‘Competent’ self-discipline in Japan has this rationale that it improves a man’s conduct of his own life. Any impatience he may feel while he is new in the training will pass, they say, for eventually he will enjoy it – or give it up. An apprentice tends properly to his business, a boy learns judo (jujitsu), a young wife adjusts to the demands of her mother-in-law; it is quite understood that in the first stages of training, the man or woman unused to the new requirements may wish to be free of this shuyo. Their fathers may talk to them and say, ‘What do you wish? Some training is necessary to savor life. If you give this up and do not train yourself at all, you will be unhappy as a natural consequence. And if these natural consequences should occur, I should not be inclined to protect you against public opinion.’ Shuyo, in the phrase they use so often, polishes away ‘the rust of the body.’ It makes a man a bright sharp sword, which is, of course, what he desires to be.
All this stress on how self-discipline leads to one’s own advantage does not mean that the extreme acts the Japanese code often requires are not truly serious frustrations, and that such frustrations do not lead to aggressive impulses. This distinction is one which Americans understand in games and sports. The bridge champion does not complain of the self-sacrifice that has been required of him to learn to play well; he does not label as ‘frustrations’ the hours he has had to put in in order to become an expert. Nevertheless, physicians say that in some cases the great attention necessary when a man is playing either for high stakes or for a championship, is not unrelated to stomach ulcers and excessive bodily tensions. The same thing happens to people in Japan. But the sanction of reciprocity, and the Japanese conviction that self-discipline is to one’s own advantage, make many acts seem easy to them which seem insupportable to Americans. They pay much closer attention to behaving competently and they allow themselves fewer alibis than Americans. They do not so often project their dissatisfactions with life upon scapegoats, and they do not so often indulge in self-pity because they have somehow or other not got what Americans call average happiness. They have been trained to pay much closer attention to the ‘rust of the body’ than is common among Americans.
Beyond and above ‘competent’ self-discipline, there is also the plane of ‘expertness.’ Japanese techniques of this latter sort have not been made very intelligible to Western readers by Japanese authors who have written about them, and Occidental scholars who have made a specialty of this subject have often been very cavalier about them. Sometimes they have called them ‘eccentricities.’ One French scholar writes that they are all ‘in defiance of common sense,’ and that the greatest of all disciplinary sects, the Zen cult, is ‘a tissue of solemn nonsense.’ The purposes their techniques are intended to accomplish, however, are not impenetrable, and the whole subject throws a considerable light on Japanese psychic economy.
A long series of Japanese words name the state of mind the expert in self-discipline is supposed to achieve. Some of these terms are used for actors, some for religious devotees, some for fencers, some for public speakers, some for painters, some for masters of the tea ceremony. They all have the same general meaning, and I shall use only the word muga, which is the word used in the flourishing upper-class cult of Zen Buddhism. The description of this state of expertness is that it denotes those experiences, whether secular or religious, when ‘there is no break, not even the thickness of a hair’ between a man’s will and his act. A discharge of electricity passes directly from the positive to the negative pole. In people who have not attained expertness, them is, as it were, a non-conducting screen which stands between the will and the act. They call this the ‘observing self,’ the ‘interfering self,’ and when this has been removed by special kinds of training the expert loses all sense that ‘I am doing it.’ The circuit runs free. The act is effortless. It is ‘one-pointed.’ The deed completely reproduces the picture the actor had drawn of it in his mind.