The powerful Soka Gakkai sect and its party, the Komeito, have drawn their inspiration from this sort of ‘protestant Buddhism’.
Having also originated from the continent, Confucianism has only influenced a certain number of educated people. It is rather a ‘theory of good governance’ based on an almost positivistic philosophy than a mere religion — what purpose does it serve for one to concern oneself with heavenly matters, which one can never know anything about, when earthly matters are already so complex?
These doctrines have several common features. Each of them represents a morality devoid of both revelation and punishment. Stemming from the very same ancestors, divinities, men and nature are each other’s kin, and it is through one’s ancestors that one honours their lineage.
Even when displaying respect for nature, Europeans manifest the constant will to transform their own living space. Professor Louis Rougier907 writes:
The myth of Prometheus prefigures all of Western history. (Le génie de l’Occident.908 Laffont, 1969)
Communing with nature as part of an almost sensual connection, the Far East is founded upon the ability to restrict certain temptations. Instead of dramatising the cycle of life, it surrenders to it and respects the world’s autonomous will, which then fuels its own fulfilment.
The innate naturalism characterising Japanese people accounts for their indifference to metaphysics. Despite the efforts exerted by the missions and all the means that the latter had at their disposal, Christians represent a mere 0.4% of the Japanese population.
In 1905, Félicien Challaye wrote:
The Christian ideas which the Japanese mind regards as most repugnant are those of original sin and eternal punishment. The Japanese cannot acknowledge nature to be essentially bad. Already in the seventeenth century, they objected to Saint Francis Xavier’s909 words, using statements such as this: “Either God chose to create hell and is thus not merciful in any way, or he could not help creating it and is therefore not almighty”. It seems that such objections were a source of great embarrassment to the first Christian missionaries. (Au Japon et en Extrême-Orient,910 Armand-Colin)
The doctrine of individual salvation is just as perplexing to them. How could a Japanese person ever imagine that they would, all on their own, gain access to eternal life, with their ancestors — whose very flesh and blood they embody and who live on inside them and never leave their hearts — perhaps facing eternal damnation?
Everything Has Repercussions on Everything Else
The principle of contradiction takes on a special sort of significance in the Far East. In order to comprehend this, one must consider the example of Taoism, the Chinese popular form of worship.
The Chinese concept of Tao, which is summarily translated as ‘nature’, has sometimes been likened to the Indo-Aryan prakriti and the Germanic sköp, concepts which, in fact, relate to the immanent basis of all that exists, to the cosmic forces of becoming and destiny. Another parallel between Tao, Brahman and Logos was drawn by Rudolf Otto911 (in Das Gefühl des Ueberwertlichen,912 1932). All these words are connected to the idea of cosmic sequencing (rta, asha, orlog) encountered in the notion of Tao.
In Taoism, all things are connected and cannot be separated from one another. No boundary could ever be established between existence and non-existence, nor between the useful and the harmful or life and death. I could dream that I am a butterfly and then wake up and find that I am Zhuang Zhu.913 But who, or what, am I really? Zhuang Zhu dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly imagining itself to be Zhuang Zhu? The precept abided by here is that of ‘obscuring the obscure’.
Lao Tzu914 never conceived the idea of law, but solely that of its model. He never reasoned through deduction, only by analogy. In his famous work on Chinese Thought (Albin Michel, 1934), Marcel Granet915 writes:
When a philosopher undertakes to explain the invention of the wheel, he asserts that the idea itself was provided by the whirling seeds of the air. Dismissing mechanical explanations, Chinese thought does not seek to implement itself in the domain of movement and quantity. Instead, it confines itself most obstinately to a world of symbols, a world which it refuses to distinguish from the real universe.
Their entire social and military life is thus governed by such analogies. During the feudal period, the suzerain received his vassals as he stood upon a south-facing platform; ‘for the South is akin to the sky, and therefore to what is high’ (Granet). In the household, ‘the wife spreads her mat across the corner where the grain, harvested in autumn and stored along the west side, is kept. She borrows the grain’s fertility and offers her own in return’. During the summer, the left and front are considered yang, whereas the back and the right are yin. A fish served to a guest must have its belly turned rightwards in winter, leftwards in summer, etc.
In The Decline of the West (Gallimard, 1949), Oswald Spengler contrasts the all-natural and ‘landscape’-based Taoist soul of traditional China with the entirely artificial and ‘architectonic’ Egyptian one. Furthermore, he demonstrates the fact that this acute sense of ‘natural order’ is not accompanied by a Promethean or Faustian will to act upon the world and transform it, as is the case in the West. He writes:
The Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape become so genuinely the material of the architecture.
By means of analysis and synthesis, the European man has mastered the art of grasping the unity of a concept through a series of particular cases, the invariance of a relation within a sequence of transformations, or the permanence of a structure. He formulates general laws on the basis of relative observations. He has, to use the words of Philolaus,916 the ability to seek out ‘the unity of the multiple and the harmony of disharmony’. The Near East, by contrast, aspires to reduction, to Being, to the Unique. As for the Far East, it exists within a perpetually changing and overdriven universe, whose every aspect is equivalent to the next. Nothing is separate from anything else, and everything has repercussions on everything else. One thus cannot look for the cause of a certain event at the sole level where this event took place. The idea of an efficacious and complete sort of Order engulfs both the notion of category and that of causality.
Where the Western mind perceives a succession of phenomena forming a single process, the Far East only detects aspectual alternations. And whenever it considers two of these aspects to be connected, it is not in terms of cause and effect but in the shape of naturally ‘paired’ elements — sound and echo, forwards and backwards, shadow and light. Yin and yang are not in contrast with each other the way Being and non-Being or the positive and the negative are (pursuant to the classical principle of contradiction which states that the same concept cannot simultaneously be defined, from the same perspective and in the same regard, as A and non-A). For they are ‘paired’; they ‘melt into one another’ (Cheng). The principle of the harmony of contrasts (Ho signifies harmonic union) replaces the classical contradiction principle; one thus understands the influence exerted by Mao Zedong through the dialectical idea of a reconciliation of opposites.
The Tao has hardly had any direct impact upon the Japanese, yet one does come across a weakening of the contradiction principle in Japan.
Although very different in our eyes, public and private life do not contrast with one another in Japan, just as the cities, which abound in flowers, are not at variance with the countryside. One can separate neither forward movement from backward movement nor time from space. So as to point out the way that allows one to reach a place, the Japanese actually begin with the destination; and in the streets, houses are not numbered in accordance with their logical order of succession but according to the order in which they were constructed.
The Japanese language, which belongs to the Ural-Altaic family, is an agglutinative language devoid of flexion. The notions of ge
nder, number and person are foreign to it. Rarely does it distinguish between the singular and the plural and only offers ambiguous possibilities when it comes to conjugating verbs. Alongside a ‘certain’ tense generally known as the ‘present’ and an ‘uncertain’ one often referred to as the ‘future’, it no longer includes more than a single past tense, one which, during the 20th century, replaced other, more ancient forms of ‘close’, ‘middle’ and ‘distant’ past, etc.
The Olympiad of Industrial Production
Illogicality and rationality; hyper-effectiveness and a pronounced taste for the useless; ‘communist capitalism’: what Japan calls for at any given moment are the most contradictory qualifiers. Lafcadio Hearn, an American author of the early-20th century, once said:
When, after several years, you notice that you are completely unable to understand the Japanese, that is when you begin to understand them a little.
Floating like motionless ships off the shore of an immense continent, the four main islands of the former Empire of Japan remained, for a thousand years, sheltered by their natural borders and the proud traditions of their inhabitants. Then, the Japanese rediscovered the world, as their ships changed direction, tacking towards one another.
Judo, the Japanese national sport, is the very foundation of Japanese physical and mental education. When forced to yield to the use of force, the Japanese did not respond as one does in boxing. They used the jiu-jitsu principle (‘taking one step back’) to give the enemy the impression of having prevailed, while simultaneously making sure that his own strength backfired against him; so as to beat him on his own turf, in other words.
Commodore Perry’s ultimatum dates back to 1853. In 1865, Japan signs a treaty with the Americans. Two years later, Meiji promulgates a decennial reorganisation plan. Within a few months, all potential energies are transformed into active ones, as the country changes face. Upon Meiji’s passing in 1912, Japan had already exited the age of the hand fan and entered that of battleships.
Less than a century later, Hiroshima faces a new ultimatum. A new retreat, a new change of direction. The Japanese leave the forces of the Axis to join the Anglo-Saxon big brother. Expansion, in any shape or form, is henceforth forbidden. Except for one, that is — economic expansion. They espouse the latter with equal vigour and a matching will, launching the GNP’s Olympiad. In 1968, Takeo Fukuda, the Japanese Minister of Finance and future Minister of Foreign Affairs, declares:
Let us put up with the noise and the filth. In twenty years’ time, we shall be the richest nation in the world.
In 1966, futurologist Herman Kahn stated:
The twenty-first century shall be a Japanese one.
There is also a certain European diplomat who declared some time ago that ‘modern Japan is no more than a mistranslation’. What he meant to say was that the copy was in no way a decal. And right he was. It is as if Japan had only consented to relinquish some of its customs in the hope of acquiring the necessary means to preserve others. Félicien Challaye had already stated the following:
It only borrowed from Europe that which makes European states both strong and independent, undergoing Europeanisation so as to better remain Japanese.
The issue at hand is that of finding out how much wealth per square kilometre a country can handle without undergoing moral change. The sirens of the consumerist society may yet turn out to be the loudest; unless, of course, Japan has managed to grow a kind of cherry flower that can resist our era’s pollution.
Whatever the case, it is all too clear that the Japanese mentality is no export product at all.
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Le Japon, monstre ou modèle?,917 an essay by Jean-François Delassus. Hachette, 318 pages.
Le Japon au rendez-vous de l’Occident,918 an essay by Raymond Charles. Laffont, 338 pages.
The Japanese Miracle and Peril, an essay by Willard Price. William Heinemann, London, 341 pages.
Japon, troisième Grand,919 an essay by Robert Guillain. Seuil, 368 pages.
Bushidō, a compendium published by Nitobe Inazō. Sannō-Kai editions (Via S. Biagio 38, 35100 Padova, Italy), 264 pages.
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Confucius
Displaying a thin and grey silhouette, emaciated features and thick eyebrows, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai received Zambian President Kaunda on 25th February, 1974. He made the most of the occasion and highlighted ‘the great and far-reaching historical significance’ of a new campaign whose purpose was to ‘prevent the renewal of capitalism’, as well as to ‘prolong and develop the movement centred around the criticism of Lin Biao920 and the rectification of the land’s working style’.
‘Lin Biao and Confucius are both reactionary figures seeking to turn the wheel of history in a backward fashion’, he specified.
Shortly afterwards, all of China’s enemies, namely Lin Biao’s supporters, ‘Chiang Kai-shek’s921 clique’, American imperialism and the ‘new Soviet tsars’, were reproached for being ‘Confucianist’.
Upon meeting Alain Peyrefitte in Beijing in 1972, however, writer Kuo Mo-jo had previously declared:
Nowadays, it is Mao Zedong’s line of thought which enunciates the basic principles of both reasoning and life. And yet we have also preserved the Confucian values of old, which we continue to honour, or, to be more precise, are now beginning to honour once again.
In early February 1974, The People’s Daily gave the following explanation:
Lin Biao’s political line was a revisionist and counter-revolutionary one, belonging to the far-right spectrum and striving towards both restoration and regression. To use its own words, it consisted in moderation and a return to the rites. Embracing moderation and returning to the rites was, however, a programme proposed by Confucius for the reestablishment of slavery; and Lin Biao regarded its implementation as his life’s work.
The fact that they chose to connect the name of a philosopher who had passed away some twenty-five centuries earlier with that of Mao Zedong’s former successor, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1973, is very surprising indeed. It also compelled observers to re-delve into China’s ancient history.
During the 6th century BC, the Chu empire, which had been founded around 600 years earlier (at the height of the Bronze Age) by tribes that had come from the west, seemed to be in the throes of agony. Its leaders had reigned for five centuries, enjoying an undivided sort of power. Little by little, however, the empire had come apart and rival principalities were now striving to tear each other to pieces. Institutions were thus in a state of decline.
A Feudal Society
The Indo-European element was perhaps not entirely absent from this empire’s formation and development, for some Indo-European tribes seem to have emigrated eastwards from Central Asia (Turkistan, the Iranian highlands or the Pamir region). Taking into account the results of the excavations conducted in 1924 by a Swede named Anderson, researchers such as H. Schmidt and O. Kümmel postulated the existence of a link between the Indo-European culture and the emerging Chinese one. Analogous conclusions were drawn by F. von Richthofen (1877) in the field of astronomical knowledge and in the linguistic domain by Koppelmann (1928, 1933) and Güntert (1930).
One particularly stressed the role played by the Hia or Ta Hia tribes, who O. Franke identified in 1926 as the Tocharian people, a people that had an agricultural lifestyle and a patriarchal type of social structure. These tribes, whose ceramics bore a striking resemblance to Indo-European linear pottery (Bandkeramik), clashed with the Miao indigenous tribes, whose familial structure was of the matriarchal kind, repelling them southwards.
6th-century Chinese society was of a feudal nature. The nobles, who were all freemen and affiliated with a certain clan, indulged in archery and war and frequently observed sacrificial rites. Alongside them, some ‘bourgeois’ families enjoyed hereditary emoluments. As for common people, they included all artisans, merchants and slaves.
It is in this turbulent era that Kǒng Fūzǐ, or simply Kǒng Zǐ, meaning ‘Maste
r Kong’, lived. His name was later Latinised by missionaries to ‘Confucius’.
Little is known about him, and even his name seems to be connected to myths that relate to his teachings. His date of birth may have been chosen for conventional reasons so as to fall 500 years after the birth of another Chinese philosopher, the Duke of Zhou. One has also perhaps deliberately decided to have him pass away at the age of seventy-two, since this number represents a significant reference point in the official and classificatory Chinese numbering system (additionally, Confucius is said to have had seventy-two disciples, a number that is also that of the brotherhoods). As for his work, it is widely known as The Analects (Lun Yu) and was compiled and penned by his disciples.
To Re-create Ancestral and Traditional Values
Confucius is alleged to have been born in 551 BC, in the state of Lu, Eastern China, into an ancient royal family of the Zhou dynasty. His father was a renowned army commandant. He is said to have had a brother, of whom nothing is known. Having received an extensive sort of education, he is thought to have then accepted his first official function (which may have been the position of grassland intendant or granary supervisor). At the age of twenty-two, however, following a decision to dedicate himself to his country’s moral and social reform, he supposedly resigned from his post.
Having very rapidly become famous for his teachings, he was allegedly invited on several occasions to visit various imperial courts, where he is reported to have sometimes achieved genuine diplomatic success.
Around 500 BC, Confucius is believed to have accepted the post of prefect in the city of Chung-Tu. A year later, he would become the Minister of Justice, a supreme judge and perhaps even the acting Prime Minister in the state of Lu. He did, however, have some critics, who the Prince of Lu could not help lending an ear to; in 496 BC, Kǒng Zǐ handed in his notice and, together with his disciples, chose the path of exile, where he would remain for a period of twelve years.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 38
