Conventional Japanese strictly separate drinking from eating. As soon as a man tastes rice at a village party where sake is served it means that he has stopped drinking. He has stepped over into another ‘circle’ and he keeps them separate. At home he may have sake after his meal but he does not eat and drink at the same time. He gives himself up in turn to one or the other enjoyment.
These Japanese views on ‘human feelings’ have several consequences. It cuts the ground out from under the Occidental philosophy of two powers, the flesh and the spirit, continually fighting for supremacy in each human life. In Japanese philosophy the flesh is not evil. Enjoying its possible pleasures is no sin. The spirit and the body are not opposing forces in the universe and the Japanese carry this tenet to a logical conclusion: the world is not a battlefield between good and evil. Sir George Sansom writes: ‘Throughout their history the Japanese seem to have retained in some measure this incapacity to discern, or this reluctance to grapple with, the problem of evil.’ They have in fact constantly repudiated it as a view of life. They believe that man has two souls, but they are not his good impulses fighting with his bad. They are the ‘gentle’ soul and the ‘rough’ soul and there are occasions in every man’s – and every nation’s – life when he should be ‘gentle’ and when he should be ‘rough.’ One soul is not destined for hell and one for heaven. They are both necessary and good on different occasions.
Even their gods are conspicuously good-evil in this same fashion. Their most popular god is Susanowo, ‘His Swift Impetuous Male Augustness,’ brother of the Sun Goddess, whose outrageous behavior toward his sister would in Western mythology identify him as a devil. His sister tries to throw him out of her rooms because she suspects his motives in coming to her. He behaves wantonly, scattering excrement over her dining hall where she and her followers are celebrating the ceremony of the First-fruits. He breaks down the divisions of the rice fields – a terrible offense. As worst offense of all – and most enigmatic to a Westerner – he flings into her chamber through a hole he makes in the roof a piebald horse which he ‘had flayed with a backward flaying.’ Susanowo, for all these outrages, is tried by tho gods, heavily fined and banished from heaven to the Land of Darkness. But he remains a favorite god of the Japanese pantheon and he duly receives his worship. Such god-characters are common in world mythologies. In the higher ethical religions, however, they have been excluded because a philosophy of cosmic conflict between good and evil makes it more congenial to separate supernatural beings into groups as different as black and white.
The Japanese have always been extremely explicit in denying that virtue consists in fighting evil. As their philosophers and religious teachers have constantly said for centuries such a moral code is alien to Japan. They are loud in proclaiming that this proves the moral superiority of their own people. The Chinese, they say, had to have a moral code which raised jen, just and benevolent behavior, to an absolute standard, by applying which all men and acts could be found wanting if they fell short. ‘A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.’ So wrote the great eighteenth-century Shintoist, Moto?ri, and modern Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on the same theme. Human nature in Japan, they say, is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to fight an evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. If it has allowed itself to become ‘dirty,’ impurities are readily removed and man’s essential goodness shines forth again. Buddhist philosophy has gone farther in Japan than in any other nation in teaching that every man is a potential Buddha and that rules of virtue are not in the sacred writings but in what one uncovers within one’s own enlightened and innocent soul. Why should one distrust what one finds there? No evil is inherent in man’s soul. They have no theology which cries with the Psalmist, ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ They teach no doctrine of the Fall of Man. ‘Human feelings’ are blessings which a man should not condemn. Neither the philosopher nor the peasant does condemn them.