CHAPTER ONEThe Fifth Miracle
The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life
By PAUL DAVIES
Simon & SchusterThe Meaning of Life
Imagine boarding a time machine and being transported back four billion years. What will await you when you step out? No green hills or sandy shores. No white cliffs or dense forests. The young planet bears little resemblance to its equable appearance today. Indeed, the name "Earth" seems a serious misnomer. "Ocean" would suit better, for the whole world is almost completely submerged beneath a deep layer of hot water. No continents divide the scalding seas. Here and there the peak of a mighty volcano thrusts above the surface of the water and belches forth immense clouds of noxious gas. The atmosphere is crushingly dense and completely unbreathable. The sky, when free of cloud, is lit by a sun as deadly as a nuclear reactor, drenching the planet in ultraviolet rays. At night, bright meteors flash across the heavens. Occasionally a large meteorite penetrates the atmosphere and plunges into the ocean, raising gigantic tsunamis, kilometers high, which crash around the globe.
The seabed at the base of the global ocean is unlike the familiar rock of today. A Hadean furnace lies just beneath, still aglow with primeval heat. In places the thin crust ruptures, producing vast fissures from which molten lava erupts to invade the ocean depths. The seawater, prevented from boiling by the enormous pressure of the overlying layers, infuses the labyrinthine fumaroles, creating a tumultuous chemical imbroglio that reaches deep into the heaving crust. And somewhere in those torrid depths, in the dark recesses of the seabed, something extraordinary is happening, something that is destined to reshape the planet and, eventually perhaps, the universe. Life is being born.
The foregoing description is undeniably a speculative reconstruction. It is but one of many possible scenarios offered by scientists for the origin of life, but increasingly it seems the most plausible. Twenty years ago, it would have been heresy to suggest that life on Earth began in the torrid volcanic depths, far from air and sunlight. Yet the evidence is mounting that our oldest ancestors did not crawl out of the slime so much as ascend from the sulfurous underworld. It may even be that we surface dwellers are something of an aberration, an eccentric adaptation that arose only because of the rather special circumstances of Earth. If there is life elsewhere in the universe, it may well be almost entirely subterranean, and only rarely manifested on a planetary surface.
Although there is now a measure of agreement that Earth's earliest bioforms were deep-living microbes, opinion remains divided over whether life actually began way down in the Earth's crust, or merely took up residence there early on. For, in spite of spectacular progress over the past few decades in molecular biology and biochemistry, scientists still don't know for sure how life began. The outline of a theory is available, but we are a long way from having a blow-by-blow account of the processes that transformed matter into life. Even the exact location of the incubator remains a frustrating mystery. It could be that life didn't originate on Earth at all; it may have come here from space.
The challenge facing scientists struggling to explain the origin of life is the need to piece together a narrative of events that happened billions of years ago and have left little or no trace. The task is a daunting one. Fortunately, during the last few years some remarkable discoveries have been made about the likely nature of Earth's most primitive organisms. There have also been great strides in laboratory procedures, and a growing understanding of conditions in the early solar system. The recent revival of interest in the possibility of life on Mars has also served to broaden the thinking about the conditions necessary for life. Together, these developments have elevated the subject from a speculative backwater of science to a mainstream research project.
The problem of how and where life began is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. But it is more than that. The story of life's origin has ramifications for philosophy and even religion. Answers to such profound questions as whether we are the only sentient beings in the universe, whether life is the product of random accident or deeply rooted law, and whether there may be some sort of ultimate meaning to our existence, hinge on what science can reveal about the formation of life.
In a subject supercharged with such significance, lack of agreement is unsurprising. Some scientists regard life as a bizarre chemical freak, unique in the universe, whereas others insist that it is the expected product of felicitous natural laws. If the magnificent edifice of life is the consequence of a random and purely incidental quirk of fate, as the French biologist Jacques Monod claimed, we must surely find common cause with his bleak atheism, so eloquently expressed in these words: "The ancient covenant is in pieces: man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down." But if it transpires that life emerged more or less on cue as part of the deep lawfulness of the cosmos -- if it is scripted into the great cosmic drama in a basic manner -- it hints at a universe with a purpose. In short, the origin of life is the key to the meaning of life.
In the coming chapters I shall carefully examine the latest scientific evidence in an attempt to confront these contentious philosophical issues. Just how bio-friendly is the universe? Is life unique to Planet Earth? How can something as complex as even the simplest organism be the product of straightforward physical processes?
Life's mysterious origin
The origin of life appears...to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.FRANCIS CRICK
According to the Australian Aborigines of the Kimberley, in the Creation Time of Lalai, Wallanganda, the sovereign of the galaxy and maker of the Earth, let fresh water fall from space upon Wunggud, the giant Earth Snake. Wunggud, whose very body is made of the primeval material, was coiled into a ball of jellylike substance, ngallalla yawun. On receiving the invigorating water, Wunggud stirred. She formed depressions in the ground, garagi, to collect the water. Then she made the rain, and initiated the rhythmic processes of life: the seasons, the reproductive cycles, menstruation. Her creative powers shaped the landscape and brought forth all creatures and growing things, over which she still holds dominion.
All cultures have their creation myths, some more colorful than others. For centuries, Western civilization looked to the Bible for enlightenment on the subject. The biblical text seems disappointingly bland when set beside the Australian story: God created life in more or less its present form ab initio, as the fifth miracle.
Not far from the Kimberley -- across the Great Sandy Desert, in the mountains of the Pilbara -- lie the oldest known fossils on Earth. These extraordinary remains form part of the scientific account of creation. Science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn't made by a god or a supernatural being: it happened unaided and spontaneously, as a natural process.
Over the past two centuries, scientists have painstakingly pieced together the history of life. The fossil record shows clearly that ancient life was very different from extant life. Generally speaking, the farther back in time you go, the simpler were the living things that inhabited Earth. The great proliferation of complex life forms occurred only within the last billion years. The oldest well-documented true animal fossils, also to be found in Australia (in the Flinders Ranges, north of Adelaide), are dated at 560 million years. Known as Ediacara, they include creatures resembling jellyfish. Shortly after this epoch, about 545 million years ago, there began a veritable explosion of species, culminating in the colonization of the land by large plants and animals. But before about one billion years ago, life was restricted to single-celled organisms. This record of complexification and diversification is broadly explained by Darwin's theory of evolution, which paints a picture of species continually branching and rebranching to form more and more distinct lineages. Conversely, in the past these lineages converge. The evidence strongly affirms that all life on Earth descended via this branching process from a common ancestor. That is, every person, every animal and plant, every invisible bacterium can be traced back to the same tiny microbe that lived billions of years ago, and thence back to the first living thing. What remains to be explained -- what stands out as the central unsolved puzzle in the scientific account of life -- is how the first microbe came to exist.
Peering into life's innermost workings serves only to deepen the mystery. The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
How did something so immensely complicated, so finessed, so exquisitely clever, come into being all on its own? How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their immediate neighbors, cooperate to form and sustain something as ingenious as a living organism?
Solving this riddle is an exercise in many disciplines -- biology foremost, but chemistry, geology, astronomy, mathematics, computing, and physics contribute too. It is also an exercise in history. Few scientists believe that life began in a single monumental leap. No physical process abruptly "breathed life" into inert matter. There must have been a long and complicated transitional stage between the nonliving and the first truly living thing, an extended chronology of events unlikely to be preordained in its myriad details. A law of nature could not alone explain how life began, because no conceivable law would compel a legion of atoms to follow precisely a prescribed sequence of assemblage. So, although complying with the laws of nature, the actual route to life must have owed much to chance and circumstance -- or contingency, as philosophers call it. Because of this, and because of our ignorance about the conditions that prevailed in the remote past, we will never know exactly which particular sequence of events produced the first life form.
The mystery of biogenesis runs far deeper than ignorance over details, however. There is also a profound conceptual problem concerning the very nature of life. I have on my desk one of those lamps, popular in the 1960s, containing two differently colored fluids that don't mix. Blobs of one fluid slowly rise and fall through the other. People often comment that the behavior of the blobs is "lifelike." The lamp is not alone in this respect. Many inanimate systems have lifelike qualities -- flickering flames, snowflakes, cloud patterns, swirling eddies in a river. What is it that distinguishes genuine living organisms from merely lifelike systems? It is not simply a matter of degree; there is a real difference between the nature of the living and the merely lifelike. If a chicken lays an egg, it is a fair bet that the hatched fledgling will also be a chicken; but try predicting the precise shape of the next snowflake. The crucial difference is that the chicken is made according to specific genetic instructions, whereas lamp blobs, snowflakes, and eddies form willy-nilly. There is no gene for a snowflake. Biological complexity is instructed complexity or, to use modern parlance, it is information-based complexity. In the coming chapters I shall argue that it is not enough to know how life's immense structural complexity arose; we must also account for the origin of biological information. As we shall see, scientists are still very far from solving this fundamental conceptual puzzle. Some people rejoice in such ignorance, imagining that it leaves room for a miraculous creation. However, it is the job of science to solve mysteries without recourse to divine intervention. Just because scientists are still uncertain how life began does not mean life cannot have had a natural origin.
How does one go about assembling a scientific account of the genesis of life? At first sight the task seems hopeless. The traditional method of seeking rock fossils offers few clues. Most of the delicate prebiotic molecules that gave rise to life will long ago have been eradicated. The best we can hope for is some degraded chemical residue of the ancestral organisms from which familiar cellular life evolved.
If we had to rely on rock fossils alone, the task of understanding the origin and early evolution of life would indeed be formidable. Fortunately, there is another line of evidence altogether. It too stretches back into the dim and distant past, but it exists right here and now, inside extant life forms. Biologists are convinced that relics of ancient organisms live on in the structures and biochemical processes of their descendants -- including human beings. By studying how the modern cell operates, we can glimpse remnants of ancestral life at work -- a peculiar molecule here, an odd chemical reaction there -- in the same way that out-of-place coins, rusty tools, or suspicious mounds of earth alert the archaeologist. So, amid the intricate processes going on inside modern organisms, traces of primeval life survive, forming a bridge with our distant past. Analyzing these obscure traces, scientists have made a start on reconstructing the physical and chemical pathways that may have brought the first living cell into existence.
Even with such biochemical clues, the task of reconstruction would still be largely guesswork were it not for the recent discovery of certain "living fossils" -- microbes that inhabit weird and extreme environments. These so-called superbugs are being intensively investigated, and look set to revolutionize microbiology. It could be that we are glimpsing in these offbeat microbes something close to the primitive organisms that spawned all life on Earth. More clues may come from the search for life on Mars and other planets, and the study of comets and meteorites. By piecing together all these strands of evidence, we may yet be able to deduce, in broad outline at least, the way in which life first emerged in the universe.
What is life?
Before we tackle the problem of its origin, it is important to have a clear idea of what life is. Fifty years ago, many scientists were convinced the mystery of life was about to be solved. Biologists recognized that the key lay among the molecular components within the cell. Physicists had by then made impressive strides elucidating the structure of matter at the atomic level, and it looked as if they would soon clear up the problem of life too. The agenda was set by the publication of Erwin Schrödinger's book What Is Life? in 1944. Living organisms, it seemed at the time, would turn out to be nothing more than elaborate machines with microscopic parts that could be studied using the techniques of experimental physics. Careful investigation lent support to this view. The living cell is indeed crammed with miniature machines. All it required was an assembly manual and the problem would be solved. Today, however, the picture of the cell as nothing but a very complicated mechanism seems rather naïve. To be sure, molecular biology has scored some dazzling successes, but scientists still can't quite put their finger on exactly what it is that separates a living organism from other types of physical objects. Though treating organisms as mechanisms has undoubtedly proved very fruitful, it is important not to be mesmerized by its simplistic charm. Mechanistic explanation is an important part of understanding life, not the whole story.
Let me give a striking example of where the problem lies. Imagine throwing a dead bird and a live bird into the air. The dead bird will land with a thud, predictably, a few meters away. The live bird may well end up perched improbably on a television aerial across town, on the branch of a tree, on a rooftop, in a hedgerow, or in a nest. It would be hard to guess in advance exactly where.
As a physicist, I am used to thinking of matter as passive, inert and clodlike, responding only when coerced by external forces -- as when the dead bird plunges to the ground under the tug of gravity. But living creatures literally have a life of their own. It is as if they contain some inner spark that gives them autonomy, so that they can (within limits) do as they please. Even bacteria do their own thing in a restricted way. Does this inner freedom, this spontaneity, imply that life defies the laws of physics, or do organisms merely harness those laws for their own ends? If so, how? And where do such "ends" come from in a world apparently ruled by blind and purposeless forces?
This property of autonomy, or self-determination, seems to touch on the most enigmatic aspect that distinguishes living from nonliving things, but it is hard to know where it comes from. What physical properties of living organisms confer autonomy upon them? Nobody knows.
Autonomy is one important characteristic of life. But there are many others, including the following:Reproduction. A living organism should be able to reproduce. However, some nonliving things, like crystals and bush fires, can reproduce, whereas viruses, which many people would regard as living, are unable to multiply on their own. Mules are certainly living, even though, being sterile, they cannot reproduce. A successful offspring is more than a mere facsimile of the original; it also includes a copy of the replication apparatus. To propagate their genes beyond the next generation, organisms must replicate the means of replication, as well as replicating the genes themselves.Metabolism. To be considered as properly alive, an organism has to do something. Every organism processes chemicals through complicated sequences of reactions, and as a result garners energy to enable it to carry out tasks, such as movement and reproduction. This chemical processing and energy liberation is called metabolism. However, metabolism cannot be equated with life. Some micro-organisms can become completely dormant for long periods of time, with their vital functions shut down. We would be reluctant to pronounce them dead if it is possible for them to be revived.Nutrition. This is closely related to metabolism. Seal up a living organism in a box for long enough and in due course it will cease to function and eventually die. Crucial to life is a continual throughput of matter and energy. For example, animals eat, plants photosynthesize. But a flow of matter and energy alone fails to capture the real business of life. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a fluid vortex sustained by a flow of matter and energy. Nobody suggests it is alive. In addition, it is not energy as such that life needs, but something like useful, or free, energy. More on this later.Complexity. All known forms of life are amazingly complex. Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria are veritable beehives of activity involving millions of components. In part, it is this complexity that guarantees the unpredictability of organisms. On the other hand, a hurricane and a galaxy are also very complex. Hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable. Many nonliving physical systems are what scientists call chaotic -- their behavior is too complicated to predict, and may even be random.Organization. Maybe it is not complexity per se that is significant, but organized complexity. The components of an organism must cooperate with each other or the organism will cease to function as a coherent unity. For example, a set of arteries and veins are not much use without a heart to pump blood through them. A pair of legs will offer little locomotive advantage if each leg moves on its own, without reference to the other. Even within individual cells the degree of cooperation is astonishing. Molecules don't simply career about haphazardly, but show all the hallmarks of a factory assembly line, with a high degree of specialization, a division of labor, and a command-and-control structure.Growth and development. Individual organisms grow and ecosystems tend to spread (if conditions are right). But many nonliving things grow too (crystals, rust, clouds). A subtler yet altogether more significant property of living things, treated as a class, is development. The remarkable story of life on Earth is one of gradual evolutionary adaptation, as a result of variety and novelty. Variation is the key. It is replication combined with variation that leads to Darwinian evolution. We might consider turning the problem upside down and say: if it evolves in the way Darwin described, it lives.Information content. In recent years scientists have stressed the analogy between living organisms and computers. Crucially, the information needed to replicate an organism is passed on in the genes from parent to offspring. So life is information technology writ small. But, again, information as such is not enough. Though there is information aplenty in the positions of the fallen leaves in a forest, it doesn't mean anything. To qualify for the description of living, information must be meaningful to the system that receives it: there must be a "context." In other words, the information must be specified. But where does this context itself come from, and how does a meaningful specification arise spontaneously in nature?Hardware/software entanglement. As we shall see, all life of the sort found on Earth stems from a deal struck between two very different classes of molecules: nucleic acids and proteins. These groups complement each other in terms of their chemical properties, but the contract goes much deeper than that, to the very heart of what is meant by life. Nucleic acids store life's software; the proteins are the real workers and constitute the hardware. The two chemical realms can support each other only because there is a highly specific and refined communication channel between them mediated by a code, the so-called genetic code. This code, and the communication channel -- both advanced products of evolution -- have the effect of entangling the hardware and software aspects of life in a baffling and almost paradoxical manner.Permanence and change. A further paradox of life concerns the strange conjunction of permanence and change. This ancient puzzle is sometimes referred to by philosophers as the problem of being versus becoming. The job of genes is to replicate, to conserve the genetic message. But without variation, adaptation is impossible and the genes will eventually get snuffed out: adapt or die is the Darwinian imperative. How do conservation and change coexist in one system? This contradiction lies at the heart of biology. Life flourishes on Earth because of the creative tension that exists between these conflicting demands; we still do not fully understand how the game is played out.
It will be obvious that there is no easy answer to Schrödinger's question: what is life? No simple defining quality distinguishes the living from the nonliving. Perhaps that is just as well, because science presents the natural world as a unity. Anything that drives a wedge between the domains of the living and the nonliving risks biasing us towards the belief that life is magical or mystical, rather than something entirely natural. It is a mistake to seek a sharp dividing line between living and nonliving systems. You can't strip away the frills and identify some irreducible core of life, such as a particular molecule. There is no such thing as a living molecule, only a system of molecular processes that, taken collectively, may be considered alive.
I can summarize this list of qualities by stating that, broadly speaking, life seems to involve two crucial factors: metabolism and reproduction. We can see that in our own lives. The most basic things that human beings do are breathe, eat, drink, excrete, and have sex. The first four activities are necessary for metabolism; the last is necessary for reproduction. It is doubtful that we would consider a population of entities that have metabolism but no reproduction, or reproduction without metabolism, to be living in the full sense of the term.
The life force and other discredited notions
Given the elusive character of life, it is not surprising that some people have resorted to mystical interpretations. Perhaps organisms are infused with some sort of essence or soul that brings them alive? The belief that life requires an extra ingredient over and above ordinary matter obeying normal physical laws is known as vitalism. It is a beguiling idea with a long history. The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that a special quality which he called the life force, or psyche, bestowed upon living organisms their remarkable properties, especially that of autonomy or self-movement. Aristotle's psyche was different from the later Christian idea of the soul as a special and separate entity. Indeed, in Aristotle's scheme, everything in the universe was considered to possess intrinsic properties that determined its behavior. In effect, he regarded the whole cosmos as an organism.
Over the centuries, the notion of a life force reappeared in many different guises. From time to time attempts were made to link it with specific substances -- for example, air. Perhaps this was not unreasonable; after all, breathing stops on death, and artificial respiration can sometimes restore vital functions. Later, blood became the life-giving substance. These ancient myths live on in expressions like "breathing life" into something, or "draining away the lifeblood," as if there were more than one kind of blood.
As scientific understanding advanced, so the life force became associated with more sophisticated concepts. Claims were made that it was attributable to phlogiston, or the ether -- imaginary substances that themselves became discredited in due course. Another idea, popular in the eighteenth century, was to identify the life force with electricity. At that time electrical phenomena were sufficiently mysterious to serve such a purpose, and Volta's famous experiments demonstrated that electricity could make severed frog muscles twitch. The belief that electricity could revivify matter was dramatically exploited by Mary Shelley in her famous novel Frankenstein, in which the monster, assembled from dead human organs, is brought to life with a huge spark from a thunderstorm. In the late nineteenth century, radioactivity replaced electricity as the latest mysterious phenomenon; sure enough, claims were made that a solution of gelatine could be instilled with life by exposing it to emissions from radium crystals.
These early attempts to pin down the life force appear to us today as plain daft. Nevertheless, the assumption that life requires something in addition to normal physical forces survived well into the twentieth century. For a long time, chemicals made by organisms were regarded as somehow different from the rest. Even today, the subject of chemistry is divided into "organic" and "inorganic." The implication was that organic substances like alcohol, formaldehyde, and urea somehow retain the magical essence of life even when separated from any living organism. By contrast, inorganic substances such as common salt are well and truly dead.
It came as something of a shock to vitalists when, in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler managed to synthesize urea from ammonium cyanate, an inorganic substance. By breaching the invisible barrier between the inorganic and organic worlds, and demonstrating that life itself was not needed to make organic substances, Wöhler scotched the idea that organic chemicals are subtly different from the rest. No longer was it necessary to posit two distinct types of matter. A common set of principles would henceforth govern the chemistry of both the living and the nonliving world. We now know that atoms are cycled through the biosphere, in and out of living organisms, all the time. Every carbon atom in your body is identical to a carbon atom in the air or in a lump of chalk. There is no mysterious "zing" that renders your carbon atoms "alive" while those around you are dead; no lifelike quality that a carbon atom acquires when you eat it, and gives up when you exhale it.
In spite of the blurring of the distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry, vitalism lived on, popularized by some well-known philosophers such as Henri Bergson in France. In fact, it entered a more scientific phase with the work of a German embryologist, Hans Driesch, in the early 1900s. Driesch was impressed that embryos could be mutilated early in their growth yet still recover to produce a normal organism. These and other remarkable properties of organic development led him to propose that the emergence of the correct form of the organism, in all its intricate complexity, must be under the control of a guiding life force, which he termed entelechy. Driesch realized that the ordering properties of entelechy would place it in conflict with normal physical forces and the law of conservation of energy. He suggested that entelechy operates by affecting the timing of molecular interactions in a way that introduces a cooperative, holistic pattern.
Although embryo development remains incompletely understood, enough is known about it, and biological pattern formation in general, to convince biologists that entelechy, like any other version of the life-force concept, is an unnecessary complication. This hasn't prevented many nonscientists from clinging to vitalistic ideas today. Beliefs range from the quasi-scientific, such as Kirlian photography, where a photographic image showing a sort of corona glow around a person's hand is produced by placing it in a strong electric field, to the unashamedly mystical ideas of yin and yang energy flows, karmas, and auras that appear only to gifted psychics. Unfortunately for the mystics, no properly conducted scientific experiment has ever demonstrated a life force at work, nor do we need such a force to explain what goes on inside biological organisms.
A further reason to reject vitalistic explanations of life is their totally ad hoc character. If the life force manifests itself only in living things, it has little or no explanatory value. To make this point clear, let me use the analogy of a steam locomotive. Ask: what is a steam locomotive and how does it work? An engineer could give a very detailed reply to this question. He could tell you about pistons and governors and steam pressure and the thermodynamics of combustion. He could say which bits moved what to make the wheels turn. He might also wax lyrical and describe the gleaming brass and belching smoke.
Now, it might be objected that the engineer's account, however complete, would still leave out the essential traininess of the locomotive, the thing that endows a mere heap of connected metallic parts with the thrilling power, the majesty, the elegance of movement, the sense of presence that one associates with a steam locomotive. So are we to suppose that, in addition to being a collection of metal components, a locomotive must also be infused with "traininess" to make it the genuine item?
Of course, that is absurd. Where else are we to find traininess other than in a train? The steam locomotive simply is the bits and pieces of which it is composed, arranged together in the manner that they are. That is all. There is no extra ingredient, no traininess, that the manufacturer must add to "bring the machine alive" for its intended function. Likewise, in seeking to understand the origin of life, scientists look to normal molecular processes to explain what happened, and not to an external life force to enliven dead matter. What makes life so remarkable, what distinguishes the living from the nonliving, is not what organisms are made of but how they are put together and function as wholes.
Even though vitalism is discredited, a germ of the idea is correct. There is a nonmaterial "something" inside living organisms, something unique and, literally, vital to their operation. It is not an essence or a force or an atom with a zing. That extra something is a certain type of information or, to use the modern jargon, software.
The tale of the ancient molecule
Inside each and every one of us lies a message. It is inscribed in an ancient code, its beginnings lost in the mists of time. Decrypted, the message contains instructions on how to make a human being. Nobody wrote the message; nobody invented the code. They came into existence spontaneously. Their designer was Mother Nature herself, working only within the scope of her immutable laws and capitalizing on the vagaries of chance. The message isn't written in ink or type, but in atoms, strung together in an elaborately arranged sequence to form DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the most extraordinary molecule on Earth.
Human DNA contains many billions of atoms, linked in the distinctive form of two coils entwined in mutual embrace. This famous double helix is in turn bundled up in a very convoluted shape. Stretch out the DNA in just one cell of your body and it would make a thread two meters long. These are big molecules indeed.
Although DNA is a material structure, it is pregnant with meaning. The arrangement of the atoms along the helical strands of your DNA determines how you look and even, to a certain extent, how you feel and behave. DNA is nothing less than a blueprint -- or, more accurately, an algorithm or instruction manual -- for building a living, breathing, thinking human being.
We share this magic molecule with almost all other life forms on Earth. From fungi to flies, from bacteria to bears, organisms are sculpted according to their respective DNA instructions. Each individual's DNA differs from others in the same species (with the exception of identical twins), and differs even more from that of other species. But the essential structure -- the chemical makeup, the double-helix architecture -- is universal.
DNA is incredibly, unimaginably ancient. It almost certainly existed three and a half billion years ago. It makes nonsense of the phrase "as old as the hills": DNA was here long before any surviving hills on Earth. Nobody knows how or where the first DNA molecule formed. Some scientists even speculate that it is an alien invader, a molecule from Mars perhaps, or from a wandering comet. But however the first strand of DNA came to exist, our own DNA is very probably a direct descendant of it. For the crucial quality of DNA, the property that sets it apart from other big organic molecules, is its ability to replicate itself. Put simply, DNA is in the business of making more DNA, generation after generation, instruction manual after instruction manual, cascading down through the ages from microbes to man in an unbroken chain of copying.
Of course, copying as such produces only more of the same. Perfect replication of DNA would lead to a planet knee-deep in identical single-celled organisms. However, no copying process is totally reliable. A photocopier may create stray spots, a noisy telephone line will garble a fax transmission, and a computer glitch can spoil data transferred from hard disk to a floppy. When errors occur in DNA replication, they can manifest themselves as mutations in the organisms that inherit them. Mostly a mutation is damaging, just as a random word change in a Shakespeare sonnet would likely mar its beauty. But occasionally, quite by chance, an error might produce a positive benefit, conferring an advantage on the mutant. If the advantage is life-preserving, enabling the organism to reproduce itself more efficiently, then the miscopied DNA will out-replicate its competitors and come to predominate. Conversely, if the copying error results in a less well-adapted organism, the mutant strain will probably die out after a few generations, eliminating this particular DNA variant.
This simple process of replication, variation, and elimination is the basis of Darwinian evolution. Natural selection -- the continual sifting of mutants according to their fitness -- acts like a ratchet, locking in the advantageous errors and discarding the bad. Starting with the DNA of some primitive ancestor microbe, bit by bit, error by error, the increasingly lengthy instructions for building more complex organisms came to be constructed.
Some people find the idea of an instruction manual that writes itself simply by accumulating chance errors hard to swallow, so let me go over the argument once more, using a slightly different metaphor. Think of the information in human DNA as the score for a symphony. This is a grand symphony indeed, a mighty orchestral piece with hundreds of musicians playing thousands of notes. By comparison, the DNA of the ancient ancestor microbe is but a simple melody. How does a melody turn into a symphony?
Suppose a scribe is asked to copy the original tune as a musical score. Normally the copying process is faithful, but once in a while a quaver becomes a crotchet, a C becomes a D. A slip of the pen introduces a slight change of tempo or pitch. Occasionally a more serious error leads to a major flaw in the piece, an entire bar omitted or repeated perhaps. Mostly these mistakes will spoil the balance or harmony, so that the score is of no further use: nobody would wish to listen to its musical rendition. But very occasionally the scribe's slip of the pen will add an imaginative new sound, a pleasing feature, a successful addition or alteration, quite by chance. The tune will actually improve, and be approved for the future. Now imagine this process of improvement and elaboration continuing through trillions of copying procedures. Slowly but surely, the tune will acquire new features, develop a richer structure, evolve into a sonata, even a symphony.
The crucial point about this metaphor, and it cannot be stressed too strongly, is that the symphony comes into being without the scribe's ever having the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, music. The scribe might have been deaf from birth and know nothing whatever of melodies. It doesn't matter, because the scribe's job is not to compose the music but to copy it. Where the metaphor fails is in the selection process. There is no cosmic musician scrutinizing the score of life and exercising quality control. There is only nature, red in tooth and claw, applying a simple and brutal rule: if it works, keep it; if it doesn't, kill it. And "works" here is defined by one criterion and one criterion only, which is replication efficiency. If the mistake results in more copies made, then, by definition, without any further considerations, it works. If A out-replicates B, even by the slightest margin, then, generations on, there will be many more A's than B's. If A and B have to compete for space or resources, it's a fair bet that A will soon eliminate B entirely. A survives, B dies.
Darwinism is the central principle around which our understanding of biology is constructed. It offers an economical explanation of how a relatively simple genetic message elaborates itself over the eons to create molecules of DNA complex enough to produce a human being. Once the basic manual, the precursor DNA, existed in the first place, random errors and selection might gradually be able to evolve it. Good genes are kept, bad genes are discarded. Later I shall discuss the adequacy of this austere explanation, but for now I am more concerned with the starting point. Obviously Darwinian evolution can operate only if life of some sort already exists (strictly, it requires not life in its full glory, only replication, variation, and selection). Darwinism can offer absolutely no help in explaining that all-important first step: the origin of life. But if the central principle of life fails to explain the origin of life, we are left with a problem. What other principle or principles might explain how it all began?
To solve this problem, we must seek clues. Where can we look for clues about the origin of life? A good place to begin is to ask where life itself began. If we discover the place where life started, we may be able to guess the physical conditions that accompanied its genesis. Then we can set about studying the chemical processes that occur in such conditions, and build up an understanding of the prebiotic phase bit by bit.
Microbes and the search for Eden
When I was a youngster I was occasionally coerced into attending Sunday school, an ordeal which I hated. The only positive memory I have is of browsing through a picture book describing the Garden of Eden. The image it conjured up was of a well-ordered parkland in which the sun always shone and exotic animals roamed without fear, presumably being entirely vegetarian. It was a nice contrast to life in a dreary London suburb. Unfortunately, the biblical Garden of Eden turned out to be a myth. Still, there must have been a place where Earth's earliest creatures lived, a sort of scientific Eden. Where was it located?
I am writing this section of the book on a showery spring day in the Adelaide hills. The winter rain has turned the countryside green, and everywhere I look a luxuriant canopy of trees towers over a profusion of smaller bushes, shrubs, and grasses. Birds swoop in the sky and flash colorfully between the branches. Hidden among the foliage are snakes, lizards, spiders, and insects. There will also be rabbits, possums, mice, echidnas, and the occasional koala or kangaroo. Even in this arid country, life is conspicuous and exuberant.
The sheer variety of living things has delighted people for thousands of years. But it is only comparatively recently, with the invention of the microscope, that the true diversity of life on Earth has been revealed. For, even as naturalists marveled at the biological richness of a rain forest or a coral reef, a still greater cornucopia lay unseen all around them. This invisible biosphere is the realm of the micro-organisms, single-celled specks of life that inhabit almost every available nook and cranny the planet can provide. Long dismissed as "mere germs," microbes are now known to dominate the tree of life. "You could go out into your back yard," says John Holt of Michigan State University, "and if you really put your mind to it, you could find a thousand new species in not much time." Holt's comment seems exaggerated until you realize that a spoonful of good-quality soil may contain ten trillion bacteria representing ten thousand different species! In total, the mass of micro-organisms on Earth could be as great as a hundred trillion tons -- more than all the visible life put together.
To be sure, the physical effects caused by micro-organisms are often very visible: through infectious diseases, the fermentation of alcohol, and the degeneration of food, for example. Even so, microbes have been persistently underrated by humans, perhaps because they are so much smaller than we. Stephen Jay Gould believes we should correct this chauvinism by referring to the present era as the Age of Bacteria, so thoroughly do these tiny creatures overwhelm all others in population numbers and variety. By contrast, so-called higher organisms like humans, dogs, and primroses occupy just a few of the peripheral branches of the tree of life.
Size is not the only reason why microbes tend to get overlooked. They aren't easy to culture in the laboratory, and in the wild a lot of them are inert. Also, many different species of bacteria appear superficially identical, and until recently microbiologists tended to lump them together in classification schemes. Now, with the powerful techniques of molecular sequencing, the real genetic differences are revealed. Bacteria that look the same under the microscope may turn out to share fewer genes with each other than they do with humans.
Gould points out that it has always been the Age of Bacteria. Indeed, for most of the duration of life on Earth, it has consisted of nothing but microbes. This sobering fact offers an opportunity, though. Because life began with microbes, we can expect to find important clues about the origin of life by studying living examples. The hope is that some of them will contain relics of their distant past in the form of unusual structures. Vestiges of ancient biochemistry may have been retained as redundant features -- the microbial equivalent of the human appendix. It is even possible that living microbes are carrying around within them molecular remnants of a prebiotic world.
By piecing together fragments of information from living microbes, we may be able to work out what the ancestral organism might have been like, and to guess where and how it lived. Unfortunately, you can't tell just by looking what the evolutionary history of micro-organisms might be. They have few anatomical features by which to classify them. No arms or legs, gills or lungs, eyes or ears present themselves for comparison. As I shall explain later, the evidence linking microbes to their ancient ancestors lies largely in their biochemistry -- in their genetic makeup and the metabolic pathways they employ. The techniques of modern molecular biology permit this evidence to be teased out. Like scraps of an ancient scroll covered in a half-forgotten text, this trail of molecular evidence, partly obliterated by the ravages of time, offers a seductive glimpse of an evolutionary past stretching back nearly four billion years.
Given that there are so many species of microbes, where should the search for molecular clues be concentrated? Today it is the aerobic and photosynthesizing bacteria that we most notice, but for over two billion years there was little or no free oxygen available on Earth. Yet microbes flourished in a variety of habitats, fermenting alcohol, producing methane, reducing sulfate. Some microbes maintain their ancient lifestyles today, and these are the ones most likely to offer clues to the earliest forms of life. Which suggests an intriguing idea: suppose there survives today an obscure niche, an exotic place, where conditions resemble the asteroid-battered, gas-shrouded, boiling inferno that was the primeval Planet Earth? If we look carefully, we might find relic organisms still living there, microbes that have changed little since the dawn of life.
Is this possible? Could there be such a place?
The answer is yes. And its location is as surprising as it is obscure. Deep beneath the sea, on the dark ocean floor, there are regions where the Earth's crust stretches and tears. Driven by powerful thermal forces deep inside the planet, the rocky strata of the seabed are continually shifting and straining. Here and there, along mid-ocean ridges, the crust is rent to expose molten rock to the icy ocean above. The oozing lava shrinks and cracks as it cools, creating a matrix of fissures and tunnels through which water circulates by convection, dissolving minerals as it goes. At the vents, the Earth spews forth a stream of searing fluid, liberally spiced with chemicals. The brutal encounter of superheated liquid with cold seawater creates chemical and thermal pandemonium.
It seems impossible to imagine that any form of life could inhabit such a harsh environment, more reminiscent of Hades than the Garden of Eden. Yet it does. Astonishingly, these volcanic ocean vents are home to a rich variety of microbes, some of them apparently relics of an ancient biology. Here in the black volcanic depths dwell the closest organisms we know to the first living creatures on Earth. In the coming chapters I shall describe how startling discoveries of submarine and subterranean superbugs are transforming our thinking about the origin of life and the possibility of life on Mars and elsewhere.
But first I need to explain some of the basic principles of biochemistry. Foremost among these are the laws of thermodynamics.
(C) 1999 Orion Productions All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-684-83799-4
Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
2021/01/25
Ch1 The Fifth Miracle - The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life By PAUL DAVIES
The Fifth Miracle
2101 초기불교 공부 | Facebook Suggested books
초기불교 공부 | Facebook
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< 다음 번 교재 >
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"Head & Heart Together" 책이 이제 4개 챕터가 남아서, 박세진 선생님 제안대로 다음 번 책을 생각해 보려고 합니다. https://www.dhammatalks.org/ebook_index.html 이 링크에 가시면 "Dhamma Talks"라는 카테고리가 있습니다. 타니사로 스님이 수도원의 다른 스님들이나 재가자들 상대로 말씀하신 법문들을 기록한 책들인데, 이 중 두 권을 권해 드리고 싶어요.
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(1) 첫째는 "The Noble Eightfold Path"라는 책입니다. 이제 초기불교가 어떤 종교인지 대충 감은 잡으셨을 테니, 가장 정석적인 학습 방법을 택한다면 아마도, 역시나, 팔정도부터 시작해야 하지 않을까 싶어요.
(2) "Dhamma Talks"라는 카테고리의 첫째 항목인 "The Meditations Series"를 누르시면 다시 드롭다운 메뉴가 뜹니다. 이 중 "Meditations" ( ="Meditations 1")가 제가 권하고 싶은 두번째 책이예요. 제목에서 암시하듯 이 시리즈의 책들은 명상에 대한 법문들인데, 명상이라는 것에 대해 좀 알고 나면 실제 명상을 하시는 데에도 도움이 될 것 같아서요. 아는 만큼 보인다고, 기본 지식도 없이 무조건 명상을 시작하면 지루하기만 하고 시간낭비 같고, 솔직히 그런 생각이 들기가 쉽거든요.
.
아직 시간이 있으니 천천히 생각해 보시고 댓글 달아 주세요. ^^
DHAMMATALKS.ORG
eBooks | dhammatalks.org
Download Dhamma eBooks of Suttas, the Thai forest ajaans, transcribed Dhamma talks, etc. written or translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.
希修
네. "나는 명상을 정말 하고 싶은데 시간낭비 같다는 생각을 극복 못 하겠으니 도와 주시오!" 혹 이러시다면 2번을, 특별히 명상 욕구가 강하지 않으시다면 1번이 무난할 것 같습니다, ㅎㅎ.
혹시 모임 형식을 바꾼다든가 뭐 이런 제안들도 생각나시는 것 있으시면 자유롭게 해 주세요~ ^^
崔明淑
希修 저야 잘 모르고 묻어가니까 뭐든 좋아요. 명상이 올해 목표예요.
Sejin Pak
그리고 다음 읽을 책이 아니고 타니사로 스님의 책이 너무 많으니 10권 정도 추천해 주세요. 혼자 시간 날 때 읽으려고요.
希修
저도 타니사로 스님의 책을 아직 일부밖에 못 읽어서요.. ㅎㅎ.
.
우선 Essays나 Dhamma Talks 카테고리의 책들은 법문들 필사해서 묶은 거라 챕터별로 난이도 차이도 좀 있고, 챕터들을 관통하는 일관된 주제가 있지도 않아서 좀 애매하네요.
(3) "Karma Q & A." 사실 이 책은 짧고 쉽고 또 엄청 재밌습니다. 우리 모임의 다음 번 정도 교재로 하면 좋을 듯 해요.
(4) "The Paradox of Becoming." 해탈의 원리를 이해하는 데에 최고의 책일 듯 합니다.
(5) "The Shape of Suffering." 12연기 혹은 인과의 법칙에 대한 책. 윤회를 안 믿더라도 일상에서 자기 생각/마음을 어떻게 다스리면 되는지에 대해 의외로 실용적인 '이해' ('팁'이 아니라)를 얻을 수 있습니다.
(6) "The Wings to Awakening." 타니사로 스님의 책들 중 가장 어렵다고 소문난 책인데, 며칠 전 읽기 시작했거든요. 넘 멋져서 걍 입이 떡!!!!! 벌어집니다, ㅎㅎ. Just indescribable.
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타니사로 스님의 책은 아니지만 불교라는 이름의 철학 혹은 인지심리학의 breadth와 depth를 한눈에 보시려면 아비담마도 좋구요. 물론 아비담마는 부처님이 직접 하신 말씀이라기 보다는 후대 스님들이 부처님 말씀을 체계화해 놓은 참고서 같은 것인데, 이 책도 엄청난 매력을 갖고 있습니다.
https://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Manual.../dp/1928706029
希修希修
2
Beyond Success and Failure by Marguerite and Willar Beecher
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Meditations 1 by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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The Shape of Suffering by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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Some Quotes
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First Things First by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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The Truth of Rebirth by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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The Karma of Questions by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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Some Passages by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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The Paradox of Becoming by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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Head & Heart Together by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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Skill in Questions by Venerable Ṭhānissaro
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Life Force by Claude Swanson
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希修 shared a link.
Admin · tSps1hornsorged ·
< 다음 번 교재 >
.
"Head & Heart Together" 책이 이제 4개 챕터가 남아서, 박세진 선생님 제안대로 다음 번 책을 생각해 보려고 합니다. https://www.dhammatalks.org/ebook_index.html 이 링크에 가시면 "Dhamma Talks"라는 카테고리가 있습니다. 타니사로 스님이 수도원의 다른 스님들이나 재가자들 상대로 말씀하신 법문들을 기록한 책들인데, 이 중 두 권을 권해 드리고 싶어요.
.
(1) 첫째는 "The Noble Eightfold Path"라는 책입니다. 이제 초기불교가 어떤 종교인지 대충 감은 잡으셨을 테니, 가장 정석적인 학습 방법을 택한다면 아마도, 역시나, 팔정도부터 시작해야 하지 않을까 싶어요.
(2) "Dhamma Talks"라는 카테고리의 첫째 항목인 "The Meditations Series"를 누르시면 다시 드롭다운 메뉴가 뜹니다. 이 중 "Meditations" ( ="Meditations 1")가 제가 권하고 싶은 두번째 책이예요. 제목에서 암시하듯 이 시리즈의 책들은 명상에 대한 법문들인데, 명상이라는 것에 대해 좀 알고 나면 실제 명상을 하시는 데에도 도움이 될 것 같아서요. 아는 만큼 보인다고, 기본 지식도 없이 무조건 명상을 시작하면 지루하기만 하고 시간낭비 같고, 솔직히 그런 생각이 들기가 쉽거든요.
.
아직 시간이 있으니 천천히 생각해 보시고 댓글 달아 주세요. ^^
DHAMMATALKS.ORG
eBooks | dhammatalks.org
Download Dhamma eBooks of Suttas, the Thai forest ajaans, transcribed Dhamma talks, etc. written or translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.
希修
네. "나는 명상을 정말 하고 싶은데 시간낭비 같다는 생각을 극복 못 하겠으니 도와 주시오!" 혹 이러시다면 2번을, 특별히 명상 욕구가 강하지 않으시다면 1번이 무난할 것 같습니다, ㅎㅎ.
혹시 모임 형식을 바꾼다든가 뭐 이런 제안들도 생각나시는 것 있으시면 자유롭게 해 주세요~ ^^
崔明淑
希修 저야 잘 모르고 묻어가니까 뭐든 좋아요. 명상이 올해 목표예요.
Sejin Pak
그리고 다음 읽을 책이 아니고 타니사로 스님의 책이 너무 많으니 10권 정도 추천해 주세요. 혼자 시간 날 때 읽으려고요.
希修
저도 타니사로 스님의 책을 아직 일부밖에 못 읽어서요.. ㅎㅎ.
.
우선 Essays나 Dhamma Talks 카테고리의 책들은 법문들 필사해서 묶은 거라 챕터별로 난이도 차이도 좀 있고, 챕터들을 관통하는 일관된 주제가 있지도 않아서 좀 애매하네요.
Study Guides나 Treatises의 책들은 좀더 학구적이고 또 약간 '어렵고 복잡'하기도 하지만, 설명이 워낙 체계적이고 자세해서 한 주제를 이해하는 데에는 사실 훨씬 더 유용합니다.
(그 전에 그냥 그런가 보다, 알 듯 말 듯 했다가 이 카테고리의 책들을 읽으면 뭔가 눈이 확~ 뜨이는 것 같은 느낌이 들죠. ^^) 그러니 관심 가는 제목을 골라 직접 훑어보셔야 할 것 같아요, ㅎㅎ. (참고로, 타니사로 스님의 책들은 목차가 대개 맨 뒤에 나옵니다.) 아니면 제 페북에 앨범으로 만들어 놓은 것들 훑어보셔도 되구요. https://www.facebook.com/keepsurfinglife/photos_albums
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사실 제 경우 타니사로 스님의 책을 읽을 때마다 매번 '이 책이 나의 new favorite이다!'라며 감탄하는 중인데, Treatises에서 몇 권만 언급해 보겠습니다.
.
사실 제 경우 타니사로 스님의 책을 읽을 때마다 매번 '이 책이 나의 new favorite이다!'라며 감탄하는 중인데, Treatises에서 몇 권만 언급해 보겠습니다.
(3) "Karma Q & A." 사실 이 책은 짧고 쉽고 또 엄청 재밌습니다. 우리 모임의 다음 번 정도 교재로 하면 좋을 듯 해요.
(4) "The Paradox of Becoming." 해탈의 원리를 이해하는 데에 최고의 책일 듯 합니다.
(5) "The Shape of Suffering." 12연기 혹은 인과의 법칙에 대한 책. 윤회를 안 믿더라도 일상에서 자기 생각/마음을 어떻게 다스리면 되는지에 대해 의외로 실용적인 '이해' ('팁'이 아니라)를 얻을 수 있습니다.
(6) "The Wings to Awakening." 타니사로 스님의 책들 중 가장 어렵다고 소문난 책인데, 며칠 전 읽기 시작했거든요. 넘 멋져서 걍 입이 떡!!!!! 벌어집니다, ㅎㅎ. Just indescribable.
.
타니사로 스님의 책은 아니지만 불교라는 이름의 철학 혹은 인지심리학의 breadth와 depth를 한눈에 보시려면 아비담마도 좋구요. 물론 아비담마는 부처님이 직접 하신 말씀이라기 보다는 후대 스님들이 부처님 말씀을 체계화해 놓은 참고서 같은 것인데, 이 책도 엄청난 매력을 갖고 있습니다.
https://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Manual.../dp/1928706029
希修希修
Beyond Success and Failure by Marguerite and Willar Beecher
215 items
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A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: Bodhi, Bhikkhu: 9781928706021: Amazon.com: Books
A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: Bodhi, Bhikkhu: 9781928706021: Amazon.com: Books
A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma Paperback – September 1, 2003
by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Editor)
4.4 out of 5 stars 89 ratings
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This modern translation of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha (Manual of Abhidhamma) offers an introduction to Buddhism's fundamental philosophical psychology. Originally written in the 11th or 12th century, the Sangaha has served as the key to wisdom held in the Abhidhamma. Concisely surveyed are Abhidhamma's central themes, including states of consciousness and mental factors, the functions and processes of the mind, the material world, dependent arising, and the methods and stages of meditation. This presents an exact translation of the Sangaha alongside the original Pali text. A detailed, explanatory guide with more than 40 charts and tables lead readers through the complexities of Adhidhamma. This replaces 9552401038.
5.0 out of 5 stars 10
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Editorial Reviews
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“Bhikkhu Bodhi and the others who have contributed to this truly comprehensive manual of the mind have done a masterful job.” —Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author, Emotional Intelligence
“Bhikkhu Bodhi and the others who have contributed to this truly comprehensive manual of the mind have done a masterful job.” —Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author, Emotional Intelligence
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About the Author
Bhikkhu Bodhi is the general editor and president of the Buddhist Publication Society in Sri Lanka. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Claremont Graduate School and was ordained as a monk in Sri Lanka. He is the author, translator, and editor of several books, including Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Discourse on the All-Embracing Net Views, and Numerical Discourses of the Buddha.
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Product details
Publisher : Pariyatti Publishing; Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka edition (September 1, 2003)
Language : English
Paperback : 428 pages
ISBN-10 : 1928706029
ISBN-13 : 978-1928706021
Item Weight : 1.36 pounds
Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.07 x 8.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #459,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#2,511 in Buddhism (Books)
#3,467 in Medical General Psychology
#19,118 in Psychology & Counseling
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 89 ratings
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4.4 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States
Guy Deutsch
3.0 out of 5 stars A Tiring Read
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2020
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I bought this book as it was very important for me to read a book about the Abhidhamma, it containing the core of Buddhist philosophy and psychology, and this particular manual was recommended to me by one of my meditation teachers, Sayadaw U Vivekananda of Panditarama Lumbini Vipassana Meditation Center in Nepal.
While the intellectual and scholastic achievment of the celebrated Bhikkhu Bodhi is no doubt remarkable, as he goes on exploring the finer points and aspects behind every verse of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha (the Manual of Abhidhamma written by Acariya Anurudha about 800 years ago and serving as the basis for this book), do not look for any inspiration here, as you would find, say, in the works of great Buddhist teachers such as Sayadaw U Pandita or Walpola Rahola.
As the text progresses the discussion becomes more and more technical and tedious, to the point of endlessly enumerating various mental and material phenomena as classified by Buddhist philosophy, their myriad causal and interdependent connections, combinations etc. And so for a great part of the text, you get lists, enumerations, tables and diagrams - which, without detracting from the genius of the author in lucidly presenting them - leave very little room for ideational depth or inspiration for one's journey along the Buddha's path. Finally, my disappointment was aggravated by lengthy and tedious discussions of, say, the 31 "realms of existence" where one may be reborn depending on their karma, life spans in various celestial heavans, and other religious Buddhist beliefs that to me as a secular practicioner of the Noble Eightfold Path are a religious taint detracting from the .deep, practical and non-coneptual universal truths one encounters through the practice of Buddhist meditation
Nevertheless, given the importance of the Abhidhamma for Buddhist practicioners, and the scholarly diligence
with which the author presnets it, I would still recommend it to fellow Dharma-farers, with the caveat that I have not read any other Abhidhamma manuals to compare it with.
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BT
3.0 out of 5 stars BPS Edition is NOT Hardcover
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2019
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Taking away 2 stars because this is NOT hardcover, even though the BPS edition is labeled as such.
All said, this is the updated 2016 edition with updated charts and indexes.
The Abhidhamma itself is a 5 Star Product, with Bhikkhu Bodhi’s excellent guidance and translation.
If you’re looking for a guide through Psycho-Phenomenalogy, or are just interested in seeing how the Theravada school of Buddhism views the phenomenal world and our place in it, this is a great starting point.
4 people found this helpful
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Scott N. Proctor
5.0 out of 5 stars Where to start?
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2018
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This book was my introduction to the Abhidhamma, and all of the wonderful deep insights it holds. A true breakdown of the mechanics of consciousness. Bhikku Bodhi did an excellent job in helping the reader understand the subtle nuances of the translation from the original Pali texts. 10/10 Would definitely recommend this to any serious student of the Buddha's teaching!
10 people found this helpful
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Lawrence St Peter
5.0 out of 5 stars Abhiddhamma Studies
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2018
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This is a scholarly work for serious students. Exceptional. May I suggest buying the companion work, 'Process of Consciousness and Matter", by Ven. Dr. Rewata Dhamma. He kicks it up a notch. Referring to the suttas is almost a must.
This Theravadin trusts you will hear the Lions Roar as you study.
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Dominique La Garde
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Greatest Books of this Century
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2015
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I would list this book as one of the greatest books of our century. It makes the Abhidhamma very accessible. Bhikkhu Bodhi is a treasure as a translator and editor. I urge everyone who is involved with the practice of Buddhism to return to the source documents and not depend on Western "teachers". A thorough study of the Abhidhamma has the potential to change your life and I am so thankful for this guide and explanation.
20 people found this helpful
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Kim Stephens
5.0 out of 5 stars Complex and Complete
Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2019
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Very complex teachings. But Bhikku Bodhi is a wonderful scholar in accomplishing it. I will digest this in small inncrements.
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Cory Russell
1.0 out of 5 stars Your idea of a hardcover is skewed
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2020
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Ordered hardcover, got the right artwork but it is 100% not a hardcover. I even paid extra for the hardcover.
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Mason Ainsworth
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2018
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Arrived on time and is as expected
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jason17
5.0 out of 5 stars ANALISI DEI PROCESSI MENTALI
Reviewed in Italy on May 20, 2016
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Questo manuale è un testo didattico per gli studenti del Buddismo Theravada, un compendio analitico del terzo cesto del Canone Pali, l'Abhidhamma ( letteralmente " padroneggiare la Dottrina " ) Pitaka, composto da 7 volumi. Non è una lettura scorrevole, come i testi del Sutta Pitaka, ma un libro da studiare per addentrarsi nei processi mentali; le 89 o 121 coscienze, i 52 fattori mentali, e i 28 fenomeni materiali s'intersecano tra loro per fornire risposte e soluzioni. Una chiave di lettura differente ed evoluta del Buddismo, indispensabile per la formazione teorica che prepara il terreno per la corretta pratica meditativa. Caldeggiato con riserva, non per esordienti, indispensabile per coloro che vogliono approfondire il sentiero.
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J_Man
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Abhidhamma source
Reviewed in Spain on September 3, 2019
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Surprised by this book. I always appreciate the great balance between precision and readability that Bhikkhu Bodhi brings into his books. And if the book is about Abhidhamma, this is even more appreciated. I'm far from being an expert, but I'd happily recommend it.
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michele biotti
5.0 out of 5 stars Completo
Reviewed in Italy on June 18, 2015
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Un commento sistematico di un'opera grandiosa, la cui indagine della coscienza è la più raffinata che io conosca. I passaggi dell'autore chiariscono i punti più criptici. Certo, alcune parti sono degli elenchi, ma è utile sapere perché un certo fattore sia posto da una parte piuttosto che dall'altra.
Per i buddisti più "esperti", potrebbe destare delle inaspettate scoperte.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Abhidhamma made more approachable
Reviewed in Canada on March 23, 2017
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This is an excellent book that really helps to unravel the complexity of the Abhidhamma. As I understand it, this is a commentary on a commentary, but I can see why it's needed. Bikkhu Bodhi has a very straightforward approach to explaining the rationale behind some of the seemingly impenetrable descriptions that the Abhidhamma offers for the various types of mind cittas that we all experience. If when reading this book you supplement it with watching the YouTube videos that have been posted by Bhikkhu Bodhi, you will benefit greatly from the experience.
One person found this helpful
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Abhinav
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in India on June 26, 2018
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Beautifully Presented. I began to like Buddhism more after reading this book.
2 people found this helpful
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[퀘이커] 한국퀘이커 함석헌의 "퀘이커스러운" 글 들
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Sejin Pak
teSp31onsdSorcemd ·
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[퀘이커] 한국퀘이커 함석헌의 "퀘이커스러운" 글 들
---
- 책 3권을 출판년도별로 늘어놓는다.
- 글들은 중복되는 것들이 있다.
- 아직 어떤 것들이 가장 중요한지는 모르겠다.
- 함석헌은 퀘이커 사상을 한국기독교를 비판하는 시각으로 쓰고 있다.
- 한국 (보수) 기독교에서는 퀘이커를 이단으로 본다.
+3
Sejin Pak
teSp31onsdSorcemd ·
Shared with Public
[퀘이커] 한국퀘이커 함석헌의 "퀘이커스러운" 글 들
---
- 책 3권을 출판년도별로 늘어놓는다.
- 글들은 중복되는 것들이 있다.
- 아직 어떤 것들이 가장 중요한지는 모르겠다.
- 함석헌은 퀘이커 사상을 한국기독교를 비판하는 시각으로 쓰고 있다.
- 한국 (보수) 기독교에서는 퀘이커를 이단으로 본다.
+3
2021/01/24
Irie Yukio Quaker - Google Search
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Society of friends (quaker) disownment records « on: tuesday 19 august 14 ... The history of seventy years of the society of friends in japan (review) irie, yukio.
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Feb 9, 2011 — Specifically, it examines the writings of Ozaki Yukio, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Suzuki Chikara, and Uemura ... disbanded by Japanese Quakers in support of the war.121 Uemura spoke for his Christian compatriots as ... Irie Katsumi.
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A PORTRAITURE OF QUAKERISM, VOLUME I THOMAS CLARKSON, M.A. 1806
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A PORTRAITURE OF QUAKERISM, VOLUME I
Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of Friends
by
THOMAS CLARKSON, M.A.
1806.
Joseph S. O'Leary homepage: A Note on Nitobe
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« Origen on Grace | Main | 3. Respect for Life and the Problem of Scriptural Violence »
January 09, 2007
A Note on Nitobe
Nitobe Inazô, statesman and educationalist (1862-1933), is best known in the West as the author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998)., a book which owes its once great popularity in part to the rarity at the time of books on Japan in English and the other languages into which it was translated, and in part to the novelty of hearing a Japanese address the world, presenting an attractive picture of his country and its animating traditions. Nitobe, for his part, had fully internalized the authoritative discourses of the English speaking world. His eloquent English was modeled on the approved masters of the time, and gained in charm from its slightly unidiomatic touches and the general warmth and candor of his attitude. The contemporary reader will no doubt find it to be weighed down by Victorian fustian, notably in its ornamental literary allusions to Shakespeare, etc. This problem may disappear in translation and did not obstruct the recent ‘Nitobe boom’ in Japan.
In addition to the old-fashioned style, another obstacle to retrieving Nitobe’s thought today is the atmosphere of naïve idealism that pervades this young man’s book. It is an idealism of dubious alloy, of a piece with the complacent outlooks lampooned by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1918). One is tempted to suspect that Nitobe’s popularity came from the way he could reproduce the fatuous delusions of his western audience in an exotic guise, holding up a flattering mirror. At that time Japan encouraged its representatives to westernize themselves so as to present the country to the world. Conversion to Christianity was a means of ingratiating oneself with America, and many conversions, including that of Nitobe’s Sapporo classmate and insepable companion Uchimura Kanzô, were inspired by patriotic motives. Attracted to Christianity since his teens, Nitobe succumbed to pressure from sophomores at the Sapporo Agricultural College to sign William S. Clark's 'Covenant of Believers in Jesus Christ'. “At the time of graduation, three men: Kanzo, Inazo Ohta (later Inazo Nitobe) and Kingo Miyabe swore among themselves that they would devote themselves to two J's: Jesus and
Japan… During his time as a student at
Amherst, [Uchimura] wrote down the following expression on his favorite Bible: ‘I for
Japan.
Japanfor the World. The World for Christ. And All for God’”, later his epitaph.
.
Nitobe’s Christianized bushido is calibrated to meet the expectations of the Western audience. Tessa Morris-Suzuki characterizes his vision of the samurai as 'a mildly exoticized version of the British public school ethos' (Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 68; quoted, George M. Oshiro, 'Nitobe Inazô and the Sapporo Band', Japan Journal of Religious Studies 34, 2007, pp. 99-106; p. 109). Yet when we notice that Nitobe’s Christian idealism is not as simple as it seems, but masks a diplomatic harmonization between conflicting loyalties, Nitobe become more interesting to read. His book is an attempt to negotiate a profound contradiction, for Nitobe is a pacifist Quaker who advocates the way of the sword as the summit of civilization. At the end of the first chapter he sells the pass to militarism, quoting Ruskin: ‘War is the foundation of all the arts… of all the high virtues and faculties of men’ (39). This was before World War I had instructed us on ‘the pity of war, the pity war distilled’ (Wilfred Owen). In later years Nitobe was profoundly ill at ease with his country’s militaristic development. As one who worked for and was paid by the Japanese Government all his life, he could never speak out with total freedom. When in 1932 a newspaper reported his off the-record remark that the Japanese military were a worse threat to Japan than the Communists, several of his friends were murdered and he had to have police protection (see John F. Howes, ‘Japan’s New Internationalism and the Legacy of Nitobe Inazo’ (1993); http://www.capi.uvic.ca/pubs/oc_papers/HOWES.pdf). One wonders if he ever regretted penning a work that glorified a warrior ethics, in which he smoothed away so persuasively all the obvious objections against it.
Nitobe was not a jingoist, but a liberal, cosmopolitan voice, who sought to meld Japanese tradition and European enlightenment. As Professor Shinro Kato points out, Nitobe’s book shaped European and American understanding of Japan right down to Ruth Benedict’s study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), but it didn’t play any significant role in forming the Japanese mind. Rather, the reactions against the book in Japan produced a ‘Bushido boom’ that emphasized not the universal values of ‘chivalry’ set forth by Nitobe but a chauvinistic Yamatodamashii, in accord with the political tendency at the time of the Sino-Japanese and Sino-Russian wars. Traditional intellectuals took little account of Nitobe’s attempt at an ethical purification of the samurai heritage. (For contemporary responses see http://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/chushinguranew/Bushido/reinvention.htm.formos. For recent studies, see John F. Howes, ed. Nitobe Inazô: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). Many intellectuals wanted Japan to emulate Europe’s technology, but abhorred the European social customs and morals Nitobe did not follow this ideology of Wakon-Yôsai (Japanese Spirit and European Technique), which became the principle of education in the early Showa). The Europe that attracted Nitobe was not modern and progressive. He was a Romantic, finding in knightly virtues the shared inspiration of Japan and Europe, and paying scant attention to the facts of Europe’s violent history, or to those of Japan’s.
Nitobe’s role has similarities with that of D. T. Suzuki (only eight years his junior). Just as Suzuki caused people to identify Japan with Zen, which he presented as the source of all that is important in Japanese culture, so Nitobe projected an image of Japan as the country of Bushido, with a tendency to see all the other dimensions of Japanese culture and religion as merely auxiliaries serving to build up the Bushido spirit. Suzuki was also a great admirer of the way of the sword, and the enigma of how this is reconciled with Buddhism, with its prohibition on taking life, is one that he did not satisfactorily resolve. Suzuki’s book, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton UP, 1959) has a wider and deeper outlook than Nitobe’s. While Nitobe is naively chauvinistic at times, the chauvinist undercurrent in Suzuki is very discreet. His thought centers not on Japanese uniqueness of Japanese excellence but on Buddhist wisdom. He is not concerned with Japanese ‘identity’ but with what is of permanent and universal value in Japanese tradition. The solidity of Suzuki’s scholarship and spiritual culture shows up Nitobe’s rhetoric as diplomatic fluff, a packaging of Japanese tradition for apologetic purposes.
The recent Nitobe boom was a rather puzzling event. Burritt Sabin, writing in Japan Inc Newsletter 397 (December 16, 2006) notes that Bunmei Ibuki, the Minister of Education, defending the revision of the Basic Education Law, made the following remark on Nov. 22: "The book Bushido formed the normative consciousness of the Japanese. By emphasizing such things I would like to supplement the Koizumi economic reforms." Meanwhile faculty members at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, of which Nitobe was the first president, issued a statement claiming that the present Basic Law upholds the ‘freedom of the spirit’ and ‘equal esteem for the value of all individuals’ that Nitobe stressed. The president of the university, Akiko Minato notes: ‘In the first clause of the revised law “reverence for the value of the individual” is deleted…Nitobe thought that first the “individual”, the “I”, is established , and next the cooperative body we call “the public”’. Professor Tsuyoshi Kojima, reviewing former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui's Bushido: An Analysis (2003) wrote: ‘Bushido has been romanticized as something that can be connected to the modern age. One learned individual made the nuanced comment that unlike [Yukio] Mishima's militarist book [on the Hagakure], [Nitobe's] book truly reflects bushido. Bushido, which was banned by the Occupation, is now functioning after undergoing a reevaluation’. Kojima claims that Bushido is not a historical book, but rather a reconfiguration by Nitobe, a Quaker, that turned Bushido into a pure, correct philosophy through eliminating its barbaric elements. Sabin concludes: ‘The usefulness of Nitobe's Bushido as a guide for revamping education in public schools is atavistic rather than forward looking. I question whether it is the sort of model Japan requires as the balance of power shifts in Asia and preserving the technological edge for adding value to exports at the core of the Japanese economy becomes an ever greater challenge. Nitobe was a samurai's scion who embraced Quakerism, which helps explain why Bushido can appeal to a conservative politician like Bunmei Ibuki and also to a liberal educator like Akiko Minato’.
Japanese surely have access to richer presentations of their culture than what Nitobe offers. Perhaps it is that their culture is so rich that it is difficult to assimilate it and a simplified popular presentation like Nitobe’s is more digestible. Or perhaps it is that in a time of moral crisis many people are ready to clutch at simplistic remedies, as in the triumph of new religions and cults, or the appeal of right wing ideologues. Nitobe is more benign than these latter, but it would I think be rash to presume that his influence must be entirely benign. The misgivings I shall voice here are only a first impression. I am far from having a full picture of where Nitobe is coming from or of the dynamics of his past and present reception. The Christian elements in the picture are one of the fuzzy areas. I shall focus on the theological aspect of his writing, in the hope of bringing things into clearer perspective.
The Inner Light
Nitobe became a Quaker in 1886, when he was 24 years old. His full conversion was long delayed. Uchimura Kanzô recalls that, 'He could doubt all things, could manufacture new doubts, and must text and prove eerything before he could accept it (How I Became a Christian, Tokyo: Kyôbunsha, 1971, p. 36; quoted, Oshiro, p. 110); the epigraph in Bushido from Browning's 'Bishop Blougram's Apology' reflects his struggles with doubt.
Nitobe should have been less impressed by the accoutrements of war and seen the squalor beneath the glamor. But I suspect that, ironically, it was his Quaker faith that led him to adopt such bland idealizations. His way of talking about religion prepares for his way of talking about society and history. Christianity, for Nitobe, is an inner essence, deeper than the surface of church structures and dogmas. He speaks sympathetically of the Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529), finding parallels between his doctrine of the ‘luminous mind’ and the New Testament (53). Shinto, too, becomes an emanation of the Japanese soul: ‘This religion – or, is it not more correct to say, the race emotions which this religion expressed? – thoroughly imbued Bushido with loyalty to the sovereign and love of country’ (49).
For Nitobe the surface constructions of religion, its institutions and doctrines, are mere ‘skillful means’, of secondary importance compared with the religion of the heart. This sounds modern, and it is, since it derives from the quite modern Quaker idea of the ‘Inner Light’ (originally the ‘Inward Light’). This is something of which non-Quakers usually have only a vague notion, so that it is hard for us to discern what personal modifications Nitobe brought to the idea. If the Inward Light refers to the immediacy of contemplative (pneumatic) experience, no doubt is has an important place in Christianity, and some equivalent of it may be found in other religions. But the specific cultural embodiment of this idea and the nuances of its development in the quite complex history of the Society of Friends would demand detailed research.
Older Quakerism sought to balance the Inward Light of Christ against the outward realities of Scripture and doctrine. The phrase ‘Inner Light’ came into use in connection with Elias Hicks (1748-1830), who stressed the autonomy of this interior revelation at the expense of Scripture and of the objective reality of Christ’s saving death. This caused a schism among American Quakers in 1828. The main opponents of Hicks were the Evangelical Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847) and the more quietistic John Wilbur (1774-1856). However, Wilbur rejected an over-reaction to Hicks that led to ‘overemphasis on the outward and historical forms and a weakening of the experience of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit’ (Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers [New York: Greenwood, 1988], p. 377). The orthodox camp later split between Gurneyites and Wilburites. The evangelical influence tended to make Quakerism indistinguishible from other Protestant denominations, and the quietist, mystical emphasis was in a weak, defensive position throughout the nineteenth century.
The evangelical Isaac Crewdson (1780-1844), a close friend of Gurney, in his attack on the Unitarian tendencies of the Hicksites, A Beacon to the Society of Friends (1835), denounced as well the error of Robert Barclay (1648-1690) in ‘presenting the Inward Light as independent of and superior to Scripture’ (Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism 1860-1920, Oxford UP, 2001, p. 26). Similarly, Robert Charlton (1809-1872) accFused Barclay of representing Christ not with reference to his propitiatory sacrifice but ‘as an internal principle of light common to all men’ (38). Some argued that even in George Fox (1624-1691) the founder of Quakerism, the Inward Light is in tension with more orthodox Christianity. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite (1818-1895) wrote of the founders of Quakerism: ‘We clung to them as long as possible, but experience has convinced us that one thing they lacked – faith. With them everything was inward. Their hope was inward – their righteousness was inward – the blood by which they were cleansed was within – the water by which they were washed was within – their Christ was within – and George Fox even declares their heaven was within’ (31).
In Britain liberal Quakerism emerged as a massive force at the 1895 Manchester Conference, winning over the bulk of the evangelicals and putting evangelical Quakerism on the defensive thereafter. It is to this liberal Quakerism that Nitobe belongs. The Quaker Renaissance set off at Manchester was spear-headed by the magnetic John Wilhelm Rowntree (1868-1905). It was based on ‘the revival of the Inward Light as the “great and Fundamental Truth of a living and present Saviour underlying all that early Friends taught” [William Pollard]’ along with ‘the restoration of the Bible in its proper relationship with the Light’ (Kennedy, 164). Rowntree’s spiritual heir Rufus M. Jones (1863-1948), a student of the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), was the chief intellectual of Quaker modernism. ‘Royce’s neo-Hegelian thought was closely akin to that of the Oxford idealist T. H. Green, whose ideas had inspired leaders of the British Quaker Renaissance’ (160). He was also influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s stress on experience as the foundation of religious truth. Emerson had read Penn, Barclay, and Thomas Clarkson (Portraiture of Quakerism, 1806) and had Quaker friends; he regarded the Inner Light as ‘virtually the same as what had been suggested by many sages and powers, such as Zoroaster, Confucius, Orpheus, Numa, and others, Christian or pagan’ (Yukio Irie, Emerson and Quakerism [Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1967], 36).. The idealist, transcendentalist background has been absorbed by Nitobe.
Jones ‘traced the ideas of George Fox and other early Friends more or less directly to a brand of Christian mysticism imported to England from the continent at various stages of the Reformation’ (Kennedy, 161), especially that of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). Jones celebrated the mysticism of the Inward Light as overthrowing Calvinist ideas of absolute human depravity and predestination and revealing ‘the innate goodness of human nature as well as the infinite capacity of reason, properly understood and applied, to life humankind on to the higher spiritual level in concert with the exalted physical state toward which the laws of nature, expanded and clarified by Darwinian science, seemed to be taking the human race’ (Ibid.).. American Quakerism after 1907 ‘had become a microcosm of American Protestantism. It had a primitivist faction, desperately attempting to preserve the old ways, the Wilburites. It had one liberal faction that had grown out of the Unitarian-Universalist liberalism of the 1820s, the Hicksites. It had another liberal faction, symbolized by Jones, that had grown from evangelicalism into modernism. And finally a faction calling itself evangelical, the product of the holiness revival movement of the 1870s, was rapidly hardening into fundamentalism’ (Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 172).
Nitobe on Religion
It is hard to say how thoroughly Nitobe was steeped in these modernist ideas, but it is certain that his religion is not a straight-laced biblical Christianity. One may even find that he takes as rather casual and aestheticizing attitude to biblical texts, putting them on the same level as wise utterances from Chinese and Japanese tradition. His biblical quotations are odd and sometimes irreverent. Of the samurai teenager he says: ‘He beareth not the sword in vain’ (217 = Rom. 13:4). He quotes a seventeenth century priest: ‘“Him who once has died in the bottom of his breast, no spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of Tametomo can pierce”. How near we come to the portals of the temple whose Builder taught “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it”’ (207). This is in bad taste. When he quotes Mencius, ‘When men’s fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it’ and equates this with ‘a parable propounded three hundred years later in another clime and by a greater Teacher, Who called Himself the Way of righteousness’ (61), I have the feeling that there is a certain tone-deafness to all that separates the two ‘climes’. Nitobe is content to merely glance at the proposed identity, for he immediately continues: ‘But I stray from my point’. Then he rephrases Mencius in Gospel language in a way that is untrue to both: ‘Righteousness, according to Mencius, is a straight and narrow path which a man ought to take to regain the lost paradise’. This tendency to equate very different religious or ethical visions militates against sensitivity to religious pluralism and against the perception of the other as other.
His open-minded religious pluralism is in reality a kind of inclusivism – all the virtues and traditions he lauds are seen a vehicles of the unitary ethical enlightenment he is advocating. Religions are constructed over centuries of practice accompanied by intensive rational reflection. The kind of truth that is formulated in these constructions is what the Mâdhyamika philosophers call samvrti-satya (conventional, world-ensconced, screening truth) as opposed to ultimate truth or paramartha-satya, which cannot be pinned down in words. Religions can function as conventional vehicles of ultimacy, and experiences of contemplative illumination are a kind of confirmation that the religious conventions are doing their job. However, to pit religious experience against doctrine as if the former were ultimate and the latter merely conventional is a dangerous simplification, and one to which Quakerism is particularly prone. Religious experience itself is inscribed in history and cannot be distilled in a pure state from its doctrinal or ritual vehicles. Thus most Christians place much more value on creed and dogma than the Inward Light tradition does. While the sense of the relativity, historicity, conventionality, culture-boundedness of doctrinal language is seeping into Christian theological awareness today, theologians rightly remain anxious to somehow reconcile this emphasis with a retrieval of dogma in a more critical key.
Nitobe writes in ‘A Japanese View of Quakers’: ‘The starting point of Quaker teaching is the belief in the existence of the Inner Light… Whatever the name, it means the presence of a Power not our own, the indwelling of a Personality, other than human, in each one of us. Such a doctrine is... as old as the oldest form of mysticism. Buddhism is full of references to it... The Zen Sect of Buddhism makes it its aim to comprehend it’ (http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/nitobe.htm). The sweeping manner in which Nitobe courses freely through the various religious traditions of his homeland and of the West stems from this conviction of having access to the very essence of all religions.
Nitobe believes in a universal revelation which underpins the specific revelation of Christianity, and he finds this universal revelation in Classical antiquity and in Japanese culture. This inclusivism is not fascinated by the historical interplay of religions, but finds the same spiritual bedrock in all. He unites the ethics of traditional Japan are united under a single rubric, Bushido, and the extreme pluralism of Japanese religious history is elided. Buddhism and Shinto are reduced to schools for Bushido virtues. Shinto inculcates loyalty to sovereign, ancestors, parents, and reveals in the pure human heart the image of Deity. The mirror in Shinto shrines is supposed to be the mirror of self-knowledge, associated with the Delphic ‘Know Thyself’ (45) and ‘the introspection of our moral nature’ (47). Here again is a tendency to reread Japanese religion in terms of classical models, both modernized in a rather stereotyped way. The Delphic motto had less to do with introspection than with recognizing the limitedness and fragility of mere mortals. The Shinto mirror has nothing to do with self-inspection. Of course Nitobe has as much right as anyone else to read a symbolic interpretation into the mirror. A 14th century author, Kitabatake Chikafusa, writes: ‘The mirror does not possess anything of its own, but without selfish desires reflects all things, showing their true qualities. Its virtue lies in its responses to those qualities, and as such represents the sources of all honesty’ (quoted, Jean Hebert, Shinto [London, 1967], 154). ‘The average Shintoist, and even the average priest, is practically unaware of the existence of any symbolism in his religion’ (Hebert, 155). ‘The tenets of Shintoism cover the two predominating features of the emotional life of our race – Patriotism and Loyalty’. Again this is an ethical reduction, perhaps akin to the politicizing of Shinto in the Meiji to Showa periods. The fundamental religious dimensions of Shinto are elided. To call it ‘a frame work of national instinct and race feelings’ is to recuperate it for ideological purposes. The pluralistic texture of Shinto cults is ignored. Nitobe also puts the ethical systems of ancient Judaism, classical Greece and Rome, and traditional Japan on the same level, finding them to be profoundly similar. The common core of these older ethical/religious cultures is assimilated to Christian ethics. The Inner Light tends to become identified with a mystically tinged Neo-Confucian ethics which Nitobe sees as universal.
Nitobe makes some acute criticisms of the mission effort in Japan, with a hint that it is a form of cultural oppression or imperialism. But when he suggests that the Spirit is renewing the face of Japan through Bushido, not though the missions, I again see a tendency to reduce the complexity and pluralism of Japanese culture to a single model, in a manner that discourages real encounter between Japan and the world. Nitobe denies the missionaries the major role in the making of the new Japan. They ‘are doing great things for Japan – in the domain of education, and especially of moral education; – only, the mysterious though not the less certain working of the Spirit is still hidden in divine secrecy. Whatever they do is still of indirect effect. No, as yet Christian missions have effected but little visible in moulding the character of New Japan. No, it was Bushido, pure and simple, that urged us on for weal or woe’ (172-3).
‘One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are entirely ignorant of our history – “What do we care for heathen records?” some say – and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past’ (179). It still seems to be true that Christian culture in Japan lacks a vital relationship to Japanese traditions. Christianity flourishes in the neutral space, the vacuum, created by the Americanization of Japan or by a modern secular fatigue with the indigenous religions. To Nitobe, the packaged Christianity brought by missionaries was artificial, synthetic, an imitation, a pastiche, sterilized and sterile. ‘Christianity in its American or English form – with more of Anglo-Saxon freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its Founder – is a poor scion to graft on Bushido stock’ (281). Instead of drawing out the living religious and moral elements within Japanese tradition, missionaries have imposed a book-religion on their hearers. Nitobe is anxious to redraft Christianity radically to bring it into accord with Japanese ideals. But he does not face the reality of the fully constituted religions that already occupy the ground in Japan, namely Buddhism and Shinto. He focuses instead on the ethical, Confucian qualities of Japanese culture, which, presented in the general and idealizing form that he gives them, seem to provide an unproblematic point of entry for the Gospel.
Militarism
A Declaration of 1661 identifies Quakerism with pacificism, but this document was forgotten until twentieth-century pacifists plucked it from obscurity; it ‘appeared as an official Quaker document only in the 1911 edition of Friends’ Christian Discipline’ (Kennedy, 238). ‘Most Friends lived out their devotion to non-violence and non-resistance during the two and a half centuries between the Restoration and the Great War’ (240). Around 1900 some Quakers were imperfectly committed to pacificism, notably Caroline Stephen and John Bellows, vociferous defenders of the Boer War. ‘Still, for every example of Quaker support for the potentialities or results of British imperialism, two others might be found that questioned or protested against imperial adventures’ (263). Liberal Quakerism was pacifist and offered vocal opposition to the Boer War of 1899-1902, whereas the Evangelicals were pro-war. The Peace Testimony was institutionalized for the first time when a document ‘Our Testimony for Peace’ was accepted at the 1912 Yearly Meeting in Manchester: ‘the first official document in the history of Quakerism to state explicitly that the peace testimony “follows necessarily from the foundation principle on which the Society... is built... our belief in and experience of the Light Within”’ (309). Though many Quakers served in World War I, ‘the great majority of British Quakers refused to give open support to the British war effort (323), though there was much confusion and lack of consensus. More than two hundred Quakers were jailed as conscientious objectors. ‘The extraordinary Adjourned Yearly Meeting of late January 1916 decided upon an official policy of resistance to conscription and non-co-operation with the war effort’ (372). The historic All-Friends Conference of 1920 affirmed that ‘the peace testimony was “the fundamental basis of Quaker Christian truth, that man must not kill his fellow man, and that this shall take pre-eminence over the claims of any other order of any other group of people”’ (413).
Nitobe seems to have identified as much as he could with this dimension of his creed. Gilbert Bowles (1869-1960) ‘influenced and became close friends with leading Japanese Christian peacemaking diplomats Nitobe Inazo and Sawada Setzuko; with them and other statesmen he founded the Japan Peace Society and tried to halt the militarization of Japan in the 1930s’ (Barbour/Frost, 295). Bowles was close to the liberal Gurneyites Clarence Evan Pickett (1884-1965) and Alexander C. Purdy (1890-1976). Purdy replaced liberal theologian Elbert Russell (1871-1951) at Earlham College from 1916 to 1923; he left as a result of tensions aroused by his liberal theology. Russell, later dean of the Duke University Divinity School from 1928-1951, aimed to form an estimate of Jesus Christ as ‘a force in history in the same spirit and by the same methods by which we would attempt to estimate the significance of any other historical personage, such as Napoleon or Hannibal, Buddha or Mohammed’ (quoted, Hamm, 152), though he ultimately confirmed the uniqueness and divinity of Christ..
On his ill-fated American tour at the end of his life, Nitobe was set at odds with his pacifist co-religionists. ‘As far as Philadelphia is concerned, Nitobe next appeared when Japan was invading Manchuria, and the Emperor had sent him on a tour of America to explain things. At the meetinghouse on Twelfth Street, Nitobe took the line that Japan was bringing peace and order to a chaotic barbarian situation, saving many lives and restoring quiet. After a minute of silence, Rufus Jones rose from his seat. He was having none of it. And that was that for Nitobe in Philadelphia’ (http://gfisher.blogspot.com/2005/03/inazo-nitobe-quaker-samurai.html).
Nitobe is critical of giri – ‘as a motive it is ‘infinitely inferior to the doctrine of Christian love, which should be the law’ (64-5) and has led to ‘every sort of sophistry and hypocrisy’ (65), but he has no wider conception of rectitude or justice to advance; he has nothing to say about social justice. Instead he illustrates ‘courage, the spirit of daring and bearing’, with various anecdotes, but without probing ethical reflection. Then he idealizes princely ‘benevolence’: ‘not only is a free exercise of monarchical power not felt as heavily by us as in Europe, but it is generally moderated by paternal consideration for the feelings of the people’ (85). This could be seen as laying the ground for the Showa Emperor-cult and even the political passivity of postwar Japanese. Another form of this virtue is warrior’s ‘benevolence to the weak, the down-trodden or the vanquished’ (89), illustrated by a stirring anecdote about Kumagaye (‘In an instant the sword flashes in the air, and when it falls it is red with adolescent blood’, 91) which shows that ‘Tenderness, Pity, and Love were traits which adorned the most sanguinary exploits of a samurai’ (91-3). To identify these idealized historical forms of benevolence as ‘the soul of Japan’ could distract from cultivating the modern forms of the virtue so needed and so missing in the twentieth century. Similarly backward-looking are the discussions of politeness and veracity – which is not taken to mean freedom of speech and courage in criticizing abuses even at the cost of one’s own career; instead the focus is on defending Japan against the accusation of shabby trade practices. The chapter on honor has to do with the quest for fame and the dread of shame, again illustrated by anecdotes of feudal times. The chapter on loyalty focuses on apparent clashes between Christians’ loyalty to Christ and to Japan, Socrates’ loyalty to his daimon and to Athens. These sketches of Bushido virtues are rather loosely strung together, and do not constitute a comprehensive study of the Bushido ethic in its historical form. They are exercises in diplomacy, presenting sterling features of Japanese character that were then unknown in the West and correcting unfavorable perceptions of Japan.
Bushido language about ‘to die when it is right to die, to strike when to strike is right’ (59) leads Nitobe to magnify suicide and revenge in a manner incompatible with Christian ethics. ‘I do not wish to be understood as asserting religious or even moral justification of suicide’ (191) is a weak disclaimer. Maurice Pinguet La mort volontaire au Japon [Paris: Gallimard, 1984]) boldly glorifies the Japanese tradition of suicide and William R. LaFleur (Liquid Life : Abortion and Buddhism in Japan [Princeton UP, 1992] does the same for Japanese practices of abortion and infanticide. Nitobe also makes us feel the seduction of this moral relativism (or rather, this proclamation of the superiority of pagan to Christian ethics), but he is not as up-front about it. He casts a classical glow over institutions of suicide by appealing to Roman honor and to the examples of Socrates and Brutus: ‘I dare say that many good Christians, if only they are honest enough, will confess the fascination of, if not positive admiration for, the sublime composure with which Cato, Brutus, Petronius, and a host of other ancient worthies terminated their own earthly existence’ (193). Nitobe is keen on closing the gap between pagan antiquity and the Christian world: ‘the moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible’ (207). He does not hold back from equating the samurai ethic with the Gospel.
His discussion of suicide proceeds with no reference to God as the giver of life (except for a jocular reference to Dante’s Inferno) and his discussion of revenge makes no reference to the central Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. He talks of Judaism leaving a jealous God to effect vengeance, mentioning the Greek Nemesis in the same breath – a rather shallow and extrinsic view. His apologia for revenge is incompatible with either Christianity or Buddhism: ‘Our sense of revenge is as exact as our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone’ (209). Kataki-uchi he sees as a rational institution, hence easily replaced by ‘a few paragraphs in the Criminal Code’ (211). He casually invokes ‘duelling and lynching’ (209) as Western equivalents of the noble oriental conceptions of redress, thus blithely blessing one of the most obscene evils of American life.
Imperialism and racial superiority
In Nitobe’s lifetime, the Western powers drooled over Japan as the force of modernity and enlightenment nation in the East, blessing its colonial enterprises in Korea and Taiwan as advances of civilization. Nitobe made his own the discourse of British colonialism. In 1919 he wrote as follows:
‘I count myself among the best and truest friends of Koreans. I like them… I think they are a capable people who can be trained to a large measure of self-government, for which the present is a period of tutelage. Let them study what we are doing in Korea, and this I say not to justify the many mistakes committed by our militaristic administration… In all humility, but with a firm conviction that Japan is a steward on whom devolves the gigantic task of the uplifting of the Far East, I cannot think that the young Korea is yet capable of governing itself’ (Quoted, Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun [New York: Norton, 2005], 157).
Nitobe’s outlook is a kind of nihonjinron – a celebration of Japanese uniqueness. He is at pains to distinguish this from racialist theories: the character instilled by Bushido discipline is not ‘an irreducible element of species’ ‘transmitted only by heredity’ (267, 269). He defines national identity as ‘the aggregate of psychological elements which constitute a national character’ (265). His stress on the nation’s soul is typical of nationalist discourse of the time. Bushido is ‘an unconscious and irresistible power’, ‘the motor force of our country’ (p. 269)
‘While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of civilisations already developed’ (57). Here is banal stereotyping – the common man’s perception that ‘we’ are all unique individuals, whereas ‘foreigners’ are all the same, ‘you can’t tell one from another’. This is the kind of thinking that oiled the machinery of British imperialism. ‘In Asia to speak of humanity is to speak of its plains; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its mountains’ (57). The implication is that Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, are somehow less fully human than Japanese. (Ironically, it is in Japan that one hears so often that ‘the nail that sticks out will be hammered into place’, and it is a regular experience of teachers in Japan that students from other Asian countries show more originality of thought and capacity to express disagreement, which the Japanese educational system serves rather to repress.) Yet, though Nitobe alludes to Nietzsche here, it should be noted that his ideas were in the main current of thinking of the time. Even the Quaker document, ‘Our Testimony for Peace’ accepted ‘the positive Social Darwinist argument that the “fittest races and nations” were those who “care most for human personality”’ (309).
Ahistorical actualizations
Nitobe’s combines whiggish liberalism and optimism with a hankering for an idealized feudal past. Something similar can be found in European thinkers who find in feudal society a socialist moder for today (I think vaguely of Carlyle, William Morris, Chesterton’s distributivism). His actualization of Bushido also fits Masao Maruyama’s account of the ahistorical actualizations frequent in Japan (see Hans Peter Liederbach, Martin Heidegger im Denken Watsuji Tetsuros [Munich, 2001]). These anachronistic actualizations seek to simplify the tradition by taking one element from the past and presenting it as the essence of Japanese identity (just as in Christianity many efforts were made to reduce the tradition to a single ‘essence of Christianity’).
‘Thinking that comes from outside Japan is not perceived as such, and consequently no real confrontation with it takes place and its appropriation does not last long; the foreign element can put down no roots, but is pushed out by the next foreign element, not however put aside or synthesized, so that later it can suddenly and unmediatedly emerge again in an appropriate constellation. Thoughts that though they have long had a place in Japan have no real relationship to the present, and seem historically cut off from it so to speak, suddenly pop up unmediately in the present’ (Liederbach, 37). ‘That thought does not accumulate into a tradition and that the “traditional” thought re-enters in a scarcely graspable and unsystematic way, are at bottom two sides of the same thing. There is a tendency, faced with the ideas that came to Japan in a determined temporal sequence, to rearrange them merely spatially in the individual’s interior and let them co-exist timelessly so to speak, whereby they lose their historical structuredness’ (Masao Maruyama, Denken in Japan,\[Frankfurt 1988], 29; quoted, Liederbach, 37). ‘The Japanese likes to interpret as benevolent broad-mindedness his readiness to appropriate the best from whatever quarter. Yet despite the modesty that distinguishes the Japanese in civil life, this attitude is not free from vanity and even arrogance’ (Karl Löwith, quoted, Liederbach, 49). Nitobe’s willingness to recognize the best in Europe is what Maruyama calls a ‘selective reception’. The selected European best (chivalry and imperialism) boosts the selected Japanese best (bushido), short-circuiting a true pluralistic and dialectical encounter of cultures. Maruyama gives an example of what he means, from Inoue Tetsujiro, who claimed that the ethics of German Idealism, ‘though people have seen it as a novel foreign teaching, is close to what the school of Zhu Xi [Chu Hsi 1130-1200] have taught from of old’ (Liederbach, 48). Nitobe’s book would provide Maruyama with many more examples of the same hermeneutical vice of ‘dehistoricizing, i.e. decontextualizing the foreign element’ (48) in order to assimilate it to something already present in Japanese tradition.
Joseph S. O'Leary
Posted at 12:26 PM in Japanese Religions | Permalink
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About 3 years ago I dropped into a black hole – four months of absolute terror. I wanted to end my life, but somehow [Holy Spirit], I reached out to a friend who took me to hospital. I had three visits [hospital] in four months – I actually thought I was in hell. I imagine I was going through some sort of metamorphosis [mental, physical & spiritual]. I had been seeing a therapist [1994] on a regular basis, up until this point in time. I actually thought I would be locked away – but the hospital staff was very supportive [I had no control over my process]. I was released from hospital 16th September 1994, but my fear, pain & shame had only subsided a little. I remember this particular morning waking up [home] & my process would start up again [fear, pain, & shame]. No one could help me, not even my therapist [I was terrified]. I asked Jesus Christ to have mercy on me & forgive me my sins. Slowly, all my fear has dissipated & I believe Jesus delivered me from my “psychological prison.” I am a practicing Catholic & the Holy Spirit is my friend & strength; every day since then has been a joy & blessing. I deserve to go to hell for the life I have led, but Jesus through His sacrifice on the cross, delivered me from my inequities. John 3: 8, John 15: 26, are verses I can relate to, organically. He’s a real person who is with me all the time. I have so much joy & peace in my life, today, after a childhood spent in orphanages [England & Australia]. Fear, pain, & shame, are no longer my constant companions. I just wanted to share my experience with you [Luke 8: 16 – 17].
Peace Be With You
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick | March 25, 2007 at 05:43 AM
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« Origen on Grace | Main | 3. Respect for Life and the Problem of Scriptural Violence »
January 09, 2007
A Note on Nitobe
Nitobe Inazô, statesman and educationalist (1862-1933), is best known in the West as the author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998)., a book which owes its once great popularity in part to the rarity at the time of books on Japan in English and the other languages into which it was translated, and in part to the novelty of hearing a Japanese address the world, presenting an attractive picture of his country and its animating traditions. Nitobe, for his part, had fully internalized the authoritative discourses of the English speaking world. His eloquent English was modeled on the approved masters of the time, and gained in charm from its slightly unidiomatic touches and the general warmth and candor of his attitude. The contemporary reader will no doubt find it to be weighed down by Victorian fustian, notably in its ornamental literary allusions to Shakespeare, etc. This problem may disappear in translation and did not obstruct the recent ‘Nitobe boom’ in Japan.
In addition to the old-fashioned style, another obstacle to retrieving Nitobe’s thought today is the atmosphere of naïve idealism that pervades this young man’s book. It is an idealism of dubious alloy, of a piece with the complacent outlooks lampooned by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1918). One is tempted to suspect that Nitobe’s popularity came from the way he could reproduce the fatuous delusions of his western audience in an exotic guise, holding up a flattering mirror. At that time Japan encouraged its representatives to westernize themselves so as to present the country to the world. Conversion to Christianity was a means of ingratiating oneself with America, and many conversions, including that of Nitobe’s Sapporo classmate and insepable companion Uchimura Kanzô, were inspired by patriotic motives. Attracted to Christianity since his teens, Nitobe succumbed to pressure from sophomores at the Sapporo Agricultural College to sign William S. Clark's 'Covenant of Believers in Jesus Christ'. “At the time of graduation, three men: Kanzo, Inazo Ohta (later Inazo Nitobe) and Kingo Miyabe swore among themselves that they would devote themselves to two J's: Jesus and
Japan… During his time as a student at
Amherst, [Uchimura] wrote down the following expression on his favorite Bible: ‘I for
Japan.
Japanfor the World. The World for Christ. And All for God’”, later his epitaph.
.
Nitobe’s Christianized bushido is calibrated to meet the expectations of the Western audience. Tessa Morris-Suzuki characterizes his vision of the samurai as 'a mildly exoticized version of the British public school ethos' (Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 68; quoted, George M. Oshiro, 'Nitobe Inazô and the Sapporo Band', Japan Journal of Religious Studies 34, 2007, pp. 99-106; p. 109). Yet when we notice that Nitobe’s Christian idealism is not as simple as it seems, but masks a diplomatic harmonization between conflicting loyalties, Nitobe become more interesting to read. His book is an attempt to negotiate a profound contradiction, for Nitobe is a pacifist Quaker who advocates the way of the sword as the summit of civilization. At the end of the first chapter he sells the pass to militarism, quoting Ruskin: ‘War is the foundation of all the arts… of all the high virtues and faculties of men’ (39). This was before World War I had instructed us on ‘the pity of war, the pity war distilled’ (Wilfred Owen). In later years Nitobe was profoundly ill at ease with his country’s militaristic development. As one who worked for and was paid by the Japanese Government all his life, he could never speak out with total freedom. When in 1932 a newspaper reported his off the-record remark that the Japanese military were a worse threat to Japan than the Communists, several of his friends were murdered and he had to have police protection (see John F. Howes, ‘Japan’s New Internationalism and the Legacy of Nitobe Inazo’ (1993); http://www.capi.uvic.ca/pubs/oc_papers/HOWES.pdf). One wonders if he ever regretted penning a work that glorified a warrior ethics, in which he smoothed away so persuasively all the obvious objections against it.
Nitobe was not a jingoist, but a liberal, cosmopolitan voice, who sought to meld Japanese tradition and European enlightenment. As Professor Shinro Kato points out, Nitobe’s book shaped European and American understanding of Japan right down to Ruth Benedict’s study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), but it didn’t play any significant role in forming the Japanese mind. Rather, the reactions against the book in Japan produced a ‘Bushido boom’ that emphasized not the universal values of ‘chivalry’ set forth by Nitobe but a chauvinistic Yamatodamashii, in accord with the political tendency at the time of the Sino-Japanese and Sino-Russian wars. Traditional intellectuals took little account of Nitobe’s attempt at an ethical purification of the samurai heritage. (For contemporary responses see http://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/chushinguranew/Bushido/reinvention.htm.formos. For recent studies, see John F. Howes, ed. Nitobe Inazô: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). Many intellectuals wanted Japan to emulate Europe’s technology, but abhorred the European social customs and morals Nitobe did not follow this ideology of Wakon-Yôsai (Japanese Spirit and European Technique), which became the principle of education in the early Showa). The Europe that attracted Nitobe was not modern and progressive. He was a Romantic, finding in knightly virtues the shared inspiration of Japan and Europe, and paying scant attention to the facts of Europe’s violent history, or to those of Japan’s.
Nitobe’s role has similarities with that of D. T. Suzuki (only eight years his junior). Just as Suzuki caused people to identify Japan with Zen, which he presented as the source of all that is important in Japanese culture, so Nitobe projected an image of Japan as the country of Bushido, with a tendency to see all the other dimensions of Japanese culture and religion as merely auxiliaries serving to build up the Bushido spirit. Suzuki was also a great admirer of the way of the sword, and the enigma of how this is reconciled with Buddhism, with its prohibition on taking life, is one that he did not satisfactorily resolve. Suzuki’s book, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton UP, 1959) has a wider and deeper outlook than Nitobe’s. While Nitobe is naively chauvinistic at times, the chauvinist undercurrent in Suzuki is very discreet. His thought centers not on Japanese uniqueness of Japanese excellence but on Buddhist wisdom. He is not concerned with Japanese ‘identity’ but with what is of permanent and universal value in Japanese tradition. The solidity of Suzuki’s scholarship and spiritual culture shows up Nitobe’s rhetoric as diplomatic fluff, a packaging of Japanese tradition for apologetic purposes.
The recent Nitobe boom was a rather puzzling event. Burritt Sabin, writing in Japan Inc Newsletter 397 (December 16, 2006) notes that Bunmei Ibuki, the Minister of Education, defending the revision of the Basic Education Law, made the following remark on Nov. 22: "The book Bushido formed the normative consciousness of the Japanese. By emphasizing such things I would like to supplement the Koizumi economic reforms." Meanwhile faculty members at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, of which Nitobe was the first president, issued a statement claiming that the present Basic Law upholds the ‘freedom of the spirit’ and ‘equal esteem for the value of all individuals’ that Nitobe stressed. The president of the university, Akiko Minato notes: ‘In the first clause of the revised law “reverence for the value of the individual” is deleted…Nitobe thought that first the “individual”, the “I”, is established , and next the cooperative body we call “the public”’. Professor Tsuyoshi Kojima, reviewing former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui's Bushido: An Analysis (2003) wrote: ‘Bushido has been romanticized as something that can be connected to the modern age. One learned individual made the nuanced comment that unlike [Yukio] Mishima's militarist book [on the Hagakure], [Nitobe's] book truly reflects bushido. Bushido, which was banned by the Occupation, is now functioning after undergoing a reevaluation’. Kojima claims that Bushido is not a historical book, but rather a reconfiguration by Nitobe, a Quaker, that turned Bushido into a pure, correct philosophy through eliminating its barbaric elements. Sabin concludes: ‘The usefulness of Nitobe's Bushido as a guide for revamping education in public schools is atavistic rather than forward looking. I question whether it is the sort of model Japan requires as the balance of power shifts in Asia and preserving the technological edge for adding value to exports at the core of the Japanese economy becomes an ever greater challenge. Nitobe was a samurai's scion who embraced Quakerism, which helps explain why Bushido can appeal to a conservative politician like Bunmei Ibuki and also to a liberal educator like Akiko Minato’.
Japanese surely have access to richer presentations of their culture than what Nitobe offers. Perhaps it is that their culture is so rich that it is difficult to assimilate it and a simplified popular presentation like Nitobe’s is more digestible. Or perhaps it is that in a time of moral crisis many people are ready to clutch at simplistic remedies, as in the triumph of new religions and cults, or the appeal of right wing ideologues. Nitobe is more benign than these latter, but it would I think be rash to presume that his influence must be entirely benign. The misgivings I shall voice here are only a first impression. I am far from having a full picture of where Nitobe is coming from or of the dynamics of his past and present reception. The Christian elements in the picture are one of the fuzzy areas. I shall focus on the theological aspect of his writing, in the hope of bringing things into clearer perspective.
The Inner Light
Nitobe became a Quaker in 1886, when he was 24 years old. His full conversion was long delayed. Uchimura Kanzô recalls that, 'He could doubt all things, could manufacture new doubts, and must text and prove eerything before he could accept it (How I Became a Christian, Tokyo: Kyôbunsha, 1971, p. 36; quoted, Oshiro, p. 110); the epigraph in Bushido from Browning's 'Bishop Blougram's Apology' reflects his struggles with doubt.
Nitobe should have been less impressed by the accoutrements of war and seen the squalor beneath the glamor. But I suspect that, ironically, it was his Quaker faith that led him to adopt such bland idealizations. His way of talking about religion prepares for his way of talking about society and history. Christianity, for Nitobe, is an inner essence, deeper than the surface of church structures and dogmas. He speaks sympathetically of the Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529), finding parallels between his doctrine of the ‘luminous mind’ and the New Testament (53). Shinto, too, becomes an emanation of the Japanese soul: ‘This religion – or, is it not more correct to say, the race emotions which this religion expressed? – thoroughly imbued Bushido with loyalty to the sovereign and love of country’ (49).
For Nitobe the surface constructions of religion, its institutions and doctrines, are mere ‘skillful means’, of secondary importance compared with the religion of the heart. This sounds modern, and it is, since it derives from the quite modern Quaker idea of the ‘Inner Light’ (originally the ‘Inward Light’). This is something of which non-Quakers usually have only a vague notion, so that it is hard for us to discern what personal modifications Nitobe brought to the idea. If the Inward Light refers to the immediacy of contemplative (pneumatic) experience, no doubt is has an important place in Christianity, and some equivalent of it may be found in other religions. But the specific cultural embodiment of this idea and the nuances of its development in the quite complex history of the Society of Friends would demand detailed research.
Older Quakerism sought to balance the Inward Light of Christ against the outward realities of Scripture and doctrine. The phrase ‘Inner Light’ came into use in connection with Elias Hicks (1748-1830), who stressed the autonomy of this interior revelation at the expense of Scripture and of the objective reality of Christ’s saving death. This caused a schism among American Quakers in 1828. The main opponents of Hicks were the Evangelical Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847) and the more quietistic John Wilbur (1774-1856). However, Wilbur rejected an over-reaction to Hicks that led to ‘overemphasis on the outward and historical forms and a weakening of the experience of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit’ (Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers [New York: Greenwood, 1988], p. 377). The orthodox camp later split between Gurneyites and Wilburites. The evangelical influence tended to make Quakerism indistinguishible from other Protestant denominations, and the quietist, mystical emphasis was in a weak, defensive position throughout the nineteenth century.
The evangelical Isaac Crewdson (1780-1844), a close friend of Gurney, in his attack on the Unitarian tendencies of the Hicksites, A Beacon to the Society of Friends (1835), denounced as well the error of Robert Barclay (1648-1690) in ‘presenting the Inward Light as independent of and superior to Scripture’ (Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism 1860-1920, Oxford UP, 2001, p. 26). Similarly, Robert Charlton (1809-1872) accFused Barclay of representing Christ not with reference to his propitiatory sacrifice but ‘as an internal principle of light common to all men’ (38). Some argued that even in George Fox (1624-1691) the founder of Quakerism, the Inward Light is in tension with more orthodox Christianity. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite (1818-1895) wrote of the founders of Quakerism: ‘We clung to them as long as possible, but experience has convinced us that one thing they lacked – faith. With them everything was inward. Their hope was inward – their righteousness was inward – the blood by which they were cleansed was within – the water by which they were washed was within – their Christ was within – and George Fox even declares their heaven was within’ (31).
In Britain liberal Quakerism emerged as a massive force at the 1895 Manchester Conference, winning over the bulk of the evangelicals and putting evangelical Quakerism on the defensive thereafter. It is to this liberal Quakerism that Nitobe belongs. The Quaker Renaissance set off at Manchester was spear-headed by the magnetic John Wilhelm Rowntree (1868-1905). It was based on ‘the revival of the Inward Light as the “great and Fundamental Truth of a living and present Saviour underlying all that early Friends taught” [William Pollard]’ along with ‘the restoration of the Bible in its proper relationship with the Light’ (Kennedy, 164). Rowntree’s spiritual heir Rufus M. Jones (1863-1948), a student of the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), was the chief intellectual of Quaker modernism. ‘Royce’s neo-Hegelian thought was closely akin to that of the Oxford idealist T. H. Green, whose ideas had inspired leaders of the British Quaker Renaissance’ (160). He was also influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s stress on experience as the foundation of religious truth. Emerson had read Penn, Barclay, and Thomas Clarkson (Portraiture of Quakerism, 1806) and had Quaker friends; he regarded the Inner Light as ‘virtually the same as what had been suggested by many sages and powers, such as Zoroaster, Confucius, Orpheus, Numa, and others, Christian or pagan’ (Yukio Irie, Emerson and Quakerism [Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1967], 36).. The idealist, transcendentalist background has been absorbed by Nitobe.
Jones ‘traced the ideas of George Fox and other early Friends more or less directly to a brand of Christian mysticism imported to England from the continent at various stages of the Reformation’ (Kennedy, 161), especially that of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). Jones celebrated the mysticism of the Inward Light as overthrowing Calvinist ideas of absolute human depravity and predestination and revealing ‘the innate goodness of human nature as well as the infinite capacity of reason, properly understood and applied, to life humankind on to the higher spiritual level in concert with the exalted physical state toward which the laws of nature, expanded and clarified by Darwinian science, seemed to be taking the human race’ (Ibid.).. American Quakerism after 1907 ‘had become a microcosm of American Protestantism. It had a primitivist faction, desperately attempting to preserve the old ways, the Wilburites. It had one liberal faction that had grown out of the Unitarian-Universalist liberalism of the 1820s, the Hicksites. It had another liberal faction, symbolized by Jones, that had grown from evangelicalism into modernism. And finally a faction calling itself evangelical, the product of the holiness revival movement of the 1870s, was rapidly hardening into fundamentalism’ (Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 172).
Nitobe on Religion
It is hard to say how thoroughly Nitobe was steeped in these modernist ideas, but it is certain that his religion is not a straight-laced biblical Christianity. One may even find that he takes as rather casual and aestheticizing attitude to biblical texts, putting them on the same level as wise utterances from Chinese and Japanese tradition. His biblical quotations are odd and sometimes irreverent. Of the samurai teenager he says: ‘He beareth not the sword in vain’ (217 = Rom. 13:4). He quotes a seventeenth century priest: ‘“Him who once has died in the bottom of his breast, no spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of Tametomo can pierce”. How near we come to the portals of the temple whose Builder taught “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it”’ (207). This is in bad taste. When he quotes Mencius, ‘When men’s fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it’ and equates this with ‘a parable propounded three hundred years later in another clime and by a greater Teacher, Who called Himself the Way of righteousness’ (61), I have the feeling that there is a certain tone-deafness to all that separates the two ‘climes’. Nitobe is content to merely glance at the proposed identity, for he immediately continues: ‘But I stray from my point’. Then he rephrases Mencius in Gospel language in a way that is untrue to both: ‘Righteousness, according to Mencius, is a straight and narrow path which a man ought to take to regain the lost paradise’. This tendency to equate very different religious or ethical visions militates against sensitivity to religious pluralism and against the perception of the other as other.
His open-minded religious pluralism is in reality a kind of inclusivism – all the virtues and traditions he lauds are seen a vehicles of the unitary ethical enlightenment he is advocating. Religions are constructed over centuries of practice accompanied by intensive rational reflection. The kind of truth that is formulated in these constructions is what the Mâdhyamika philosophers call samvrti-satya (conventional, world-ensconced, screening truth) as opposed to ultimate truth or paramartha-satya, which cannot be pinned down in words. Religions can function as conventional vehicles of ultimacy, and experiences of contemplative illumination are a kind of confirmation that the religious conventions are doing their job. However, to pit religious experience against doctrine as if the former were ultimate and the latter merely conventional is a dangerous simplification, and one to which Quakerism is particularly prone. Religious experience itself is inscribed in history and cannot be distilled in a pure state from its doctrinal or ritual vehicles. Thus most Christians place much more value on creed and dogma than the Inward Light tradition does. While the sense of the relativity, historicity, conventionality, culture-boundedness of doctrinal language is seeping into Christian theological awareness today, theologians rightly remain anxious to somehow reconcile this emphasis with a retrieval of dogma in a more critical key.
Nitobe writes in ‘A Japanese View of Quakers’: ‘The starting point of Quaker teaching is the belief in the existence of the Inner Light… Whatever the name, it means the presence of a Power not our own, the indwelling of a Personality, other than human, in each one of us. Such a doctrine is... as old as the oldest form of mysticism. Buddhism is full of references to it... The Zen Sect of Buddhism makes it its aim to comprehend it’ (http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/nitobe.htm). The sweeping manner in which Nitobe courses freely through the various religious traditions of his homeland and of the West stems from this conviction of having access to the very essence of all religions.
Nitobe believes in a universal revelation which underpins the specific revelation of Christianity, and he finds this universal revelation in Classical antiquity and in Japanese culture. This inclusivism is not fascinated by the historical interplay of religions, but finds the same spiritual bedrock in all. He unites the ethics of traditional Japan are united under a single rubric, Bushido, and the extreme pluralism of Japanese religious history is elided. Buddhism and Shinto are reduced to schools for Bushido virtues. Shinto inculcates loyalty to sovereign, ancestors, parents, and reveals in the pure human heart the image of Deity. The mirror in Shinto shrines is supposed to be the mirror of self-knowledge, associated with the Delphic ‘Know Thyself’ (45) and ‘the introspection of our moral nature’ (47). Here again is a tendency to reread Japanese religion in terms of classical models, both modernized in a rather stereotyped way. The Delphic motto had less to do with introspection than with recognizing the limitedness and fragility of mere mortals. The Shinto mirror has nothing to do with self-inspection. Of course Nitobe has as much right as anyone else to read a symbolic interpretation into the mirror. A 14th century author, Kitabatake Chikafusa, writes: ‘The mirror does not possess anything of its own, but without selfish desires reflects all things, showing their true qualities. Its virtue lies in its responses to those qualities, and as such represents the sources of all honesty’ (quoted, Jean Hebert, Shinto [London, 1967], 154). ‘The average Shintoist, and even the average priest, is practically unaware of the existence of any symbolism in his religion’ (Hebert, 155). ‘The tenets of Shintoism cover the two predominating features of the emotional life of our race – Patriotism and Loyalty’. Again this is an ethical reduction, perhaps akin to the politicizing of Shinto in the Meiji to Showa periods. The fundamental religious dimensions of Shinto are elided. To call it ‘a frame work of national instinct and race feelings’ is to recuperate it for ideological purposes. The pluralistic texture of Shinto cults is ignored. Nitobe also puts the ethical systems of ancient Judaism, classical Greece and Rome, and traditional Japan on the same level, finding them to be profoundly similar. The common core of these older ethical/religious cultures is assimilated to Christian ethics. The Inner Light tends to become identified with a mystically tinged Neo-Confucian ethics which Nitobe sees as universal.
Nitobe makes some acute criticisms of the mission effort in Japan, with a hint that it is a form of cultural oppression or imperialism. But when he suggests that the Spirit is renewing the face of Japan through Bushido, not though the missions, I again see a tendency to reduce the complexity and pluralism of Japanese culture to a single model, in a manner that discourages real encounter between Japan and the world. Nitobe denies the missionaries the major role in the making of the new Japan. They ‘are doing great things for Japan – in the domain of education, and especially of moral education; – only, the mysterious though not the less certain working of the Spirit is still hidden in divine secrecy. Whatever they do is still of indirect effect. No, as yet Christian missions have effected but little visible in moulding the character of New Japan. No, it was Bushido, pure and simple, that urged us on for weal or woe’ (172-3).
‘One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are entirely ignorant of our history – “What do we care for heathen records?” some say – and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past’ (179). It still seems to be true that Christian culture in Japan lacks a vital relationship to Japanese traditions. Christianity flourishes in the neutral space, the vacuum, created by the Americanization of Japan or by a modern secular fatigue with the indigenous religions. To Nitobe, the packaged Christianity brought by missionaries was artificial, synthetic, an imitation, a pastiche, sterilized and sterile. ‘Christianity in its American or English form – with more of Anglo-Saxon freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its Founder – is a poor scion to graft on Bushido stock’ (281). Instead of drawing out the living religious and moral elements within Japanese tradition, missionaries have imposed a book-religion on their hearers. Nitobe is anxious to redraft Christianity radically to bring it into accord with Japanese ideals. But he does not face the reality of the fully constituted religions that already occupy the ground in Japan, namely Buddhism and Shinto. He focuses instead on the ethical, Confucian qualities of Japanese culture, which, presented in the general and idealizing form that he gives them, seem to provide an unproblematic point of entry for the Gospel.
Militarism
A Declaration of 1661 identifies Quakerism with pacificism, but this document was forgotten until twentieth-century pacifists plucked it from obscurity; it ‘appeared as an official Quaker document only in the 1911 edition of Friends’ Christian Discipline’ (Kennedy, 238). ‘Most Friends lived out their devotion to non-violence and non-resistance during the two and a half centuries between the Restoration and the Great War’ (240). Around 1900 some Quakers were imperfectly committed to pacificism, notably Caroline Stephen and John Bellows, vociferous defenders of the Boer War. ‘Still, for every example of Quaker support for the potentialities or results of British imperialism, two others might be found that questioned or protested against imperial adventures’ (263). Liberal Quakerism was pacifist and offered vocal opposition to the Boer War of 1899-1902, whereas the Evangelicals were pro-war. The Peace Testimony was institutionalized for the first time when a document ‘Our Testimony for Peace’ was accepted at the 1912 Yearly Meeting in Manchester: ‘the first official document in the history of Quakerism to state explicitly that the peace testimony “follows necessarily from the foundation principle on which the Society... is built... our belief in and experience of the Light Within”’ (309). Though many Quakers served in World War I, ‘the great majority of British Quakers refused to give open support to the British war effort (323), though there was much confusion and lack of consensus. More than two hundred Quakers were jailed as conscientious objectors. ‘The extraordinary Adjourned Yearly Meeting of late January 1916 decided upon an official policy of resistance to conscription and non-co-operation with the war effort’ (372). The historic All-Friends Conference of 1920 affirmed that ‘the peace testimony was “the fundamental basis of Quaker Christian truth, that man must not kill his fellow man, and that this shall take pre-eminence over the claims of any other order of any other group of people”’ (413).
Nitobe seems to have identified as much as he could with this dimension of his creed. Gilbert Bowles (1869-1960) ‘influenced and became close friends with leading Japanese Christian peacemaking diplomats Nitobe Inazo and Sawada Setzuko; with them and other statesmen he founded the Japan Peace Society and tried to halt the militarization of Japan in the 1930s’ (Barbour/Frost, 295). Bowles was close to the liberal Gurneyites Clarence Evan Pickett (1884-1965) and Alexander C. Purdy (1890-1976). Purdy replaced liberal theologian Elbert Russell (1871-1951) at Earlham College from 1916 to 1923; he left as a result of tensions aroused by his liberal theology. Russell, later dean of the Duke University Divinity School from 1928-1951, aimed to form an estimate of Jesus Christ as ‘a force in history in the same spirit and by the same methods by which we would attempt to estimate the significance of any other historical personage, such as Napoleon or Hannibal, Buddha or Mohammed’ (quoted, Hamm, 152), though he ultimately confirmed the uniqueness and divinity of Christ..
On his ill-fated American tour at the end of his life, Nitobe was set at odds with his pacifist co-religionists. ‘As far as Philadelphia is concerned, Nitobe next appeared when Japan was invading Manchuria, and the Emperor had sent him on a tour of America to explain things. At the meetinghouse on Twelfth Street, Nitobe took the line that Japan was bringing peace and order to a chaotic barbarian situation, saving many lives and restoring quiet. After a minute of silence, Rufus Jones rose from his seat. He was having none of it. And that was that for Nitobe in Philadelphia’ (http://gfisher.blogspot.com/2005/03/inazo-nitobe-quaker-samurai.html).
Nitobe is critical of giri – ‘as a motive it is ‘infinitely inferior to the doctrine of Christian love, which should be the law’ (64-5) and has led to ‘every sort of sophistry and hypocrisy’ (65), but he has no wider conception of rectitude or justice to advance; he has nothing to say about social justice. Instead he illustrates ‘courage, the spirit of daring and bearing’, with various anecdotes, but without probing ethical reflection. Then he idealizes princely ‘benevolence’: ‘not only is a free exercise of monarchical power not felt as heavily by us as in Europe, but it is generally moderated by paternal consideration for the feelings of the people’ (85). This could be seen as laying the ground for the Showa Emperor-cult and even the political passivity of postwar Japanese. Another form of this virtue is warrior’s ‘benevolence to the weak, the down-trodden or the vanquished’ (89), illustrated by a stirring anecdote about Kumagaye (‘In an instant the sword flashes in the air, and when it falls it is red with adolescent blood’, 91) which shows that ‘Tenderness, Pity, and Love were traits which adorned the most sanguinary exploits of a samurai’ (91-3). To identify these idealized historical forms of benevolence as ‘the soul of Japan’ could distract from cultivating the modern forms of the virtue so needed and so missing in the twentieth century. Similarly backward-looking are the discussions of politeness and veracity – which is not taken to mean freedom of speech and courage in criticizing abuses even at the cost of one’s own career; instead the focus is on defending Japan against the accusation of shabby trade practices. The chapter on honor has to do with the quest for fame and the dread of shame, again illustrated by anecdotes of feudal times. The chapter on loyalty focuses on apparent clashes between Christians’ loyalty to Christ and to Japan, Socrates’ loyalty to his daimon and to Athens. These sketches of Bushido virtues are rather loosely strung together, and do not constitute a comprehensive study of the Bushido ethic in its historical form. They are exercises in diplomacy, presenting sterling features of Japanese character that were then unknown in the West and correcting unfavorable perceptions of Japan.
Bushido language about ‘to die when it is right to die, to strike when to strike is right’ (59) leads Nitobe to magnify suicide and revenge in a manner incompatible with Christian ethics. ‘I do not wish to be understood as asserting religious or even moral justification of suicide’ (191) is a weak disclaimer. Maurice Pinguet La mort volontaire au Japon [Paris: Gallimard, 1984]) boldly glorifies the Japanese tradition of suicide and William R. LaFleur (Liquid Life : Abortion and Buddhism in Japan [Princeton UP, 1992] does the same for Japanese practices of abortion and infanticide. Nitobe also makes us feel the seduction of this moral relativism (or rather, this proclamation of the superiority of pagan to Christian ethics), but he is not as up-front about it. He casts a classical glow over institutions of suicide by appealing to Roman honor and to the examples of Socrates and Brutus: ‘I dare say that many good Christians, if only they are honest enough, will confess the fascination of, if not positive admiration for, the sublime composure with which Cato, Brutus, Petronius, and a host of other ancient worthies terminated their own earthly existence’ (193). Nitobe is keen on closing the gap between pagan antiquity and the Christian world: ‘the moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible’ (207). He does not hold back from equating the samurai ethic with the Gospel.
His discussion of suicide proceeds with no reference to God as the giver of life (except for a jocular reference to Dante’s Inferno) and his discussion of revenge makes no reference to the central Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. He talks of Judaism leaving a jealous God to effect vengeance, mentioning the Greek Nemesis in the same breath – a rather shallow and extrinsic view. His apologia for revenge is incompatible with either Christianity or Buddhism: ‘Our sense of revenge is as exact as our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone’ (209). Kataki-uchi he sees as a rational institution, hence easily replaced by ‘a few paragraphs in the Criminal Code’ (211). He casually invokes ‘duelling and lynching’ (209) as Western equivalents of the noble oriental conceptions of redress, thus blithely blessing one of the most obscene evils of American life.
Imperialism and racial superiority
In Nitobe’s lifetime, the Western powers drooled over Japan as the force of modernity and enlightenment nation in the East, blessing its colonial enterprises in Korea and Taiwan as advances of civilization. Nitobe made his own the discourse of British colonialism. In 1919 he wrote as follows:
‘I count myself among the best and truest friends of Koreans. I like them… I think they are a capable people who can be trained to a large measure of self-government, for which the present is a period of tutelage. Let them study what we are doing in Korea, and this I say not to justify the many mistakes committed by our militaristic administration… In all humility, but with a firm conviction that Japan is a steward on whom devolves the gigantic task of the uplifting of the Far East, I cannot think that the young Korea is yet capable of governing itself’ (Quoted, Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun [New York: Norton, 2005], 157).
Nitobe’s outlook is a kind of nihonjinron – a celebration of Japanese uniqueness. He is at pains to distinguish this from racialist theories: the character instilled by Bushido discipline is not ‘an irreducible element of species’ ‘transmitted only by heredity’ (267, 269). He defines national identity as ‘the aggregate of psychological elements which constitute a national character’ (265). His stress on the nation’s soul is typical of nationalist discourse of the time. Bushido is ‘an unconscious and irresistible power’, ‘the motor force of our country’ (p. 269)
‘While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of civilisations already developed’ (57). Here is banal stereotyping – the common man’s perception that ‘we’ are all unique individuals, whereas ‘foreigners’ are all the same, ‘you can’t tell one from another’. This is the kind of thinking that oiled the machinery of British imperialism. ‘In Asia to speak of humanity is to speak of its plains; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its mountains’ (57). The implication is that Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, are somehow less fully human than Japanese. (Ironically, it is in Japan that one hears so often that ‘the nail that sticks out will be hammered into place’, and it is a regular experience of teachers in Japan that students from other Asian countries show more originality of thought and capacity to express disagreement, which the Japanese educational system serves rather to repress.) Yet, though Nitobe alludes to Nietzsche here, it should be noted that his ideas were in the main current of thinking of the time. Even the Quaker document, ‘Our Testimony for Peace’ accepted ‘the positive Social Darwinist argument that the “fittest races and nations” were those who “care most for human personality”’ (309).
Ahistorical actualizations
Nitobe’s combines whiggish liberalism and optimism with a hankering for an idealized feudal past. Something similar can be found in European thinkers who find in feudal society a socialist moder for today (I think vaguely of Carlyle, William Morris, Chesterton’s distributivism). His actualization of Bushido also fits Masao Maruyama’s account of the ahistorical actualizations frequent in Japan (see Hans Peter Liederbach, Martin Heidegger im Denken Watsuji Tetsuros [Munich, 2001]). These anachronistic actualizations seek to simplify the tradition by taking one element from the past and presenting it as the essence of Japanese identity (just as in Christianity many efforts were made to reduce the tradition to a single ‘essence of Christianity’).
‘Thinking that comes from outside Japan is not perceived as such, and consequently no real confrontation with it takes place and its appropriation does not last long; the foreign element can put down no roots, but is pushed out by the next foreign element, not however put aside or synthesized, so that later it can suddenly and unmediatedly emerge again in an appropriate constellation. Thoughts that though they have long had a place in Japan have no real relationship to the present, and seem historically cut off from it so to speak, suddenly pop up unmediately in the present’ (Liederbach, 37). ‘That thought does not accumulate into a tradition and that the “traditional” thought re-enters in a scarcely graspable and unsystematic way, are at bottom two sides of the same thing. There is a tendency, faced with the ideas that came to Japan in a determined temporal sequence, to rearrange them merely spatially in the individual’s interior and let them co-exist timelessly so to speak, whereby they lose their historical structuredness’ (Masao Maruyama, Denken in Japan,\[Frankfurt 1988], 29; quoted, Liederbach, 37). ‘The Japanese likes to interpret as benevolent broad-mindedness his readiness to appropriate the best from whatever quarter. Yet despite the modesty that distinguishes the Japanese in civil life, this attitude is not free from vanity and even arrogance’ (Karl Löwith, quoted, Liederbach, 49). Nitobe’s willingness to recognize the best in Europe is what Maruyama calls a ‘selective reception’. The selected European best (chivalry and imperialism) boosts the selected Japanese best (bushido), short-circuiting a true pluralistic and dialectical encounter of cultures. Maruyama gives an example of what he means, from Inoue Tetsujiro, who claimed that the ethics of German Idealism, ‘though people have seen it as a novel foreign teaching, is close to what the school of Zhu Xi [Chu Hsi 1130-1200] have taught from of old’ (Liederbach, 48). Nitobe’s book would provide Maruyama with many more examples of the same hermeneutical vice of ‘dehistoricizing, i.e. decontextualizing the foreign element’ (48) in order to assimilate it to something already present in Japanese tradition.
Joseph S. O'Leary
Posted at 12:26 PM in Japanese Religions | Permalink
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About 3 years ago I dropped into a black hole – four months of absolute terror. I wanted to end my life, but somehow [Holy Spirit], I reached out to a friend who took me to hospital. I had three visits [hospital] in four months – I actually thought I was in hell. I imagine I was going through some sort of metamorphosis [mental, physical & spiritual]. I had been seeing a therapist [1994] on a regular basis, up until this point in time. I actually thought I would be locked away – but the hospital staff was very supportive [I had no control over my process]. I was released from hospital 16th September 1994, but my fear, pain & shame had only subsided a little. I remember this particular morning waking up [home] & my process would start up again [fear, pain, & shame]. No one could help me, not even my therapist [I was terrified]. I asked Jesus Christ to have mercy on me & forgive me my sins. Slowly, all my fear has dissipated & I believe Jesus delivered me from my “psychological prison.” I am a practicing Catholic & the Holy Spirit is my friend & strength; every day since then has been a joy & blessing. I deserve to go to hell for the life I have led, but Jesus through His sacrifice on the cross, delivered me from my inequities. John 3: 8, John 15: 26, are verses I can relate to, organically. He’s a real person who is with me all the time. I have so much joy & peace in my life, today, after a childhood spent in orphanages [England & Australia]. Fear, pain, & shame, are no longer my constant companions. I just wanted to share my experience with you [Luke 8: 16 – 17].
Peace Be With You
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick | March 25, 2007 at 05:43 AM
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