], and is suggestive of the Domain of the interpenetration of shih and shih in Hua Yen philosophy."27
Izutsu's post-Ishiki to honshitsu writings are premised on these ideas, and what becomes apparent when one reads them is a spiritual perspective quite separate from his scholarly views that deserves to be called the "philosophical landscape" Izutsu saw.
What I am thinking of here is Kosumosu to anchi kosumosu (1989; Cosmos and anticosmnos).28 Just as Imi no fukami e (1985; To the depths of meaning) constitutes the flip side of Ishiki to honshitsu, adding to it and deepening it, Kosuniosu to anchikoswnosu broadens and deepens the main themes of Sufism and Taoism (1966-1967). In this work are collected translations of the lectures of the Eranos period as well as those that he gave in Japan upon his return from Iran. These are not what are generally regarded as lecture transcripts. Izutsu wrote his lectures the same way that he composed his essays. What he read before an audience was a work for which he had chosen his words with extreme care, thought about their expression, gave them structure and then polished them until the lecture could be published unchanged as an essay. I have seen a documentary film of the English-language lecture "Cosmos and Anti-cosmos," which would serve as the title of the book.29 There is virtually no difference between what was spoken on that occasion and what is contained in the printed text.
In one essay in Kosumosu to anchi kosumosu, in which Izutsu alludes to Plotinus, he writes as follows about the aim of his speculations and the results that might to be expected from them. "If there is any merit in this essay, it probably lies in the fact that I have attempted [299] to interpret the classical texts of Hua Yen philosophy systematically in terms of their relevance to the modem philosophical problematique."°
We should not understand this attempt as philosophical speculation in a general sense. For Izutsu, the "philosophical problematique' means the issues that are directly related to human existence.
That he does not go so far as to say so is not out of modesty; for him, the assumption was so self-evident that, were it not the case, there would be no reason for philosophy to exist.
Izutsu continued to be interested in Plotinus throughout his life. In his final years, that interest grew deeper and deeper. Plotinus' ideas flow like an underground stream through Kosumosu to anchi kosuniosu.
Just as Plotinus depicts the Primordial emanation from the One as light, Izutsu draws attention to the fact that the world of Hua Yen, too, is a world full of light. As if to say there were topics he had been unable to deal with exhaustively in Shin pi tetsugaku (1949), he often alludes to Plotinus even in his last work, Ishiki no keijijogaku (1993).
The biography of Plotinus—"On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Books," to be exact—was written shortly after his death by his disciple Porphyry." The person depicted in it is not the brilliant philosopher; rather, he is a man of unusual powers with ties to the other world. Small wonder then that one of the treatises in Plotinus' Ennead is called "On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit."
In the Roman period, it was the custom to celebrate Plato's birthday as a holy day and to offer poems. On one such occasion, when Porphyry read aloud a poem entitled "The Sacred Marriage," full of mystical and occasionally even shamanistic content, someone in the crowd yelled out that he was out of his mind for composing such a fantastical work. At that moment, Plotinus said to Porphyry in a loud voice for all to hear: "You have proved yourself simultaneously a poet, a philosopher and a teacher of sacred truth.3: Plotinus, it would be fair to say, was a sage in the true sense, someone who went beyond being a philosopher narrowly defined.
"[H]aving completed the inquiry in his own mind from the beginning to the end, he then committed to writing the results of his inquiry, and as he thus wove together, in the course of writing, what he had deposited in his soul, it seemed as if he was transcribing what he wrote from a book."33
Porphyry speaks not only about what his teacher Plotinus [300] wrote but about how he wrote it.
When it came to speaking. Plotinus "often goes into raptures and speaks emotionally from the depths of feeling rather than from tradition."4
What Porphyry describes as "tradition" means the history of Platonic philosophy as passed down in the Academy, but to say that he spoke "from the depths of feeling" does not mean he said what he pleased; "as was divinely told to him" would perhaps be a better description.
Philosophy for Plotinus was not an academic intellectual discipline; it was a wisdom, a spirituality, a religious practice that rivaled Christianity, which was then spreading throughout the Roman Empire.
What Porphyry tries to depict is not what we today would call the life of a philosopher. It is the life of a mystic seeking after Truth.
In Izutsu's statement that Plotinus' successor was not Proclus but Augustine, we should probably read his view of the history of philosophy that sees the revival of Plato's philosophy as occurring not in the philosophic tradition but in religion.
The ideas of Plotinus that Kukai encountered, too, were not a philosophy but had already assumed the form of religion, Nestorian Christianity, which had made its way across China and changed its name to Chingchiao, the luminous religion.'
In an early novella, "Tosotsuten no junrei" (The pilgrimage of heaven),15 Shiba envisions the possibility that Nestorianism had been introduced into Japan. The assumption that Christianity as a religion had been brought to Japan in Kukai's time was open to debate, as both Shiba and Izutsu were presumably fully aware, but that was probably not the main point. The two of them believed, however, that one could not completely discount the possibility that the cultural —or what may well he called the spiritual—shock, which began with Plotinus and was inherited by Augustine, had been brought to Japan by the founder of Shingon esotericism.
Kenzahuro Oe (1935—) has written a work entitled "Izutsu uchü no shuen de: Chöetsu no kotoba Izutsu Toshihiko o yomu" (On the fringes of the Izutsu universe: Transcendental WORDs, Reading Toshihiko lzutsu). The impact of reading Izutsu's Mahometto (1952; Mulam-mad) in his youth, Oe says, was comparable to that of reading Furansu runesansu no hitobito (1950; The people of the French Renaissance) and deciding that one day he wanted to study with its author, Kazuo Watanabe (1901-1975 ).17
It would be fair to regard this as the highest praise Oe could give. While Oe was reading William Blake, he read lzutstu's Shinpi tetsugaku "as though in a delirium." And when he read Dante, too, he took his lead from Izutsu's studies of Islam, he said. For Oe, Blake and Dante are not merely literary classics; they are his predecessors who opened the way to Corbin's mundus imaginalis. Oe even made a statement suggestive of Asin Palacios when he said that Dante's Divine Comedy came to mind while he was reading Izutsu on lbn 'Arabi. What is more, in discussing Toshihiko Izutsu, Oe alluded to themes that Hideo Kobayashi dealt with in his later years, his theories about language and the world of the dead.
I once likened the late Hideo Kobayashi's study of the ancient period and the world of the dead in Motoori Norinaga to the world of Professor Levi-Stratiss. If Mr Kobayashi had adopted structuralism as a practical approach, I believe that he would have been able to make those statements in which, even despite his prodigious rhetorical ability, ambiguities remain, into something more readily understandable. To put it another way, Mr Kobayashi would likely have gone in the direction of bringing his research on Motoori Norinaga to completion as linguistic theory, and new perspectives on it would likely have been opened up; or so I thought as I gave my imagination free rein while reading Mr Izutsu's work.'
The potential for linguistic development in Norinaga studies that ôe remarks on presumably points to the deepening of the theory of WORD as a "depth-consciousness philosophy of language" that Izutsu had attempted. It was noted earlier that Shüsaku Endo had alluded to linguistic alava-consciousness, without mentioning Izutsu's name, in a tribute to Hideo Kobayashi's memory. That both ôe and Endö discuss points of similarity between Izutsu and Kobayashi is highly suggestive. I have heard that Izutsu read Oe's essay and was so delighted by it that he sent a letter to the editors of the magazine in which it was published.
Had he never heard of Toshihiko Izutsu, Keizo Hino (1929-2002) writes, he would not have been able to get through the uphill battle against the hallucinations that plagued him during his treatment for a [302] malignant tumor and "could probably not have brought my consciousness, which had gone one step short of madness, back into a somewhat more bearable form."
There is a collection of essays, selected by Hino himself, entitled Tamashii no kökei (The spectacle of the soul).° Divided into four parts corresponding to the times in which the essays were written, it begins in Part One with pieces dating from 1950 into the 196os when he was employed at a newspaper company; the last section, Part Four, contains works written in the 1990S while he was suffering from cancer. The name of Toshihiko tzutsu is found here and there in several works from this last period. Guided by the Koran, which Izutsu translated, Hino speaks of the 'night of existence"; he also discusses the light of "Being" an allusion to Suhrawardi and his .4 metaphysics of light." Keizo Hino started out as a literary critic. In his later years, he returned once again to the question of Being, which he had raised during his years as a critic. As he proceeded along this path, Izutsu was, in a true sense, his travelling companion. Having been a reader of Izutsu ever since Mahometto, Hino had long been aware of Toshihiko Izutsu. Yet what he experienced in Ishiki to hon-shitsu was something On a completely different order from what lie had caught sight of in the biography of the Prophet. The impact of reading it exceeded his expectations, as can be deduced from his statement, "I probably read Ishiki to honshitsu three times."41
Keizo Hino was sixty-one when a malignant tumor was discovered. After surgery, suffering from hallucinations as a result of side effects from general anesthesia and painkillers, he came to experience the world of Ishiki to honshitsu literally.
Whenever a hallucination occurs, even though not clearly aware of it, I had the physical sensation of some faint movement deep inside my body. It is a sensation that had an awful, primordial effect in which meaning and image were indistinguishable, that somehow combined both meaning and image, or, rather, as though image were actually meaning and meaning were image.
Hino sees that Izutsu's true nature is that of a poet, not because Izutsu discusses poets, but because "his awareness of issues is itself poetic" and because he relates to the world as a poet. "
The poet is the person who puts him/herself in the deepest places of the body and of consciousness from which words shimmer forth and who lives primordially in all human beings, the whole world, the entire universe.
In that sense, s/he is even a branch of science, and of what is called scholarship as well." he writes.41 This passage from a work entitled "iigataku yutakana sabaku no hito"(A man of the ineffably fertile desert), written as an insert to accompany Izutsu's selected works, is one of the most beautiful in all of Keizö Hino's essays. In it, he cites Imi no fukami e as one of his favorite books and quotes this paragraph from it.
As the countless tangled and intertwined "potential forms of meaning" attempt to emerge into the surface brightness of meaning,
they jostle and joust with one another in the dusk of linguistic consciousness—the subtle, intermediate zone where the "Nameless" are just on the verge of metamorphosing into the "Named."
Between "Being" and 'Non-Being," between unarticulated and articulated, the specter of some indeterminate thing faintly flickers.
This beautiful passage truly captures the very instant at which WORDs manifest themselves in the world along with meaning, but Hino probably did not cite it simply to express his appreciation of its style. Just as Izutsu did when dealing with lbn 'Arabi, Limo borrows izutsu's words to speak about his own experience. He, too, had witnessed a similar scene and found in izutsu's writing what he had been unable to put into words for himself.
Keizo Hino died at the age of seventy-three, twelve years after being diagnosed with cancer. In his late novels, Toshihiko Izutsu's influence can he found, both directly and indirectly. It appears in the way Hino perceives the reality of the other world and puts it into words and in his constant efforts to try to universalize that experience. If it were possible to discuss in detail this group of novels written toward the end of his life, a new understanding of both Izutsu and the true nature of the mystic within Keizô Hino the writer would perhaps become clear.
Alluding to imi no fukami e, linguist Keizaburo Maruyama (1933-1993) writes, "the main melody can be heard echoing throughout." It is "nothing less than the WORD at the root of human existence."45
[304]
Maruyama was perhaps the first to perceive that WORD was Toshihiko Izutsu's most important technica1 term. He, too, used WORD as part of his own core vocabulary. In an essay introducing. Izutsu, Maruyama writes, "The living thought of this profound international scholar does not know how to stand still and is even now in flux," calling attention to the fact that his predecessor's ideas know no bounds and continue to evolve." Maruyama's contributions to the study of Saussure in Japan are huge. His existence as a trailblazer has been indispensable for the emergence of such outstanding scholars as Hideki Maeda (1951— ) and Mono Tagai (1972— ) who came after him. Although Maruyama's views on Saussure may have been superseded by the deepening of research and the discovery of new material, the study of Keizaburo Maruyama the thinker has only just begun.
Keizaburo Maruyamas major work is Seimei to kajo (Life and excess), a central topic of which is the thought of Toshihiko Izutsu. Seimei to kajö was intended as a trilogy, but when he completed Part Two, Horno mortalis, he became ill and died suddenly at the age of sixty. When reading this work, one realizes that, although Maruyama's experience of Izutsu occurred in his later years, it was the most important intellectual event in his life.
If I were to summarize the theory of linguistics as ontology common to Toshihiko Izutsu, to the late Saussure of the anagrams, and to me myself, it is the idea that "the semantic articulation process of WORD, which simultaneously affects the superficial and deep strata of consciousness, is essentially incorporated into the end fine-tion of perception—object recognition; the entire world of being that spreads out before us externally and internally is itself nothing less than the product of WORD's power to cause being to anise."4
Hereafter, similar passages frequently appear in Maruyama's writings. Maruyama speaks of Izutsu's theory of WORD in enthusiastic language as though he has made a discovery. But in "Nijisseiki no 'chi' iii mukete" (Towards a 'wisdom' for the twenty-first century), which concludes Sei no enkan undo (The cyclical movement of life), the work he wrote in the year before he died,5 the tone is slightly different from his other writings. Rather than the study of WORD, what Maruyama [305] powerfully deals with this time is the significance of Eranos. And, as if going back in time, he discusses ekstcisis and enthousias',nos and calls attention to the need for a reevaluation of Shin p1 tetsugaku. This work is a profoundly interesting, as well as accurate, study of Izutsu, but it perhaps should be read as Maruyama's intellectual last will and testa-inent. Just as the writer of a will expects it to be read and put into effect, one cannot help thinking that Maruyama, too, expected this work to be read in a similar way. Indeed, already suffering from cancer. Maruyama sensed that death was near.
Although the acquaintance between Izutsu and Maruyama arose out of the scholarly field of linguistic philosophy, the inevitability of their encounter predates scholarship. From the time lie was a boy. and even more so as a young man. Maruyama felt a "distrust of reality, a sense of its insubstantiality, its utter inability to answer the question 'why. He was unable, he said, to have a firm sense of being alive. The mere telling Of his own experiences. he probably thought, would make it difficult for them to acquire universality. And so Maruyama let Julien Green say what was in his own heart.
"C'est tin bizarrerie de mon esprit dc ne croire a title chose que si je l'ai révéc." (It is one of my peculiarities not to believe in anything unless I have dreamt about)7 or
"Peut-ètrc tout cette vie qui s'agitait autour de nous n'était-elle qu'un songe, tin autre omnieil qui ne nons fermait pas Ics paupieries. inais nous faisait réves es yeux ouverts. . . . [Djans cc monde d'illusions. . . . ni les paroles des hommes, ni leurs livres . . . n'avait dc róalite."
(Perhaps the whole Of this life which went on about us was nothing but a dream, another sort of sleep, which did not cause our eyelids to close, but induced LIS to dream with our eyes open. . . . [1]n this world of illusions . . . [njeither the words that men uttered nor their books. . . had any reality.)"
When discussing Maruyama, it is necessary to consider Julien Green's influence as having the same importance for him as Sausure's. Indeed, the fact that he started out from a study of Julien Green would determine Maruyama's intellectual and literary views. "The seer of souls"—this term that Izutsu used of Dostoevsky could he applied directly to Julien Green. Green did not conceal the fact that he had such a nature. When one reads his diaries and other writings, one realizes that this quality belonged not only to him but to his [306] family as well. It was probably because of his encounter with Green that Maruvama discovered 'Saussure not just as a linguist but also as an existential seeker. Saussure was two people, Maruvama writes. One was the founder of modern linguistics; the other, the late Saussure symbolized by his study of anagrams, he writes, "was also a poet for whom madness, phantasms and fear and trembling flooded his inner being."" That this was not merely Mamyamas personal opinion, but an indisputable historical fact can be seen from the research of Mono Tagai. Recall the passage cited above, "common to Toshihiko Izutsu, to the late Saussure of the anagrams, and to me myself." The intrinsic function of langage for Saussure and WORD for Izutsu and Maruyama is the evocation of Being. WORDs are not means of expressing something; WORDs, they believed, cause all things to be. Each of them developed his own respective ideas based on a recognition that the exis¬tence of WORDs plainly demonstrates that another world exists deep within the phenomenal world and that WORDs are sign posts which lead human beings to the other world.
Being is fundamentally phenomenal. From the perspective of funcLi mental phenomenally, one acknowledges that what people no doubt believe to be the whole of "reality" is not indeed the whole of reality but merely its surface. The surfaces of Being are merely the visible fonns of its depth. All phenomena emerge from that which is the "prior-to-phenomena." Entering the "prior-to-phenomena," one has to grasp everything from it. 53
The reason that Maruvama alluded frequently to Eranos in the last year of his life was because he, too, was living the "Eranos spirit" in Japan
"Lettre a tin ami japonais" is an open letter addressed to Toshihiku Izutsu from Jacques Derrida. It is dated io July 1983. and, as we can tell from its contents, the occasion for writing it was a conversation Izutsu had had with Derrida in Paris earlier that June.54 Although Psyche, in which this work is contained, was not published in France until 1987. Keizaburo Maruyama's translation of this letter came out in the April 1984 issue of the magazine Shiso (Thought) under the title of "'Kaitai ködhiku' Déconstruction to wa nani ka" (What is déconstruction?). It was Izutsu who recommended Maruyama as its translator.
In the autumn of the year in which the letter was written. Derrida visited Japan, and at that time Maruyama exchanged views with him on Saussure. In Bunka no fetishizumu, Maruvama alludes to their conversation and to this letter as well. In the final analysis. Derricla's dec(,,lsruction is "by no means destructive," Maruvaina writes, "but rather, it was an act of dismantling the Western metaphysical tradition, iw tracing it back to its origins."' There is a perception that dCconstruc-tion has been exhaustively dealt with, so it is extrenick interesting that \iaruiyama sas it is a dismantling that goes hack to the origins. I-krc, .is in Derrida, a Being is perceived that is eternally incapable of being tieconstructed. What Izutsu discussed throughout "Ishiki to honshitsu" is a type of dismantling/ddconstruction involving the breakdown of lan¬guage in the phenomenal world it is nothing less than the act of going hack to the origins of the Real World. "Things, losing clear distinctions from one another, become floating and unstable, lose their own origi¬nal formation, as they mingle and permeate one another, and gradually ittcmpt to return to the primordial ell aus." 'I his was also the mental¬ity that permeated Eranos. Derrida. Maruvama writes, "called lizutsu] maltre, with a respect that went beyond professeur.'
In "Letter to a Japanese Friend," the question Derrida first raised with Izutsu was the possibility of translating déconstruction into Japa¬nese. The letter format indicates Derrida's desire to continue their earlier conversation. Recalling his own philosophical career, Derrida begins by attempting a negative definition of déconstruction, which, despite being repeatedly misunderstood. had taken the intellectual world by storm. And vet, no matter from which angle one looks at it, it is impossible to define déconstruction, in the sense of elucidating its linguistic meaning. Déconstruction, rather, is an "eveuut," Derrida says, one that lakes place Of its own accord. He not only perceived in it something that is by no means capable of being "deconstructed" by human hands, he presum¬ably held the firm belief that the subject/agent of dCconstruction is not a human being. In the letter, Derrida repeatedly says that what we should pay attention to is not the static meaning of the virtually indefinable word déconstruction but its dynani ism .
Nowadays philosophers, too busy dealing too long with the empiri¬cal world, have forgotten to invest their intellectual energies in solving [308] problems that have intrinsic meaning—this sense of crisis seems to be the spiritual foundation thalboth Izutsu and Derrida shared. History will likely remember Derrida, who played an active part in the polit¬ical, religious and cultural clashes of his day, not just as a thinker but as a practitioner in the higher sense—someone who put his ideas into practice. Such a figure calls to mind the sages who appear in Izutsu's Shinpi tetsugaku.
Of the many essays by Izutsu on Derrida, "Derida no naka no 'Yudavajin.'" (The "Jew" in Derrida) is a response to this letter. Der-rida is accorded a special position in hni 110 fukarni e, which contains this essay, and is discussed there many times. Although izutsu was a first-rate exegete of the classics, he was. also an outstanding expositor of modern thought. There are essays of his on Sartre. of course, but also on Merlean-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. What is common to the modern French thinkers just cited is their "Jewishness." In "Derida no naka no 'Yudavajin," Izutsu deals with Jewishness in relation to Derrida. Jewishness does not indicate simply that someone has genetically inherited Jewish bloodlines. It was Derrida who said of [-lusserl that, although he was a Jew, he was Creek inside. Derrida was an Algerian by origin, and, as Izutsu points out, he was a Jew more by basic temperament, i.e. spiritually, than in terms of blood, What Izutsu has his sights on is the deconstruction of the spir¬ituality taking place in Jacques Derrida the man. Derrida might say that, unless religion is deconstructed, "real" religion cannot exist. Here Izutsu cites the words of the Jewish poet Edmond Jabes. The possibil¬ity and impossibility of déconstruction was clearly recognized by Jabës, who likened the world to a book. A book is static, but the WORDs contained in it are alive. WORDs change their shape and reveal them¬selves depending on the reader who sees them.
True Reality and Panentheism:
Kitarö Nishida and Ben'nei Yamazaki
Kitaro Nishida probably never heard of Toshihiko Izutsu. The reason that statement cannot be made categorically is that Izutsu's Arabia shisOshi (History of Arabic thought), the first serious history of Islamic [309] philosophy in Japanese, was published in ii, and KitarO Nishida was still alive at the time,
\Vhcri Izutsu first began to read Nishida is not known. After Yasa-burO Ikeda entered Keio university but before he became a student of Shinobu Orikuchi, around the time he was boasting about construct¬ing an "Ikeda philosophy," he and Izutsu were, for some reason, "crazy about philosophy," he wrote, so it is conceivable that Izutsu was already reading Nishida by that time. In the writings and colloquies contained in Izutsu's selected works, Kitaro Nishida's name appears once in one of the essays and once in the colloquies, and each citation is limited to quoting a passage from Nishida. I-Ic did not engage in any developed thinking about Nishida's philosophy. In addition, there is a comment on Zen no kenkyu 0911; An Inquiry into the Good, iz), which Izutsu wrote in response to a questionnaire from Iwananii Shoten, "Watashi no sansatsu" 0988; My three books), which is included in the collec¬tion of his miscellaneous pieces, Yoniu to kaku (Reading and writing): "The central theme of this work, 'pure experience,' is the starting point of what is called Nishida philosophy. It is a record of his thinking in the early years while he was still groping for the path he should follow. The freshness of that thinking strikes the reader's heart." There is also a blurb, which has not vet been published elsewhere, for the 1988 edition of Nishida's complete works, entitled "Ima, naze 'Nishida tetsugaku' ka" (Why "Nishida philosophy" now?).
An original and creative philosopher who, in his speculations, freely manipulated the conceptual structures of Occidental philosophy while preserving in the depths of existence the primal sub jecthood of Oriental self-awareness. In post-1ciji Japan, newly opened to the West. lie lived dynamically as a pioneer at the intellectual contact point between Orient and Occident. The genuine starting point of modern Japanese philosophy. KitarO Nishida's thinking hints at the potential for developing Oriental philosophy in various new direc¬tions. The time has now come, I believe, to once more critically retrace the trajectory of his thought.
These sentences are the most substantial account of Nishida that Izutsu ever made. When he writes "The time has now come . . to [310]
once more critically retrace, he trajectory of this thought," his "reading" of Nishida does not seem to be that of someone who had been following him earlier.
It is possible. however, to detect Nishida's influence in Shin p1 tet-sugaku and the essays of Izutsu's early period. It is not my intention to argue that this influence was on a par with the influence Izutsu received from Ibn 'Arabi, Plato or Plotinus. Yet the closeness in their terminology and the contrast in their speculations about Cod seem impossible to overlook. The term that comes to mind here is "true reality" (shin jitsuzai) The importance that this one word has in An Inquiry into the Good can be seen simply by looking at the table of contents. The fourth chapter in "Part II: Reality" is entitled "True Reality Constantly Has the Same Formative Mode," and the fifth is "The Fundamental Mode of True Reality." Let me cite several sentences in which Nishida refers to "true reality."
We must now investigate what we ought to do and where we ought to find peace of mind, but this calls first for clarification of the nature of the universe, human life, and true reality. (An Inquiry into the Good, PP- 37-38)In the independent, self-sufficient true reality prior to the separation of subject and object, our knowledge, feeling, and volition are one. Contrary to popular belief, true reality is not the subject matter of dispassionate knowledge; it is established through our feeling and willing. (ibid., p. 49)[T]rue reality is the free development that emerges from the internal necessity of a single uniMng factor. (Ibid., p. 58)-
The first sentence deals with the priority of understanding reality. This takes precedence over ordinary activities, of course, but also over the personal desire for peace of mind. "Peace of mind" here does not mean financial security; it implies salvation as seen from the human perspective. Nishida states dearly that knowledge of true reality comes before this. TO truly know the Transcendent, he believes, is the real goal of human life. The next passage implies that what brings reality [311] into existence is "feeling and willing"; in other words, it is something that results from an activity of the soul. And, in the final passage, true reality is shown to be synonymous with the "freedom" that arises from the internal necessity of the One.
As the ultimate true reality, the One is not something that in an absolute, negative way is opposite to, or rejecting of, the world of the relative Many. It must be the agent of wise love, dispensing being to them and causing them to he, surpassing all beings in its infinite loftiness, while enveloping them with infinite closeness and infinite wanuth. To put it another way, Xenophanes' Cod is not a purely metaphysical One that unequivocally confronts and contends with the All, It is hen kai pan, in which both the One and the All, while in an absolutely antithetical relationship of transcendence vs. non-transcendence, are congruent with one another in a paradoxical unity (Simplicius, on Physics : to gar touto hen kai pan ton f/icon elegen ho Xcnophanes [ForXcnophanes said that Cod is One and All]
Whereas for Nishida "Itiruc reality is the free development that emerges from the internal necessity of a single uniMng factor," Izutsu writes that it is nothing less than "the agent of wise love, dispensing being." For both men, "true reality" is another name for the absolutely Transcendent, but Nishida understands it as "ultimate freedom," Izutsu, as "wise love." The two men are not dealing with different realities; each sees a different persona of the One.
The God of Islam, the Ultimate, has ninety-nine personae,Yoshi-nori Moroi writes, and a hundred faces, if one adds Allah. Moroi translates them all into Japanese, beginning with "The Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful, the King, the Most Holy" and ending with 'Pardoner." What he emphasizes by doing so is the impossibility, in an ultimate sense, of naming God. The moment someone gives God a name, no matter how outstanding that person may be, s/he is already circumscribing God. By adding Allah and counting a hundred personae, Moroi is clearly stating his awareness that even the word "Allah" is incapable of expressing Cod's true nature. Allah is God, but not Cod per se. The statement that even the absolute name in religious terms cannot elucidate God carries even more weight when one [312] considers that Moroi was a sincere monotheist. He perceived the world as he discussed it, and he lived that way. Moroi made the impossibility of speaking about God the starting point of his own scholarship.
Herein lies the main reason for discussing the similarities and dif¬ferences between Izutsu and Nishida in regard to the term "true real¬ity." They both call transcendent reality "true reality" and base their discussions of it on the persona that each of them perceived precisely because they are aware that God has countless faces that they cannot possibly deal with fully, In their studies of the Transcendent, each of them treated only those aspects that they had seen, felt and experi¬enced for themselves.
In the language of izutsu, who calls the Transcendent "wise love," one cannot help recalling thu 'Arabi, who expressed the workings of Cod as "the breath of the Merciful." That the "internal necessity" of the Tran¬scendent is ultimate love is what Ibn 'ArabT dealt with at the risk of his life and what Izutsu sought to revive for modem times. In this endeavor, it was Hua Yen thought, Izutsu contended, that had a remarkable, svn-chronic resonance with the ideas of Ibn 'Arabj.6 The influence of Hua Yen had already found its way into Izutsu's thought in the work on the pre-Socratics that he wrote before Shinpi tetsugaku. In the passage cited above, Izutsu sums up Xenophanes ideas with the phrase hen kai pan, which he translates into Japanese as ic/i soku zen (—IJ). It is clear that behind this translation is the passage from the Garland SUtra ic/i soku issai, issai soku ic/i (—flu— U'—Jflh]—), "One in All, All in One," which is emblematic of a central concept of Hua Yen: interdependent originationP" The expression "One in All," taken directly from Hua Yen, is frequently used in Shinpi tetsugaku. "One and All" and "One in All" signifr that individuals and the whole are in a participatory relation with one another. In other words, it is not an additive view of the world in which ones—separate, individual beings—gather together to form a whole; the One is immediately in All and vice versa.
Hua Yen is also alive in Nishida when, in discussing the basic prin¬ciple of being, he writes that, "the fundamental mode of reality is such that reality is one while it is many and many while it is one."': Nishida does not refer directly to Hua Yen in An Inquiry into the Good; yet the influence of Hua Yen thought can be detected everywhere in this work. [313]
The fact that the spirit of Hua Yen flows powerfully in both Shinpi tetsugaku, which was Izutsu's real starting point, and in An Inquiry into the Good, which was Nishida's intellectual starting point, cannot. I believe, be overlooked in accurately assessing the intellectual role that Buddhism played up to that time and not just in the spiritual history of these two men.
The thought of Izutsu and Nishida also resonates with one another in regard to the deepening their thinking underwent at the linguistic and WORD level, Just as Izulsu expresses WORD's transcendence when he says, "Being is WORD," Nishida, too, attempted to explain the mystery of Being in terms of the logic of "subject." "predicate" and "copula." The Catholic philosopher Isao Onodera 09:9— ), who has been developing a unique reading of Nishida's philosophy, takes note of Nishida's view that "subject," "predicate" and "copula" constitute an integral reality and sees in it a logical/ontological structure that corre¬sponds to the Christian Trinity.6R Kitarö Nishida's philosophical strug¬gles lay in the discovery of a philosophical language. The task Nishida was charged with was not only to develop his own thought but also to create a philosophical language for Japan. hi beginning his specula¬tions from the discovery and/or creation of a philosophical language, Izutsu inherited Nishida's bloodlines. Nishida called prophets "the mouth of God,`9 and be recognized that a philosopher was another name for the "hand" of the Transcendent. The two men are remark¬ably close in their efforts to transform their thoughts into words. At the time lzutsn was writing Shinpi tetsugaku, he faced the manuscript pages, he writes. "while coughing up blood, and not metaphorically; the work was written in his blood. There are traces of a similar struggle in Nishida's works as well. It is no lie when Nishida says of his own work that it is a "document of a hard-fought battle of tliought."°
Formulating a concept and discovering a language in which to express it are activities that may be alike in appearance, but they are different in nature. Whereas conceptualizing is an activity in the phe¬nomenal world, philosophical language, like poetic language, never manifests itself except through existential access to the other-worldly realm. It is for that reason that Izutsu felt close to, and had the utmost respect for. Mallarrné, a predecessor entrusted with a similar mission. [314]
A mission is literally one's life's work, an obligation that cannot suc¬cessfully be brought to completion without setting to work and staking one's life on it. What reveals itself is language; a person only observes and elucidates it. In "Ishiki to honshitsu," Izutsu vividly depicts the scene of Mallarnié's encounter with absolute language, Le Verbe.
But when the poet pronounces the word "flower" in an absolute-language sense, something odd happens. The flower that had appeared as [what Mailarm calls] a "contour," a real sensate thing under the ordinary circumstances of being, is transformed into a faint vibration of air pro-duced by the spoken word, and disappears. And with the disappearance of the flower's "contour," the sub jecthood of the poet who sees the flower also disappears. The flow of life is suspended. and the forms of all things fade away. In the solidification of this space of death, the flower that had once disappeared becomes a metaphysical reality, and suddenly, illuminated by a flash of lightning, very clearly rises to the surface. A flower, an eternal flower, an immutable flower.'"
This sort of event occurs not only with external objects but with imma¬nent phenomena as well, if, as 1zuu shows in Shin p1 tetsugaku, poetry and philosophy are inextricable, then the mystery of the birth of an "absolute language" works in the same way for philosophical language as it does for poetic language. And it is for that very reason that the appearance of WORD in philosophy, too, "suddenly, illuminated by a flash of lightning, very clearly rises to the surface."
When he stood on these metaphysical heights of being and pro¬nounced the word "flower," it was, for Mallarmé, a primal act of cre¬ation comparable to God's creation of the universe. But, at the same time, in the uncanny tension of its extreme impersonality, brought about through its [the flower's] nonexistence as a thing, it was also a gesture, both splendid and infinitely sad, with which Mallarmë sig¬nalled the end of his own poem.
Mallarmé likened himself writing poetry to a monk. Le Verbe would visit him when he was by himself and no one else was there; in fact, even when there are people around, when the event occurs, the poet must confront the Absolute alone.
===
315
An inquiry into the Good was published in 1911. But if there were
a Japanese who used the term "true reality" .shinjitsuzai) before
that date, he would probably be worth considering. Why? Because the act of talking about ultimate reality in one's own words is nothing less than the beginning of philosophy. If the age we live in has forgotten that person, we must recall him. Ilis name was Ben'nei Yamazaki. Ben'nei was a Buddhist priest of the Jodo (Pure Land) school, who was born in 1859 and died in 1920. A zealous proselytizer, he was also a cleric who, having forimilated systematic teachings on "light" that would reform modern Japanese Buddhism, deserves to be called a phi¬losopher. 'lbgethcr with Bcnkyö Shiio (1876-1971), he could fairly be said to represent modern Pure Land Buddhism,
In 1914, Ben'nei established the Kmvökai as a sect independent of the existing Pure Land school and called his teachings Komyoshugi. the doctrine of kOm'o (flfl), the light of grace that emanates from the Buddha. To serve as nourishment for his own teachings, Ben'nei actively absorbed and assimilated Christian theology. Rather than being a purely Buddhist expression, his koinvô is reminiscent of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Religious philosopher Akira Kawanami, the foremost authority on Ben'nei Yamazaki studies, writes that "an import¬ant part of the development [of Ben'nci's doctrines] was Christian, Christianity itself; indeed, it was far more Christian even than Christi¬anity itself"-,I This statement is worth noting when one considers that Kawanami is also a Buddhist priest practicing tinder the name Josho. Ben'nei Yamazaki's teachings on Komvoshugi have points of contact with lbn 'Arabi's "unity of existence" and with Suhrawardi's mystical philosophy of light. In addition, Ben'nei treated "spirituality" as a core concept more than twenty years before Daisetz Suzuki wrote Nihon-teki reisei (1944; Japanese Spirituality, 1972). little Transcendent per se is regarded as a spirit, then Bcn'nèi's teachings can also be said to he about spirit and spirituality.
"There is no one so unhappy as the person who lives his life in darkness and enters into darkness without recognizing the true reality of the one Parent in the world," Ben'nei writes.74 The one whom Ben'nei calls "Parent" is Amida Nyorai, the Amitbha Buddha, or Buddha of Infinite Light. Despite being a Buddhist, Ben'nei not only actively uses
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the word "God" in his teachings, he writes that the ideal state of ulti¬mate religion is a "transcendental/immanent monotheistic pantheism." In other words, it goes well beyond the religions and spiritualities that slavishly adhere to the differences between monotheism and pantheism as narrowly defined.
The passage cited below is from Bashoteki ronri to shükvoteki sekaikan (1949; "The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldvicw," 1986-1987), Nishida's final wo&.71 I cannot help regarding it as provi¬dential that it was published posthumously after Nishida finished writ¬ing it. Not only is it a sincere valediction to those who come after him, it is also, I believe, Kitarô Nishida the philosopher's most important work. "A God who is merely transcendent and self-sufficient is not a real God," he states and goes on to say:
The truly dialectical God is totally transcendent and immanent, immanent and transcendent. As such, he is the real absolute. This view is not pantheistic but may be called panentheistic.6
"Pantheism" is the belief that all things are gods; "panentheism," on the other hand, is the belief not that all things are gods but that Cod exists transcendent]' in all things. both intrinsically and extrinsically. A God that merely transcends human beings is not a real God. Nor does Nishida subscribe to the woridview that each thing individually is a god. Rather, all things exist and contain God within them. It would be fair to think of these words as a clear expression of Nishida's philosophic creed.
When I read the following passage, it makes me think that Izutsu had, at least, read "The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview" before writing Shin p1 tetsugaku.
In regard to this theory of divine immanence, there is no need to argue whether it is pantheismus or panentheismus. On the affirmative side of Plotinus' own view of the One, i.e. on the immanent side, it is not a matter of Cod existing immanentl within all things: clearly all things are contained in God and exist immanently within God.
When Izutsu writes that there is no need to discuss the difference between pantheism and panentheisrn, that "true reality" lies "beyond" [317]
such distinctions, it would be natural to think that Nishida's essay was in Izutsu's mind. What is more, Izutsu believes that the entrance to the transcendental world is found at the point at which human discussion of the Ultimate reaches its limits.
In addition, when Nishida says, "the One of Plotinus is diametri¬cally opposed to Oriental Nothing for it does not reach the ordinary standpoint I i.e. the horizon of everyday existence I," lie places Plotinus and Oriental Nothing at diametrically opposite poles.78 He also writes that because the Greeks turned toward philosophy, they had no real knowledge of religion. In the passage from Izutsu iust cited, his strong objection both to Nishida's interpretation of panentlicism and his view of Plotinus is, I suspect, evident. Not only that. Slzinpi tetsugaku as a whole emerges as a resounding "No" to Nishida's views on Greece.
It is Ben'nei Yamazaki, rather, who resonates with Izutsu. "A tran¬scendent/ immanent monotheistic pantheism" goes beyond panen-theism, which is the polar opposite of pantheism, because, as Ben'nei explains, the argument over which alternative to choose takes place within the Transcendent.
If all things were created by the hand of the one and only Dharmakya of the universe landl if the great oucs. (lie universe as a whole, the sun, the earth and all things belonging to them, as well as each and every separate part. no matter how infinitesimal. are offshoots of the one great Dharmakva. then, each is a small dhar-makva. . . . In that case, a person is an individual clhannakya, and no matter bow infinitesimal things may be. there is nothing so small that it cannot contain God.'9
The Dharmakva—the unmanifested unity, of all beings and things—is the ultimate Absolute. All things are generated by its hand. The large ones are the sun, the earth, the universe as a whole, but no matter how tiny a thing might be, there are no beings that are exceptions to this rule. Each individual being is a real existence to which the Transcendent has allotted a piece of itself. For that reason, Ben'nei says, no matter how small each thing might be, nothing is so small that the workings of Cod do not extend to it. These words closely resemble the world of lbn 'Arabi. Just as Ibn 'Arabi calls the Transcendent "Being," Ben'nei writes
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"Parent" or "Dharniakva" or "God." it is his strong intention to show that even the single word "(d" is only an expression of the self-mani¬festation, self-determination and self-articulation of the One.
Throughout his entire life, Thshihiko Izutsu continued to raise questions existentially about reincarnation. In Shin pi tetsugaku, there is even a chapter entitled "Rinne tensei kara junsui jizoku e" (From metempsychosis to durée pure. but the topic was not confined to that one chapter.° He did not lose sight of it even in his discussions of Plato and Aristotle. Stop it, Pythagoras said to someone kicking a (log; that dog used to be a friend of mine in a previous existence. Plato inherited Pythagoras' ideas and believed in previous, present and future lives, Izutsu writes; likewise, the young Aristotle came tinder Plato's influ¬ence and at one time even treated reincarnation and transmigration in the context of the mystery religions. Even though Plato and Aris¬totle may have discussed it, Izutsu did not believe in it unless he was able to experience it for himself. The issues of reincarnation and karma are classic examples of this. For that reason, Izutsu's theory of karma reveals a development uniquely his own.
We cannot know the truth about the concept of karma, Izutsu believed, as long as it is confined to the framework of the individual; whereas individuals remain individuals, karma, rather, is the gateway that opens on to the universal.
We find this conclusion of his in his final work, Ishiki no keijijôgaku 형이상학, "Daijo kishinron"大乗起信論 no tetsugaku (1993; Metaphysics of consciousness in the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana).
And yet, be that as it may, the journey to reach "ultimate awareness" is indeed long and arduous. For in order to achieve satori in the sense of the "ultimate awareness" that the Awakening of Faith talks about, a person must rid him/herself of the karma of the innumerable and immeasurable semantic articulations that have accumulated layer by layer not only during his/her lifetime but over the hundreds or even thousands of years that preceded it, and that cannot be done all at once.And so, in order to renounce all karma and revert to the original state that preceded it. as long as one lives, one must repeatedly return from unawareness to awareness, over and over again. Satori is not a one-time-only event. From unawareness to awareness, from awareness to unawareness. and from unawareness to awareness once againThe individual existence that has awakened to the religious and ethical principle of "ultimate awareness" is drawn into the cyclical motion of the held of existential consciousness that the unceasing exchange between unawareness and awareness creates in this way.It is this existential. cyclical journey, I believe, that is the deep level of philosophical meaning of what is known as samsara [reincarnation]."
This passage might well be called the last sentence of ishiki no keijijogaku.
That means that it was also the last sentence that lziitsu ever wrote.
In it Izutsu raises the primordial question of who is it that has truly lived.
That he felt that "a person must rid him/herself of the karma of the innumerable and immeasurable semantic articulations that have accumulated layer by layer not only during his/her lifetime but over the hundreds or even thousands of years that preceded it" tells us that his dialogues with the people he encountered through his philosophical activities both in everyday life and in the imaginal world were real events for him in the true sense of the word. Yet simultaneously implicit here is an existential question:
Can philosophy save the dead?
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