The most ordinary people seek this kind of ‘expertness’ in Japan. Sir Charles Eliot, the great English authority on Buddhism, tells of a schoolgirl who applied to a well-known missionary in Tokyo and said that she wished to become a Christian. When questioned as to her reasons she replied that her great desire was to go up in an aeroplane. On being invited to explain the connection between aeroplanes and Christianity, she replied that she had been told that before she went up in an aeroplane she must have a very calm and well-regulated mind and that this kind of mind was only acquired by religious training. She thought that among the religions Christianity was probably the best and so she came to ask for teaching.
The Japanese not only connect Christianity and airplanes; they connect training for ‘a calm and well-regulated mind’ with an examination in pedagogy or with speech-making or with a statesman’s career. Technical training for one-pointedness seems to them an unquestioned advantage in almost any undertaking.
Many civilizations have developed techniques of this kind, but the Japanese goals and methods have a marked character all their own. This is especially interesting because many of the techniques are derived from India where they are known as Yoga. Japanese techniques of self-hypnotism, concentration, and control of the senses still show kinship with Indian practices. There is similar emphasis on emptying the mind, on immobility of the body, on ten thousands of repetitions of the same phrase, on fixing the attention on a chosen symbol. Even the terminology used in India is still recognizable. Beyond these bare bones of the cult, however, the Japanese version has little in common with the Hindu.
Yoga in India is an extreme cult of asceticism. It is a way of obtaining release from the round of reincarnation. Man has no salvation except this release, nirvana, and the obstacle in his path is human desire. These desires can be eliminated by starving them out, by insulting them, and by courting self-torture. Through these means a man may reach sainthood and achieve spirituality and union with the divine. Yoga is a way of renouncing the world of the flesh and of escaping the treadmill of human futility. It is also a way of laying hold of spiritual powers. The journey toward one’s goal is the faster the more extreme the asceticism.
Such philosophy is alien in Japan. Even though Japan is a great Buddhist nation, ideas of transmigration and of nirvana have never been a part of the Buddhist faith of the people. These doctrines are personally accepted by some Buddhist priests, but they have never affected folkways or popular thought. No animal or insect is spared in Japan because killing it would kill a transmigrated human soul, and Japanese funeral ceremonies and birth rituals are innocent of any notions of a round of reincarnations. Transmigration is not a Japanese pattern of thought. The idea of nirvana, too, not only means nothing to the general public but the priesthoods themselves modify it out of existence. Priestly scholars declare that a man who has been ‘enlightened’ (satori) is already in nirvana; nirvana is here and now in the midst of time, and a man ‘sees nirvana’ in a pine tree and a wild bird. The Japanese have always been uninterested in fantasies of a world of the hereafter. Their mythology tells of gods but not of the life of the dead. They have even rejected Buddhist ideas of differential rewards and punishments after death. Any man, the least farmer, becomes a Buddha when he dies; the very word for the family memorial tablets in the household shrine is ‘the Buddhas.’ No other Buddhist country uses such language, and when a nation speaks so boldly of its ordinary dead, it is quite understandable that it does not picture any such difficult goal as attainment of nirvana. A man who becomes a Buddha anyway need not set himself to attain the goal of absolute surcease by lifelong mortification of the flesh.
Just as alien in Japan is the doctrine that the flesh and the spirit are irreconciliable. Yoga is a technique to eliminate desire, and desire has its seat in the flesh. But the Japanese do not have this dogma. ‘Human feelings’ are not of the Evil One, and it is a part of wisdom to enjoy the pleasures of the senses. The one condition is that they be sacrificed to the serious duties of life. This tenet is carried to its logical extreme in the Japanese handling of the Yoga cult: not only are all self-tortures eliminated but the cult in Japan is not even one of asceticism. Even the ‘Enlightened’ in their retreats, though they were called hermits, commonly established themselves in comfort with their wives and children in charming spots in the country. The companionship of their wives and even the birth of subsequent children were regarded as entirely compatible with their sanctity. In the most popular of ail Buddhist sects priests marry anyway and raise families; Japan has never found it easy to accept the theory that the spirit and the flesh are incompatible. The saintliness of the ‘enlightened’ consisted in their self-disciplinary meditations and in their simplification of life. It did not consist in wearing unclean clothing or shutting one’s eyes to the beauties of nature or one’s ears to the beauty of stringed instruments. Their saints might fill their days with the composition of elegant verses, the ritual of tea ceremony and ‘viewings’ of the moon and the cherry blossoms. The Zen cult even directs its devotees to avoid ‘the three insufficiencies: insufficiency of clothing, of food, and of sleep.’