唐木順三 Karaki Junzō (1904-1980)

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Karaki Junzō 唐木順三 (1904–1980) Karaki Junzō was active throughout the Shōwa period more as a critic than a philosopher professionally trained in western sources. He studied under Nishida Kitarō at Kyoto University and remained indebted to the thinking of Kyoto School philosophers throughout his life. At the same time, the religious ideas of Dōgen's Zen and Shinran's Pure Land teachings are also reflected in the development of his thought. Beginning with early works on modern and contemporary literary criticism, in later years he turned to medieval literature and to figures like the haiku poet, Bashō. Throughout his career, his abiding concern was with aesthetics and religious sensibility. In addition to a major work on the writing of contemporary history, he also published a critical appraisal of the work of Miki Kiyoshi. His last book, published in the year of his death, was an attempt to address the social responsibilities of scientists in the present age. Karaki's 1963 book, Impermanence, from which the following pages have been extracted, is an extended attempt to clarify the sense of the transiency of all things that he sees as defining the Japanese mentality from the Middle Ages on. Seeing the awareness of the fragility and uncertainty of existence, often associated with male warriors, as grounded in Buddhist ideas, Karaki went on to develop a highly regarded theory of Japanese aesthetic appreciation. [mh]

Metaphysical impermanence
by Karaki Junzō
in Japanese Philosophy: a sourcebook
edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, John C. Maraldo
University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2011. pp. 227-232.
https://cdn.oceanpdf.co/files/JapPhiASou.pdf

I should like to set down my thoughts on what most interests me in
Dōgen’s account of impermanence. I shall begin with a close reading of this
passage from the ninety-third fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō:

In a degenerate age there is almost no one with a genuine will to the truth.
Nevertheless, applying the mind for a while to impermanence, we should not
forget the transience of the world and the precariousness of human life. We
need not be conscious that “I am thinking about the transiency of the world.”
Deliberately attaching weight to the dharma, we should think lightly of “my
body” and “my life.” For the sake of the dharma we should begrudge neither
body nor life. (Dōgen n.d., 241 [223])

I think I detect in this short passage, which on first reading might seem to be
no more than conventional preaching about impermanence, something that is
essentially different from former understandings of impermanence. As I read

the passage I was brought up short by the words, “We need not be conscious
that ‘I am thinking about the transiency of the world.’” I did not sufficiently take
in the meaning of this phrase, and I suspected that Dōgen must have inserted
it at a later stage. It certainly seems very abrupt. Looking into the Collected
Commentaries on the Shōbōgenzō, all I found was the following marginal note:
“Not to know you are meditating on the world’s transience and impermanence
means correcting the dharma.” To me this correcting the dharma seems unclear,
if not evasive.
……

The first thing to attend to in developing the bodhisattva mind, the mind set
on the Way, is “insight into impermanence.” To be a real person whose mind
is set on the Way, one must first reflect deeply on impermanence. Now notice
the “for a while” in the injunction to “apply the mind for a while to impermanence.”
In order for a worldly person, who seeks for what should not be sought,
to become a renunciant who attains the Way, the first condition to be met is
that one is convinced that the thing one was seeking is really something that
should not be sought. From keeping impermanence in mind one recognizes
that the world is transient and human life is uncertain. The “mind” referred to
here is the mind of the “ego,” the mind of the subject. “Impermanence” is an
objective reality, but “transiency” and “uncertainty” can be seen as reflecting the
emotional consciousness of the subjective ego. As the marginal note referred to
above says, transiency and impermanence are not the same in every respect.
They are distinguished as follows: transience is what the subject emotively recognizes,
impermanence is the reality of the object. That is the very reason for
“applying the mind to impermanence.”

The next sentence refers to the ego, the mind of that self that thinks about
transiency. It is commonly thought that one’s personal feeling is the subject that
thinks of transiency and what is transient, but that is not the way things really
are. “Mind” and “emotion” must first be cast aside and put away, and the ego,
too, is something to be eliminated. We have earlier quoted the saying, “The first
precaution for insight into impermanence is to put away the ego.” Since it is a
“precaution” or “taking thought,” one first must use one’s mind “for a while” by
meditating on impermanence. Through insight into impermanence, conversely
and in return, it comes about that this mind, the ego-mind, is able to cast itself
away. This is what is called the mind of the Way. It is not the mind of the ego.
The mind of the Way can be called a mind that transcends the self.

Here we may say, exaggerating slightly, that the passage I quoted earlier dealing
with the notion of transiency in court literature is criticized and rejected by
Dōgen. When we talk of things coursing forward rapidly, fleetingly, that is one
mode of being of the object. The gap between the tempo of this rapid fleetingness
of the external world and the tempo of my psychology or emotion that
does not readily go along with it is what constitutes the feeling of “transiency.”
When, having this subjective feeling or emotion, we turn to assess and measure
the speedy tempo of the forward-coursing outer world, then that exceedingly
speedy movement is reflected in the sense of transiency that goes against it.
Thus arises the awareness of a “fleeting life” “amid a fleeting world.” Again,
when we attempt to forget this transiency there emerges what the Tale of Genji
calls sabi or the pathos of transiency.

“Coursing forward” is basically a fact of the outer world; again, it is because
of a momentum appearing in the outer world, spilling over from it, that the
psychological, emotional, sentimental reality of “transiency” emerges. It is when
the outer world is looked at once more from this sentimental basis that one gets
ideas of a fleeting human life in the midst of a fleeting world.…

We have already said that when this “feeling” of feminine court art is transferred
to the masculine feeling of the military world it becomes the “sense of
impermanence,” from which stems the grief of impermanence, the acute sense
of impermanence. As we have also pointed out, the courtly sense of “transiency,”
that is, the female emotion arising within a stagnant society, remains as a feeling.
But in a period of wars and disturbances, with the many vicissitudes they
give rise to, including the experience of living beings perishing right under one’s
eyes, this feeling borrows the Buddhist sense of impermanence as an underpinning
and in this form is transferred to the center of the medieval culture of
impermanence.

The passage from Dōgen’s Dōshin can be seen as a critique and rejection of
the above “transiency” and “sense of impermanence.” It shows that the fixed ego
that contemplates the transience of the world has no substance in reality and no
mind. Once again the “mind” of “for a while keep impermanence in mind” is
rejected here. Just before the passage quoted it is explained that “we should not
treat our own mind as foremost, but consider only what the Buddha expressed
to be foremost.”

The following sentence tells us not to put mind first but to put the dharma
first, and in following this dharma not to neglect our body or our life. Thus
we see the order in which the mind of the Way should be developed. Its stages
should be seen as depicted very precisely. The conclusion is that the dharma
comes first and that we should put away the ego-mind.

But what is the dharma referring to here? To put it boldly and directly, the
dharma is nothing other than impermanence itself. We may speak of impermanence-
in-dharma. Thus, even though the text says, “Keep impermanence
in mind,” the impermanence of impermanence-in-dharma is not an imperma-
nence kept by the mind. Impermanence as such embraces in itself both the self
and the mind. It is not impermanence as an object of cognition. It may be called
metaphysical impermanence.

In Bendōwa (A Talk on Pursuing the Way), the first fascicle of the Shōbō-
genzō, the tenth question put to Dōgen by a disciple is to the following effect:
body and mind are distinguished as two, and the body arises and passes away,
whereas the mind is “abiding.” When the flesh decays, the mind does not die but
enters an eternal world. Therefore, there is the theory that the first step in order
to escape from the passions of samsara is to believe that the soul is eternal; is
this the true buddha-dharma?

Dōgen replies in the following way: Such a theory as the above is a heretical
view, held by those who “are even more foolish than the person who grasps a tile
or a pebble thinking it to be a golden treasure.” It is no more than the noise of
a lunatic’s tongue, nothing but foolish confusion. This heretical false view separates
the body and the spirit as two dimensions, divides the flesh and the soul,
ascribing to the body the “phenomenon” of transformation and to the spirit or
soul the “substance” of imperishable abiding. This heresy maintains that when
the flesh dies “the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn on the other side; so even
though it seems to die here it lives on there.” There is nothing more senseless
than this. In Buddhist teaching “mind and body are one,” “substance and phenomenon
are not two. One should not separate body and spirit, with arisingand-extinction
on one side and abiding on the other. Even if there provisionally
exists a mind that has penetrating insight into the phenomenal world of arising-
and-extinction and of change, this mind in turn is “arising-and-extinction, with
no abiding at all.” So to be separated from the passions of samsara it is not
adequate to advance groundless theories upholding the eternity of mind.

Having given this reply, Dōgen goes a step further: “living-and-dying is just
nirvāna. Nirvāna is never discussed outside of living-and-dying.” The meaning
of the oft-cited dictum that samsara itself is nirvāna must here be carefully
examined anew.

Already in the Nirvāa sūtra’s “verse on impermanence” we read, “All things
are impermanent, this is the law of arising and extinction; when arising and
extinction are extinguished, one attains the joy of peaceful extinction.” This
verse, so familiar to Japanese ears, has been written about since ancient times.
Here the “peaceful extinction” that comes from ending arising-and-extinction
is identified with nirvāna, and the ending of arising-and-extinction is usually
thought of as the end of time, the final limit of the process of arising-andextinction;
this again is identified with death as the final limit of life. Consequently
“impermanence,” as, for example, in the proverbial “life of dew” or
as in the expressions “impermanence overtakes one quickly” and “the speed
of impermanence,” is immediately identified with the end of life, the idea of
death. With this is associated the idea of peaceful extinction or nirvāna coming
after death. The Pure Land, the other shore, and paradise are spoken of in this
connection. The statement, “Birth-and-death is itself nirvāna” is the rejection
of such common ideas. We should not think that the impermanence of birthand-death
is followed by the permanence of nirvāna. Rather, impermanence is
nirvāna; birth-and-death is nirvāna.

The time of impermanence and change does not advance in a linear and continuous
way toward a fixed point of arrival, toward a destination. The impermanence
of arising-and-extinction, continually arising and continually passing
away, is time in its naked form. Time is originally a purposeless, discontinuous,
instantaneous arising-and-extinction, instantaneous arising of phenomena. We
might say that the manifest shape of time is the infinite repetition of meaningless
things. If we see that time is not a progress directed to a goal, then it does not
advance in the direction of nothingness, death, and extinction. On the contrary,
time is continually connected with nothingness. In the discontinuous chasm of
no beginning and no end, the bottomless abyss of nothingness is yawning. The
time of repetition is nothingness. This can indeed be called nihilism. Time is the
endless repetition of meaningless things rooted in nothingness. Human life, all
phenomena, the whole universe, since they exist nowhere but in time, are in the
end nothing, meaningless, and impermanence is clearly shown to be such nothingness
and meaninglessness. Impermanence is a cold fact, an actuality quite
unrelated to emotions of wonder, poetic sentiment, and the like.

Since humans cannot face this cold nihilism, they create all kinds of lofty
ideas. The idea that time is infinite repetition without beginning or end robs the
point in time we call “the present” of all meaning and value. Without meaning,
humans do not have the courage even to live. They adorn time in order to confer
meaning, putting into effect various methods of creating meaning.

The first such adornment is the idea that “there is a beginning” in time. One
searches for the “beginning” of “in the beginning was the logos.” Thus the whole
myth of the creation of the universe is set up with the story of Genesis and
image of a divine lord of creation. This is a strategy for giving security to one’s
present self by linking it to remote ancestors.

The last section of Yoshida Kenkō’s Essays in Idleness** is quite interesting:

When I turned eight years old I asked my father, “What sort of thing is a Buddha?”
My father said, “A buddha is what a man becomes.” I asked then, “How
does a man become a buddha?” My father replied, “By following the teachings
of Buddha.” “Then, who taught the Buddha to teach?” He again replied,
“He followed the teachings of the buddha before him.” I asked again, “What
kind of buddha was the first buddha who began to teach?” At this my father
laughed and answered, “I suppose he fell from the sky or else sprang up out of
the earth.” My father told other people, “He drove me into a corner, and I was
stuck for an answer. But he was amused.”*

The compositional skill of the author of the Essays in Idleness is seen in the
way the concluding reference to the amusement of the father’s friends ties up
with the closing words of the work’s preface: “What a strange, demented feeling.”
The final section is not just an amusing anecdote about the eight-year-old’s
precocious talent. The passage deals with the quest for the “beginning,” which
confers significance on the present. That conferral of significance allows one to
be serene and to greet the folly of the world with a hollow laugh.

The second method of conferring significance on time is the theory that
“there is an end.” The thought that time is progressing in the direction of a definite
telos sets up a teleology or a “kingdom of ends.” That there is continuous
progressive development in the direction of an ultimate goal encourages one
to think optimistically of the present historical moment. That history is soon
to reach completion in an ideal form and that all things are to be brought into
harmony constitutes a grandiose drama. However, there is also another way of
thinking that takes this direction of time in an eschatological way. Placing the
ideal in the past, in the beginning, it sees history as originating thence but as
progressing in the direction of corruption and decline. Then history is structured
in terms of “paradise lost,” or a division into periods of true law, false law,
end of the law (źmappōŻ), or the “last judgment.” Here, too, we have a grandiose
drama, a plot-construction holding out the obscure promise of ascent to heaven
at the eschaton, the possibility of the Pure Land.

A third strategy for conferring significance on time is so-called “creative
achievement,” that is, culturalism or historicism. The creation of temples and
pagodas, of culture and civilization, of historical progress, of human formation,
is a way of artificially adorning the present. Humans, through believing in civilization
and progress, are able to affirm time and life.

Dōgen repeatedly rejected the above conferral of adornment and significance
on time. Time just as it is, in its nakedness, is to be faced squarely. Time, without
beginning or end, is to be confronted without purpose or action. Without blinking
we must face the reality of the time of instantaneous arising and ceasing,
instantaneous production. This is a gate through which one has to pass. There
is no Zen if one does not look clearly at this. [jso]

*See Andō Bun'ei 安藤文英 and Jinbo Nyoten 神保如天, 『正法眼蔵註解全書』
[Complete commentaries on the Shōbōgenzō] (Tokyo: Mugasanbō, 1913–1914).

**[Yoshida Kenkō (ca. 1283–1350) was a Buddhist monk whose two hundred and forty-three
short Essays in Idleness were widely read through the Middle Ages. Cited from the
English translation, Yoshida Kenkō n.d., 201.]