The koan are called ‘bricks with which to knock upon the door.’ ‘The door’ is in the wall built around unenlightened human nature, which worries about whether present means are sufficient and fantasies to itself a cloud of watchful witnesses who will allot praise or blame. It is the wall of haji (shame) which is so real to all Japanese. Once the brick has battered down the door and it has fallen open, one is in free air and one throws away the brick. One does not go on solving more koan. The lesson has been learned and the Japanese dilemma of virtue has been solved. They have thrown themselves with desperate intensity against an impasse; for ‘the sake of the training’ they have become as ‘mosquitoes biting a lump of iron.’ In the end they have learned that there is no impasse – no impasse between gimu and giri, either, or between giri and human feelings, between righteousness and giri. They have found a way out. They are free and for the first time they can fully ‘taste’ life. They are muga. Their training in ‘expertness’ has been successfully achieved.
Suzuki, the great authority an Zen Buddhism, describes muga as ‘ecstasy with no sense of I am doing it,’ ‘effortlessness.’ The ‘observing self’ is eliminated; a man ‘loses himself.’ that is, he ceases to be a spectator of his acts. Suzuki says: ‘With the awaking of consciousness, the will is split into two ... actor and observer. Conflict is inevitable, for the actor(-self) wants to be free from the limitations’ of the observe-self. Therefore in Enlightenment the disciple discovers that there is no observer-self, ‘no soul entity as an unknown or unknowable quantity.’ Nothing remains but the goal and the act that accomplishes it. The student of human behavior could rephrase this statement to refer more particularly to Japanese culture. As a child a person is drastically trained to observe his own acts and to judge them in the light of what people will say; his observer-self is terribly vulnerable. To deliver himself up to the ecstasy of his soul, he eliminates this vulnerable self. He ceases to feel that ‘he is doing it.’ He then feels himself trained in his soul in the same way that the novice in fencing feels himself trained to stand without fear of falling on the four-foot pillar.
The painter, the poet, the public speaker and the warrior use this training in muga similarly. They acquire, not Infinitude, but a clear undisturbed perception of finite beauty or adjustment of means and ends so that they can use just the right amount of effort, ‘no more and no less,’ to achieve their goal.
Even a person who has undergone no training at all may have a sort of muga experience. When a man watching Noh or Kabuki plays completely loses himself in the spectacle, he too is said to lose his observing self. The palms of his hands become wet. He feels ‘the sweat of muga.’ A bombing pilot approaching his goal has ‘the sweat of muga’ before he releases his bombs. ‘He is not doing it.’ There is no observer-self left in his consciousness. An anti-aircraft gunner, lost to all the world beside, is said similarly to have ‘the sweat of muga’ and to have eliminated the observer-self. The idea is that in all such cases people in this condition are at the top of their form.
Such concepts are eloquent testimony to the heavy burden the Japanese make out of self-watchfulness and self-surveillance. They are free and efficient, they say, when these restraints are gone. Whereas Americans identify their observer-selves with the rational principle within them and pride themselves in crises on ‘keeping their wits about them,’ the Japanese feel that a millstone has fallen from around their necks when they deliver themselves up to the ecstasy of their souls and forget the restraints self-watchfulness imposes. As we have seen, their culture dins the need for circumspection into their souls, and the Japanese have countered by declaring that there is a more efficient plane of human consciousness where this burden falls away.
The most extreme form in which the Japanese state this tenet, at least to the ears of an Occidental, is the way they supremely approve of the man ‘who lives as already dead.’ The literal Western translation would be ‘the living corpse,’ and in all Occidental languages ‘the living corpse’ is an expression of horror. It is the phrase by which we say that a man’s self has died and left his body encumbering the earth. No vital principle is left in him. The Japanese use ‘living as one already dead’ to mean that one lives on the plane of ‘expertness.’ It is used in common everyday exhortation. To encourage a boy who is worrying about his final examinations from middle school, a man will say, ‘Take them as one already dead and you will pass them easily.’ To encourage someone who is undertaking an important business deal, a friend will say, ‘Be as one already dead.’ When a man goes through a great soul crisis and cannot see his way ahead, he quite commonly emerges with the resolve to live ‘as one already dead.’ The great Christian leader Kagawa, since VJ-Day made a member of the House of Lords, says in his fictionalized autobiography: ‘Like a man bewitched by an evil spirit he spent every day in his room weeping. His fits of sobbing verged on hysteria. His agony lasted for a month and a half but life finally gained the victory ... He would live endued with the strength of death ... He would enter into the conflict as one already dead ... He decided to become a Christian.’ During the war Japanese soldiers said, ‘I resolve to live as one already dead and thus repay ko-on to the Emperor,’ and this covered such behavior as conducting one’s own funeral before embarking, pledging one’s body ‘to the dust of Iwo Jima,’ and resolving ‘to fall with the flowers of Burma.’