(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 21)
Let me start this Scrap from a Sinological Scrapbook, which I hope
for a change will be quite short, with an apology. I hope a person of my age
(66) may be excused for talking about Chinese and Japanese things as if they
were, if not interchangeable, at any rate meaningfully related. That attitude
was common when folks like me were young students of Chinese. In those days it
was normal to say someone was ‘an Oriental,’ believed in ‘Oriental thought’ and
so on.
Okay...what I want to talk about this time
is one of my all-time favorite books of poetry: Afterimages: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi 高橋新吉, translated by Lucien Stryk and
Takashi Ikemoto.[1]
(That’s right, translated. As a
retired sinologist, presumably I no longer need to apologize for not pretending
to be able to read it in Japanese.) If I had to expand on why I continue to
re-read these poems after decades, I could write a book at least as long as
this 137-page volume. If I were to criticize the book at all, I would say I
wish the Introductions (one by each translator), hammering very hard on the
point that Takahashi is a Zen man, didn't take up so much space – almost a fourth of
the whole book. But so be it – I suspect the publisher was afraid that if the
book wouldn’t sell as poetry, maybe it could at least break even as Zen.
But what really jars, discomfits, somehow
goes down wrong with me every time I see it...is one short passage from the
foreword by the poet himself. Takahashi writes:
In Japan
Clearly, even after attaining this or that level of Buddhist
enlightenment (for this I refer to the 32-page Introductions), he regrets the
demise of ‘the right’ relationship between young and old.
Why does this bother me? Because it seems
to imply that whatever the enlightenment an individual may attain, be it ever
so far-reaching in metaphysical or psychological dimensions, it is never to be
taken as grounds for criticizing, revising, or repudiating the pre-existing social-conventional
ethos. That ethos, you can be very sure, was not, is not, and never will be
based on any such thing as a striving for enlightenment in individual consciousness.
I would guess that whether in East or West, consciousness as such would not
play much of a role in it – not anywhere near as much as, just to call it what
it is, unreflective imitative behavior based on conditioning.
In other words, in the mentality I have
just quoted, the side of yourself that has forged its way through to new and
perhaps subjectively earth-shaking insights, is never going to be able to apply
those insights in practical living. As soon as you walk out the front door, once
again you’re just a dummy, a cog, a billiard ball like anybody else. Suddenly
you are supposed again to consider it a big deal whether people are ‘young’ or ‘old.’
The assumption is that the worn-in Ben Franklin-like ground rules of
middle-class or Confucianist society, though they be based on far lesser levels
of reflection, discernment, or sophistication, remain not only valid but superior
and unchallengeable. The same poet who writes[2]
...one must go on, beyond time,
which in any case does not exist.
...
...
...I must live
beyond the smoke and clouds, as all else
without dimension, succession, relationship...
continues to agree, apparently, with the non-reflective bulk of his
generation who thought girls should not show their legs. The revelatory openness
that the poem proclaims ceases to exist as soon as a social fashion is in
question.
Or, to consider an
example from the Sinitic world: what to think of a Taiwanese businessman who in
recent years has taken up many New Age health and diet habits, claims to live
by ‘listening to his body’ and the qigong
philosophy of avoiding harmful overexertion – yet almost immediately after a
major heart attack, went ahead with a planned business trip to the Western
hemisphere because he ‘didn’t want to disappoint his colleagues’ with whom he
had already arranged meetings before his heart went bad? I would say that in
this case, too, a Confucianist mental rut took precedence over a recently won
insight which had actually been dramatically confirmed in experience.
On the other hand – it
suddenly occurs to me that if (in the terminology of my own ancestors) ‘the
spirit moved him’ to let the planned trip go through, then to cancel it in the
name of anything so individualistic as ‘listening to his body’ would have been ‘quenching
the spirit’[3]
and perhaps worse for his well-being in the long run.
Maybe it is actually a
very high and esoteric form of enlightenment just to accept that there are many
mental ruts in our lives that we simply cannot help honoring, and that many of
those ruts were indeed installed or imprinted in us by the kind of people who
care nothing for this whole concept of ‘enlightenment’ – the smotheringly
populous type of whom Proust says with chilling concision that they ‘do not try
to get light upon it.’[4]
But then – if we are to
give up the attempt to bring mental ‘enlightenment’ usefully to bear on our social
and behavioral ruts – is the striving to ‘get light upon it’ just superfluous
nonsense that adds nothing to life and could just as well never have existed?
Was the anti-miniskirt crowd actually, unbeknown to themselves, in possession
of the only wisdom there is?
My answer to that is, I
think, very un-New Age. But it is also one that the conventionally adjusted
crowd, whether in East or West, never likes to hear.
It is: ‘I don’t know.’
And in support of my answer, I will do
something I would never have done in my youth, and that I think Takahashi would
have approved of. (He left this world in 1987.) I will quote Confucius –
‘When you know a thing, to hold that you
know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; –
this is knowledge.’[5]
--Lloyd Haft
[1] New York
[2] From the poem ‘Autumn Flowers’ on page 73 (capitalization
adjusted).
[3] See 1 Thessalonians 5: 19.
[4] From The Past Recaptured,
translated by Frederick A. Blossom: New
York
[5] Analects, Book II,
Chapter 17, translated by James Legge.
