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How is humankind’s consciousness evolving toward global integration and interconnectedness? What evidence is there at the mystic heart of the world’s spiritual traditions that beneath the illusion of separateness humanity is one family? How can the practice of yoga in it’s broadest sense help us move toward the unifying power of love? Join regular guest host Dr. Laurel Trujillo and Robert Atkinson, author of The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness, as they discuss the story of the spiritual evolution of humankind, and the unity that is our ultimate destination. Tune in to hear more about humanity’s shift in consciousness that is already underway.
Hiraizumi's views have infuriated many of his countrymen and no sooner had his plan been publicly outlined than critics began to surface.
Chief among them has been Shoich Watanabe, professor of linguistics at Sophia University, who blasted the proposal in the monthly Shokun.
Watanabe argues that the schools should continue to give "Japanese students potental rather than visible ability" in languages.
With this basic foundation, Watanabe maintains, the students can easily refine their linguistic skills later if they need to travel abroad or "marry foreigners."
渡部名誉教授はこの頃を回想され、
「マッカーシー旋風のとき、『付き合っただけで有罪（guilty by association)』という言葉がアメリカで流行りましたが、田中氏に関しては、『裁判に批判的な事を言っただけで有罪
（guilty by vindication）』という言葉でも必要になりそうな、そんな異様な時代だったのです」と書かれている（渡部昇一著『朝日新聞と私の４０年戦争』PHP研究所、一二五ページ）。
このような状況にあって、社会的に批判されている側に立って物事を発言するのは大変に勇気のいることだが、これから日本は、より厳しく、より混乱した世界情勢に否応なく巻き込まれるであろう。
若い世代も、渡部名誉教授のこのような「覚悟ある姿勢」に、大いに学ぶべきである。
「インテグラル理論の最高の入門書である『万物の歴史』（Brief History of Everything）の新装版です。
この作品は、ケン・ウィルバー（Ken Wilber）が『進化の構造』（Sex, Ecology, Spirituality）の要約版として執筆したものですが、全体が対話形式でまとめられており、初心者にも非常に解りやすい内容となっています。」
The Third Turning occurred with the half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, and is generally called the Yogachara school, sometimes referred to as the “Mind-Only” school (which agreed with Nagarjuna that ultimate Reality was Emptiness, but so was ultimate Mind). This teaching became a central foundation of the great Tantra and Vajrayana (Diamond Path) teachings, which particularly flourished in such places as the extraordinary Nalanda University in India from the 8th to the 11th century CE, and continued unabated in Tibetan Buddhist schools—and, indeed, many Buddhists consider Tantra and Vajrayana to be a “Fourth Turning of the Wheel.” (If we do so, which makes sense to me, then what I am actually talking about would be a “Fifth Turning,” so please keep that in mind. But whether we acknowledge these Turnings or not doesn’t affect the main points of this book, which is what a genuinely inclusive, comprehensive spirituality would begin to look like—this is our main issue.) But with regard to the Turnings, those who acknowledged them maintained that each of them tended to “transcend and include” the previous ones, all of them agreeing with many of the Buddha’s original points, and then adding new teachings of their own.
Buddhism is thus used to updating its own major teachings with new and profound additions. But it has been some 1,500 years since the Third Turning; and even the great Tantric schools, which (as noted) flourished from the 8th to the 11th centuries CE, are now close to a thousand years old. The time, again, is more than ripe for a new fundamental addition, a new Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Many teachers have been saying the same thing for a number of years now; this is one version, a version that has already demonstrated its usefulness and versatility.
One of the leading experts in mind control, Dr. Lifton addressed the issue of doomsday cults such as Aum Shinrikyo.
「Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.」」
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure.
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
In the original report of the vision, the god who manifested himself was nameless, but in later versions of it Asahara identified the god as Shiva, the Hindu deity who by then had become his ultimate spiritual authority (or his guru, as he sometimes put it). It was somewhat odd for Asahara to invoke a Hindu god in the creation of an essentially Buddhist group, even if the esoteric Buddhism he drew upon stayed close to its Hindu roots. His choice of Shiva (as opposed to Vishnu or Brahma, the other great Hindu gods) probably had two important determinants. First, Shiva is specifically identified as the god of yoga. Second, while all Hindu gods have destructive as well as beneficent tendencies, Shiva is specifically associated with salvation through world destruction.
イギリスの宗教学者イアン・リーダーさんの「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo 」では、この疑問について、オウムの在家信徒から聞いた話として、「仏教はヒンドゥー教の環境の中から生まれたので、仏教の開祖ブッダとシヴァ神は縁があるのであり、また、オウムはヒンドゥーのヨーガやマントラを取り入れており、オウムが仏教団体としてシヴァ神を拝むのは、なんら矛盾しないのだ。シヴァ仏教と呼んでもらいたい。」と紹介しています。
【メッセージ内容】
Many of you may think English learning is just a tool for your entrance exams or to advance your career.
英語学習を入試やキャリアのツールに過ぎないと思うかもしれません。
But, in point of fact, it may be much much more than you have ever imagined.
でもきっとそれは想像してるよりずっと素晴らしいものだと思います。
I'd say that it's all about recognizing the ongoing narrative that's inside yourself that makes the life you're leading truly yours,
大事なのは、自分の個性の根源となる、絶え間なく変化する内なるストーリーであり、
and how important it is to know that your various memories and feelings actually enable you to express yourself freely in English.
またさまざまな記憶や感覚が英語で気持ちを伝える原動力だと知ることなんです。
Without them, you wouldn't be able to have a distinct personality that sets you apart from others, or express yourself in English.
それなしには他人と自分の違いをつくる個性をとらえ、英語で伝える事は難しくなります。
So, why not take joy in who you are and what you do, and how you feel about things in your own life in order to enjoy being yourself through the English language?
自分らしさ、行動、そして感想を楽しみ、英語を通して自分であることを味わってみませんか？
This book is all about knowing how great it is to take joy in who you are, and what you learn by expressing yourself in the English language.
英語で思いを表現し、自分らしさと学びを味わう素晴らしさを本書でとことん追求します！
No matter where you are in your journey, there are ways to teach yourself English and free yourself through it.
英語を学び、自分を解き放つことは、どこに居ようとできるんです。
You're the lead on the stage of your life.
英語学習の主人公はあくまで自分自身なんです！
Once I was asked that question by the English cineast, Mr. Basil Wright, and I replied to him in a letter: “I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible, but in feudal times we believed that sincerity resided in our entrails, and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity. And it was also the symbol of the will of the soldier, the samurai; everybody knew that this was the most painful way to die. And the reason they preferred to die in the most excruciating manner was that it proved the courage of the samurai. This method of suicide was a Japanese invention and foreigners could not copy it!”
Once I was asked that question by the English cineast, Mr. Basil Wright, and I replied to him in a letter: “I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible, but in feudal times we believed that sincerity resided in our entrails, and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity. And it was also the symbol of the will of the soldier, the samurai; everybody knew that this was the most painful way to die. And the reason they preferred to die in the most excruciating manner was that it proved the courage of the samurai. This method of suicide was a Japanese invention and foreigners could not copy it!”
But sometime, sometime during such a peaceful life [Mishima had spoken of his married life]—we got the two children—still the old memory comes to my mind.
It is the memory of during the war, and I remember one scene which happened during the war, when I was working at the airplane factory.
One motion picture was shown there for the entertainment of the working students, which was based on the novel of Mr. Yokomitsu. And it was maybe Maytime of 1945, the very last of the war, and all students—I was twenties—couldn’t believe that we could be survived after the war. And I remember one scene of the film. There was a street, a street scene of Ginza, before the war, a lot of neon signs, beautiful neon signs; it was glittering and we believed we couldn’t see all in my life, we can never see it all in my life. But, as you know, we see it actually right now, in the Ginza street, there are more and more neon signs on it. But sometimes, when the memory during the war comes back to my mind, some confusion happens in my mind. That neon sign on the screen during the war, and the actual neon sign on the Ginza street, I cannot distinguish which is illusion.
It might be our . . . my basic subject and my basic romantic idea of literature. It is death memory . . . and the problem of illusion.
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2017/12/16 に公開
Richard Gere Talks with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson who co-wrote "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body". The talk is in part about the content of the best-selling book, but it is also enriched by the personal experience of the Hollywood star. At 92Y event, October 2017.
Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (英語) ペーパーバック – 2017/9/5
In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.
Daniel Goleman (著), Richard J. Davidson (著)
津田 講義とセミナーを週に一回ずつやりました。講義は[Early Buddhist Thought and its Tantric Evolution]（ゴータマ・ブッ ダの思想とその密教的展開）というタイトルで、私がこの数年来考えている＜開放系＞（これは依然として仮称なのですが） という考え方から密教思想史について話をしました。密教思想史とはいいましても、ゴータマ・ブッダ（釈尊）に始まって、大 乗、純粋密教を経てタントラ仏教にいたり、さらに日本の空海から覚ばんを経て法然、親鸞にいたろうという、一種の通仏教 的な思想の流れを追おうというものです。
セミナーのほうは『華厳経』を取り上げました。「入法界品」、ガンダヴューハ・スートラですね、そのサンスクリット原典を購 読するのですが、サンスクリットを英語に訳すだけならわりに簡単なんですね。しかし、内容を理解させようとするとどうしても 中国・日本の華厳教学に触れなくてはなりませんので、そういう伝統的な術語表現を英語でどう表現したらいいのか、だい ぶ苦労しました。たとえば、お大師さん（弘法大師空海）の「普賢法界の重重帝網なる即身と名づく」とか、そういう理解です ね。そのスカッとしたところを英語的にどう表現するのか。くどくど説明することならどうにか可能なのですが・・・・・・。
In this study, Sheila A. Smith has availed herself of a massive number of documents and interview surveys and has traced concisely and persuasively the course whereby Japan has been compelled toward the reform of its conservative political system and its security arrangements, which were established with a view to maintaining Japan's position as a leader in Asia. This work suggests that the Japanese experience with China might serve as a lesson for other countries, the United States included, and is an essential read for those interested in the reconstitution of the East Asian order in light of the rise of China.--Ryosei Kokubun, president, National Defense Academy of Japan
In this study, Sheila A. Smith has availed herself of a massive number of documents and interview surveys and has traced concisely and persuasively the course whereby Japan has been compelled toward the reform of its conservative political system and its security arrangements, which were established with a view to maintaining Japan's position as a leader in Asia. This work suggests that the Japanese experience with China might serve as a lesson for other countries, the United States included, and is an essential read for those interested in the reconstitution of the East Asian order in light of the rise of China.--Ryosei Kokubun, president, National Defense Academy of Japan
Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb (英語) ペーパーバック – 1995/8/1
Wilcox (著), F A Wilcox (著), Clyde Wilcox (著)
After years of research based on material gathered by American intelligence during the occupation of Japan as well as extensive interviews with surviving participants, Robert Wilcox gives the first detailed account of Japan's version of the Manhattan Project - from its earliest days to the possible testing of an actual weapon. The story involves Japan's leading scientists, including a future Nobel prize winner; a network of Spanish spies working in North America; and a German U-boat desperately trying to reach Japan with a cargo of uranium in the final days before the Third Reich's collapse. But perhaps the most fascinating element is the giant industrial complex in northern Korea where the final aspects of the Japanese atomic research may have taken place. When the Soviet army invaded Korea at the war's end, they had the entire complex dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union. We can only speculate about the information they gained from it. This new edition includes recently unearthed research showing that the Japanese spent much more time on their atomic program than previously made public.
James Rondo Jensen
5つ星のうち5.0
Japan almost beat the US to the Atomic Bomb
2013年5月3日 - (Amazon.com)
Amazonで購入
Fifteen years ago I heard that at the end of WW II, the US Navy destroyed 5 cyclotrons in Tokyo by throwing them into the ocean in spite of the protests of a scientist named Nishina. To this day, no one knows who authorized their destruction. I even found a photo on Google of one cyclotron toppling over the edge of a ship in Tokyo Harbor. The story fascinated me because four of my uncles served in the military in the Pacific during the war, also because my dad was a machinist-welder who worked on the Manhattan Project in Hanford, Washington and then on the reconstruction of Pearl Harbor itself. However, on-line searches, the only resource available to me at the time, only produced tantalizing bits of information and photos, e.g. photo of Neils Bohr in Japan in the 1920's with Japanese physicists.
But Robert K. Wilcox has, once more, produced an amazing book that reflects his dogged determination to get to the bottom of an unusual story and write a fascinating book about it. Filing hundreds of FOIA requests, sending letters everywhere he thought he might find information, and interviewing as many people as he could, produced the information that he skilfully put together in this text that reads like a mystery novel.
One of the most surprising parts of the story is the role of Germany in this Japanese project, and the use of their submarines to transport not only uranium, but also samples of novel German armaments, planes, drawings and blue prints. The Tripartite Agreement entered into in the 1930's by Japan, Germany and Italy formed the basis for this sharing of information and materials. It turns out that Japan had a long history of physics research. Einstein even visited Japan in the 1920's.
James Rondo Jensen
5つ星のうち5.0
Japan almost beat the US to the Atomic Bomb
2013年5月3日 - (Amazon.com)
Amazonで購入
Fifteen years ago I heard that at the end of WW II, the US Navy destroyed 5 cyclotrons in Tokyo by throwing them into the ocean in spite of the protests of a scientist named Nishina. To this day, no one knows who authorized their destruction. I even found a photo on Google of one cyclotron toppling over the edge of a ship in Tokyo Harbor. The story fascinated me because four of my uncles served in the military in the Pacific during the war, also because my dad was a machinist-welder who worked on the Manhattan Project in Hanford, Washington and then on the reconstruction of Pearl Harbor itself. However, on-line searches, the only resource available to me at the time, only produced tantalizing bits of information and photos, e.g. photo of Neils Bohr in Japan in the 1920's with Japanese physicists.
But Robert K. Wilcox has, once more, produced an amazing book that reflects his dogged determination to get to the bottom of an unusual story and write a fascinating book about it. Filing hundreds of FOIA requests, sending letters everywhere he thought he might find information, and interviewing as many people as he could, produced the information that he skilfully put together in this text that reads like a mystery novel.
One of the most surprising parts of the story is the role of Germany in this Japanese project, and the use of their submarines to transport not only uranium, but also samples of novel German armaments, planes, drawings and blue prints. The Tripartite Agreement entered into in the 1930's by Japan, Germany and Italy formed the basis for this sharing of information and materials. It turns out that Japan had a long history of physics research. Einstein even visited Japan in the 1920's.
副島隆彦です。今日は2018年5月9日です。
今日は、『マルクス・エンゲルス』という映画を、私は、２月に、試写会で見ましたので、それに対する映画評論を話します。The Young Karl Marx が原題ですから、「若き日のカール・マルクス」という映画です。日本語のタイトルは「マルクス・エンゲルス」になっています。
副島隆彦です。今日は2018年5月9日です。
今日は、『マルクス・エンゲルス』という映画を、私は、２月に、試写会で見ましたので、それに対する映画評論を話します。The Young Karl Marx が原題ですから、「若き日のカール・マルクス」という映画です。日本語のタイトルは「マルクス・エンゲルス」になっています。
Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (英語) ペーパーバック – 2007/7/17
Gavan McCormack (著)
Japan is the world’s No. 2 economy, greater in GDP than Britain and France together and almost double that of China. It is also the most durable, generous, and unquestioning ally of the US, attaching priority to its Washington ties over all else. In Client State, Gavan McCormack examines the current transformation of Japan, designed to meet the demands from Washington that Japan become the “Great Britain of the Far East.” Exploring postwar Japan’s relationship with America, he contends that US pressure has been steadily applied to bring Japan in line with neoliberal principles. The Bush administration’s insistence on Japan’s thorough subordination has reached new levels, and is an agenda heavily in the American, rather than the Japanese, national interest. It includes comprehensive institutional reform, a thorough revamp of the security and defense relationship with the US, and—alarmingly—vigorous pursuit of Japan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (英語) ハードカバー – 2017/9/5
Richard McGregor (著)
Richard McGregor’s Asia’s Reckoning is a compelling account of the widening geopolitical cracks in a region that has flourished under an American security umbrella for more than half a century. The toxic rivalry between China and Japan, two Asian giants consumed with endless history wars and ruled by entrenched political dynasties, is threatening to upend the peace underwritten by Pax Americana since World War II. Combined with Donald Trump’s disdain for America’s old alliances and China's own regional ambitions, east Asia is entering a new era of instability and conflict. If the United States laid the postwar foundations for modern Asia, now the anchor of the global economy, Asia’s Reckoning reveals how that structure is falling apart.
With unrivaled access to archives in the United States and Asia, as well as to many of the major players in all three countries, Richard McGregor has written a tale that blends the tectonic shifts in diplomacy with bitter domestic politics and the personalities driving them. It is a story not only of an overstretched America, but also of the rise and fall and rise of the great powers of Asia. The about-turn of Japan—from a colossus seemingly poised for world domination to a nation in inexorable decline in the space of two decades—has few parallels in modern history, as does the rapid rise of China—a country whose military is now larger than those of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and southeast Asia's combined.
The confrontational course on which China and Japan are set is no simple spat between neighbors: the United States would be involved on the side of Japan in any military conflict between the two countries. The fallout would be an economic tsunami, affecting manufacturing centers, trade routes, and political capitals on every continent. Richard McGregor’s book takes us behind the headlines of his years reporting as the Financial Times’s Beijing and Washington bureau chief to show how American power will stand or fall on its ability to hold its ground in Asia.
NEW YORK, September 7, 2017 — ChinaFile presents Orville Schell, Richard McGregor, Ian Buruma, and Susan Shirk discussing McGregor's new book "Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century." (1 hr. 17 min.)
There is no shortage of scenarios in which America’s postwar world comes under challenge and starts to crack. It could take the form of a draining showdown with Islamist radicals in the Middle East, a conflict with Russia that engulfs Europe, or a one-on-one superpower naval battle with China. Soon after his election, Donald Trump finished his first conversation as president-elect with Barack Obama at the White House fretting about the threat from a nuclear-armed North Korea.
In daily headlines, the jousting between China and Japan can’t compete with the medieval violence of ISIS or the outsize antics of Vladimir Putin or threats from tyrants like Kim Jong Un. The rivalry between the two countries has festered, by some measures, for centuries, giving it a quality that lets it slip on and off the radar. After all, China and Japan, according to the conventional wisdom, are at their core practical nations with pragmatic leaders.
The two countries, along with Taiwan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia, sit at the heart of the global economy. The iPhones, personal computers, and flat-screen televisions in electronic shops around the world; most of the mass-produced furniture and large amounts of the cheap clothing that fill shopping centers in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom; a vast array of industrial goods that consumers are scarcely aware of, from wires and valves to machine parts and the like—all of them, one way or another, are sourced through the supply chains anchored by Asia’s two giants. With so much at stake, how could they possibly come to blows?
China and Japan’s thriving commercial ties, one of the largest two-way trade relationships in the world, though, have failed to forge a closer political bond. In recent years, the relationship has taken on new and dangerous dimensions for both countries, and for the United States as well, an ally of Japan’s that it has signed a treaty to defend. Far from exorcising memories of the brutal war between them that began in the early 1930s and lasted more than a decade, Japan and China are caught in a downward spiral of distrust and ill will. There has been the occasional thawing of tension and the odd uptick in diplomacy in the seventy years since the end of the war. Men and women of goodwill in both countries have dedicated their careers to improving relations. Most of these efforts, however, have come to naught.
Asia’s version of the War of the Roses is being fought on multiple battlefields: on the high seas over disputed islands; in capitals around the world as each tries to convince partners and allies of the other’s infamy; and in the media, in the relentless, self-righteous, and scorching exchanges over the true account and legacy of the Pacific War. The clash between Japan and China on this issue echoes a conversation between two Allied prisoners of war in Richard Flanagan’s garlanded novel set on the Burma Railway in 1943, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. “Memory is the true justice, sir,” a soldier says to his superior officer, explaining why he wants to hold on to souvenirs of their time in a Japanese internment camp. “Or the creator of new horrors,” the officer replies.
In Europe, an acknowledgment of World War II’s calamities helped bring the Continent’s nations together in the aftermath of the conflict. In east Asia, by contrast, the war and its history have never been settled, politically, diplomatically, or emotionally. There has been little of the introspection and statesmanship that helped Europe to heal its wounds. Even the most basic of disagreements over history still percolate through day-to-day media coverage in Asia more than seventy years later, in baffling, insidious ways. Open a Japanese newspaper in 2017, and you might read of a heated debate about whether Japan invaded China, something that is only an issue because conservative Japanese still insist that their country was fighting a war of self-defense in the 1930s and 1940s. Peruse the state-controlled press in China, and you will see the Communist Party drawing legitimacy from its heroic defeat of Japan, though in truth, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists carried the burden of fighting the invaders, while the Communists mostly preserved their strength in hinterland hideouts. Scant recognition is given to the United States, who fought the Japanese for years before ending the conflict with two atomic bombs.
“McGregor has written a shrewd and knowing book about the relationship between China, Japan and America over the past half-century. Among much else, he shows how the world’s top three economies are now imprisoned by increasingly unstable dynamics, and not only in the military realm. Though Mr. McGregor has pored over archives to put together a hard-to-surpass narrative history of high diplomacy in Asia, the strength of his book is its old-fashioned journalism, in which empathy and explanation outweigh mere exposé. Indeed, Asia’s Reckoning has the aura of a ‘tour-ender,’ the kind of conspectus that foreign correspondents of a generation ago and further back would put together after they had finished a multiyear stint in some far-flung place. Here are insightful, detail-rich profiles of everyone from Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger to Kakuei Tanaka and Jiang Zemin.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, The Wall Street Journal
JOANNE MYERS: Good afternoon. I'm Joanne Myers, director of Public Affairs programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to welcome our members, guests, and C-SPAN Book TV to this very special program.
We are delighted to be hosting Eri Hotta, author of Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, and her husband, who is a celebrated Asian scholar and a prolific writer whom I know many of you are familiar with, Ian Buruma. Ian will engage Eri in what is certain to be a very lively conversation about Japan and its role in World War II. This will be followed by a discussion with you, our distinguished audience.
「Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy」は日本の近現代史を英語で学ぶために参考になると思います。
Selected Events in Japanese History Prior to April 1941
Here and throughout the book, the dates are indicated in local times.
1853 July Commodore Matthew Perry presses Japan to end its isolationist policy.
1854 March 31 The Tokugawa shogunate signs the unfavorable Treaty of Peace and Amity with the United States, ending its isolationist policy and leading to the opening of Japanese ports to the rest of the world.
1868 January 3 The shogunate falls and the Meiji Restoration is proclaimed.
1882 January 4 The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, a code of military conduct that will form a vital part of Japanese nationalism, is issued.
1889 February 11 The Meiji Constitution is promulgated.
1890 July 1 Japan holds its first general elections.
November 25 The first session of the Diet, Japan’s bicameral parliament, is summoned, and held four days later.
1894 August 1 Japan declares war on Qing China, beginning the Sino-Japanese War.
1895 April 17 Japan defeats China, concluding the war with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, placing Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, strategically located to access northeastern China (Manchuria), under Japanese control.
April 23 Russia, Germany, and France pressure Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China (the so-called Triple Intervention), which it does on May 5.
1898 March 27 Russia secures a leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula.
1902 January 30 The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, a treaty between equals, is formed.
1904 February 8 Japan attacks czarist Russia at Port Arthur, declaring war two days later.
1905 May 27–28 The Japanese navy scores a major victory in the Battle of Tsushima.
September 5 The Russo-Japanese War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, through the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt.
November 17 Korea becomes a Japanese protectorate.
1906 August 1 Japan forms the Kwantung Army to protect its Manchurian possessions, newly acquired from Russia.
1910 August 29 Japan annexes Korea.
1912 July 30 Mutsuhito, the Meiji emperor, dies, succeeded by his son, Yoshihito.
1914 July 28 World War I breaks out.
August 23 Japan goes to war with Germany, enabling it to take over German possessions in China and the Pacific by November.
1915 January 18 Japan issues the Twenty-One Demands to Yuan Shikai’s China, but fails to win diplomatic concessions while antagonizing the Chinese.
1918 November 11 World War I ends, followed by the convocation of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
1922 February 6 Japan ratifies the Nine-Power Treaty and the Washington Naval Treaty, commencing the era of Japan’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.
1923 September 1 The Great Kanto Earthquake and the ensuing fire destroy much of Tokyo.
1926 December 25 Yoshihito dies and Crown Prince Hirohito becomes the emperor.
1929 October 29 Black Tuesday marks the beginning of the Great Depression.
1930 January 21 The London Naval Conference begins.
November 4 Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi is gravely wounded by an ultranationalist for supporting Japan’s ratification of the London Naval Treaty.
1931 September 18 The Kwantung Army launches the Manchurian Incident, a Japanese invasion of northeastern China, after blowing up a railway line near Mukden and blaming the act on the Chinese.
September 24 Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro’s cabinet condones the military insubordination by accepting the Kwantung Army’s takeover of the Manchurian province of Jilin.
1932 March 1 The establishment of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state with nominal Chinese leaders, is proclaimed by the Kwantung Army.
October 2 The Lytton Commission issues its report condemning the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
1933 January 28 The Kwantung Army occupies Rehe, a buffer province between Manchukuo and China (in today’s northern Hebei Province), with a view to establishing a stronghold in North China.
February 24 Matsuoka Yosuke, Japan’s ambassador plenipotentiary, announces his country’s intention to withdraw from the League of Nations over its adoption of the Lytton Report.
May 31 Japan successfully pressures the Guomindang (a.k.a. Kuomintang, often referred to as the Chinese Nationalist Party) leader Chiang Kai-shek to agree to the Tanggu Truce, creating a demilitarized zone in eastern Hebei, near Manchukuo’s borders.
1935 June Japanese pressures on Chiang Kai-shek increase, prompting him to withdraw his troops from Hebei, and Chahar, Inner Mongolia, enabling Japan to secure its sphere of influence around Manchukuo.
1936 February 26 A coup attempt in Tokyo instigated by young army officers almost succeeds, but Hirohito’s decisive intervention quells it.
December 12 Chiang Kai-shek is kidnapped by the anti-Japanese warlord Zhang Xueliang, who forces Chiang to reassess his policy, eventually making him agree to join a united front against Japan, in cooperation with Chinese Communists.
1937 June 4 Konoe Fumimaro becomes prime minister.
July 7 The China War begins with a Sino-Japanese clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing.
December 13 Japanese forces conquer the Guomindang capital, Nanjing, followed by weeks of mass killing and rape.
1938 January 16 Prime Minister Konoe declares that Japan will not “deal with” Chiang Kai-shek.
March 24 The National Mobilization Law is passed in the Diet, followed by a series of emergency centralization measures to carry out Japan’s effective war mobilization.
July 1 The United States begins its “moral embargo” on aircraft and aircraft parts against Japan.
November 3 Konoe announces that Japan’s aim in the war against China is to help create a “New East Asian Order.”
1939 January 5 Konoe’s cabinet resigns.
February 10 The Japanese occupation of Hainan Island begins.
July 26 The United States announces its intention to abrogate the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Japan.
1940 March 30 Wang Jingwei forms a pro-Japanese government in Japanese-occupied Nanjing.
May 7 Pearl Harbor is made the main base for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
June 4 The United States embargoes exports of industrial equipment to Japan.
June 14 German forces begin to invade Paris, leading to the fall of France.
July 22 Konoe becomes prime minister for the second time; Matsuoka Yosuke becomes foreign minister.
From late July to early August U.S. exports of metals, aviation gasoline, and lubricating oil to Japan come under strict federal control.
August 1 Matsuoka uses the term “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” to sum up the government’s ambition to build a self-sufficient regional bloc under Japan’s leadership.
September 23–29 Japan occupies the northern half of French Indochina.
September 25 The United States increases its financial assistance to Chiang Kai-shek.
September 26 The United States embargoes the sale of steel and scrap iron to Japan, to go into effect on October 16.
September 27 Japan signs the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
October 12 The Imperial Rule Assistance Association is formed under Konoe’s presidency, putting an end to Japan’s party politics and beginning the New Order Movement.
October 31 Dance halls are closed and jazz performances become illegal in Japan.
November 10 The twenty-six-hundred-year reign of the Japanese imperial house is celebrated nationwide.
1941 January 8 Army Minister Tojo Hideki issues “Instructions for the Battlefield,” commanding soldiers to die a soldier’s death rather than become captives; this code, glorifying heroic death, will form the basis of Japan’s wartime credo.
February 11 The Japanese ambassador to the United States, Nomura Kichisaburo, arrives in Washington, D.C.
March 12 Matsuoka leaves for his grand tour of Europe to meet Japan’s Axis partners, Hitler and Mussolini.
This hymn was recorded live during a service at the Plainfield Christian Science Church, Independent, located in Plainfield, NJ.
We are located online at http://plainfieldcs.com.
2018/04/29 に公開
Michelle Nanouche, Speaker. This lecture tackles the essentials of Christian Science – its theology, its Christianity and its role in healing – giving an insider’s look at Christian Science treatment through prayer for physical cure. The speaker is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science healing. The talk was sponsored by the Christian Science Churches in Orange County.
View amazing, verified healings of physical, emotional, financial problems & more. Prayer that Heals is based on The Bible and teachings of Jesus Christ. The Christian Science religion was founded by Mary Baker Eddy who wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. View more talks on PrayerThatHeals.org.
A talk by Rob Gilbert, a Christian Science healer and teacher. More talks about prayer and healing at www.PrayerThatHeals.org . He has found that prayer and a deep understanding of God are reliable way to maintain health and experience healing.
Dear Mr. Gilbert ~ Your Lecture on God and Health is most inspiring and appreciated.
Your calm and assuring tone, along with your obvious deep conviction about the topic
are truly...wonderful, healing, so Love-given! Thank you very much.
“So, what is your heart beating for?” was a question I faced in my late twenties. I was a struggling filmmaker in Los Angeles, experiencing some problems with my heart after a failed marriage and an unsuccessful business venture. On my mental knees in prayer, I opened to a passage in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings that instantly got my attention: “The heart that beats mostly for self is seldom alight with love.” * I realized that the function of the heart is to beat for God; it’s a reflection of divine Love itself. This glimpse of the Christ—the pure love of God embracing humanity—transformed my life and my health. From that day to this, I’ve been doing everything I can to share the healing message of Christian Science with the world.
Http://unitymedford.org - What is Unity? In this video we answer the most frequently asked question about the Unity Movement and Unity Churches. We could be your Spiritual Home in the Rogue Valley as we are located in Medford. So if you live in Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Central Point, Gold Hill, Rogue River, White City, Eagle Point, Shady Cove, Trail or Prospect you're just a few minutes away. Come take a look... Connect with Spirit ! http://www.unitymedford.org
Fujiko Signs, speaker. This talk is for anyone looking for healing and for communities moving forward after the Thomas Fire and floods. Signs is an international speaker and a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science healing. She talks about the healing power of prayer. Discover how you can overcome fear and feel a deep sense of God's limitless love. The talk was sponsored by the Christian Science Churches in Ojai and Ventura, CA.
View amazing, verified healings of physical, emotional, financial problems & more. Prayer that Heals is based on The Bible and teachings of Jesus Christ. The Christian Science religion was founded by Mary Baker Eddy who wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. View more talks on PrayerThatHeals.org.
If time, as Einstein declared, is merely an illusion of consciousness, then linear time itself is a metaphysical fiction; everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen, is happening now. There, in that realm of the eternal now, is the true “I am.”
Who you are in this moment, therefore, is who you truly are. And from that essential point of perfect being―created anew by God in every instant―miracles flow naturally.
Thoughts of love interrupt the past and open the future to new probabilities.
No matter who you are, no matter how old you are, in the present, all things are possible.
2018 World Day of Prayer September 13, 2018
Courage to Heal
I am a healing presence.
World Day of Prayer is a 24-hour prayer vigil and meditation.
September 13, 2018, marks the 25th anniversary of the event, and thousands of individuals and communities around the world will come together to affirm and celebrate the true spiritual nature of healing.
The live event will be held at Unity World Headquarters at Unity Village and broadcast to Unity and New Thought communities and homes around the world.
Join us for music, prayer, and meditation as we support and strengthen our courage to heal ourselves, our communities, and our world, guided by the affirmation: I am a healing presence.
Paramahansa Yogananda: As I Knew Him -- Experiences, Observations & Reflections of a Disciple (英語) ペーパーバック – 2018/5/31
Roy Eugene Davis (著)
Frances Fayden
5つ星のうち5.0
If you love Yogananda, this is a treasure!
2018年6月28日 - (Amazon.com)
This is a wonderful first-hand account of life with the great master, Paramahansa Yogananda. Mr. Davis' stories of his time with Yogananda made me feel even closer to this great saint. I always recommend reading books about a great master written by their disciples, as they give you great insight about the guru-disciple relationship. Also included are an expanded Q&A section about yogic living, which is especially helpful for aspiring yogis like me.
Roy Eugene Davis met his guru, Paramahansa Yogananda on Christmas eve 1949. It is rare that a direct disciple of a master of yoga shares an intimate account of that relationship and describes the psychological and spiritual transformations that can occur. In this informative book the reader is introduced to a realm of experience and knowledge that is not ordinarily accessible. Mr. Davis has taught meditation and spiritual growth processes in North and South America, Europe, West Africa, Japan and India for more than 50 years. His books have been published in 10 languages. He is the founder and spiritual director of Center for Spiritual Awareness with International Headquarters in north Georgia.
著者について
Roy Eugene Davis has taught meditation and spiritual growth processes in North and South America, Europe, West Africa, Japan, and India for more than 50 years. Some of his books have been published in 10 lanuguages and 11 countries. He is the founder and spiritual director of Center for Spiritual Awareness.
Roy Eugene Davis is one of the last of Paramahansa Yogananda's personal disciples still living. He was ordained by Yoganandaji with the directive to "Teach as I have taught, heal as I have healed, and initiate sincere seekers in kriya yoga." In this video he recalls his time with the great kriya yoga master, the example he set, his open sharing of spiritual practices and his enlightened consciousness.
Potal Site : http://quaneko.net
昔から、中沢氏はどうしても胡散臭く見えてたし、いま映像を見ても怪しい。しかしながら、オウムでのバッシングの時はヒドイなあと思ったし、以降、表舞台から消えてしまった。しかし、昨年、いやもう一昨年になるが、浅田彰とゲンロンカフェで対談し、良かったなあと思った。東浩紀氏には大いに感謝するとともに、その功績は絶大であったと思います。
It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
Aum’s obsession with nuclear weapons and with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in particular connected with interview work I had done in that city in the early 1960s on the psychological effects of the atomic bomb and on the psychology of the survivor. In subsequent work I had explored the dangers of “nuclearism,” the embrace and even deification of nuclear weaponry so that potential agents of mass destruction become a source of security, life-power, and even at times salvation. My work in the early 1970s with Vietnam veterans who told of destroying a village—indeed, much of a country—in order to save it had reverberations in Aum, where the ambition was considerably greater: destroying a world in order to save it. There were striking parallels in Aum to behavior I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s while studying the Nazis’ utilization not only of professional killers but also of killing professionals—in this case, doctors. In Aum, too, doctors were central to the cult’s reversal of healing and killing. They participated in individual murders and had an important role, together with other scientists, in producing and releasing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
Aum is now viewed throughout the world as the primary example of the extraordinary dangers posed by private terrorist groups arming themselves with versions of “the poor man’s atomic bomb.” For Aum was a small antigovernment group claiming ten thousand followers in Japan, about fourteen hundred of whom were renunciants, or monks, at thirty facilities across the country; thirty thousand in Russia (a figure that has been disputed); and a handful in West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Yet this relatively tiny organization managed to manufacture, stockpile, and release deadly sarin gas first in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo, and then in Tokyo itself. It also prepared equally deadly anthrax bacillus and botulinus toxin, releasing them several times in Tokyo and nearby areas (including in the vicinity of two American military bases), largely unsuccessfully but with effects not yet fully known. Between 1990 and 1995 the cult staged at least fourteen chemical and biological attacks of varying dimensions. Aum also made inquiries, particularly in Russia, into acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. It was the grandiose plan of Shōkō Asahara to employ this weaponry to initiate World War III, a global holocaust of unprecedented proportions that would in turn trigger a hoped-for Armageddon. In his fantasies he saw the United States as a major military participant in this apocalyptic project.
But plans and fantasies, however earnest and elaborate, are not the same as action. A simple but terrible question therefore haunts this study: How did Aum Shinrikyō come to cross the crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps to bring it about?
My way of going about answering this question was, as always, to talk to people—to interview those involved. I have been doing that for decades in applying a psychological perspective to historical problems. Here, during five trips to Japan between 1995 and 1997, I was able to conduct intensive interviews with ten former members of Aum, eight men and two women, averaging more than five hours with each person. Since the guru himself and most of his leading disciples were in prison and inaccessible, the people I interviewed tended to be at either the lower or the mid echelons of a very hierarchical organization. Only a privileged inner circle of Asahara’s highest-ranking followers were told of the more violent aspects of the guru’s visionary plans, and even then often incompletely. Most of those I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the various facets of Aum violence. But while part of Aum they had to do considerable psychological work to fend off that knowledge in the face of the evidence around them.
I was also able to have discussions, though less structured, with two additional former members and one present member as well as with many close observers of Aum. I spent several particularly valuable days with one of the people most intensely involved in helping former Aum members extricate themselves psychologically from the cult and find alternative forms of spiritual expression. Because my Japanese is limited, I required interpreters for all these exchanges. I was extremely fortunate to have the close collaboration of an eminent scholar of Japanese religion, Manabu Watanabe, in this project. He interpreted for me in many of these interviews and meetings and consulted on various issues having to do with present and past patterns in Japanese religion, history, and psychology. Almost all the interviews were tape-recorded and then transcribed and retranslated by young bilingual scholars, providing a further opportunity to explore nuanced meanings.
Several of the former Aum members I spoke to were introduced to me by scholars and journalists they had been in touch with. Having found some value in the interviews, these former members introduced me to friends who had also been part of Aum. Much of their motivation had to do with their need to understand more about what had happened to them in the cult, how they had become so profoundly involved with a group they and others came to see as criminal, and how they could extricate themselves from their tie to a guru who still had a considerable psychological hold on them. I felt a certain sympathy for their efforts, while remaining aware, as were most of them, of their moral complicity in Aum. To protect their anonymity, I have used pseudonyms consisting only of family names for those I interviewed. In addition, I have altered certain identifying details that do not affect the substance of our exchanges.
I supplemented my interviews with efforts to learn all I could about historical and cultural influences on Aum—from writings by and discussions with scholars concerned with Japanese religion and society, Japanese journalists who had covered or followed the story of the cult, and Europeans and Americans familiar with Japan’s religious climate. I utilized the Japanese and American Internets for early reports on Aum and details of the ongoing trials of its leaders, especially that of its guru. And I drew upon my past work on Japan, including studies of its youth and of prominent figures of the modern era.
I focused on the inner life of Aum members and above all on the extraordinary ramifications of the guru-disciple relationship. Most of Aum’s wildly destructive visions came from its guru, but he in turn was completely dependent upon his disciples to sustain those visions and act upon them—indeed, for his own psychological function. One can understand little about Aum without probing the extremity of what can be called its guruism, and that guruism helps us to grasp certain essential aspects of the leader-follower interaction in much of the extreme behavior taking place elsewhere. Included in Aum’s guruism was a bizarre embrace of science to “prove” Aum’s religious truths and to provide Asahara with the kinds of ultimate weapons that might bring such “truths” to fruition.
No truth was more central to Aum than the principle that world salvation could be achieved only by bringing about the deaths of just about everyone on this earth. Disciples described their embrace of this vision and their understanding of its evolution from Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian doctrine, but they always assumed that the world-ending violence would be initiated by others, not by the cult itself. Yet Asahara’s idiosyncratic version of these traditions came to focus on the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims: that is, to provide them with a favorable rebirth. One can speak, then, of a weapons-hungry cult with a doctrine of altruistic murder—murder ostensibly intended to enhance a victim’s immortality. The doctrine sanctified not only violence against the world at large but the killing of numerous individuals who ran afoul of the guru’s aspirations.
At the heart of Aum’s violence—and its violent world-ending fantasies—was the interaction of a megalomanic guru with ultimate weapons of annihilation. Such weapons were profoundly attractive precisely because they enabled him to feel that he alone had the power to destroy the world. The existence of the weapons, then, effaces age-old distinctions between world-destroying fantasy (whether of paranoid schizophrenics, religious visionaries, or even ordinary people in their dreams) and the capability of actualizing that fantasy. That blurring of categories was noted by a thoughtful psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, within months of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spoke of the atomic bomb as “less a weapon of war than a weapon of extermination [and therefore] well adapted to the more bloodthirsty fantasies with which man is secretly preoccupied during phases of acute frustration.” He concluded, “The capacity so painfully acquired by normal men to distinguish between sleep, delusion, hallucination and the objective reality of waking life has for the first time in human history been seriously weakened.”
In sustaining his ties to ultimate weapons, Asahara brought to bear highly varied, seemingly contradictory personal characteristics: a genuine religious talent, a form of paranoia that enabled him to function at a rather high intellectual level, a con-man style that involved continuous falsification (both conscious lying and self-deception), a grandiosity of moral claim that justified unlimited mass murder, and a tendency, when control over his environment was threatened, to succumb to paranoid psychosis. His obsession with weapons of mass destruction aside, Asahara was hardly unique. All megalomanic gurus are likely to be some such psychological composite—hence the confusion of observers who focus on just one or two of these characteristics. Certainly, all of them operated in Aum as the guru and his closest disciples, struggling with internal and external crises, managed to generate a powerful momentum toward mass killing and eventually crossed a threshold that allowed for no turning back.
Aum is a Japanese phenomenon but a more general one as well. To begin to explain its emergence we must look at various psychological and historical currents in contemporary and modern Japan, which are replete with violence, national guruism, and apocalyptic temptation. But we are, of course, only dealing with a Japanese expression of our universal psychological repertoire, with feelings now being experienced everywhere, perhaps most strongly in the United States. We all have to face Aum’s significance for the human future and to ponder the question of how to deal with, and what alternatives there might be to, its vision of apocalyptic violence.
For Aum is about death in the nuclear age, about a distorted passion for survival, and about an ever more desperate quest for immortality. It is also about despising the world so much that one feels impelled to destroy it. In these ways, Aum encompassed the most destructive forces of the century just passing.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
No adult is a mere product of childhood. There is always a forward momentum to the self that does not follow simple cause and effect. Each self becomes a constellation or a collage that is ever in motion, a “self-system” or “self-process.” There are, of course, powerful early influences on that self, but outcomes depend upon evolving combinations of experience and motivation that are never entirely predictable. This is especially clear with exceptional people: one would be hard put to explain the extraordinary actions of either a Picasso or a Hitler on the basis of childhood experience alone. With anyone, we can at best connect that childhood to later inclinations, attitudes, or passions, finding certain continuities of talent, destructiveness, or both. But precisely the quality that claims our interest here—what we usually call charisma—tends to leap out of the life narrative and create a special realm of its own.
The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found “the truth,” creating a general aura around him that “he knows.” The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, “new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience.”
But the guru, in turn, needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. We will observe a particularly bizarre and violent version of this in Asahara, and in the manner in which he disintegrated when his closest disciples turned against him. Disciples are crucial to all dimensions of a guru’s psychological struggles in ways that are seldom fully grasped.
What has also been insufficiently recognized is the life-death dimension that pervades the guru-disciple tie, a dimension I have stressed throughout my work. Moving away from the classical Freudian model of instinct, mostly sexual, and defense, mostly repression, I emphasize our struggles with the continuity of life and our ways of symbolizing life and death. At an immediate level these include experiences of vitality as opposed to numbing and inner deadness. But I also include an ultimate level of universal need for human connectedness, for a sense of being part of a great chain of being that long preceded, and will continue endlessly after, one’s own limited life span. This sense of immortality encompasses feelings of living on in our children and their children, in our influences on other human beings, in our “works,” in a particular set of spiritual or religious beliefs, in what we perceive as eternal nature, or in the oneness of transcendent experiences.
In the cult, the guru becomes a crucible for life-power. That life-power is experienced as a surge of vitality, or what was constantly spoken of in Aum as “energy.” One’s previously deadened life now has vigor and purpose, even if the vigor and purpose are borrowed from the guru. That life-power becomes bound up with larger spiritual forces, that is, with a fierce sense of death-defying immortality. This aspect was the most compelling feature of Asahara’s hold on his disciples. The charisma that a guru like him is always said to possess is usually described with phrases like “magnetic attractiveness” or a “naked capacity of mustering assent.” But at the heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to instill and sustain feelings of vitality and immortality, feelings that reach into the core of each disciple’s often wounded, always questing self, while propelling that self beyond itself. Such feelings can be as fragile as they are psychologically explosive.
In this book Asahara, the guru, will be everywhere, most of all inhabiting, even in the wake of Aum’s violence, the minds of the disciples I interviewed. At the same time he will be nowhere, his guruism a phantom force, wavering between hyperreality and nothingness.
One-Eyed Child
Shōkō Asahara’s childhood brings to mind Erasmus’s aphorism “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But this particular one-eyed child was apparently an odd and uneasy king. Born in 1955 into the impoverished family of a tatami craftsman in a provincial area of Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, he was the sixth of seven children and the fourth of five boys. Chizuo Matsumoto (Asahara’s birth name), afflicted with congenital glaucoma, was without sight in one eye and had severely impaired vision in the other. Because he did have some vision he was eligible to attend an ordinary school, but his parents chose to send him to a special school for the blind. It had the advantage of providing free tuition and board, and a completely sightless older brother was already enrolled there.
Having some vision while his fellow students had none, and being bigger and stronger than most of them, he could be a dominating, manipulative, bullying, and sometimes violent figure in the school, where he would remain until he was twenty years old. He would, for instance, force his roommates to strike one another in a contest he called “pro wrestling,” and when he found their efforts unsatisfactory he would himself demonstrate how it should be done. He could be rebellious to the point of threatening teachers but, if challenged, would back down and deny any provocation. He always had a few completely blind followers toward whom he could at times exhibit great kindness, and his teachers observed that he was also capable of tenderness toward his older brother and a younger brother who later became a student at the school. But he was generally coercive, gave evidence of resentment over having been forced to attend this special school, and was prone to quick changes in attitude and demands.
In his early ventures into proto-guruism, this one-eyed “king” did not command wide allegiance. He unsuccessfully ran for class head on several occasions, and each failure left him dejected. Once, after being voted down by fellow students despite an attempt to bribe them with sweets, he accused a teacher of influencing the election by saying bad things about him, but the teacher pointed out to him that the other students were simply afraid of him.
While his actual background was humble enough, there were rumors of a further taint—that his family came from the outcast group known by the euphemism burakumin (literally “village people”) or that they were Korean, also a victimized group in Japan. These rumors, though false, suggest something of others’ attitudes toward him. Yet later he would sometimes himself imply that he was burakumin, in order to identify himself with a despised and victimized group and so to claim extraordinary triumph over adversity.
Most accounts of Asahara’s early years emphasize his preoccupation with money. He would charge other students for favors his partial sight allowed him to accomplish and insist upon being treated by them when he took them to food shops or restaurants. He is said to have accumulated a considerable sum of money this way by the time of his graduation. But whatever the complexities of his school life, he apparently obtained rather good grades as a student and achieved a black-belt ranking in judo.
One aspect of Asahara’s childhood is not frequently mentioned. He was attracted to drama of all kinds. From an early age, he loved to watch melodramas on television; later he acted in various school plays and as a high school senior wrote a play of his own about Prince Genji, a great romantic figure, taking the exalted leading role for himself. His stated ambition was to become prime minister of Japan. (One teacher remembered him avidly absorbing a biography of Kakuei Tanaka, the new prime minister in 1972.) He even reportedly said in those years that he wished to be “the head of a robot kingdom” (although in the context of the popular science-fiction culture of his adolescence, this fantasy might not have been as strange as it may now sound). His teachers generally came to think of him as someone who wished to “extend his own image into someone strong or heroic.” A former classmate made the interesting observation that as the school for the blind was a closed society, so in Aum Asahara would try “to create the same kind of closed society in which he could be the head.”
None of this can account for what he did later. Moreover, retrospective reconstructions always run the risk of evoking the past selectively in the light of subsequent behavior, particularly when that behavior is extreme. But every guru begins somewhere. Asahara’s childhood undoubtedly contributed to his sense of alienation, of otherness, to his generalized hatred of the world, to his tendency toward paranoia, to what was to become a habit of violence, to his cultivation of the art of performance, and to his aspirations toward the heroic and transcendent. Overall, he developed in childhood an inclination toward controlling and manipulating other people, and perhaps the beginnings of an identity as a “blind seer.”
The narrative of the guru—of the religious founder in general—can be seen as a version of the myth of the hero. That myth involves a mysterious birth and early childhood, a call to greatness, and a series of ordeals and trials culminating in heroic achievement. I believe that this culmination lies not, as Freud claimed, in the resolution of the Oedipus complex and symbolic reconciliation with the father but rather in the hero’s achievement of special knowledge of, or mastery over, death, which can in turn enhance the life of his people. In the case of the religious hero—the guru—the ordeals faced must be moral and spiritual; the crux of the guru biography, therefore, is the overcoming of moral failure by means of spiritual rebirth.
Asahara entered readily into that myth by means of conscious manipulation as well as unconscious inclination. After graduating from a special extension course at the high school for the blind in 1975, he moved to the Kyūshū city of Kumamoto, where he became, at the age of twenty, an acupuncturist and masseur (the latter a traditional occupation for the blind in Japan). But in 1976 he was convicted by a Kyūshū court of causing bodily injury to another person (one report suggests that he misused the judo he had studied) and was fined 15,000 yen ($150). In 1977 he moved to Tokyo, largely because of that incident. He was said to have at times expressed an ambition to enter either the law or the medical school of Tokyo University, Japan’s most elite educational institution. According to the narrative of his life (largely supplied by him), an important reason for his move was to attend a preparatory, or “cram,” school in order to take that university’s extremely difficult entrance examinations, which he then failed. Since there are no clear records connecting him with either the examinations or a cram school, it is possible, as some observers have speculated, that Asahara invented that sequence of events as part of his mythic tale.
In any case, in Tokyo he resumed his work as an acupuncturist and masseur, while at the same time immersing himself in the revolutionary writings of Mao Zedong. In 1978, he met, impregnated, and married Tomoko Ishii, who gave birth to a daughter and would eventually bear their five other children. That same year, with the financial support of his wife’s family, he opened a Chinese herbal-medicine pharmacy, which made a great deal of money. But in 1982, at the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for selling fake Chinese medicines, convicted, fined 200,000 yen (about $2,000), and given a brief jail sentence. He went into bankruptcy, experienced a profound sense of humiliation, and plunged more deeply into studies he had already begun of various forms of traditional fortune-telling, Taoist medicine, and related expressions of divination and mysticism.
This pre-Aum experience suggests that Asahara (then still going by the name of Matsumoto) wavered between fantasies of mainstream power (entering Tokyo law school or becoming prime minister) and radical rebelliousness (lawbreaking and a fascination with Mao). He did the same in his preoccupation with healing: the vision of Tokyo University medical college giving way to fringe expressions of spiritual healing that relied on con-man tactics. His trajectory went from grandiose plans to conquer society from within to embittered failure to idiosyncratic healing enterprises.
He would later place all of his experience within a guru myth. He described himself as having been “mentally unstable” and full of “doubts about my life.” In connection with such doubts, he described “a conflict between self-confidence and an inferiority complex.” Then came his heroic spiritual quest: “One day I stopped fooling myself altogether and thought: ‘What am I living for? Is there anything absolute, does true happiness really exist in this world? If so, can I get it?’ I did not realize at this point that what my soul was looking for was enlightenment. But I couldn’t sit still. Urged by such restlessness, I started a blind search. It was an intense feeling; it was a faith.”
Many people in such situations, he further explained, would simply change jobs or “just disappear.” In him, however, there “awoke … the desire to seek after the ultimate, the unchanging, and I began groping for an answer.” His spiritual journey, he tells us, meant “discarding everything … everything that I had” and required “great courage and faith, and great resolution.” The emerging guru had found a way to heal himself and could embark on “a long and arduous eight years of practice” on the road to enlightenment.
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
The emerging guru may have a number of visions, but one in particular usually serves as a crucial illumination and a sacred mandate for a special spiritual mission. This should not be seen as simply a matter of calculation or fakery: intense personal conviction is essential to the guru’s success. But that conviction can be helped considerably by grandiose ambitions and manipulative inclinations, which themselves can be enhanced by impressive demonstrations of superhuman powers. Prior to his main vision, Asahara claimed to have experienced during his early period in Agonshū an “awakening of Kundalinī”—a concept of mystical yoga in which one gains access to the cosmic energy that ordinarily lies “sleeping” at the base of the spine. An accomplished practitioner, he opened a yoga school in Tokyo at about this time and was to gain many early converts through the skills he demonstrated.
In 1984 Asahara founded Aum Shinsen no Kai. Aum (often rendered in English as Om or Ohm), a Sanskrit word that represents the most primal powers of creation and destruction in the universe, is often chanted in Buddhism as part of a mantra or personal incantation. Shinsen no Kai means “circle of divine hermits” or “wizards” and has a strong suggestion of esoteric supernatural power. Asahara also created a commercial enterprise, the Aum Corporation. It was to have the important function of publishing his books.
In 1985 Asahara became famous when a photograph of him “levitating” appeared in a popular occult magazine, Twilight Zone, identifying him as the “Aum Society representative.” The ability to levitate is considered to reflect extraordinarily high spiritual attainment. In his case it was apparently simulated by means of an upward leap from the lotus position along with a bit of trick photography. The placing of the picture in such a visible outlet was an early example of Asahara’s strong sense of the importance of the media.
That same year, at the age of thirty, Asahara experienced his central, self-defining vision. While he was wandering as a “homeless monk” near the ocean in northern Japan, a deity appeared before him and ordained him as Abiraketsu no Mikoto, “the god of light who leads the armies of the gods” in an ultimate war to destroy darkness and bring about the kingdom of Shambhala—in Tibetan and other Buddhist traditions, a utopian society of spiritually realized people. The vision was announced to the world in a Japanese New Age magazine in the form of an interview with Asahara.
In the original report of the vision, the god who manifested himself was nameless, but in later versions of it Asahara identified the god as Shiva, the Hindu deity who by then had become his ultimate spiritual authority (or his guru, as he sometimes put it). It was somewhat odd for Asahara to invoke a Hindu god in the creation of an essentially Buddhist group, even if the esoteric Buddhism he drew upon stayed close to its Hindu roots. His choice of Shiva (as opposed to Vishnu or Brahma, the other great Hindu gods) probably had two important determinants. First, Shiva is specifically identified as the god of yoga. Second, while all Hindu gods have destructive as well as beneficent tendencies, Shiva is specifically associated with salvation through world destruction. Asahara was later to claim that Aum Shinrikyō emerged directly from this vision, but he was rewriting history a bit since he had formed Aum Shinsen no Kai the previous year. In 1987, two years after his vision, he renamed the group Aum Shinrikyō, the Shinrikyō meaning “teaching of the supreme truth.” Very likely the change reflected his desire for a name that was less obscure, more accessible, and more absolute.
The context in which Asahara placed the vision set the tone for what could be called Aum’s New Age Buddhism. Aum did not employ traditional Japanese Buddhist terms, which originated in China and are expressed in Chinese characters, but instead used early Buddhist terms from Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Pali and expressed them in katakana, a Japanese phonetic system employed for retained foreign words. These terms were combined with American New Age ones like empowerment (rendered in katakana as empawahmento). This application of a New Age sensibility to ancient Buddhist and Hindu mysticism was to have great appeal for many young people.
In 1986 Asahara claimed another transcendent religious experience, a “final enlightenment,” achieved while meditating in the Himalayas—perhaps the world’s ideal place for such visions. A New Delhi holy man whom Asahara sometimes referred to as his master and a “great saint” later told a Japanese reporter that he referred a supplicant Asahara to monks in the Himalayas and was “surprised” when he reappeared four or five days later with a claim to enlightenment, as the master had always assumed that such spiritual achievement required a lifetime. Yet Asahara seems to have been convinced, in at least a part of his mind, that he had indeed become enlightened and that his spiritual achievement entitled—even required—him to be a great guru or perhaps a deity.
Asahara would soon combine such spiritual grandiosity and his organizational and financial skills with endless self-promotion. He would make a point of meeting with prominent Buddhist figures in various parts of the world—most notably the Dalai Lama in India—and of having photographs taken with them, which would then be displayed in Aum publications together with his hosts’ lavish expressions of praise for him and his spiritual quest. Here the emerging guru undoubtedly took liberties in converting spiritual hospitality into self-advertisement.
“Guru” is not a title that is used in much Japanese religious practice. It is a Sanskrit word meaning “heavy,” suggesting a person of special weight. The guru’s authority is such that he is sometimes described as “Father-Mother.” In the original Hindu tradition he is more important to the Brahman (a member of the Hindu priestly cast) than the Brahman’s actual parents because the latter merely “bring him into existence” while “the birth of a Brahman to a Veda (sacred knowledge) lasts forever.” The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes three kinds of gurus: ordinary religious teachers who are part of the “human line”; more extraordinary human beings possessed of special spiritual powers; and “superhuman” beings of the “heavenly (or ‘divine’) line.” Asahara was to claim to be all three.
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In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonsh�・, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonsh�・ and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiy�・ Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
SHAINBERG: What did Aum hope to achieve by its horrific acts?
LIFTON: Aum represents a new human danger: it was an apocalyptic cult with both a fascination for and the capability to acquire ultimate weapons, in particular what they called the “ABCs of weapons”—atomic, biological, and chemical. They had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and had sought to acquire nuclear ones. The attack on the subway was actually an improvised response to news that a police raid was on the way. In fact, their planned release of sarin gas was scheduled for some months later, in November. Asahara had originally wanted to make seventy tons of sarin. They had bought a helicopter and sent one of their members to America to learn how to fly it so they could dispense the gas from the skies over Tokyo. That could have killed people in the hundreds of thousands, even millions. That was to be their means of setting off World War III. And thereby initiating Armageddon and the end of the world. That was their modest ambition.
SHAINBERG: How many members did it have at its peak?
LIFTON: It’s usually thought that there were 10,000 people in Japan and 30,000 in Russia—it’s a strange statistic. But of those 10,000, fewer than 3,000 were shukke, monks or full-time devotees who lived in isolated communities.
SHAINBERG: Did they have a following in this country?
LIFTON: Just a sprinkling. They had a little office here, and Asahara came here a couple of times, but he was quoted as saying that Americans were almost impossible to convert because their bad karma was fifteen to twenty times heavier than that of the Japanese. But I do think it’s important to recognize that Aum was part of a worldwide end-of-the-world impulse. It’s not just the Japanese. Everywhere, on every continent, there are religious or political groups that embrace the idea of the end of the world. Where Aum was different was that, rather than simply anticipating the end of the world, they actively sought to bring it about.
SHAINBERG: Instead of waiting passively, the guru took action to make his predictions come true?
LIFTON: It was mainly Asahara’s idea, but it was embraced by his followers. The end of the world was an integral part of their concept of salvation. That’s why Aum has to be seen, as uncomfortable as this is for many of us, as a religious problem.
SHAINBERG: But why did they want to destroy the world? How did that connect with their religious vision?
LIFTON: Aum sought to cleanse the world of all its defilement by destroying it. Only then could a pure, new people and spiritual level be attained in the world. The apocalyptic message itself stemmed from a vision Asahara described in which the god Shiva appeared and commanded him to lead an army of the gods in a struggle of light against darkness. Of course, Shiva is a Hindu deity, but then, Aum was eclectic. As you know, there’s a lot of Hinduism in Tibetan Buddhism, and Aum’s overall focus was on intense forms of Tibetan Buddhist practice. When Asahara began to train his followers, it was with a set of practices that were largely taken from the Tibetan tradition.
LIFTON: There were various kinds of meditation, including so-called standing worship-moving from a standing position to abject prostration and doing it 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times-he took this from the preliminary practices of the Nyingma school. But I think the most significant idea he took from Tibetan Buddhism was phowa [a practice whereby a dying person’s consciousness is liberated from the body through the top of the head]. Phowa is to be learned from a guru and to be applied when one is in the process of dying, for the sake of enhancing one’s own spiritual movement toward Buddhahood. There’s uncertainty about the extent to which in actual tantric practice it might have been extended toward the performing of some violent act. But the way that it was interpreted by Asahara emphasized that in Tibetan Buddhism there are some very rough demands. If your guru says you must kill others, you must kill them. Because that means that their time to die has come, so it’s the right thing to do.
SHAINBERG: In other words, it’s an act of compassion.
LIFTON: Yes. The capacity to insist that everyone in the world must be killed, to purify the world, comes from a world-hating vision of religion. The world is defiled and hopeless in its bad karma. It’s an act of compassion to kill such people—that is, ordinary people like you and me—because it enhances their immortality, or their subsequent reincarnation, or their journey to the Pure Land, however you want to put it. Not everybody in Aum believed this in such stark terms, but Asahara pressed this point of view, and as he became more unstable, he pressed it more.
SHAINBERG: How did he get to Buddhism in the first place?
LIFTON: He read extensively 111 Tibetan and tantric Buddhism. And in the early eighties, he was a member of Agon-shu, one of the so-called Japanese New Religions. Thousands of these have been founded in Japan since the nineteenth century, and a whole run of them following World War II. Certain of his ideas about the persona of the guru and the heritage of Tibetan Buddhism can be traced back to Agon-shu. After leaving Agonshu, he went to the Himalayas, where in 1986, he claimed to have achieved final enlightenment.
SHAINBERG: Has he discussed what he meant by final enlightenment?
LIFTON: Not really; he just declared it. One of the problems with final enlightenment is that it’s such a subjective claim. Because he didn’t belong to any reputable religious institution, he wasn’t responsible to anybody or anything. You know, you can say, as many young Japanese do, that Buddhism in Japan lacks life. It seems deadened to them. But if you’re a Japanese Buddhist and you belong to an institution, there are limits to what you can do. That’s not so when you form your own religious organization that has no ties or requirements involving anybody else.
SHAINBERG: Do we know who he studied with in the Himalayas or what his experience there was? Was he just wandering there?
LIFTON: He visited a few people there. He didn’t really study with anybody. He just checked in and discussed his religious life, as he did with the Dalai Lama.
LIFTON: The Dalai Lama received him courteously, probably even warmly. And probably said things to him that he wishes he didn’t say. Asahara had pictures taken, and then quoted the Dalai Lama as saying, “What I’ve done for Buddhism in Tibet, you will do for Buddhism in Japan.” The Dalai Lama was asked about it later on and denied having said these things and said he just received him in a hospitable way. Asahara also visited religious leaders in Sri Lanka and other places, had his picture taken with them, and claimed they received him as a great spiritual master. But the Japanese press followed up his visits and interviewed a number of the people he’d described as having acclaimed him. One of them said, “We had a meeting and then he came back to me a week or two later and said he had achieved final enlightenment. I thought that was rather surprising because it usually takes close to a lifetime to achieve enlightenment.” But the act was convincing to his followers. And, in some way, it was convincing to himself. There’s a strange psychology with some people that enables them to believe in their own version of events and simultaneously maintain a whole manipulative, con man side. The combination can be persuasive.
SHAINBERG: Any can man becomes more effective the more he believes in himself Was anything in his belief justified?
LIFTON: He demonstrated a rather unusual talent for yoga from early on. A lot of people came to him initially for yoga instruction, many of them professionals or young university graduates who wanted something spiritual in their lives. This talent for yoga was a very important basis for what came later. It became inseparable from the Buddhist practices or Buddhistlike practices that he taught And he had a certain superficial brilliance in articulating various Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian concepts. Asahara was an extraordinarily effective religious teacher as well as a murderer.
SHAINBERG: How did he get from religion to murder?
LIFTON: One account of his direction, which is the usual one, is that Aum Shinrikyo, like Agon-shu, could initially be seen as a typical example of a New Religion. It held a lot of interest for spiritual seekers and got a lot of positive response. It was only later, once people began to resist Aum in various ways—parents’ groups claiming that it was brainwashing their children and so on—that it came into conflict with mainstream society; then Asahara went bad and broke down, and caused a lot of trouble.
LIFTON: I think a truer version of the sequence is that he was visionary and megalomaniacal from the beginning. He was an extreme paranoid, and paranoids are notorious for functioning at a high level of intellectual capacity. Especially if they can continue to control their immediate environment, which is their whole world. When that control is threatened, for one reason or another, they tend to break down. And that’s what happened with Asahara when his cult came under siege. Details started to leak into the press in the late eighties about Aum’s illegal acquisition of land and the finances of its members and other crimes. The most notorious case was the murder of a lawyer named Sakamoto who was taking the lead in exposing Aum’s illegal behavior. He was killed in 1989 along with his wife and baby. And there were lots of other murders that took place between ’89 and ’95. In fact, it’s not quite known how many people they killed. It could be up to a hundred. Many people are missing from within Aum. Now, it’s true that most of the ordinary members did not know about the weapons or the plans for violence. But they too had to ward off evidence that something was wrong—although just when the change occurred in Asahara is not easy to say. Because it was not a complete change: the potential was always there. There was always the dimension of the con man in him as well as the effective religious teacher.
SHAINBERG: Have you heard descriptions of him as a teacher?
LIFTON: Yes. His disciples describe him as extraordinarily dignified and composed. One man I interviewed described how struck he was by the contrast between the dignity that never left him when he was a teacher in those early years and the way he has fallen apart in the courtroom.
LIFTON: Oh, absolutely, and he’s acting psychotic, bizarre, accusing the judge of sending waves of radiation to his brain. I think it’s possible that he had become psychotic even before the end of Aum. Months before he launched the actual attack he was talking about being attacked by sarin gas, suffering from acute fever, looking for spies within Aum. He always had an apocalyptic orientation; but he became more monolithic, more insistent on his prophecies of doom. And his project for realizing those prophecies.
SHAINBERG: Do you think there’s a relationship between the way that Asahara’s own fantasies seem to have bled over into the world outside, and the condition of a world in which media is making fantasies concrete for us all the time?
LIFTON: Asahara’s relationship with the media was a two-way street: if there were fantasies going out, there were also fantasies coming in. Aum, like certain other New Religions, was media-savvy; it took full advantage of Japan’s media saturation. Asahara was a frequent television guest. In one of the blurbs for his book, it says he was, in effect, your all-purpose genius—”He wrote music, he made films, he was a great religious figure and a prominent television personality.” So there is a way that the media could be seen as a conduit between Asahara’s imagination and outer reality. His ideas certainly found a fertile environment. Ever since World War II, the Japanese media have thrived on apocalyptic fantasy. They feature all kinds of stories about the earth being threatened, or the earth being blown up, or the earth being involved in an enormous confrontation with an evil planet; and usually there are Japanese saviors who struggle to sustain the earth or who come into a postapocalyptic world and offer services to the human remnant. And World War II is very much a factor in these stories. It may be no accident that a violent cult that wants to bring about Armageddon appears first in Japan, the only country that’s experienced the atomic bomb.
SHAINBERG: Did that kind of imagery get reproduced in the fantasies of Asahara and his followers?
LIFTON: There’s a vision that I’ve heard from several former members of Aum. It starts with a scene of absolute devastation. Big fires, cities crumbling, parts of them falling into the sea—Armageddon combined with a nuclear holocaust. Then, in some tiny corner, there’s a quiet spiritual area in which a small group of Aum practitioners are going through their meditative practices. World-ending images or fantasies have always been with us; they’re part of the human repertoire. Ordinary people have these fantasies in dreams all the time. But the weapons that could make this fantasy come to pass didn’t exist until recently. That’s what’s extraordinary.
SHAINBERG: So is the degree of credibility Aum members were encouraged to place in these fantasies.
LIFTON: The place was full of visions. I talked to many people who referred to intense mystical experiences. Enormous emphasis was placed on meditation and oxygen-depriving breathing exercises. And later, there were drugs, including LSD. People had frequent visionary experiences, many of which had to do with seeing bright lights—that seemed to be their mystical logo. From very early on, the word among people who had undergone training with Asahara was that it was extraordinarily intense, extraordinarily rewarding.
LIFTON: Almost to a person, they describe experiencing high energy. And that energy itself took on a kind of mystical feeling because it really meant life power, immortality power. And they miss it, despite everything that’s gone on in Aum. One former member I spoke with in Tokyo told me, “I’ve been going to the trial every day. I’m learning things that I hadn’t known about Aum. But it’s funny, I had such enormous energy when I was in Aum.” I asked him: “What about since then?” He told me: “Well, it’s gradually petering out.” And I’ve spoken with others who were more actively nostalgic for that energetic state that they had never known prior to or after Aum. But I should also make it clear that not all the teachings were on this rarefied level. He would also give sermons or little lectures about understandable, everyday lifestyle issues. “What’s the point of worrying about death? It’s karma, it’s a silly thing to worry about. What you want to do is look at your life. Is there some sort of vacuum in your life? Do you feel you live in a corrupt social situation?” And his analysis of Japanese society could be quite hard-hitting—that it’s lockstep authoritarianism in both educational and corporate structures. It made sense to people who were themselves antagonistic toward Japanese society and felt themselves to be excluded from it. They were often young people who were viewed as weak because they couldn’t stand up to the demands of the Japanese rat race. So Aum gave them a home and spoke to them on this nitty-gritty basis as well.
SHAINBERG: So you’re saying Aum offered its members a sense of community, it offered them a spiritual anchor, and on top of that it offered mastery of these special practices that were generating high energy?
LIFTON: Yes, but if you put it that way, it sounds pretty calm and matter-of-fact. What it offered was fierce intensity. Not simply a community, but a transcendent community of special people who alone had the highest spiritual aspirations-increasingly devoted to the teaching that everybody outside of Aum was defiled, hopelessly doomed by their bad karma. That’s why, when things started to go wrong, their commitment was so internalized that they couldn’t condemn the guru. They couldn’t separate themselves from him. Even now, it’s extremely hard. People I’ve talked to will say things like, “Asahara’s a criminal, he betrayed me as well as others.” But then in their next breath, they’ll tell me, “I must have had a tie to him in an earlier life. Maybe he was my guru back then.” He used the whole concept of karma in a highly manipulative way. Even in esoteric Buddhist or Tibetan teachings, as I understand it, karma may be the result of past lives, but you still always have an opportunity for redemption through good behavior. Karma doesn’t wipe out your potential for good, so to speak. But with Asahara, it did, unless you followed him. You were weighed down, you were dominated by your bad karma, that was his teaching.
LIFTON: Yes. When I studied “thought reform;’ or so-called brainwashing methods, in totalistic systems, I found that the key to controlling other human beings seemed to be in controlling their guilt and shame mechanisms. Well, controlling their karma goes one further than that-it includes guilt and shame because you can feel yourself to be bad or condemned on account of what you’ve done in past lives. But the guru also assumes control over your destiny, over what you are and what you can be in an absolute way.
LIFTON: And all of your next lives, that’s right. He’s knowledgeable about your past, he’s offering you a fascinating, transcendent present, and he’s asserting control over your future. And all future lives.
SHAINBERG: He has also lifted any sense of personal responsibility from you. He’s liberated you from all banal responsibility in this lifetime.
LIFTON: Yes. Your only responsibility is toward following his training so completely that you merge with the guru. It’s a total annihilation of self, but it’s also an assumption of his megalomania. Total self-surrender is rewarded by shared grandiosity. Several former members I interviewed still struggled with that grandiosity—it was palpable. Because they are these very special people who alone are in possession of the truth that is destined to be transmitted to the whole world following World War III and Armageddon. They are to be not just the leaders, but the arbiters of this new cosmic dimension. And in return for such a promise, they surrender. Annihilate their own self in the service of merging with the guru self. Many of them experienced visions that illustrate this belief.
LIFTON: One young man saw a pyramid-like structure that was made of human beings. At the top of it was Asahara sitting like a divinity. Like the Buddha. And he, the person who was having this vision, was drawn toward the top of this pyramid, toward the guru, by some inexorable force. He moved closer and closer until the two of them merged and he was no longer just himself, he was Asahara, and Asahara was no longer just Asahara, Asahara was also he. And then he asked Asahara—but of course it was also Asahara doing the askin—”ls this true emptiness?”; and the Asahara figure, but at the same time also he himself, answered: “Ah. So you experience it for the first time.”
SHAINBERG: This is all consistent with Zen or other Buddhist doctrines which aim toward a relinquishing of ego, losing separateness from the teacher and becoming one with him—but here it’s turned into megalomania. Can you say something about the scenario that transforms what is essentially a vision of total humility to one of egomania?
LIFTON: Well, the humility was never there for the guru, so, you see, there’s a terrible problem for the practitioner in discerning megalomania in his or her guru. The paradox of Asahara, I think, is how the leader of a religion could both genuinely convey and teach spiritual practices—mainly Buddhist in this case—and, at the same time, be corrupt from the beginning. One can’t dismiss either his deep corruption or his genuine religious achievement.
LIFTON: Yes, it’s hard for me even to say that because I don’t like to call it an achievement, but at least it was perceived by followers as such. It’s not always easy to tell a compassionate guru from a murderous one. Part of the problem is that states of exaltation have a certain consistency and appeal no matter what their source. Or, to put it another way: He who enables someone to achieve high states that are perceived as authentic has gained tremendous influence over him. That’s true whether it’s a great Zen master or somebody who turns out to be not only a fanatic but also a criminal, as was the case with Asahara. A genuine religious experience, in this sense, requires a kind of enhancement of the disciple’s vulnerability by opening his self up to formlessness. And Asahara seems to have had a powerful ability to induce visions of formlessness on the way to mystical experience through kundalini yoga or other methods. The danger lay in his ability to exploit this vulnerability.
SHAINBERG: What we call “formlessness” in Buddhist tradition means, among other things, the experience of total insecurity or groundlessness. Ideally, in a Buddhist framework, if the teacher and student trust each other and can work together-if the teacher is an authentic teacher-he can help the student tolerate this vulnerability and see, as we would say, the unity of form and formlessness. But if one persists in maintaining a distinction, then the experience of formlessness is only going to create a desperate need for form. Buddhist literature is full of statements to the effect that if the practice is explored in any kind of partial manner, it can turn to poison. In some ways, what you’ve described with Asahara is a horrible caricature of this point; but you can also see it as a metaphor for all institutional religion. At the source, it’s a vision of formlessness, but the vision evolves to impose a new form and subsequently to corrupt and abuse it.
LIFTON: Aum arrogated to itself the claim of all truth for all human beings. But it also radically separated itself from a life-affirming or human-centered morality by setting up a barrier between itself and ordinary people. In fact, there were two sets of barriers—two sets of absolute distinctions. On the one hand, there was the barrier between the Aum people and the ordinary people, who were hopelessly defiled. They were defiled in the first place because they had had no contact with Asahara. The second level of radical differentiation was the barrier between Aum members and Asahara himself. Even now, quite a few of them feel guilty and fearful over having “broken the pipeline”—that’s their phrase. One side of their mind still holds to the guru as the only source of truth and purity in the world. And that makes many of them wonder whether maybe history will prove him right—that all this was for a higher purpose that we ordinary human beings are incapable of grasping, but that he understands, in order to achieve a higher level of human evolution.
SHAINBERG: It’s quite extraordinary when you think of it corning out of Buddhism, which begins with a denial of precisely that kind of discrimination: the fundamental idea that all beings as they are have Buddha nature. There is no such thing as defilement in terms of a Buddhist vision-in any true Buddhist vision. But he appropriated the doctrine that essence is formless, and he turned it inside out.
LIFTON: All religions have the possibility for destructive behavior. You know, I spoke with a Buddhist priest who helped me a great deal in my research. He has been extraordinarily giving in his way of dealing with former Aum members. Nevertheless, when he talked about Aum, he would say: “This is not Buddhism. Buddhism is about other things; compassion is central to our theory and practice.” Well, that’s true; it’s not Buddhist compassion, certainly-but you can’t say it’s not Buddhism.
SHAINBERG: There’s an expression in Buddhism that Buddha and the devil are never more than a hairbreadth apart. That’s why it’s critical to examine the way that Aum Shinrikyo springs from Buddhist understandings.
LIFTON: That’s what so many of the former disciples are trying to do. And they have a very hard time. It’s partly that the whole experience has been so disrupting that their lives have been not only interrupted, but shattered; and, of course, there’s the reality of being made pariahs in Japanese society. But I also think that it’s very hard for them to extricate themselves from the Aum version in which they were immersed so deeply and come to another Buddhism. Many are simply casting about. But they do struggle with the tradition. They read the Buddhist scriptures, they look to Buddhist teachers, they do all kinds of things to rediscover a different Buddhism.
米国の著名な精神医学者、ロバート・ジェイ・リフトンへのインタビューです。リフトンは、広島の被爆者に対するインタビュー調査とその精神的側面に光をあてた『ヒロシマを生き抜く─精神史的考察』の著者として知られています。長年にわたり、戦争をはじめとする極限的な状況における人間の心理について批判的分析を行ってきた研究者です。近著、Witness To Extreme Century : A Memoir （『極限の世紀の証言者 〜回想録』） では、これまでの自身の活動を、研究者としての学問的行為であると同時に、「証言者」としての行為であったと振り返っています。「証言者」とは、体験を受け入れ、自身の言葉で語り直す人のことだとリフトンは言います。原爆投下とホロコースト、２０世紀に人類は最も過酷な歴史を体験しました。そうした歴史に「証言者」として向き合うことが、過酷な体験から意味を見出し、それを乗り越えるために必要であるとリフトンは考えています。今回のインタビューで、リフトンは自身が関心を寄せてきた様々な話題（気候変動、拷問、反戦活動、死刑制度、ジェノサイドなど）について語っています。
I sat down and had a most wonderful conversation with Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. on the occasion the publication of his memoir entitled, Witness to an Extreme Century.
Lifton talks about Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and his work in Hong Kong in the 1950s exploring brainwashing in communist China. We then talk about his book, Death in Life, which describes the psychological effects of the nuclear bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as his life work campaigning against nuclear bombs and ultimately nuclear energy. Then a discussion of his work with Nazi Doctors, the concept of "doubling" and the mot amazing levels of atrocity done in the name of "virtue." Then to his book, Destroying the World to Save it, about apocalyptic cults. The book focuses on Aum Shinrikyo, the cult of Shoko Asahara who ordered the manufacture and ultimate sarin gassing of thousands on the subways of Tokyo. We talk in depth about this cult and throughout this fascinating talk, the themes of how powerful situational influences can make essentially, intelligent, good people commit extreme and immoral acts.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition) 1
Introduction
The world has changed since Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves was first published. Back in 1999, most Americans including myself could not have imagined the destruction and fear of 9/11, jihad, terrorism, the prevalence of religious extremism, or the many other phenomena that can make today seem like a frightening time to be alive. I have decided to do this updated and revised edition as an e-book and print on demand paperback and retitle it Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs. I have made numerous substantial changes to more accurately reflect all that I have learned.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition)
The phenomenon of destructive influence and cults of all types has not gone away. It has morphed and become much more sophisticated. Today’s twenty-year-olds know little or nothing about major cult stories of past decades: Charles Manson; Jim Jones’ People Temple Jonestown tragedy (they know the expression, “drink the kool-aid” though); David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco; Heaven’s Gate mass death; Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gassing in Japan; and Order of the Solar Temple mass deaths to name some major news stories. Mainstream media is doing less investigative reporting on destructive cults, avoiding their civic responsibility, in my opinion. Large cults have gone mainstream and become very sophisticated, hiring top law firms and lobbyists. The Internet is now the major recruitment arena. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation is rampant, making people especially vulnerable to undue social influence.
But events are happening that also make this an exciting and hopeful time. Former members of cults are putting up web sites, and are writing blogs and publishing books. Many have, like myself become mental health professionals, and have gone on to have very successful careers. As we learn more about human behavior, we enhance our ability to help people who’ve been recruited by controlling organizations and cults. Today we have knowledge, including neurobiology research that explains what just a few years ago would have been considered magical, occult, or satanic.
Like most of us, I knew nothing about any of these phenomena when I was recruited into the “One World Crusade,” a front group for the Unification Church, better known for decades as the Moonies. I was a 19-year-old junior at Queens College in New York in February of 1974. I was an appealing target for cult recruiters as I sat in the college cafeteria and mourned the loss of my girlfriend. I was idealistic and bright, the only son of a loving middle-class family and especially vulnerable at that moment to the smiles of three attractive women who flirted with me and invited me over for dinner.
Dinner led to longer meetings, and workshops. Within a few short weeks, I came to believe that Armageddon was at hand, World War III would start in 1977, and we Moonies were single-handedly responsible for defeating Satan and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I threw myself into the work of “saving the world,” logging 18 to 21 hours a day, seven days a week, fundraising, recruiting and indoctrinating new members, organizing public relations and political campaigns, and meeting regularly with Moon and his highest-ranking lieutenants. As an American, I had no real power, just position. The upper echelons of the hierarchy were composed exclusively of Koreans and Japanese, with the Koreans in the position of the master race. Moon had moved to the United States, and he needed American front men who were intelligent, passionate and dedicated. Over a matter of months, I went from founder of a recruiting front group, C.A.R.P.[1] at my former college, to the rank of Assistant Director of the Unification Church #10 at National Headquarters in Manhattan. I was highly praised by Moon himself, and proclaimed, “the model member.”
It took a miracle–disguised as an accident–to save my life. In 1976, after three days without sleep, I nodded off at the wheel of a fund-raising van and crashed into the back of an 18-wheeler. This near-fatal accident gave my family the opportunity to do a deprogramming. On the second day, I threatened my father with violence, at which point he broke down in tears and asked me what I would do if I were in his position? For a brief moment, I was able to see from his perspective, to feel his pain. I reluctantly agreed to meet with a team of former members for five days without contacting the cult or trying to escape.
As a devoted Moonie, I did my best to fight the deprogramming process. But the information gradually began to sink in. In the days that followed, I came to understand brainwashing as practiced by Mao Tse Tung in his Communist re-education centers. Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Norton, 1961) helped me realize that the techniques we used in the Moonies were much like those used by the Chinese Communists to make their people obedient. Eventually, after five days, I came to the painful realization that not only had I been subjected to these techniques, I had used them on others. I was horrified that I could have turned my back on my family, friends, religion, my life goals to essentially become a tool of a demagogue who wants to take over the world.
After my deprogramming, I went on to complete a master’s degree in counseling psychology. From my unique position as a former cult member and counselor, I dedicated myself to helping others escape and recover from destructive situations. In 1979, following the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, I founded EX-MOON Inc., a nonprofit educational organization made up of ex-members of Moon’s international organization. I published a newsletter, held media conferences, and established a clearinghouse for information about the Moon organization. I later served as the national coordinator of FOCUS, a support and information network of former members of destructive cult groups. I am now directing the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Inc. (www.freedomofmind.com), a center dedicated to helping families and individuals, and to informing the public about destructive and deceptive influence practices.
In the early 1990s, I learned that the leaders of some cults were buying copies of my first book, Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, so they could learn how to resist the exit-counseling process. For example, Kip McKean, who founded the International Churches of Christ, reportedly held up my book at a general assembly and told some 15,000 members that it would be sinful to meet with me or even read my book.[2] In this way, cult leaders impeded the efforts of many families–but also forced me to develop more effective ways of strategically and creatively interacting with those trapped in cults. A cult member’s friends and family are traumatized by the situation and, to mobilize them, I had to find ways to empower them, both as individuals and as a team. These revelations became the cornerstones of the method I call the Strategic Interactive Approach, or SIA.
This book is the culmination of 36 years of experience in helping people all over the world. It describes a practical approach to helping those affected by destructive cults. The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) improves upon exit counseling, and promotes a family-centered, non-coercive course of action. It provides friends and family of the cult member with a greater understanding of cult methods, and the effects of indoctrination. It offers new insight into cult-induced phobias, and effective tools for overcoming them.
The SIA is designed to help the cult member recognize that he has been under the influence of the group and eventually, to recognize the pervasiveness of the group’s control over his life. Once the former member has experienced such an awakening, my methods help him regain a sense of personal power, integrity, and direction. Most cult members I have worked with have experienced emotional, psychological and even spiritual rebirth. They were able to return to their families and were spared further injury or possibly even death.
SIX YEARS AGO, in 1989, I set out across the country on my own search for wisdom. In the course of my travels, I interviewed and worked with more than two hundred psychologists, philosophers, physicians, scientists, and mystics who claimed to have the answers I was after. By the time I wrote What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, it was clear to me that Ken Wilber was in a category by himself. He is, I believe, far and away the most cogent and penetrating voice in the recent emergence of a uniquely American wisdom.
It has been nearly twenty years since Ken Wilber published The Spectrum of Consciousness. Written when he was twenty-three, it established him, almost overnight, as perhaps the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times. Spectrum, which Wilber wrote in three months after dropping out of graduate school in biochemistry, made the case that human development unfolds in waves or stages that extend beyond those ordinarily recognized by Western psychology. Only by successfully navigating each developmental wave, Wilber argued, is it possible first to develop a healthy sense of individuality, and then ultimately to experience a broader identity that transcends—and includes—the personal self. In effect, Wilber married Freud and the Buddha—until then divided by seemingly irreconcilable differences. And this was just the first of his many original contributions.
The title of this book is deceptively breezy. A Brief History of Everything delivers just what it promises. It covers vast historical ground, from the Big Bang right up to the desiccated postmodern present. Along the way, it seeks to make sense of the often contradictory ways that human beings have evolved—physically, emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually. And for all its breadth, the book is remarkably lean and compact.
Indeed, what sets A Brief History of Everything apart both from Spectrum and from Wilber’s eleven subsequent books is that it not only extends the ideas advanced in those earlier works, but presents them now in a simple, accessible, conversational format. Most of Wilber’s books require at least some knowledge of the major Eastern contemplative traditions and of Western developmental psychology. A Brief History is addressed to a much broader audience—those of us grappling to find wisdom in our everyday lives, but bewildered by the array of potential paths to truth that so often seem to contradict one another—and to fall short in fundamental ways. For those readers who want still more when they finish this book, I recommend Wilber’s recent opus, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, which explores many of the ideas here in more rigorous detail.
No one I’ve met has described the path of human development—the evolution of consciousness—more systematically or comprehensively than Wilber. In the course of my journey, I ran into countless people who made grand claims for a particular version of the truth they were promoting. Almost invariably, I discovered, they’d come to their conclusions by choosing up sides, celebrating one set of capacities and values while excluding others.
Wilber has taken a more embracing and comprehensive approach, as you will soon discover. In the pages that follow, he lays out a coherent vision that honors and incorporates the truths from a vast and disparate array of fields—physics and biology; the social and the systems sciences; art and aesthetics; developmental psychology and contemplative mysticism—as well as from opposing philosophical movements ranging from Neoplatonism to modernism, idealism to postmodernism.
What Wilber recognizes is that a given truth-claim may be valid without being complete, true but only so far as it goes, and this must be seen as part of other and equally important truths. Perhaps the most powerful new tool he brings to bear in A Brief History is his notion that there are four “quadrants” of development. By looking at hundreds of developmental maps that have been created by various thinkers over the years—maps of biological, psychological, cognitive, and spiritual development, to name just a few—it dawned on Wilber that they were often describing very different versions of “truth.” Exterior forms of development, for example, are those that can be measured objectively and empirically. But what Wilber makes clear is that this form of truth will only take you so far. Any comprehensive development, he points out, also includes an interior dimension—one that is subjective and interpretive, and depends on consciousness and introspection. Beyond that, Wilber saw, both interior and exterior development take place not just individually, but in a social or cultural context. Hence the four quadrants.
None of these forms of truth, he argues in a series of vivid examples, can be reduced to another. A behaviorist, to take just a single case, cannot understand a person’s interior experience solely by looking at his external behavior—or at its physiological correlates. The truth will indeed set you free, but only if you recognize that there are many kinds of truth.
A Brief History of Everything operates on several levels. It’s the richest map I’ve yet found of the world we live in, and of men and women’s place in it. In the dialectic of progress, Wilber suggests, each stage of evolution transcends the limits of its predecessor, but simultaneously introduces new ones. This is a view that both dignifies and celebrates the ongoing struggle of any authentic search for a more conscious and complete life. “No epoch is finally privileged,” Wilber writes. “We are all tomorrow’s food. The process continues, and Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.”
At another level, Wilber serves in A Brief History as a demystifier and a debunker—a discerning critic of the teachers, techniques, ideas, and systems that promise routes to encompassing truth, but are more commonly incomplete, misleading, misguided, or distorted. Too often we ourselves are complicit. Fearful of any change and infinitely capable of self-deception, we are too quick to latch on to simple answers and quick fixes, which finally just narrow our perspective and abort our development.
Wilber’s is a rare voice. He brings to the task both a sincere heart and a commitment to truth. He widens his lens to take in the biggest possible picture, but he refuses to see all the elements as equal. He makes qualitative distinctions. He values depth. He’s unafraid to make enemies, even as he is respectful of many voices. The result is that A Brief History of Everything sheds a very original light, not just on the cosmic questions in our lives, but on dozens of confusing and unsettling issues of our times—the changing roles of men and women; the continuing destruction of the environment; diversity and multiculturalism; repressed memory and childhood sexual abuse; and the role of the Internet in the information age—among many others.
I cannot imagine a better way to be introduced to Ken Wilber than this book. It brings the debate about evolution, consciousness, and our capacity for transformation to an entirely new level. More practically, it will save you many missteps and wrong turns on whatever wisdom path you choose to take.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING is one of the most popular books I have written, which is heartening in that it contains a good deal of the integrative vision that I have tried to develop. “Integrative” simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible—from the East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality. As one critic put it, this integrative approach “honors and incorporates more truth than any approach in history.” I would obviously like to believe that is true, but you can best be the judge of that as you read the following pages.
And even if it were true, so what? What does an “integrative approach” even mean? And what does it have to do with me in today’s world? Well, let’s have a quick look at what it might mean in business, science, and spirituality.
Scholars of the many and various human cultures—premodern, modern, and postmodern—have increasingly been struck by their rich diversity: the beautiful, multicultural, many-hued rainbow of humanity, with multiple differences in religion, ethics, values, and beliefs. But many scholars have also been struck by some of the similarities of these cultures as well. Certain patterns in language, cognition, and human physiology, for example, are quite similar wherever they appear. Humans everywhere have the capacity to form images, symbols, and concepts, and although the contents of those concepts often vary, the capacity is universal. These universal and cross-cultural patterns tell us some very important things about the human condition, because if you have found something shared by most or even all humans, you have probably found something of profound significance.
What if we took all of these common patterns and put them together? What kind of picture would we get?
This would be very much like the human Genome Project (the complete mapping of the genes of human DNA), except that this would be a type of human Consciousness and Culture Project: the mapping of all those cultural capacities that humans everywhere have access to. This would give us a rather extraordinary map of human potentials, a great map of human possibilities. And it would further help us to recognize any of those potentials that we—that you and I—might not yet be fulfilling. It would be a map of our own higher stages of growth and a map of our own greater opportunities.
You might be surprised to know that a good deal of this Consciousness and Culture Project has in fact been completed. The result of the research of thousands of workers from around the world, the Consciousness and Culture Project has already disclosed a profound range of higher states of consciousness, stages of growth, patterns of spirituality, and forms of science that often dwarf the more restricted versions sanctioned in our present culture of scientific materialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the postmodern celebration of surfaces.
As you will see, these greater potentials and possibilities are a crucial ingredient in the bigger picture that is presented in the following pages—a bigger picture that is a kind of “theory of everything.” A “theory of everything” is just that: if we assume that all the world’s cultures have important but partial truths, then how would all of those truths fit together into a richly woven tapestry, a unity-in-diversity, a multicolored yet single rainbow?
And once that rainbow is clear, how does it apply to me? Perhaps very simply: a more accurate, comprehensive map of human potentials will directly translate into a more effective business, politics, medicine, education, and spirituality. On the other hand, if you have a partial, truncated, fragmented map of the human being, you will have a partial, truncated, fragmented approach to business, medicine, spirituality, and so on. In garbage, out garbage.
Thus, no matter what your field of endeavor, a “theory of everything” will likely make it much more effective. So it is not surprising that this more comprehensive map of human possibilities has seen an explosion of interest in virtually all fields, including politics, business, education, health care, law, ecology, science, and religion. For those interested in some of these recent applications, see A Theory of Everything—An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality.
But the basics are all here, in this volume, which will give you all that you need of this comprehensive map to see if it is useful for you. And although this comprehensive map might sound complex, once you get the hang of it—as I will try to show in the following pages—it is surprisingly simple and easy to use, and by the time you finish reading, you will have all the tools you need to begin applying it if you wish.
One last point: the whole idea of a more comprehensive map is to enrich, not deny, your own present understanding. Some people are threatened by a more integral approach, because they imagine that it somehow means that what they are doing now is wrong. But this would be like a great French chef being threatened by Mexican cooking. We are simply adding new styles, not condemning those that already exist. I love French cooking, but I also like Mexican. They are not going to cease being what they are if both are fully appreciated. Most of the resistance to an integral approach comes from French chefs who despise Mexican cooking—an attitude that is perhaps less than helpful.
And so, in the following pages, you will find an international style of “cooking”—a universal smorgasbord of human possibilities, all arrayed as a shimmering rainbow, an extraordinary spectrum of your own deeper and higher potentials. This map is simply an invitation to explore the vast terrain of your own consciousness, the almost unlimited potentials of your own being and becoming, the nearly infinite expanse of your own primordial awareness, and thus arrive at that place which you have never left: your own deepest nature and your own original face.
In the following pages I do not offer any formulas for getting rich quickly or for discovering immediate solutions to all personal problems. What is explained are reliable, tested and verified ways to experience satisfying spiritual growth and live happily and effectively. My thesis is simple: for prosperity to be real or authentic, it must be based on an awareness of spiritual realities and on compliant cooperation with the principles which enable it to be experienced.
In 1994, a department of the United Nations published a progress report to provide information about global conditions and human affairs. It reported that, in comparison to conditions fifty years previously, more people had access to food and literacy levels were higher. Even so, almost two billion people, most of them in economically undeveloped regions of the world, were impoverished. Approximately one third of the planet’s human inhabitants were illiterate. The gap between rich people and poor people had widened. In some countries, the average annual income per person was less than three hundred dollars. Ten countries had nearly seventy percent of the world’s poorest people.
Other sources report that global human population is increasing at the rate of eighty million people every year: approximately six and a half million a month; one and a half million each week; more than two hundred thousand each day. According to a report published by World Watch Institute, there are already some signs of faltering growth trends in countries that were expected to have the greatest population increases in the near future. Population in thirty-two industrialized countries has stabilized because of declining birthrates.
A few countries, including Russia, Italy, the United States, and Japan, have declining populations. In some developing countries where population growth will probably be slower in a few years, more people are dying. India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, for instance, are beginning to experience difficulty in feeding, housing, and educating increasing numbers of children while having to confront the challenges of falling water tables, deforestation, and soil erosion caused in part by rapid population growth in recent decades. Some observers of global trends are of the opinion that human population growth will slow down because developing countries will begin to encourage smaller families or unrestrained birth rates will result in the spread of famine and disease. The major threats to human security on the planet are conflicts within nations because of socioeconomic deprivation and differences, and ethnic and religious intolerance.
The period in human history through which we are now passing is characterized by rapid changes in the outer realm, while indications of accelerated intellectual growth and spiritual awakening are increasingly observable in the transformations occurring in the social order. That we are being confronted by effects of powerful evolutionary causes is obvious to anyone who is sufficiently perceptive to examine the evidence. I look upon the world scene with an abiding sense of wonder and am serenely optimistic about our near and distant future possibilities. I hope you are viewing the unfolding drama of life with a thankful heart and pronouncing it good.
Because of these unfolding circumstances, and the widespread interest in matters related to facilitating expanded states of consciousness and improving functional abilities, the information in this edition of An Easy Guide to Meditation will, I feel, be helpful to many readers. The first book issued under this title was published in 1978 and distributed in many editions in several countries. Now, to make the message even more widely available, the text has been newly written, the format is designed for convenient reference, and the price is within the means of anyone with a sincere interest in the subject.
After reading this book, and putting into practice some of the recommended routines, please consider sharing copies with people whom you know to be interested in enhancing their lives. Having a harmonious relationship with the Presence and Power that produced the realm of nature and enlivens it, and which, ultimately, determines satisfying outcomes for all worthwhile endeavors, is certainly a most favorable condition for all of us.
During my early teenage years I pondered the meaning of life and aspired to clearly know it. Near the end of my eighteenth year I was fortunate to meet my guru Paramahansa Yogananda in Los Angeles, California, and to be accepted by him for training. Now, as I write these words, forty-five years have passed; each has provided invaluable opportunities for continued spiritual growth and service. I have traveled the world to share this information and have discovered that, behind the screens of social fabric and cultural influences, all people are, at the core, the same: that one, divine essence is the reality of us all.
Everything I recommend in these pages, I do, or have done. The basic principles, practices, and guidelines are universal. I did not originate them. They are not mine, nor do they belong to anyone. Some of the insights shared here, and explanations of how I view our relationship with the Infinite, are my own because I, like everyone else, see from my personal perspective. Take to heart whatever is meaningful to you. Use your intellectual skills to determine the meaning of whatever is not immediately clear to you. Use your intuitive abilities to see beyond words and concepts, to truth — that which is factual. Doing this is the only approach to understanding the processes of life that will satisfy your heart.
If you are a beginning meditator, the guidelines in the early chapters will be sufficient to enable you to practice with benefit. If you a more experienced meditator, review your practice to be sure you are doing it correctly, then use the various techniques and procedures to improve your meditative skills. Even if you are not inspired when you first sit to meditate, sit still anyway, and wait in the silence. In time, your innate, soul urge to have awareness restored to flawless clarity will implement the meditation process and direct its actions to a successful conclusion.
Planet Earth is our present dwelling place but it is not our permanent abode. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What are we supposed to do while here? What will become of us when we depart this world? How can we awaken to higher understanding and live with meaningful purpose? These are questions we should ask until the true answers are known. I pray that the allness of life becomes known to you, and that all your needs are met and your destiny is fulfilled.
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (English Edition)
From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.
At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness.
In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution.
This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.
Any book with a title like Why Buddhism Is True should have some careful qualification somewhere along the way. We might as well get that over with:
1. I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism—reincarnation, for example—but rather about the naturalistic parts: ideas that fall squarely within modern psychology and philosophy. That said, I am talking about some of Buddhism’s more extraordinary, even radical, claims—claims that, if you take them seriously, could revolutionize your view of yourself and of the world. This book is intended to get you to take these claims seriously.
2. I’m of course aware that there’s no one Buddhism, but rather various Buddhist traditions, which differ on all kinds of doctrines. But this book focuses on a kind of “common core”—fundamental ideas that are found across the major Buddhist traditions, even if they get different degrees of emphasis, and may assume somewhat different form, in different traditions.
3. I’m not getting into super-fine-grained parts of Buddhist psychology and philosophy. For example, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, a collection of early Buddhist texts, asserts that there are eighty-nine kinds of consciousness, twelve of which are unwholesome. You may be relieved to hear that this book will spend no time trying to evaluate that claim.
4. I realize that true is a tricky word, and asserting the truth of anything, certainly including deep ideas in philosophy or psychology, is a tricky business. In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it. Some early Buddhist writings go so far as to raise doubts about whether such a thing as “truth” ultimately exists. On the other hand, the Buddha, in his most famous sermon, lays out what are commonly called “The Four Noble Truths,” so it’s not as if the word true has no place in discussions of Buddhist thought. In any event, I’ll try to proceed with appropriate humility and nuance as I make my argument that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important.
5. Asserting the validity of core Buddhist ideas doesn’t necessarily say anything, one way or the other, about other spiritual or philosophical traditions. There will sometimes be logical tension between a Buddhist idea and an idea in another tradition, but often there won’t be. The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
NEW YORK, April 18, 2018 — Author Robert Wright discusses insights from his recent book Why Buddhism Is True with Juju Chang of ABC News. (1 hr., 19 sec.)
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (英語) ペーパーバック – 2001/2/1
Eckhart Tolle (著)
The bestselling self-help book of its generation - which has now sold over a million copies in the UK alone. Eckhart Tolle demonstrates how to live a healthier and happier life by living in the present moment. To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle offers simple language and a question and answer format to show us how to silence our thoughts and create a liberated life. Surrender to the present moment, where problems do not exist. It is here we find our joy, are able to embrace our true selves and discover that we are already complete and perfect. If we are able to be fully present and take each step in the Now we will be opening ourselves to the transforming experience of The Power of Now. It is in your hands. Discover The Power of Now.
The Power of Nowの原文も読んでみました。長年にわたりいろいろな悟りに関する本を読んだり実践してきましたが、今ひとつ納得出来ない状態でした。この本を読んで、ああそうだったのかと今までの疑問が溶けてしまいました。[Power of now]を実践するには、相当時間がかかるとは思いますが、明確な行くべき方向がわかったので、安心感のある生活に変わっていきつつあります。勝手に働き続ける思考（エゴ）から脱出する方法もわかりやすく書かれています。
Oprah Winfrey Interviews "THE POWER OF NOW" & "A NEW EARTH" Author Eckhart Tolle (SuperSoul Series)
The Power of Now is essential reading, and Eckhart's follow-up books (Stillness Speaks and A New Earth) explain the core principle that has resonated so deeply with me and thousands of others:
The only moment we ever really have is this one. Happiness isn't in the future or the past, but in mindful awareness of the present.
Spiritual Teacher and author Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany and educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge.
At the age of twenty-nine a profound inner transformation radically changed the course of his life. The next few years were devoted to understanding, integrating and deepening that transformation, which marked the beginning of an intense inward journey.
Later, he began to work in London with individuals and small groups as a counselor and spiritual teacher. Since 1995 he has lived in Vancouver, Canada.
Eckhart Tolle is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Power of Now (translated into 33 languages) and the highly acclaimed follow-up A New Earth, which are widely regarded as two of the most influential spiritual books of our time.
There is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. Many people use the word God to describe it; I often call it Being. The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very presence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
BEING IS NOT ONLY BEYOND BUT ALSO DEEP WITHIN every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to understand it.
You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of “feeling-realization” is enlightenment.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflicts within and without become the norm.
The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of your connectedness is identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself.
THE BEGINNING OF FREEDOM is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind.
The Suicide of the West author explains his anti-Trumpism, evolution on culture-war issues, and growing attraction to libertarianism.
In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks of what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."
As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.
"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fear-mongers and reactionaries.
Pope Francis’s condemnation of capital punishment is simple and unambiguous: It is inadmissible. No exceptions for especially heinous crimes; no loopholes allowing execution when other lives might be in jeopardy, as in past Catholic teachings. No, declared the pope; state-sanctioned killing is always an unjustifiable attack on the dignity of human life, it’s always wrong.
That it is. It is an arbitrary and hugely expensive barbarism whose victims in the United States are often black, poor or mentally disturbed — and sometimes innocent. Over the past 45 years, when 1,479 people were executed in this country, 162 people sentenced to death have been exonerated. All the arguments for executing criminals have been debunked: It is useless as a deterrent and it does not save lives by getting rid of murderers. Many countries, including nearly all Western democracies with the shameful exception of the United States, have rejected it.
Since his election to the papacy five years ago, Francis has introduced a less formal, more pragmatic and progressive approach to his ministry, taking strong stands on issues like climate change and consumerism. His approach has often drawn criticism from Catholic conservatives, and the new teaching on the death penalty is bound to generate a heated debate — indeed it already has — on what it means for Catholic judges and politicians in the United States.
The church’s new position on the death penalty carries no formal punishment for defying it, but in eliminating any ambiguity it does compel Catholic officials at least to find concrete reasons to not abide by it. Four Supreme Court justices are Catholic, as is Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the court; among governors, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Catholic and staunch supporter of the death penalty, has already declared that he will not block an execution scheduled for this month.
There will also be conservative Catholics who reject the pope’s reasoning for changing his church’s teaching on capital punishment after centuries in which it was tolerated. A letter to bishops accompanying the revised teaching explained at length that it was a development of the teachings of the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, reflecting changes in awareness that had taken place in recent times.
Yet the importance of the pope’s definitive rejection of capital punishment is not solely for Catholics, or for Christians, as the Vatican made clear in saying that the church would work “for its abolition worldwide.”
Capital punishment has been long abandoned across Europe and indefinitely suspended in Russia, and even in the United States its use has been declining for years. There were 23 executions in 2017, compared to 98 in 1999, and 14 so far this year. And though 31 states still allow the death penalty, only 10 have carried out executions since 2014.
The man awaiting execution in Nebraska is a prime example of the absurdity of capital punishment. Carey Dean Moore, now 60, has been on death row for 38 years and few Nebraskans remember what he was condemned for. How taking his life would serve justice is a mystery even to many state legislators, who voted to repeal the death penalty in 2015, only to have Governor Ricketts lead a campaign to restore it.
President Trump would most likely be on Mr. Ricketts’ side, not the pope’s. The president has expressed support for the death penalty several times, as in this tweet after a man killed eight people with a truck in New York City last October: “NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!”
In fact, very few of those who have been executed or are on death row committed anything as monstrous as that terror attack by Sayfullo Saipov, who is awaiting trial. Yet even the most serious crimes, in Pope Francis’s view, do not deprive the perpetrator of the “dignity of the person,” and modern prisons are fully capable of protecting citizens from him or her.
For those who have long opposed capital punishment as cruel and pointless, as has this page, the only lingering question is why the Catholic Church or any religious denomination that still condones executions would take so long to recognize that they are simply inadmissible. The same can be asked of Americans, whose Constitution so clearly prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Seventy-three years after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took more than 200,000 lives by the end of that year, we are no closer to a world without nuclear weapons. Pledges to achieve that goal, which Japan has advocated for decades, were repeated in ceremonies held over the past week to mark the anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of the two cities in the closing days of World War II. But more than seven decades later, we can hardly say that a path has been laid out to eliminate nuclear arms.
Last year, a landmark treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons was adopted at the United Nations. But without the participation of nuclear weapons powers as well as countries that rely on the “nuclear umbrella” of their allies, including Japan, there is little prospect that the treaty would effectively pave the way for disarmament. Today, more than 14,000 nuclear warheads exist in the world.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose call for a “world free of nuclear weapons” in his Prague speech earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, became two years ago the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. The U.S. strategy for nuclear weapons, however, did not undergo substantial changes during the Obama presidency. And his successor, Donald Trump, released a Nuclear Posture Review in February that promoted the use of smaller nuclear weapons that would be easier to use, and did not rule out pre-emptive nuclear attacks in order to protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Tokyo said it “highly appreciates” the new U.S. strategy in that it clarifies Washington’s commitment to providing extended deterrence to its allies.
In a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, Trump signed a joint statement calling for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. But as subsequent progress in U.S.-North Korea relations remains slow, any optimism that the summit would result in the near-term end to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program — a serious threat to regional security — has quickly dissipated.
While campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons as the sole country in history to suffer a nuclear attack during warfare, Japan has continued to rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its own security — and opposed the U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons on the grounds that such an accord without the involvement of nuclear weapons states would have little effect on nuclear disarmament. Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki called this week on the government to endorse the nuclear ban treaty. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, attending the ceremonies in both cities, reiterated that Japan will seek to contribute to the goal by serving as a bridge between nuclear weapons powers and non-nuclear weapons states — although concrete results from such efforts do not appear to be on the horizon.
This stalemate in the effort to eliminate nuclear arms must not lead us to give up, in view of the threat from such weapons that continues to grip the world to this day.
The 73rd anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II marks the last one under Emperor Akihito, whose abdication next April will officially end his reign and the Heisei Era. The fact that Emperor Akihito, who in 1989 became the first emperor to ascend the throne as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people” under the postwar Constitution, is stepping down soon due to his advanced age testifies to the lengthy time that has passed since the end of the war.
The Showa Era of his late father, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, witnessed the turbulence that Japan experienced during its 64-year period — from its rush into war and its devastating defeat in 1945 to the postwar reconstruction and development under the war-renouncing Constitution.
As the subsequent Heisei Era is set to wrap up next year, memories of the last war that Japan fought and lost — which left 3.1 million Japanese dead — may be fading fast for a large majority of the nation’s citizens. The number of bereaved families of the war dead taking part in the government-organized annual Aug. 15 ceremony to mourn for those who died in the war is declining each year. Today, the number of people born after the war has topped 100 million, accounting for more than 80 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, one of the duties that Emperor Akihito has apparently imposed on himself as the “symbol of the state” is his series of visits over the years to places, both in Japan and abroad, that were the sites of fierce battles and devastation during the war — including Iwojima in 1994, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in 1995, Saipan in 2005, Peleliu Island in Palau in 2015 and to the Philippines in 2016.
According to people close to him, his visits to these sites were intended to pray for the souls of all the people who died in the war — not just the Japanese — and to keep the memories of the war from fading away.
Most Japanese now lack firsthand experience of the war, and with the passage of times it will become increasingly difficult for us to keep the memories of the war alive and to pass them on to future generations. The 15th of August should be a day for each and every one of us to think what we can do to remember the war that ended 73 years ago and what it tells us as we go forward.
“Reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse over the last war, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated. Together with all of our people, I now pay my heartfelt tribute to all those who lost their lives in the war, both on the battlefields and elsewhere, and pray for world peace and for the continuing development of our country,” the Emperor said in his address to the Aug. 15, 2015, Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead on the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII — a message that he essentially repeated in the two past years.
Praying for the people who lost their lives in the war has indeed been a key purpose of the trips that Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko made over the span of his reign to the sites of fierce battles involving Japanese forces in the Pacific War.
Since their days as crown prince and princess, the Imperial couple has visited Okinawa — which experienced fierce ground battles that killed large numbers of civilians in the closing days of the war and came under extended U.S. military rules in the postwar decades — a total of 11 times, the latest in March this year that took place reportedly based on their strong wishes.
Since their days as crown prince and princess, the Imperial couple has visited Okinawa — which experienced fierce ground battles that killed large numbers of civilians in the closing days of the war and came under extended U.S. military rules in the postwar decades — a total of 11 times, the latest in March this year that took place reportedly based on their strong wishes.
Yutaka Kawashima, a former grand chamberlain who served the Emperor as a top aide, says the trips that Emperor Akihito made to these places — to mourn for the dead and reflect on the sorrow of the families who lost them — carry the message that the war must not be forgotten.
In his August 2015 statement marking the 70th year after the end of the war, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, “We Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future.”
It is indeed an obligation for each of us to not forget our last war and to think what needs to be done so that the folly of war will not be repeated in the future.
On the 73rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II on Wednesday, people across the nation remembered the country’s past and expressed hopes that memories of the war will not be forgotten.
At the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo, visitors spoke of their aspirations for a peaceful future, some criticizing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his calls to revise the pacific Constitution in order to acknowledge clearly the presence of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and enable them to conduct fully-fledged military operations.
“The anniversary of the end of the war is a good opportunity to stop and think about what happened in the past,” said Kazunori Adachi, a high school history teacher from Hyogo Prefecture who had traveled to Tokyo for the summer holidays.
学校の歴史の先生である足立先生は終戦記念日は過去に何が起こったのかを知り考える絶好の機会だと言う。
“There are many students who have no interest in the war, and a lot of them don’t even know which countries Japan fought against. Somebody has got to hand history down (to younger generations) and I want to do that as a teacher,” the 56-year-old said.
Adachi emphasized the need for a secular war memorial without political overtones like the Chidorigafuchi facility, saying he believes Japanese politicians who visit nearby Yasukuni Shrine — where convicted war criminals are honored along with the war dead — are effectively going against national interests.
a secular war memorial 無宗教の戦没者追悼施設
overtone 付帯的な意味、ニュアンス
Michiko Tanaka, a 71-year-old from Hokkaido, says she comes here almost every summer to pray for the soul of her uncle, who starved to death on Woleai Atoll in the Pacific islands, now part of Micronesia, in 1944 while fighting for Japan.
“His family received only the tip of what was claimed to be his little finger as his remains, so I believe the rest of his body is here,” she said.
Tanaka also expressed her opposition to making constitutional revisions, saying, “I get the feeling that Japan is now moving toward war and that would mean my uncle died in vain.”
Meanwhile, perennial visitors at Yasukuni Shrine thanked those who died in the war for giving their lives to bring peace and prosperity to Japan, while some expressed disappointment that Abe did not come to personally pay homage.
perennial絶え間ない
pay homage参拝する
“Of course I want him to come here,” Masanari Nakamoto, 70, said of Abe.
The prime minister refrained from visiting the Shinto shrine for the sixth year in a row, but sent a ritual donation and dispatched ruling party lawmaker Masahiko Shibayama on his behalf.
“But I guess there are diplomatic issues that stand out more. It’s disappointing that Japan does not have enough power” to go through with a prime minister’s visit despite criticisms from neighboring countries, Nakamoto added.
Countries such as China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s wartime aggression, see the shrine as a symbol of the country’s past militarism, and protest when its leaders go to Yasukuni.
「the shrine as a symbol of the country’s past militarism」ということですが、これが政治問題化したのは、日本側が火付け役だったことは間違いない。
外交問題化すること自体がおかしい。内政干渉だと撥ね付ければよいだけのこと。日本の政治家の決断力を求められる。安倍ちゃんにはそのガッツがないですな。
An 82-year-old Tokyo woman who identified herself only by her surname, Murosawa, said she believes Abe as well as Emperor Akihito actually want to visit but can’t due to the circumstances. “I pray for the day when they will be able to visit the shrine and pay respect to the war dead who sacrificed themselves for Japan,” she said.
東京大学理学部数学科卒、都立大学理学研究科（数学専攻）修了。
大学生時代から、平岡塾で数学を教え、1981年に、中高生対象の塾ＳＥＧ（科学的教育グループ）を創立。また、同時に、駿台予備学校、河合塾でも教鞭をとり、1985年より、月刊「大学への数学」に連載を執筆。定積分の「回転体の求積の傘型分割」、「行列のｎ乗の、多項式の割り算を利用した解法」などを発表し、一世を風靡する。
また、数学だけでなく、英語教育を改革すべく、ＳＥＧで新しい英語文法指導法を模索するが、文法指導法の改良の限界を悟り、Graded Direct Method等、英語で英語を教える直接教授法の研究・実践を行うなかで、「どうして英語が使えない」の著者酒井邦秀（当時、電気通信大学）と知り合い、英語多読を実践。その効果を確信し、SSS英語学習法研究会を設立し、英語多読の実践・普及活動を始める。自らが代表をつとめる中高生対象塾ＳＥＧでも、多読教室を始め、中１〜大学生・社会人まで、自ら多読指導にあたる。現在は、多読・多聴を軸に、文法・語彙・会話・Writingを組み合わせた、より効果的な英語指導を研究。ＳＳＳ英語多読研究会理事長、日本多読学会事務局長、「多読多聴マガジン」アドバイザー、Extensive Reading Foundation 理事をつとめ、多読指導の実践・研究・普及活動を行っている。
COLIN WILSON AND THE OCCULT A FOREWORD BY COLIN STANLEY
When his now classic study The Occult was published in 1971, some critics, fans and scholars of Colin Wilson’s previous non-fiction – particularly the ‘Outsider Cycle’ in which he had created his ‘new existentialism’ and established himself as a philosopher of some note – were surprised, others downright horrified. It had seemed that after the terrible mauling he had received from the critics and the tabloid press, in the late 1950s, his reputation was recovering somewhat and his career taking an upturn. Many thought this leap into the rather contentious unknown was a retrograde step: both mystifying and likely to be a disaster. Wilson, they felt, was merely jumping onto the occult bandwagon in order to make money.
When the book was suggested, he made no secret of the fact that the occult was not a subject that interested him greatly and when he sought the advice of none other than the poet Robert Graves, asking him whether he should write it, he was told very firmly that he should not. But with a young family to support, he had spent far too much of the 1960s on the arduous American university lecture trail, keeping him away from home for lengthy periods of time. This was to be his first commissioned work, a sign that he had finally ‘arrived’ as a professional writer. The financial terms from his would-be publishers, Random House in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK (a $4000 advance), were obviously too tempting and so he went ahead.
During the course of his research, he found his attitude to the subject changing:
Although I have always been curious about the ‘occult’ ... it has never been one of my major interests, like philosophy, or science, or even music. ... It was not until two years ago, when I began the systematic research for this book, that I realised the remarkable consistency of the evidence for such matters as life after death, out-of-body experiences (astral projection), reincarnation. In a basic sense my attitude remains unchanged; I still regard philosophy – the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by intellect – as being more relevant, more important, than questions of the ‘occult’. But the weighing of the evidence ... has convinced me that the basic claims of ‘occultism’ are true.
The completed book, dedicated to Graves, was published on October 4, 1971 with a distinctive dust jacket, in the UK, depicting a large open eye.
Up until then Wilson had always anticipated trends in literature and thought, rather than being one for jumping onto bandwagons. In 1961, for example, he published with Pat Pitman An Encyclopedia of Murder, a book which anticipated the boom in true crime studies by almost twenty years. His The Strength to Dream – a book on literature and imagination, published in 1962 – heralded the late sixties’ obsession with fantasy and science fiction literature. The late sixties also brought about a surge in interest in all things mystical and on this occasion Wilson was not altogether ahead of the game: the pioneers were Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, whose The Morning of the Magicians had been a bestseller in France for several years. His publishers clearly wanted Wilson to replicate its success in the English-speaking world and he did not disappoint them: his monumental study went on to be a bestseller and an inspiration to many who read it. So although he lost some readers by taking this seemingly unexpected and bold move into the occult, he gained many, many more.
In fact Wilson had not abandoned philosophy at all. Indeed, he always considered his ‘serious’ occult books – i.e. ‘The Occult Trilogy’* – to be a logical extension of his ‘new existentialism’, providing evidence that man possesses latent powers which, if tapped and harnessed, could lead to hugely expanded consciousness and potentially even an evolutionary leap. In a lengthy Introduction to the new Watkins edition of Beyond the Occult, published in 2008, he wrote:
When The Occult appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics, and abandoned the rigour of my ‘Outsider’ books. To me, such a view was incomprehensible. It seemed obvious to me that if the ‘paranormal’ was a reality – as I was increasingly convinced that it was – then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.
Readers of Wilson’s fiction, however, were definitely not taken by surprise and had no qualms about his serious foray into the subject; for occult instances and anecdotes abound in all of his novels from the first in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, Ritual in the Dark (1960), onwards. For example, in his 1963 novel The World of Violence (published in the US as The Violent World of Hugh Greene), the young protagonist Hugh, after listening to a piece of music by Beethoven that deeply moves him, sees a ghost (which he calls a ‘presence’) in the garden and speculates, ‘... it seems to me that I saw the “presence” in the garden because I was in a disturbed state after listening to the Beethoven, and some new faculty in me had been awakened.’ The important phrase here being, of course, ‘some new faculty in me had been awakened’. It seems that here we have the germ of an idea that became the focal point of The Occult, that is to say ‘Faculty X’ (‘that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present’), formulated originally in 1966 and featured in his novel The Philosopher’s Stone in 1968. Wilson considered ‘Faculty X’ to be ‘... the key not only to so-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race ... [and] ... it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.’
Also in 1963, Wilson’s novel The Man Without a Shadow (published in the US as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme), the second in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, appeared in print. It featured Caradoc Cunningham, a larger than life character and practitioner of sex magic, based on the ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley, who, when he first meets Sorme, impresses him with his telepathic powers. This anticipates the chapter on Crowley in The Occult by several years. Wilson then went on to write a short biography, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, in 1987 (recently reprinted).
In a later novel, The Glass Cage, published in 1966, Damon Reade, a William Blake scholar, is approached by the police in the hope that he can help them catch the Thames Murderer, who leaves a quote from Blake beside each victim. Reade has a file of correspondence from Blake fans and decides to take a couple of the weirder letters to an old man in his village who has ‘strange powers’ and whom he believes will be able to tell intuitively if one of them has been written by the murderer.
And in the final part of the Sorme trilogy, The God of the Labyrinth (The Hedonists in the US), published in 1970, just before The Occult, Sorme researches an eighteenth-century rake by the name of Esmond Donelly. On an increasing number of occasions he finds himself seeing the world through Donelly’s eyes, gradually becoming his subject.
So we have devil worshippers, ghosts, telepathy, men with ‘strange powers’, duo-consciousness, and there are many other such ‘occult’ instances in the early novels, most of which had been out of print for some time before Valancourt Books set about systematically reprinting them in 2013.
Wilson confirmed his early interest in the subject in the opening chapter of The Occult, when he informed us that as a twenty-year-old, living in rented accommodation in London with his wife and young child, forced to work in various dead-end factory jobs – long before the publication of his first book, The Outsider, in 1956 – he read all the books on magic and mysticism that he could find in libraries; not just as an escape from his lot but ‘... because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share.’ By the time he came to write the book, in the late 1960s, he had apparently accumulated a library of over five hundred volumes on the subject. And in his 2004 autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, he revealed that his interest in the subject went right back to his childhood:
As a child, I had been fascinated by ghost stories. My grandmother was a spiritualist, so I accepted the idea of life after death from the age of six or so.
In the early days of the Second World War, the Sunday People had published a series by Air Marshall Dowding, in which he discussed the after-death experiences of an airman, as relayed through a spirit medium. The next world, the dead airman claimed, was not all that different from this one, except that there were no discomforts; grass, trees and sky all looked much as on earth, but when he tried swimming, the water was not wet, so it felt rather like swimming in cotton wool. I read the series avidly every week.
Our local library in Leicester, St Barnabas, had an excellent section on psychical research, and I read all I could find by Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, and Poltergeist over England ...
Despite the advice against it, writing The Occult turned out to be very advantageous to Wilson both critically and financially. For it was, by and large, received favourably by the critics, sold very well on both sides of the Atlantic and has been translated into many different languages. Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, who were instrumental in turning The Outsider into a bestseller in 1956, but had subsequently changed their minds and then ignored his work for fifteen years, relaxed their embargo and came out in support of him again. Indeed, Connolly went on to write:
I am very impressed by this book, not only by its erudition but by the marshalling of it, and above all by the good-natured, unaffected charm of the author whose reasoning is never too far-fetched, who is never carried away by preposterous theories. Mr Wilson’s mental processes are akin to Aldous Huxley.
Alan Hull Walton, writing in Books and Bookmen, declared:
... in an age of talented mediocrity, [Colin Wilson] is blessed with far more than talent – he is blessed with insight, sincerity, humility, an extraordinarily wide learning (comparable to that of the ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance), and also manifests something of the breadth of genius of a Goethe. ... His new book ... is by far and away his best work to date, and worthy to be placed on the same shelf alongside William James, F. W. H. Myers’ monumental study of Human Personality ... and Frazer’s Golden Bough. ... A review of a thousand words ... cannot do justice to a book of this calibre. ... The Occult is a valuable ‘must’ for anyone with the remotest interest in the future of civilised man.
James Blish in The Spectator advised that ‘anyone wishing to begin reading in this field might well begin with this book (which also contains a good bibliography)’.
In the US, Joyce Carol Oates praised the work as a ‘book of wonders’, recommending it as: ‘one of those rich, strange, perplexing, infinitely surprising works that repay many readings. Though it contains a great deal of history it is really, like most of Colin Wilson’s books, about the future.’ And Clifford P. Bendau, in his book on Wilson’s work, wrote:
The Occult establishes that Wilson has the ability to research and interpret vast quantities of information. It is apparent that he is able to convey consistent and challenging ideas that prod those who are most comfortable with their established beliefs.
The book’s success inspired Wilson’s publishers to commission another, Mysteries: an investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural, an equally bulky tome, which appeared in 1978, and then a third, ten years later, Beyond the Occult, which summed up his twenty years of research into the subject. The three books amount to a monumental 1,600 pages and also spawned many ephemeral popular illustrated spin-offs – too numerous to mention here individually – but listed entirely in my guide to his ‘Occult Trilogy’ published by Axis Mundi in 2013.
According to Wilson, the reviews ‘had a serious and respectful tone that I hadn’t heard since The Outsider’ and in his 2003 Introduction to the Watkins reprint, he wrote:
But for me, The Occult did a great deal more than make me ‘respectable’, it also served as a kind of awakening. Before 1970, I had been inclined to dismiss ‘the occult’ as superstitious nonsense. Writing The Occult made me aware that the paranormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has a great deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses to take it into account is simply shutting his eyes to half the universe.
Colin Stanley is author of The Colin Wilson Bibliography, 1956–2010; Colin Wilson’s ‘Outsider Cycle’: A guide for students; Colin Wilson’s ‘Occult Trilogy’: A guide for students; and Colin Wilson’s Existential Literary Criticism: A guide for students.
He has edited Around the Outsider: Essays presented to Colin Wilson on the occasion of his 80th birthday and Colin Wilson, a Celebration: Essays and recollections. He edits the series ‘Colin Wilson Studies’, which features essays on Wilson’s work by scholars worldwide.
He has written Introductions to new editions of four of Colin Wilson’s novels: Ritual in the Dark, The Man Without a Shadow, The Philosopher’s Stone and Necessary Doubt.
ショックだ！大好きだったアレサ・フランクリンが死んでしまった。今ロイターから入った速報で悲しみを禁じ得ない。60〜70年代の彼女が大好きだった。ご冥福をお祈りする。
‘Say a Little Prayer’: Music legend Aretha Franklin dies aged 76 — RT
5つ星のうち5.0
The Meaning of Life from a Buddhist Perspectiveの原著を超える訳本2007年2月1日
形式: 文庫Amazonで購入
この本はLondon のCamden Hall で３日間にわたって行なわれた講演をまとめた英文の書“The Meaning of Life from a Buddhist Perspective”の訳本です。原書にない翻訳者の詳細な注が、ダライラマ本人の話に勝るとも劣らない丁寧な解説で、仏教の初学者には理解の助けになります。また、日本人向けの内容として、翻訳者とのインタビューをもとにした章が新たに付け加えられています。この意味では、原書を超える内容になっています。ただし、原書と比較してみると、挿絵はすべて差し替えられおり、特に、カラーのものは原書の方が鮮明です。ダライラマが口語で話している部分が文語に書き換えられ、彼の喋ったジョークや講演が行なわれた日付けが省略されています。章の分け方も原文とことなります。また、残念ながら、質疑応答の部分がすべて削除されています。よって、原書の忠実な翻訳とはいえません。ダライラマの研究者には、英文原書をあたる必要があります。
“Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.”
—Mark Levin
Movie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, “One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation.” With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential exposé of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry
志恩さんの仲間新羅人のアクエリアンは傍流版入館禁止です
↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓
1128:アクエリアン
19/02/23(土) 09:55:11
Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (英語) ペーパーバック ･ 2012/6/26
“Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.”
･Mark Levin
Movie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, “One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation.” With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential expos･ of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry
Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan (Nias Monographs) (英語) ペーパーバック – 2000/4/20
Ian Reader (著)
The Tokyo subway attack in March 1995 was just one of a series of criminal activities including murder, kidnapping, extortion, and the illegal manufacture of arms and drugs carried out by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo, under the guidance of its leader Asahara Shoko. Reader looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks, why did a religious movement ostensibly focussed on yoga, meditation, asceticism and the pursuit of enlightenment become involved in violent activities?
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」2
Reader discusses Aum's spiritual roots, placing it in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns. Asahara's teaching are examined from his earliest public pronouncements through to his sermons at the time of the attack, and statements he has made in court. In analysing how Aum not only manufactured nerve gases but constructed its own internal doctrinal justifications for using them Reader focuses on the formation of what made all this possible: Aum's internal thought-world, and on how this was developed.
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」3
Reader argues that despite the horrors of this particular case, Aum should not be seen as unique, nor as solely a political or criminal terror group. Rather it can best be analysed within the context of religious violence, as an extreme example of a religious movement that has created friction with the wider world that escalated into violence.
イアンリーダー著「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan」4
S. Tanaka
5つ星のうち5.0
vivid, thorough, chilling
2013年1月22日 - (Amazon.com)
This is such a well written book. I'd read Murakami's "Underground," which was a series of interviews with victims and perpetrators of the Aum attacks. But that book, while doing its job in humanizing those involved, does very little to explain how events like this come about. I've always resisted the idea of "those crazy brainwashed ____" as a way of describing these kinds of groups. Ian Reader meticulous documents the process by which an innocuous-seeming religious group gradually turns obsessive, hateful, paranoid, and deadly. It's also about as much of a page-turner as this kind of a study can be.
Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism
Introduction: Ends and Beginnings
It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
Aum’s obsession with nuclear weapons and with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in particular connected with interview work I had done in that city in the early 1960s on the psychological effects of the atomic bomb and on the psychology of the survivor. In subsequent work I had explored the dangers of “nuclearism,” the embrace and even deification of nuclear weaponry so that potential agents of mass destruction become a source of security, life-power, and even at times salvation. My work in the early 1970s with Vietnam veterans who told of destroying a village—indeed, much of a country—in order to save it had reverberations in Aum, where the ambition was considerably greater: destroying a world in order to save it. There were striking parallels in Aum to behavior I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s while studying the Nazis’ utilization not only of professional killers but also of killing professionals—in this case, doctors. In Aum, too, doctors were central to the cult’s reversal of healing and killing. They participated in individual murders and had an important role, together with other scientists, in producing and releasing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
Aum is now viewed throughout the world as the primary example of the extraordinary dangers posed by private terrorist groups arming themselves with versions of “the poor man’s atomic bomb.” For Aum was a small antigovernment group claiming ten thousand followers in Japan, about fourteen hundred of whom were renunciants, or monks, at thirty facilities across the country; thirty thousand in Russia (a figure that has been disputed); and a handful in West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Yet this relatively tiny organization managed to manufacture, stockpile, and release deadly sarin gas first in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo, and then in Tokyo itself. It also prepared equally deadly anthrax bacillus and botulinus toxin, releasing them several times in Tokyo and nearby areas (including in the vicinity of two American military bases), largely unsuccessfully but with effects not yet fully known. Between 1990 and 1995 the cult staged at least fourteen chemical and biological attacks of varying dimensions. Aum also made inquiries, particularly in Russia, into acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. It was the grandiose plan of Shōkō Asahara to employ this weaponry to initiate World War III, a global holocaust of unprecedented proportions that would in turn trigger a hoped-for Armageddon. In his fantasies he saw the United States as a major military participant in this apocalyptic project.
But plans and fantasies, however earnest and elaborate, are not the same as action. A simple but terrible question therefore haunts this study: How did Aum Shinrikyō come to cross the crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps to bring it about?
My way of going about answering this question was, as always, to talk to people—to interview those involved. I have been doing that for decades in applying a psychological perspective to historical problems. Here, during five trips to Japan between 1995 and 1997, I was able to conduct intensive interviews with ten former members of Aum, eight men and two women, averaging more than five hours with each person. Since the guru himself and most of his leading disciples were in prison and inaccessible, the people I interviewed tended to be at either the lower or the mid echelons of a very hierarchical organization. Only a privileged inner circle of Asahara’s highest-ranking followers were told of the more violent aspects of the guru’s visionary plans, and even then often incompletely. Most of those I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the various facets of Aum violence. But while part of Aum they had to do considerable psychological work to fend off that knowledge in the face of the evidence around them.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
The emerging guru may have a number of visions, but one in particular usually serves as a crucial illumination and a sacred mandate for a special spiritual mission. This should not be seen as simply a matter of calculation or fakery: intense personal conviction is essential to the guru’s success. But that conviction can be helped considerably by grandiose ambitions and manipulative inclinations, which themselves can be enhanced by impressive demonstrations of superhuman powers. Prior to his main vision, Asahara claimed to have experienced during his early period in Agonshū an “awakening of Kundalinī”—a concept of mystical yoga in which one gains access to the cosmic energy that ordinarily lies “sleeping” at the base of the spine. An accomplished practitioner, he opened a yoga school in Tokyo at about this time and was to gain many early converts through the skills he demonstrated.
In 1984 Asahara founded Aum Shinsen no Kai. Aum (often rendered in English as Om or Ohm), a Sanskrit word that represents the most primal powers of creation and destruction in the universe, is often chanted in Buddhism as part of a mantra or personal incantation. Shinsen no Kai means “circle of divine hermits” or “wizards” and has a strong suggestion of esoteric supernatural power. Asahara also created a commercial enterprise, the Aum Corporation. It was to have the important function of publishing his books.
In 1985 Asahara became famous when a photograph of him “levitating” appeared in a popular occult magazine, Twilight Zone, identifying him as the “Aum Society representative.” The ability to levitate is considered to reflect extraordinarily high spiritual attainment. In his case it was apparently simulated by means of an upward leap from the lotus position along with a bit of trick photography. The placing of the picture in such a visible outlet was an early example of Asahara’s strong sense of the importance of the media.
That same year, at the age of thirty, Asahara experienced his central, self-defining vision. While he was wandering as a “homeless monk” near the ocean in northern Japan, a deity appeared before him and ordained him as Abiraketsu no Mikoto, “the god of light who leads the armies of the gods” in an ultimate war to destroy darkness and bring about the kingdom of Shambhala—in Tibetan and other Buddhist traditions, a utopian society of spiritually realized people. The vision was announced to the world in a Japanese New Age magazine in the form of an interview with Asahara.
I am asked to write a book about ‘the occult’. The moments of ‘mystical freedom’. Muz Murray’s experience in Cyprus. My own experience in Alsace. Derek Gibson sees inside the trees. Jacob Boehme’s vision of ‘the signature of all things’. Yuliya Vorobyeva develops X-ray vision. Jim Corbett and his ‘jungle sensitiveness’. Why man has lost his ‘occult faculties’. Calculating prodigies. How to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’. My original scepticism about ‘the occult’. Impressive consistency of reports. ‘Reading’ through the skin of the stomach. ‘Community of sensation’ under hypnosis. Buchanan and the discovery of psychometry. Peter Hurkos and precognition. My attempts to create a ‘Newtonian theory’ of the occult. My increasing doubts.
Lawrence LeShan studies Eileen Garrett. She ‘psychometrizes’ his daughter’s hair. The case of the missing doctor. The case of Marmontel’s memoirs. Eileen Garrett on mediumship: ‘A kind of turning inward’. Warner Allen’s ‘timeless moment’ at the Queen’s Hall. Is time an illusion? Poets as ‘natural psychics’. A. L. Rowse is almost decapitated. The ‘superconscious attic’ of the mind. The mystical experience. Wendy Rose-Neill lies on her lawn. Claire Myers Owen and the ‘golden light’. Bucke’s flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’. ‘A brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky.’ Vision of God in a cow-barn. Moyra Caldecott and the ‘Timeless Reality’. Ouspensky’s vision of ‘connectedness’. Steppenwolf’s mystical insight. Henri Bergson is converted from materialism to mysticism. The inability of thought to grasp experience. Two ways of grasping reality. The left and right brain. Peak experiences. Anne Bancroft’s mystical experience. The branch of rhododendron. Douglas Harding loses his head. Is it desirable to have no head? William James’s ‘Suggestion about Mysticism’. Robert Graves and ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. Another mathematical prodigy.
My dream of the amusement park. Thomson Jay Hudson watches a hypnotic demonstration. Return of the dead philosophers. Charcot and hypnosis. Man’s ‘two minds’ — the subjective and the objective. The power of the subjective mind: Henry Clay speaks for two hours. The artist who saw a picture before he painted it. Puységur and ‘magnetism’. Councillor Wesermann makes telepathic contact with a friend. The Verity Case. Hudson practises ‘distant healing’. His success. Doctor Albert Mason performs a miracle. Why Shakespeare was not Bacon. Learning to use the right brain. The Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness. The ‘robot’. Negative feedback. The power of the Spectre. Graham Greene and the revolver in the corner cupboard. The gloominess of the great philosophers. Schopenhauer complains about life. Dylan Thomas’s ‘foul mousehole’. Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’. Schizophrenic patients ‘stop seeing things’. Artsybashev’s Breaking Point. The Master Ikkyu writes, ‘Attention’. Hesse’s Journey to the East. My experience of being caught in a snowstorm. Raising consciousness by an act of will. The journey to Northampton. Rilke’s solution: ‘To praise in spite of.’
Arnold Toynbee’s vision of the battle of Pharsalus. Frank Smythe’s vision of the massacre near Glen Glomach. Toynbee’s ‘time-slip’ in Crete. His experience in the ruins of the temple at Ephesus. His vision at Monemvasía. The destruction of Mistrà. The nature of Faculty X. Doctor Johnson and the Happy Valley. Toynbee’s vision of ‘all history’. Proust and the madeleine dipped in tea. Other experiences of Faculty X described in Proust. ‘The past was made to encroach upon the present.’ G. K. Chesterton and ‘Absurd good news’. Helen Keller learns to spell ‘water’. Why Faculty X is so difficult to achieve. Sartre and ‘nausea’. Camus and ‘the Absurd’. ‘Ordinary consciousness is a form of nausea.’ Roquentin is ‘sickened’ by a tree. Maupassant and sexual failure. The ‘erase key’. The demon Screwtape heads off a conversion. Physical, emotional and intellectual values. ‘Upside-downness’. Sartre in the French Resistance. The parable of the emperor and the grand vizier. The mechanism of ‘upside-downness’. Arthur Koestler joins the Communist Party. Koestler’s mystical experience in a Spanish jail. Einstein on science and mysticism. ‘Holiday consciousness’.
Mr Chase sees a cottage that no longer exists. ‘Time-slips’. The English ladies at Versailles. Jane O’Neill and Fotheringhay Church. Falling ‘down the rabbit hole’. J. B. Priestley on Faculty X. Ivan Sanderson’s ‘time-slip’ in Haiti. Can ‘time-slips’ be explained scientifically. Lethbridge and the ‘tape-recording’ theory. The Long Gallery at Hampton Court. Buchanan and ‘psychic bloodhounds’. Denton experiments with geological fragments. Hudson attacks Denton’s results. ‘The memory of the subjective mind seems to be practically limitless.’ Sulla’s villa. Pascal Forthuny psychometrizes a letter by a murderer. Pagenstecher’s experiments with Maria de Zierold. Walter Franklin Prince and the ‘sea bean’. Maria ‘shares’ Pagenstecher’s consciousness. Rilke’s experience at Castle Duino. How to make time stand still. Bentov’s Stalking the Wild Pendulum. Stephen Jenkins sees a phantom army in Cornwall. Joan Forman sees ghosts at Haddon Hall. ‘Tape-recording’ of the Battle of Edgehill. Stephen Jenkins on ley lines. Doctor Robin Baker’s experiments with earth magnetism. Is dowsing a superstition? Harvalik’s experiments with electrical fields. ‘The human body is a magnetic detector.’ Harvalik detects brainwaves. Lethbridge and the long pendulum. Tom and Mina Lethbridge throw stones. Edgar Devaux traces a missing housewife. Edison invents the gramophone record. Robert Leftwich and the underground water main. My wife investigates Bodmin gaol. Doctor Maximilien Langsner solves a murder case. Is reality ‘out there’? ‘The holo-gramatic universe.’ Karl Pribram and David Bohm. Could the world be a hologram? Bohm’s theory of reality as ‘implicate order’. Wing Commander Goddard flies over Drem airfield and sees into the future. Eileen Garrett on clairvoyance.
Fallacies in the Allied Nations' Historical Perception as Observed by a British Journalist Kindle Edition
by Henry Scott Stokes (Author)
In 1941, Imperial Japan rapidly brought an end to the British Empire in Asia. Because a non-white race dared to upset the white colonialists’ status quo in Asia, the British resented the Japanese long after the war. Mr. Henry Scott-Stokes states that he held such a view as well before arriving in Japan as a foreign correspondent. Mr. Scott-Stokes writes of his transformation, of uncritical acceptance of the western colonialist’s version of the Greater East Asian War, the so-called Pacific War, to realization of its absolute vacuousness. “[The Japanese],” he states, “were supposed to simply accept, without any criticism or opposition whatsoever, the noble wisdom of civilization [the verdicts of the Tokyo Trials].”
Mindless parroting of historical fabrications by modern Japanese suggests a loss of national consciousness, of what it means to be Japanese, as Yukio Mishima expressed in his discussions with Mr. Scott-Stokes. Japan lost her independence to America and is merely a protectorate and not a nation with her own culture and history. Japanese people need to take it upon themselves to change this situation. Mr. Stokes’ mother-in-law, however, wryly commented that today’s Japanese are cowards, so it will take another 200 or 300 years.
It was 1964, the year the Summer Olympics were held in Tokyo, when I first set foot on Japanese soil as the first Tokyo bureau chief for The Financial Times. I have now been in Japan for 50 years, and am the oldest member of the FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan).
Growing up in England, I was told time and time again that the Japanese are a barbaric, cruel race. This sort of propaganda is similar to what the Japanese were hearing then: “Death to the kichiku Bei’ei, the American and British monsters!”
World War II ended, but British hostility toward Japan did not diminish. It only grew stronger. After all, Japan was responsible for Great Britain’s losing every one of its Asian colonies. Raised in that environment, I suppose it was only natural that I too should grow up disliking Japan.
When I first arrived in Japan I never doubted for a moment that Japan had committed war crimes, as adjudged by the Tokyo Trials. I was also convinced that the Japanese had perpetrated a massacre in Nanking.
But the longer I stayed in Japan, the more I learned about 20th-century Japanese and Asian history. At some point I found myself analyzing the past century’s events not from an Allied or a Japanese standpoint, but from a third-party perspective. I realized that the opinions I had previously embraced were wrong. My friendship with Mishima Yukio was extremely influential during that process.
In the Greater East Asian War, Japan was fighting for its survival. Gen. Douglas MacArthur said as much in a speech he delivered before the US Congress after the conflict had ended. The Tokyo Trials were a total sham, serving only as a theater for unlawful retribution. And as for the “Nanking Massacre,” there is not one shred of evidence attesting to it. However, the Chinese are hell-bent on using foreign journalists and corporations to spread their propaganda throughout the world. There is no point in even debating the comfort women issue.
I find it very disappointing that so few Japanese attempt to discredit the false accusations and set the record straight. In today’s international community those who maintain that there was no massacre in Nanking are shunned. They are filed in the same pigeonhole as the Holocaust deniers. This is regrettable, but it is the reality we face. Therefore, we must be prudent. But unless the Japanese state their case and restate it, again and again, these false accusations will go down in history as fact. Japanese efforts in this direction have been pitifully inadequate.
There is no need for the Japanese to be overly considerate or adulatory. It is enough for them to state Japan’s position, and let the Americans and the Chinese state their positions. Of course there will be disagreement. There is no way to avoid disagreement; that is the way the world works. If the Japanese adopt an empathetic stance, they will be taken advantage of immediately.
There is one more thing I would like to mention—something that I cannot emphasize enough. That is that most of the instigators at the root of the thorny issues Japan faces now (Nanking, Yasukuni Shrine, comfort women, etc.) vis-à-vis China and Korea, are Japanese nationals. It is up to the Japanese to decide how to deal with this particular problem.
The Japanese have yet to extricate themselves from the curse of the victor nations’ historical perspective forced on them by the Allies. I will be grateful if this book serves in any way to help them break free.
Patriot's History® of the Modern World, Vol. II: From the Cold War to the Age of Entitlement, 1945-2012
INTRODUCTION
It could have been a postwar American town or the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles. Busy streets served as the setting for a bustling vegetable market, teeming with customers, awash in produce—a rich bounty spread out over hundreds of stands. As far as one could see, makeshift shops in the open air stretched down the street—in post–World War II Romania. Communism, in the early 1950s, still had not gained total control of the Romanian market, and farmers came from the countryside to sell their goods. A young Romanian, Gabriel Bohm, walked through the marketplace with his mother in awe of the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, displayed under homemade tents or on crates by ordinary farmers. Bohm remembered seeing a market “full of merchandise . . . good looking, healthy stuff.” Yet within twenty years, Bohm witnessed a dramatic change. The same scene in 1965 would be much different: empty streets, devoid of vendors, patrolled by police. “Those markets were deserted,” he recalled years later: “not a single carrot, not a single vendor selling a carrot.”
There were other changes as well, ending many of the mainstays of life. Churches were closed, political gatherings banned. What had happened in the interim to Bohm and other Romanians? Communism took full control of the economy. “We saw the country deteriorate,” he noted. “Anyone who could get out would. You had to be brain dead not to get out.”1 Yet they could not get out. Nor could their neighbors in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, or East Germany, all of them trapped as prisoners of the Soviet Union, which since 1945 had embarked on a program of expansionism dictated by Soviet communism’s godfather, Vladimir Lenin. Nor were the scenes of want and desperation in those Communist-controlled countries different in any of the other Eastern European nations that could be observed—Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland—and often they were worse.
East Germans lived in constant fear of the Stasi, the state’s secret police, which recruited informants and compiled dossiers on almost every citizen to crush any potential opposition to the state. Even so much as an anti-Communist cartoon or joke was sufficient grounds for jail. One East Berliner who escaped to West Germany discovered decades later, after communism’s collapse, that one of her best friends had informed on her to the Stasi. Everywhere in the Iron Curtain countries (as they were labeled by Winston Churchill in 1946), the state spied on average citizens. Even children were tricked into informing on parents. Bulgarians knew that people simply disappeared—but they did not know that a secret prison island, kept off official maps, was their ultimate destination.
An atmosphere of discontent and fear permeated the Communist bloc. After a time, the fear and depression produced a numbing absence of vitality. Western visitors to Eastern Europe at this time all came back with the same impression of the visual images that awaited them there: “gray,” “it was grime, gray,” “all gray,” they said.2 Millions of people were prisoners in their own countries, unable to leave and usually afraid to resist.
A stunning contrast could be seen, literally, across borders where Western European nations thrived after 1945. Even Germany, crushed into rubble, with up to 10 percent of its 1939 population killed or wounded in the war, staged an astonishing revival after VE Day.3 The success could be attributed to the massive humanitarian and economic assistance provided by the United States, the adoption (even in quasi-socialist countries such as France, Italy, and Greece) of markets and price mechanisms, and the determination of Europeans themselves to recover from war yet again.
But Western Europe would soon drift into a lethargy of planned economies at the very time that a cold war was being waged to free Eastern Europe from those very ideas. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the West had lost or deliberately given up many of the freedoms that the East had sought and just gained. And within another decade still, the advent of the European Union would subtly and quietly impose controls on ordinary life that, while wrapped in a velvet glove, felt to some like the iron fist they had resisted.
Worse still, Europe was not alone. From 1945 to 1970, virtually all of the then-labeled Third World, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America, embraced state planning and rejected markets. Many of the European colonies (Uganda, Congo, Rwanda), winning their freedom in the postwar division of the world, immediately put dictators in power who squelched talk of republics and democracy. By the 1970s, postwar optimism had been replaced by widespread anger and desperation, with one set of masters exchanged for another.
None of this was supposed to have happened. Just as in the post–World War I era, the end of war was to have meant a golden age of freedom and equality. Unlike after World War I, however, this time there was little doubt in non-Communist countries that the United States was in charge of the postwar world. Emerging from the war with its homeland and domestic industries not only entirely intact, but cranked up to full production, American productivity exceeded the wildest expectations of the Truman administration. Racing to shore up Europe from 1947 to 1950, the United States introduced the Marshall Plan, aiding war-torn Europe without asking for anything in return. Understanding the Soviet threat to the rest of Europe, America created a new alliance system and took virtually all of the major Western European nations under its protection.
As much as America was to be the leader and role model in this new era, all the efforts of U.S. occupation forces and all the money delivered by foreign aid could not address the fundamental weakness of postwar development efforts. The salient point of the post–World War II period was that by 1957 no nation had adopted the four pillars that made American exceptionalism successful in the first place. As developed in the first volume of this history, those pillars consisted of a Christian (mostly Protestant) religious foundation, free enterprise, common law, and private property with titles and deeds. Missing even in postwar Europe, these features were almost totally unknown throughout the rest of the world. Long-established nations such as France and Italy seemed little different from emerging states such as Uganda or Cameroon, or the reconstructed countries of Germany or Japan.
Thus, another thirty years later—by 2000—the promise of global liberty that appeared so imminent in 1946 seemed to have slipped away to a significant degree almost everywhere. Drone spy technology monitored the movements of ordinary citizens; big-city mayors banned not only guns, but also soft drinks and fats and plastic bags; European cities saw “no-go” zones of Muslims abolish Western law and replace it with Sharia; countries published lists of children’s names that were permitted and not permitted; street preaching was banned, and pastors jailed for speaking the Gospel aloud in churches. That these liberty-limiting developments occurred in African or Asian nations hardly raised an eyebrow—so far had many of those countries fallen after 1945—but that they all occurred in the United States or Europe seemed a shocking and stunning reversal of the very reasons the “Good War” had been fought in the first place.
Why had this subtle but dangerous reversal occurred so rapidly and so unexpectedly (to some)? Indeed, what were “democracies” doing engaging in such practices at all? In fact, all along the promise of postwar liberty itself was illusory, constructed on the premise that most of the world would be rebuilt along the lines of American-style democracy and freedoms. Our argument is that without the four pillars of American exceptionalism, such developments were not only likely, they were inevitable. Moreover, we argue that Europeans’ use of terms such as “democracy,” “republic,” and even “liberty” were not the same as those understood by Americans, and therefore other nations never entertained any intention of adopting the American pillars. In our previous volume of A Patriot’s History of the Modern World: From America’s Exceptional Ascent to the Atomic Bomb, we reviewed the impact of common law, a Christian (mostly Protestant) religious culture, access to private property (including ownership with easy acquisition of deeds and titles), and free-market capitalism, which brought America to the forefront of world power by the end of the war.
Instead of copying American success, victorious or liberated nations more often sought only to dip their toes in the water of freedom, adopting free markets without common law or restricting capitalism, permitting Christian religion but steadily edging away from acknowledging the Christian foundations of society, paying lip service to private property without instituting the land-ownership institutions, such as titles and deeds, that are necessary to make it a reality. More often still, nations ignored all four of the pillars. Thus, the American model was only implemented piecemeal, where implemented at all (South Korea, for example). As we pointed out in volume 1, while any one of the pillars might be beneficial to a society, without all four no true American-style republic could be developed. The pillars were simply mutually dependent.
This volume continues the story of America’s rise to world dominance through three themes. First, we trace the battle that began early in the twentieth century between the Progressives and the Constitutionalists. The former, grounded in the “reform” movement of the late 1800s, sought to perfect man and society by a process of government-directed and controlled change. The Progressives wanted to deemphasize the Constitution as it was written, and with it, American exceptionalism. They conducted a century-long assault on the notion that the United States had any providential founding, that its heroes and heroines were particularly wise, just, or courageous. By insisting that laws needed to be continually reassessed in light of current morality, Progressives saw the Constitution as outdated or irrelevant. Constitutionalists, on the other hand, maintained that America’s founding stemmed from her Christian roots, and that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were representative of common law doctrines in which codes of conduct, given by God to the people, bubbled up, supported and promoted by the people (as opposed to being handed to a king or ruler to be dispensed downward). Moreover, Constitutionalists maintained that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, wise and visionary, and that they established a framework of laws that addressed every eventuality.
Progressives enacted a legislative campaign to regulate markets, redistribute wealth, and limit private property ownership. Constitutionalists wanted to free markets, enable all to pursue wealth, and restrain government’s ability to infringe upon individuals’ property rights. Finally, the Progressives—many of whom, in the early stages of the movement, were nominal Christians—fervently labored to remove Christianity from the public square, from all political discourse, and from entertainment. Indeed, Christianity stood in the way of implementing most of their reforms. Constitutionalists, of course, understood the admonitions of the Founders, who urged that the nation adhere to its Christian roots and above all pursue virtue.
Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the next, American exceptionalism faced hostility abroad, but more surprisingly, antipathy by numerous groups at home. The Progressive Left endeavored through the educational system, the law, and entertainment to denigrate and ridicule the very concept that America had anything special to offer, and to insist that the United States had become just one nation among many. That a number of Western and non-Western powers arose to challenge American dominance was to be expected, particularly when the American public had so generously provided the financial and commercial means of their recovery in many cases. Germany and Japan took the best of the American industrial, manufacturing, and management practices, modified them, and implemented them with zeal, producing world-class automobiles, electronics, robotics, and a host of other products that drove American goods either fully or partially from the market. Once several nations could claim economic proximity to the United States (though none could claim parity), were not their systems, goals, practices, and cultures worthy of emulation as well?
But the Progressive assault did not stop there: it insisted that undeveloped cultures were no worse than ours, only different. Americans were urged to seek out the value in what in previous generations would have been termed “backward” cultures, and to “understand” practices once deemed undesirable at best or barbaric at worse. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, as one example, cited advances and greatness in Islamic culture that never existed, implying that Americans needed to be more like Egypt rather than Egyptians being more like Americans.4 Absurdly saying that “Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” Obama claimed that Islam “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance” and gave us “cherished music,” the “magnetic compass and tools of navigation,” and furthered “our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.”5 Although his intention may have been to strike new chords of friendship, the act of ascribing to people accomplishments they never achieved looked phony and, according to polls in the subsequent three years, had no effect on Muslim views of America.
By 2012, the culmination of this Progressive march saw the United States elect a president with little or no understanding of free market capitalism, no appreciation of private property rights, little demonstrable Christian religious influence (to the point that by 2012 polls showed that up to half of the American public thought he was a Muslim), and an apparent disdain for American exceptionalism. Barack Obama repeatedly apologized to foreign nations for past American “mistakes” or transgressions and denigrated (or greatly mischaracterized) American exceptionalism by insisting that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As the British magazine The Economist stated, Americans had put into power “a left-wing president who has regulated to death a private sector he neither likes nor understands. . . .”6 In 2008, in his famous “Joe the Plumber” comment, Obama stated that it was government’s duty to “spread the wealth around,” and in 2012, referring to private businesses that had become successful, he said, “You didn’t build that [business]. . . . Somebody else made that happen.” That “somebody else” was, of course, government—not the private sector. Comments such as those showed Obama had no concept of what made markets work. Likewise, in his bailout of General Motors, he demonstrated that he had no regard for private property—in that case, the property of the bondholders who were saddled with an enormous loss to protect union pensions.
Obama’s national health care law forced the Catholic Church to compromise on its core religious beliefs regarding conception. His Supreme Court appointments routinely interpreted the American Constitution in the light of international law. And when it came to private property, Obama continued to implement the United Nations’ antigrowth/anticapitalist Agenda 21 initiatives, which were inserting themselves into all aspects of American life.
Of course, some of the erosion had already occurred. Fearing Islamic terrorists, after 9/11 Americans readily assented to substantial limitations on their freedoms, from airport body searches to cameras on stoplights. Once necessary Patriot Act precautions had grossly expanded with new computerized surveillance and monitoring technologies, including “latch-on” phone tapping, air drone camera planes, and listening devices, to the point that virtually anyone could be found by the national government. Benjamin Franklin’s comment, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” looked more prescient all the time. Worse still, by 2012, few politicians anywhere were seeking to limit such powers, let alone roll them back.
The exceptionalism that had saved the world had not met a receptive audience, even if at first the rhetoric and spirit were wildly embraced. Quite the contrary, it seemed that to some extent, Europe insisted on revisiting post–World War I practices yet again, and certainly in the former colonies the delusion of creating new “democratic” states without at least some of the pillars of American exceptionalism proved especially vexing. Yet the record of such efforts seemed abundantly clear by 1946. Europeans, after all, had witnessed the full-blown collapse of their societies not once in the first half of the twentieth century but twice. They had likewise seen the manifest failure and folly of both variations of socialism—fascism and communism.
From 1917 to 1989, neither outright government ownership under Soviet-style communism nor ownership-by-proxy through German/Italian fascism provided material prosperity or human dignity. Indeed, both heaped unparalleled inhumanity on top of astronomical levels of state-sanctioned killing. According to R. J. Rummel, perhaps the leading authority on government murder, the top governments in terms of democide (the murder of a person or people by a government including genocide, politicide, mass murder, and deaths arising from the reckless and depraved disregard for life, but excluding abortion deaths and battle deaths in war) from 1900 through 1987 were:
慰安婦と戦場の性 (新潮選書) 単行本 – 1999/6/1 秦 郁彦 (著)
Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zoneby Hata Ikuhiko
Translated by Jason Michael Morgan
Chapter One
The Comfort Women Issue “Explodes”
1. The Asahi Shimbun’s Surprise Attack
Anyone who picked up the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on January 11, 1992, would have been stunned to see the front page’s top story that the major Japanese daily played up as part of its campaign on the comfort women issue.
Looking back, it becomes clear this scoop was the very starting point of a frenzy that would ensnare not only Japan but also several other Asian nations.
In the interest of brevity, I will not explain here all the details of the Asahi’s report, which also filled much of the edition’s city news section. For now, I will just list the main headlines.
“Documents show military involvement in comfort stations”
“Written instructions, journals of former Japanese military found at Defense Agency library”
“Units instructed to set up [comfort stations]”
“Control, supervision of [comfort stations], including recruitment, instructed under name of chief of staff. Some documents had seal of administrative vice minister”
“Government view ‘that private operators were in charge’ challenged”
“Calls for apology and compensation intensifying”1
Furthermore, the report included comments by Chuo University professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who “discovered” the materials at the Defense Agency library. “The military’s involvement is very clear,” Yoshimi told the Asahi. “Japan should offer an apology and compensation.”2 The newspaper also carried remarks by historian Suzuki Yuko, who said the discovery exposed “an insufficient investigation” into the issue by the government.3 Former Second Lieutenant Yamada Seikichi, who had been in charge of recreational activities of a Japanese military unit, was quoted in the report as saying, “The military’s involvement is clear.”4 The report accompanied an analysis on military comfort women by an Asahi columnist who claimed “most [comfort women] were Korean women who were forcibly recruited under the name of female volunteer corps,” and estimates of “their number are said to range from eighty thousand to 200,000.”5
However, reading only the headlines might leave some people wondering why this article was afforded such extensive coverage. The lead section of the front-page story reveals the newspaper’s intentions:
The Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies library keeps written instructions and field diaries that show the Japanese military supervised and controlled the establishment of comfort stations and the recruitment of military comfort women during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, it was learned on January 10, [1992].
The Japanese government, during its answers to the Diet, has denied state involvement with Korean comfort women, saying civilian operators “were taking those women along.”
Last December, Korean former comfort women filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding compensation from the state. The South Korean government is also demanding that the Japanese government reveal the facts of this matter.
The discovery at the Defense Agency of materials indicating state involvement will jolt the stance the government has taken thus far and likely force the government to adopt a new approach. Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi now has a serious challenge awaiting him when he visits South Korea from January 16.6
The opening paragraphs reveal the Asahi’s intention was to influence public opinion on the comfort women issue. The report was aimed at creating a dramatic setting, timed for the prime minister’s upcoming visit, by presenting evidence to demonstrate the Japanese government had committed “perjury” by denying there had been state involvement in recruiting Korean comfort women.
The January 11 report came out just five days before Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea. The prime minister had neither the option of changing his itinerary nor much time to prepare a response to the outrage erupting in South Korea.
I was staggered by the timing of the Asahi’s report and its strategy of focusing on the single point of kanyo (involvement), which is an ambiguous concept.
It is worth pointing out, however, that it was a well-known fact among researchers that Rikushimitsu Dainikki (a collection of official documents exchanged between the Army Ministry and army units dispatched to China), which had been declassified thirty years earlier and kept at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), contained documents about comfort women and the involvement of the military in comfort stations.
Memoirs by military personnel who visited comfort stations were readily available, as were many movies and TV programs that depicted these facilities. If we include people who first learned about comfort stations through such channels, it would have been unusual if someone did not know the military was involved with them. I believe the report was a devious trick employed by the Asahi, which stretched an insufficient explanation given by a senior bureaucrat (to be detailed later in this book) during a comment made in the Diet, to write that the government “had denied the state’s involvement.”
In an article he contributed to the March 1992 issue of Sekai (World) magazine, Yoshimi described how he “discovered” the documents: “[I was aware they existed, but] I went to the Defense Agency library again for two days late last year and early this year to look mainly for materials pertaining to comfort stations.”7
Around that time, I frequently visited the NIDS library to conduct research on a different subject. Yoshimi, an old acquaintance of mine, told me about his “discovery” and the imminent publication in a newspaper. I remember feeling skeptical about whether such materials were worthy of a news story. A while later, just as I was starting to wonder why Yoshimi’s discovery had not been mentioned in a newspaper, the Asahi ran its sensationalized report on January 11.8
The report sparked the huge response the newspaper had hoped for, with other newspapers carrying stories about it a day later. The Asahi was well prepared and printed a story sent from its Seoul Bureau for its evening edition printed the same day. “[The discovery] was reported in detail by South Korean television and radio stations by citing the Asahi Shimbun’s report,” the story said. “South Korean Foreign Minister Lee Sang-ok told South Korean reporters on [January] 11, ‘I think the Japanese side will reveal an appropriate position about issues regarding former military comfort women at the time of the South Korea-Japan summit meeting.’”9
The Asahi pressed on. Its January 12 morning edition carried an editorial with the headline, “Never turn our eyes from history.” “We hope Prime Minister Miyazawa will be forward-looking when he visits South Korea from [January] 16,” the editorial said.10
The Asahi remained at the forefront of reporting the comfort women issue for a long time. But among newspapers that reported the issue, albeit belatedly, the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, was even more radical than the Asahi.
For example, on the night of January 11, Foreign Minister Watanabe Michio appeared on a TV program on a national network and said, “We don’t have any clear evidence at hand because the issue dates back more than fifty years, but I think we should admit [the Japanese military] was involved in one way or another,” according to a story carried in the Asahi’s January 12 edition.11
The Japan Times ran a story about the foreign minister’s remarks, but capped it with a malicious analysis: “The statement marks the first time a government official has admitted that the Imperial Japanese Army participated in the recruitment and forced prostitution of hundreds of thousands of Asian ‘comfort women’ during World War II.”12
The Japan Times casually added “hundreds of thousands” and “forced prostitution,” which the minister had not mentioned and even the Asahi had not acknowledged.13 The tone of ensuing reports by competing media escalated to fit the line trumpeted by the Japan Times.
The government’s mishandling of the situation—making mistakes and tardily dealing with the issue—began at this point. Few of the senior government officials flustered by the startling media reports had ever set foot on the battlefield. Miyazawa, who graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and joined the Finance Ministry in the year war broke out between Japan and the United States, did not serve in the military, which was unusual for men in his generation. Many government leaders at that time lacked basic knowledge of comfort women and comfort stations. They not only failed to make effective rebuttals, but also seemingly succumbed to the intense attack made in unison by the media and activists in Japan and South Korea without clearly understanding what was going on.
Miyazawa quickly apologized at a press conference on January 14, saying, “I acknowledge the military’s involvement and would like to make an apology.”14 On January 16, he traveled to Seoul, where “a string of street protests” broke out (according to a Mainichi Shimbun article on January 16).15 During his South Korean tour, anti-Japan demonstrations raged. Protesters set fire to effigies of the emperor, and women who came forward as former comfort women staged sit-ins.
Local newspapers, which mistook wartime female volunteer corps for comfort women, reported that even elementary school children were made to serve as comfort women.
Possibly influenced by the fervor of such reports, South Korea’s education ministry instructed two thousand elementary schools across the nation to investigate student records from the years in question. Amid this hostile atmosphere, Miyazawa repeatedly extended an apology at the summit meeting and during his speech at the South Korean parliament.
In an article written in 1993, Shimokawa Masaharu, a Seoul correspondent of the Mainichi Shimbun, recalled the atmosphere surrounding Miyazawa’s visit:
I vividly remember how subservient Prime Minister Miyazawa appeared at the press conference hall of the Blue House presidential office… During the eighty-five-minute summit meeting, Prime Minister Miyazawa expressed an apology and remorse eight times… Indeed, a South Korean presidential aide briefed South Korean reporters on how many times the Japanese prime minister apologized. I have never seen a press conference go so completely against diplomatic protocol.16
This is a must-read for anyone curious to know how the transnational feminist topic of “comfort women,” sex workers for the WWII Japanese military, transformed into a focus of anti-Japanese nationalism in Korea today. Hata reveals the unearthing of Korean former “comfort women” by Japanese and South Korean activists in the 1990s and their creation of the master narrative that Japanese authorities forcibly abducted young Korean women and used them as sex slaves in battle zones. Countering this globally-disseminated half-truth, Hata places the “comfort women” in the universal problem of sex in the military and clarifies the link between “comfort stations” and prewar Japanese licensed prostitution. Hata’s exhaustive research points to the uncomfortable truth that profiteering Korean and Japanese handlers lured destitute young women with false job offers and victimized them as “comfort women.” (Chizuko T. Allen, University of Hawai’i at Manoa)
2012/09/11 に公開
Hi! I respect Democracy and human rights. http://JapanBroadcasting.net
It is easy for a narrow minded liberal to somehow denounce me as "Al shabab". (。・ω・。) . But I'm justa Sushi eating patriot. (・_・、) (ToT)/~~~
Indeed, I have made a little speech to challenge the status quo. Of course, the final answer is up to you. You make the judgement. We live in a democratic, free society here!
I believe that what we need today is to face history based on the actual truth, and not a biased unilateral point of view. In this 21st. century we live in, friendship, trust, cooperation, discussion and reconciliation between the nations is inevitable. Hate, bullying , nor politically motivated witch hunt deep rotted in racial discrimination is meaningless.
Let us all heal the world, on behalf of my great hero, Michael Jackson.
Buddhism is a unique spiritual system in many ways, while also sharing some fundamental similarities with the other Great Wisdom Traditions of humankind. But perhaps one its most unique features is its understanding, in some schools, that its own system is evolving or developing. This is generally expressed in the notion of the Three Great Turnings of Buddhism, the three major stages of unfolding that Buddhism has undergone, according to Buddhism itself. The First Turning of the Wheel is Early Buddhism, now generally believed to be represented by the Theravada school and thought to contain the historical Gautama Buddha’s original teachings, which developed in the great Axial period around the sixth century BCE. The Second Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Madhyamaka school, was founded by the genius philosopher-sage Nagarjuna around the second century CE. The Third and final (to date) Great Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Yogachara school, originated in the second century CE but had its period of greatest productivity in the fourth century CE with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. All Three Turnings had profound impacts on every school of Buddhism that came after them.
The Madhyamaka school, although critical of Early Buddhism in many ways, nonetheless transcends and includes many of its foundational teachings, while criticizing those notions it finds partial, limited, or incomplete. And many Yogachara schools attempted to integrate and synthesize all Three Turnings. This was an ongoing, cumulative, synthesizing unfolding, as if Buddhism was plugged into the great evolution of Spirit itself.
In other words, many adherents of Buddhism had a view that Buddhism itself was unfolding, with each new turning adding something new and important to the overall Buddhist teaching itself. My point can now be put simply: many contemporary Buddhist teachers, agreeing with psychologists and sociologists that the world itself, at least in several important ways, is undergoing a global transformation, believe that this transformation will affect also Buddhism, adding to it yet newer and more significant truths, and resulting in yet another unfolding, a Fourth Great Turning, of Buddhism itself. (Some people view the rise of Tantric Buddhism, or occasionally Vajrayana Buddhism, as a Fourth Turning, and from that perspective, we are speaking of a possible Fifth Turning. But generally we will remain with the more common Three Turnings and take it from there.) This Fourth Turning retains all the previous great truths of Buddhism but also adds newer findings from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and developmental psychology—but only to the extent that they are in fundamental agreement with the foundational tenets of Buddhism itself, simply extending them to some degree, as it were. Known by various names—from evolutionary Buddhism to Integral Buddhism—the Fourth Turning, like all the previous turnings, transcends yet includes its predecessors, adding new material while retaining all the essentials. And what is so remarkable about this development is that it is completely in keeping with this general understanding of itself that Buddhism has grasped—namely, that Buddhadharma (“Buddhist Truth”) is itself unfolding, growing, and evolving, responding to new circumstances and discoveries as it does so. Even the Dalai Lama has said, for example, that Buddhism must keep pace with modern science or it will grow old and obsolete.
A brief glance at Buddhist history will show what is involved. Original Buddhism was founded on such notions as the difference between samsara (the source of suffering) and nirvana (the source of Enlightenment or Awakening); the three marks of samsaric existence; that is dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (no-self); and the Four Noble Truths: (1) life as lived in samsara is suffering, (2) the cause of this suffering is craving or grasping, (3) to end craving or grasping is to end suffering, and (4) there is a way to end grasping, namely, the eightfold way—right view, right intention, right speech, right actions, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right unitive awareness.
The ultimate goal of Early Buddhism was to escape samsara—the manifest realm of life, death, rebirth, old age, suffering, and sickness—entirely, by following the eightfold way and attaining nirvana. “Nirvana” means, essentially, formless extinction. The prefix “nir-” means “without,” and “vana” means everything from desire to grasping to lust to craving itself. The overall meaning is “blown out” or “extinguished”—as if a lit candle were handed to you, and you leaned over and blew out the flame. What is extinguished or “blown out”? All the typical marks of samsara itself—including suffering, the angst that comes from craving for permanence, the separate-self sense, or self-contraction (often called “ego”), and its inherent fear, anxiety, and depression. The state of nirvana is sometimes said to be a state similar to deep dreamless sleep, in which, of course, there is no ego, no suffering, no hankering for permanence, no space, no time, no separation—if anything, there is simply the boundless peace or vast equanimity of being liberated from the torture of samsara and its suffering-inducing ways. According to some schools, there is even an end limit, or “extreme” form of nirvana, called nirodh—complete cessation—where neither consciousness nor objects arise at all, and that might be thought of as an infinite formlessness of pure freedom. Be that as it may, the goal is clear: get out of samsara and into nirvana.
According to Buddhist history, Gautama Siddhartha (“Buddha” is not a name but a title, and means “Awakened,” and was added to his name after his Enlightenment) was raised as a prince, with all the princely affluence of palace life, and with a father who protected him closely, so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the typical horrors of everyday life in India at that time. But then one day, Gautama escaped from the palace walls and, in wandering around the surrounding city, saw three sights that severely disturbed him—a very sick person, an old and decrepit person, and a dead person. “These are something my palatial life cannot protect me from,” he thought, and he promptly left the palace and began a six-year search, studying under various holy men, looking for an answer to life’s problems that he had witnessed wandering in his city. But after six years, nothing proved satisfactory, and, exhausted and frustrated, he sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to arise until he had discovered the answer.
Early one morning, glancing at the starry heavens, Gautama had a profound experience. “Aha! I’ve found you! Never again will I be deceived!” he exclaimed, as much with utter joy as complete exhaustion. What did he find? Whatever it was, it converted him from “ignorance” to “Enlightenment.” Different responses as to what he saw and understood have been given by various schools, all of them believable. One was the “twelvefold chain of dependent origination,” a profound understanding of the completely interwoven nature of all reality and the inexorable role of causality in tying them all together—all of which conspire to inevitably cause suffering when driven by grasping. Another was the three marks of existence itself (impermanence, suffering, and selflessness) and the eightfold way to end their hold on the human being. According to Zen, Gautama had a profound satori, a deep awakening experience, awakening to his own true Buddha-nature and his fundamental oneness with the entire Ground of Being (or Dharmakaya), ending his separate-self sense, and with it, suffering. Whatever exactly it was, it did indeed soon become formalized in the three marks of existence, the twelvefold chain, and the eightfold way. Gautama Siddhartha had sat down under the Bodhi tree an ordinary individual and got up from it an Enlightened or Awakened being, a Buddha. When Buddha was asked if he was a God or supernatural being, he replied, “No.” “What was he?” “Awakened,” is all that he replied.
Such was the basic form of Buddhism as practiced for almost eight hundred years—until, that is, Nagarjuna, who began paying attention to this strange duality between samsara and nirvana. For Nagarjuna, this duality tore Reality in half and didn’t produce liberation but subtle illusion. For him, there is no ontological difference between samsara and nirvana. The difference is merely epistemological. That is, Reality looked at through concepts and categories appears as samsara, while the very same Reality looked at free of concepts and categories is nirvana. Samsara and nirvana are thus not-two, or “nondual.” And this caused a major revolution in Buddhist thought and practice.
Gautama Buddha had discovered the “emptiness,” or ultimately illusory nature of, the separate-self sense; but he had not discovered the emptiness—the shunyata—of all of what is usually called “reality” (including not only all subjects, or selves, but all objects, or “dharmas”). Buddhism had just taken its second major Turn in its illustrious history, adding a novel and profound element to its already accepted discoveries.
Nagarjuna relies on the “Two Truths” doctrine—there is relative, or conventional, truth, and there is absolute, or ultimate Truth. Relative truth can be categorized and characterized, and is the basis of disciplines such as science, history, law, and so on. That a molecule of water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is a relative truth, for example. But ultimate Truth cannot be categorized at all (including that statement). Any category or quality or characteristic makes sense only in terms of its opposite, but ultimate Reality has no opposite. Based on what is known as the “Four Inexpressibles,” you can’t, according to Nagarjuna, say that ultimate Reality is Being, or not-Being, or both, or neither. You cannot say it is Self (atman), or no-self (anatman or anatta), or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s implicate, or explicate, or both, or neither. You can’t say that it’s immanent in Gaia, or that it transcends Gaia, or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s a timeless Now, or a temporal everlastingness, or both, or neither. And so on for any category or quality. The reason is, as we were saying, that any concept you come up with makes sense only in terms of its opposite (liberated versus bound, infinite versus finite, something versus nothing, implicate versus explicate, pleasure versus pain, free versus limited, temporal versus timeless, good versus evil, true versus false, and so on), yet ultimate Reality has no opposite. As the Upanishads put it, “Brahman [ultimate Reality] is one without a second” and “free of the pairs”—the pairs of opposites, that is—and thus can’t be categorized at all (including that statement, which would also be formally denied). Nagarjuna says, “It is neither void, nor not void, nor both, nor neither, but in order to point it out, it is called the Void.” The Void, shunyata, or Emptiness. It’s a radical “neti, neti”—“not this, not that”—except “neti, neti” is also denied as a characteristic.
Now what this does mean is that Emptiness, or ultimate Reality, is not separate from anything that is arising. (Technically, even that statement would be denied; but we are now talking metaphorically to get across the general gist of Emptiness—because the main point is that although it cannot be said, it can be shown, or directly realized. More on this as we continue.) Not being separate from anything (“not having a second”), it is the Emptiness of everything that is arising. Emptiness isn’t a realm separate from other realms, it is the Emptiness, or Transparency, of all realms. Looked at free from conceptualization or categorization, everything that is arising is Emptiness, or Emptiness is the Reality of each and every thing in the manifest and unmanifest world—it is their very Suchness, their Thusness, their Isness. Looked at through concepts and categories, the universe appears as samsara—as built of radically separate and isolated things and events—and grasping after those things and attachment to them causes suffering because, ultimately, everything eventually falls apart, and thus whatever you’re attached to will sooner or later cause suffering as it falls apart. But looked at with prajna (or jnana)—nonconceptual choiceless awareness—the world of samsara is actually self-liberated nirvana. (In the word jnana, the root “jna,” by the way, in English is “kno,” as in “knowledge,” or “gno,” as in “gnosis.”) Jnana is a nondual, unqualifiable knowledge or timeless Present awareness, the realization of which brings Enlightenment or Awakening. Awakening to what? The radical Freedom or infinite Liberation or radical Luminosity-Love of pure Emptiness, though those terms, again, are at best metaphors.
Since there is no radical separation between samsara and nirvana (samsara and nirvana being “not-two,” or as the Heart Sutra summarizes nonduality, “That which is Emptiness is not other than Form; that which is Form is not other than Emptiness”), liberating Emptiness can be found anywhere in the world of Form—any and all Form is one with Emptiness. It is not a particular state of mind or state of consciousness but the very fabric or “isness” of consciousness itself.
A commonly used metaphor to explain the relationship of Emptiness to Form is the ocean and its waves. Typical, limited, bounded states of consciousness—from looking at a mountain, to experiencing happiness, to feeling fear, to watching a bird in flight, to listening to Mozart’s music—are all partial states and thus separate from each other; they all have a beginning (or are “born”), and they all have an ending (or “die”). They are like the individual waves in the ocean; each starts, has a certain size (from “small,” to “medium,” to “huge”), and eventually ends, and, of course, they are all different from each other.
But Emptiness—the Reality of each moment, its sheer transparent being, its simple “Suchness” or “Thusness” or “Isness”—is like the wetness of the ocean. And no wave is wetter than another. One wave can certainly be bigger than another, but it is not wetter. All waves are equally wet; all waves are equally Emptiness, or equally Spirit, or equally Godhead or Brahman or Tao. And that means that the very nature of this and every moment, just as it is, is pure Spirit—Spirit is not hard to reach but is impossible to avoid! And one wave can last longer than another wave, but it is still not wetter; it has no more Suchness or Thusness than the smallest wave in the entire ocean. And that means that whatever state of mind you have, right here, right now, is equally Enlightened; you can no more attain Enlightenment than you can attain your feet (or a wave can become wet). Enlightenment, and the “Big Mind/Big Heart” that reveals it, is absolutely ever-present Presence; all you have to do is recognize it (about which, more later).
But this being so, one no longer has to retreat to a monastery—away from the world, away from Form, away from samsara—in order to find Liberation. Samsara and nirvana have been joined, united, brought together into a single or nondual Reality. The goal is no longer to become the isolated saint or arhat—looking to get off of samsara entirely—but the socially and environmentally engaged “bodhisattva”—which literally means “being of Enlightened mind”—whose vow is not to get off samsara and retreat into an isolated nirvana, but a promise to fully embrace samsara and vow to gain Enlightenment as quickly as possible so as to help all sentient beings recognize their own deepest spiritual reality or Buddha-nature, and hence Enlightenment.
In one sweep, the two halves of the universe, so to speak—samsara and nirvana, Form and Emptiness—were joined into one, whole, seamless (not featureless) Reality, and Buddhist practitioners were set free to embrace the entire manifest realm of samsara and Form, not to avoid it. The vow of the bodhisattva likewise became paradoxical, reflecting both members of the pairs of opposites, not just one: no longer “There are no others to save (because samsara is illusory),” which is the arhat’s chant, but “There are no others to save, therefore I vow to save them all!”—which reflects the truth of a samsara and nirvana paradoxically joined, no longer torn in two.
The Madhyamaka notion of Emptiness henceforth became the foundation of virtually every Mahayana and Vajrayana school of Buddhism, becoming, as the title of T. R. V. Murti’s book has it, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (although “philosophy” is perhaps not the best word for a system whose goal is to recognize that which transcends thought entirely).1
But there were, nevertheless, still more unfoldings to come, as evolution continued its relentless drive. Particularly by the fourth century CE, the question had become insistent: granted that the Absolute cannot be categorized literally in dualistic terms and concepts, is there really nothing whatsoever that could be said about it at all? At least in the realm of conventional truth, couldn’t more systems, maps, and models be offered about Reality and how to realize it?
Already, in such brilliant treatises as the Lankavatara Sutra, the answer was a resounding “Yes!” The Lankavatara Sutra was so important that it was passed down to their successors by all five of the first Ch’an (or Zen) Head Masters in China as containing the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. In fact, the early Ch’an school was often referred to as the Lankavatara school, and a history of this early period is entitled Records of the Lankavatara Masters. (Starting with the sixth Head Master, Hui Neng, the Diamond Sutra—a treatise solely devoted to pure Emptiness—displaced the Lankavatara Sutra, and in many ways Zen lost the philosophical and psychological sophistication of the Lankavatara Sutra system and focused almost exclusively on nonconceptual awareness. Zen masters were often depicted tearing up sutras, which really amounted to a rejection of the Two Truths doctrine. This was unfortunate, in my opinion, because in doing so, Zen became less than a complete system, refusing to elaborate conventional maps and models. Zen became weak in relative truths, although it brilliantly succeeded in elaborating and practicing ultimate Truth. I say this as a dedicated practitioner of Zen for fifteen years, before I switched to a more Integral Spirituality, which included, among others, Vajrayana, Vedanta, and Christian contemplative approaches. We’ll see what all this means as we proceed. And, as we’ll also see, one can belong to any traditional religion, or no religion at all, and still adopt an Integral Spirituality, which is really an Integral Life Practice, incorporating what humanity has learned, East and West—and in premodern, modern, and postmodern times—about psychological growth, development, and evolution.)
The Yogachara school came to fruition in the fourth century CE with the brilliant half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. Asanga was more a creative and original thinker, and Vasubandhu a gifted systematizer. Together they initiated or elaborated most of the tenets of what came to be known as the Yogachara (“Practice of Yoga”), or Chittamatrata (“Nature of Mind Only”), school of Buddhism, and Buddhism had taken another evolutionary leap forward, the Third Great Turning of the Wheel of Dharma.
What all schools of Yogachara have in common is a continuing and intensifying of the drive to see and fully realize the union of Emptiness and Form, to integrate them in the here and now. Given the fact that Emptiness and Form are not-two, Emptiness itself is related to some everyday aspect of Form that the ordinary person is already aware of—in this case, pure unqualifiable Awareness just as it is. All schools of Yogachara either equate directly Emptiness and unconstructed pure Awareness (alaya-jnana), or at least equate them relatively as a useful orientation and metaphoric guide for practitioners.
Yogachara extends this notion of unconstructed fundamental awareness into the idea of eight (or nine) levels of consciousness, each a “downward” transformation of foundational luminous awareness (alaya-jnana). The first transformation gives rise to the storehouse consciousness, or the alaya-vijnana (the added “vi” to “jna” means “dualistic, separated, fragmented”—and thus this is the beginning of samsara as illusion, if one is ignorant of the prior all-encompassing alaya-jnana). But this storehouse actually contains, as collective memories, the resultant experiences of all human beings (and according to some, all sentient beings in toto), and the seeds for all future karmic ripening.
This is a particularly brilliant approach to what the Greeks would call archetypes—the very first forms of manifestation to be produced by Spirit as it begins to emanate or manifest the entire world. Archetypes were often conceived, by various Great Traditions around the world, as everlastingly fixed ideas in the mind of God or Spirit, and thus left no room for evolutionary input. But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse
But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse consciousness bypassed all those problems entirely, because the storehouse—as the ongoing product and accumulation of actual human actions—was itself created in part by evolutionary processes, inasmuch as human actions themselves underwent change, growth, development, and evolution. An added benefit of deploying the notion of the storehouse consciousness is that it helps explain what the Great Traditions mean when they speak of involution/evolution in a narrower and more specific sense (for example, what Plotinus called Efflux and Reflux): Involution/Efflux is the production of the manifest world via a successive manifestation or “stepping down” of Spirit into lesser and lesser versions of itself. Using Christian terms, Spirit goes out of itself (lila or kenosis) and steps
Spirit is recognized as the Source and Suchness of the entire display—a state of “Enlightenment” or “Awakening” or “metanoia.” The archetypes—being the first forms of involution to be produced, and thus having an impact on all subsequent and lesser forms (one of the meanings of “archetype” is “forms upon which all other forms depend”)—are thus crucial to all lower levels of being and consciousness. But instead of being “everlasting fixed ideas in the mind of God,” the vasanas of the Lankavatara Sutra’s storehouse—the stored memories of human interactions, which could easily be interpreted to include Kosmic memories or habits, or morphogenetic fields—would manifest the effects of evolution itself, since evolutionary memories are part of what is being stored in the storehouse. In other words, the archetypes of the Lankavatara Sutra’s storehouse are constantly changing and evolving with the Kosmos itself, and thus affecting, via involution, all of the lower and denser levels of being and consciousness. Thus the vasanas (or the archetypes), instead of being fixed ideas preventing evolution, become one of the very carriers and distributors of evolution itself, not only allowing but encouraging evolutionary change. The universe, in one stroke, moves from a fixed, deterministic, causal machine to a creative, living, responsive, conscious Kosmos. This is still a profoundly useful notion.
To continue with the original involutionary story for the Lankavatara Sutra: The first “downward” manifestation produces the “tainted” alaya-vijnana storehouse out of the “pure” alaya-jnana (Primordial Wisdom and pure Emptiness). The second downward (or involutionary) transformation is called by the Lankavatara Sutra (and many Yogachara schools) the manas, which arises out of the storehouse and becomes (when misunderstood) the self-contraction and self-view, which then looks at the alaya-vijnana and misinterprets it as a permanent self or soul, and causes the alaya-vijnana to become even further tainted (beyond containing the first forms of manifestation or samsara itself, when misunderstood). The third transformation “downward” creates the concept of objects and the senses that perceive them, of which, in standard Buddhist psychology, there are six—the five senses, plus the mind (which in Buddhist psychology is treated as another sense, the manovijnana, whose objects are simply conceptual), giving us eight levels of consciousness (or nine if you count the original, pure, unconstructed alaya-jnana, or primordial nondual Wisdom Mind). This overall view gives us a chance to work not only with manifestation, involution, or Efflux, some version of which all Great Traditions possess, but also evolution, emergence, or Reflux, which is found in an evolutionarily workable version in relatively few places, including the Lankavatara Sutra, thus giving Buddhism a truly profound approach to this issue faced by all the Great Traditions: “If Spirit is the only ultimate Reality, then why, and how, did this relative manifest world show up? What’s the actual mechanism of that?” The notion of involution/evolution, Descent/Ascent, Efflux/Reflux in all its various forms, some version of which is found in virtually every Great Tradition, is the attempted answer to that question; and some version of that—such as the Lankavatara Sutra’s—is still viable today whenever that question is sincerely asked.
It’s important to realize that, for Yogachara, it’s not phenomena (or manifest events or the elements of samsara) that cause illusion and suffering, but rather viewing phenomena as objects, viewing them through the subject–object duality. Instead of viewing objects as one with the viewer, they are seen as existing “out there,” separate, isolated, dualistically independent, tearing the wholeness of Reality into two realms—a subject versus objects. This product of the dualistic self-contraction of the manas and the tainted alaya-vijnana converts Reality in its Suchness or Thusness or pure Isness into an illusory, broken, fragmented, dualistic world, attachment to which causes bondage and suffering.
This state of bondage, itself illusory, can be seen through by “a sudden revulsion, turning, or re-turning of the ālaya vijñāna back into its original state of purity [alaya-jnana]….The mind returns to [or is recognized as] its original condition of non-attachment, non-discrimination, and non-duality [pure alaya-jnana]”—in other words, by recognizing the ever-present state of nonduality, or the union of Emptiness and Form.3 Although most Yogacharins insisted that the end state of Emptiness of Madhyamaka is the same as in Yogachara, there is an unmistakably more positive tone to the Yogachara—certainly in the concept of the nature of Mind, but also in how nonduality is conceived. For Madhyamaka, nonduality is virtually an utter blank, at least to the mind’s conceptions, although that blankness is actually seeing Reality exactly as it is, in its Suchness or Thusness, without names, concepts, categories, or prejudices. While Yogachara wouldn’t specifically disagree, it more positively sees Emptiness and nonduality as “the absence of duality between perceiving subject and the perceived object,” which allows for the grand radiance, or luminosity, of Emptiness to be better recognized in the very midst of manifestation. Again, it’s not phenomena that are illusory or suffering inducing, but seeing phenomena as objects, as items set apart from awareness or the subject and existing as independent entities out there. Once they are separated from us, then we can either desire them or fear them, both eventually causing suffering, alienation, and bondage.
Now this slightly more positive view of Emptiness, not to mention its connection to ordinary awareness (as Zen would put it, following the Lankavatara Sutra, “The ordinary mind, just that is the Tao [or ‘the way of Truth’]),” acted to unify Emptiness and Form in an even stronger way than Madhyamaka’s revolutionary nonduality. When Emptiness and Form are truly seen to be one, then Form itself is seen as the radiance and luminosity of Emptiness, and all of reality becomes a rainbow of luminous transparency, whole and complete, free and full, a realm of joy and celebration. The union of Emptiness and Form becomes the union of Emptiness and Luminosity, and playing with radiant luminosity—in the form of our own immediate Presence and brilliant Clarity—becomes a direct, daily occurrence.
All of this had a direct hand in the creation of Tantra (and its close cousin, Vajrayana Buddhism), the real flowering of the Third Great Turning. (As already noted, a few Buddhists, in fact, count Tantra/Vajrayana as a Fourth Turning, although this is not as well known. But if we do so, then of course this volume would be talking about the possibility of a Fifth Turning. But since this is less well known, we’ll stick with the standard Three Turnings as presented here, and then go to discuss a possible Fourth Turning.)
Tantra was especially developed at the great Nalanda University in India from the eighth to the eleventh centuries CE. For Tantra, what Early Buddhism (and most other religions) considered sins, poisons, or defilements were actually—precisely because of the union of Emptiness and Form—the seeds of great transcendental wisdom. The poison of anger, for example, instead of being denied, uprooted, or repressed, as in so many other spiritual approaches, is rather entered directly with nondual Awareness, whereupon it discloses its core wisdom, that of pure brilliant clarity. Passion, when entered and embraced with nondual Awareness, transmutes into universal compassion. And so on.
Thus, in Tantric initiations, it was common to use the “Five M’s”—five items that most religions considered totally sinful (such as alcohol, meat, and sex)—and directly introduce them in the initiation ceremony in order to emphasize that all things, without exception, are ornaments of, and fully one with, Spirit itself.4 This nondual realization applies as well to all of our own “sinful” qualities—all of our feelings, thoughts, and actions, no matter how apparently negative, are at heart nothing other than Godhead or nondual Spirit, and are to be seen and experienced exactly as such.
Where the First Turning was the way of renunciation, denying negative states as part of despised samsara, and the Second Turning was the way of transformation, working on a negative state with wisdom until it converted to a positive transcendental state, the Third Turning and its Tantric correlate was the way not of renunciation or transformation but of transmutation—of looking directly into a negative state of Form in order to directly recognize its already present state of Emptiness or Primordial Wisdom. The motto here is “Bring everything to the Path.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, is taboo; food, alcohol, sex, money—all are to be deeply befriended and lovingly embraced (within, of course, sane limits) as being ornaments of Spirit itself, direct manifestations of the ultimate Divine. There is only Spirit. There is only Tathagatagarbha (womb of Suchness). There is only Svabhavikakaya (Integral Body of Buddha). And all of this is because the sacred and the profane, the infinite and the finite, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, are not two different, separate, and fragmented realms, but co-arising, mutually existing, complementary aspects of one Whole Reality, equally to be embraced and cherished.
Looking at the nonduality of Emptiness and Form, we can say that Enlightenment “transcends and includes” the entire manifest world. With Emptiness, the entire world is transcended, is let go of, is seen through as a shimmering transparency, is understood to have no separate-self existence at all, is seen as a seamless (not featureless) Whole—and thus we are radically free from the torment and torture of identifying with partial, finite objects and things and events (including a small, finite, fragmented, skin-encapsulated ego), all of which are typically and normally seen as separate and “other.” As the Upanishads put it, “Wherever there is other, there is fear.”5 Samsara is being caught in the hell of others (as Sartre might say). It is identifying with various ornaments of the Divine but without an awareness of the Divine itself—being in a genuine heaven but without a genuine Spirit (Emptiness) anywhere to be found. But recognize Emptiness, and then one’s identity with any particular, separate, isolated thing or event evaporates instantly, leaving an identity, not with the small, separate-self sense, but with the entire world of Form. Since Reality is the union of Emptiness and Form, to discover Emptiness is to be free of any specific or isolated Form, and instead to become one with ALL Form, a radical Fullness that is the Form side of the radical Freedom of Emptiness—with infinite and finite, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, Freedom and Fullness, all nondual. You no longer look at a mountain, you are the mountain. You no longer hear the rain, you are the rain. You no longer see the clouds float by, you are the clouds floating by. There is no “other” here, because there is no longer anything outside of you that could hurt, harm, or torture you, or that you could crave, lust after, or hungrily grasp. There is simply the entire timeless Now, the ever-present Present, containing the entire manifest world, and you ARE all that. To quote the Upanishads again, Tat Tvam asi—“Thou art That”—where “That” is the divine Wholeness of the entire universe. In Emptiness, radical Freedom; in Form, radical Fullness—and both are “not-two.”
Now, when it comes to the manifest world, where evolution is so prominently on display, Emptiness itself does not evolve. It has no moving parts, and thus nothing to evolve; it is the absence of absence of absence (if anything), and thus, again, nothing concrete to actually evolve. It is not apart from samsara or Form; it is the emptiness (or transparency or “wetness”) of all samsara and Form. A sage who, two thousand years ago, directly realized Emptiness would discover and “possess” the same, identical Freedom as a sage who experienced Emptiness today, even though the world has evolved considerably in the meantime. But when it comes to Form, to the world of Form—well, that is exactly where evolution has occurred. And the world of Form has indeed evolved over the last two thousand years, becoming (as all evolution does) more and more conscious, more complex, more caring, more loving, more creative, and more self-organized, containing higher and higher Wholes (as we will see in more detail).
And thus, more truths have emerged. Two thousand years ago, humanity thought the earth was flat; slavery was taken to be part of the natural, normal state of nature; women were largely treated as second-class citizens, if citizens at all; there was no understanding of, say, brain neurochemistry and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA, acetylcholine, nor medical advances that have added an average of forty years to the typical lifespan. Likewise, new psychological and sociological truths have emerged and evolved, advancing considerably our understanding of what it means to be human. The world of Form, in short, has become considerably more complex and Full, and although an experience of Enlightenment—of the unity of Emptiness and Form—is no Freer today than it was two thousand years ago (Emptiness is the same, then and now), it is most definitely Fuller (Form has most definitely increased, grown, and evolved). Evolution itself operates by transcending and including, transcending and including, transcending and including—and thus a human being today transcends and includes most of the fundamental emergent phenomena going all the way back to the Big Bang. Humans today literally contain quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, a photosynthetic Kreb’s cycle, organ systems, neural nets, a reptilian brain stem, a mammalian limbic system, a primate cortex, and—as its own “transcending” addition—a complex neocortex (which contains more possible neural connections than there are stars in the known universe). All of this is “transcended and included” in a human being.
Likewise, across the board with goodness, truth, and beauty. The world today has access to all of the great premodern Wisdom Traditions (and their meditative access to ultimate Truth and Enlightened Awareness) plus all of modernity’s staggering advances in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, hygiene—stretching from a cure for polio, to putting a human on the moon, to the invention of radio, television, and computers that now contain more information than the sum total of all human brains) plus all of postmodernity’s sophisticated understanding about the contextual and constructed nature of relative truths, and the central role of perspective in all relative ideas. Shouldn’t the world’s Great Wisdom Traditions keep up with the modern and postmodern additions to our knowledge and understanding? After all, what is it that is evolving in all of this? Why, of course, Spirit! Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action: Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, Godhead, Allah, YHWH, the Great Perfection, Ati, the Ground of all Being, One without a Second. Whitehead, we noted, divided Spirit into two dimensions: the “Primordial Nature of God” (timeless and unchanging; for us, Emptiness) and the “Consequent Nature of God” (the sum total of all evolution to date; Form). And while the Primordial Nature of God has not changed one iota from the Big Bang and before, the Consequent Nature of God has grown magnificently and substantially. There are commonly understood truths now that would have simply staggered the premodern mind, from the nature of brain activity (a brain that, as noted, has more neural synaptic connections than there are known stars in the entire universe) to the extraordinary unfoldings of a self-organizing and self-transcending evolution, to the nature of the Big Bang itself in its first nanoseconds. Not to mention the Singularity that is in all likelihood bearing down on us now in technology and will change the world more than any other single change in human history.
Buddhism is a unique spiritual system in many ways, while also sharing some fundamental similarities with the other Great Wisdom Traditions of humankind. But perhaps one its most unique features is its understanding, in some schools, that its own system is evolving or developing. This is generally expressed in the notion of the Three Great Turnings of Buddhism, the three major stages of unfolding that Buddhism has undergone, according to Buddhism itself. The First Turning of the Wheel is Early Buddhism, now generally believed to be represented by the Theravada school and thought to contain the historical Gautama Buddha’s original teachings, which developed in the great Axial period around the sixth century BCE. The Second Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Madhyamaka school, was founded by the genius philosopher-sage Nagarjuna around the second century CE. The Third and final (to date) Great Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Yogachara school, originated in the second century CE but had its period of greatest productivity in the fourth century CE with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. All Three Turnings had profound impacts on every school of Buddhism that came after them.
The Madhyamaka school, although critical of Early Buddhism in many ways, nonetheless transcends and includes many of its foundational teachings, while criticizing those notions it finds partial, limited, or incomplete. And many Yogachara schools attempted to integrate and synthesize all Three Turnings. This was an ongoing, cumulative, synthesizing unfolding, as if Buddhism was plugged into the great evolution of Spirit itself.
In other words, many adherents of Buddhism had a view that Buddhism itself was unfolding, with each new turning adding something new and important to the overall Buddhist teaching itself. My point can now be put simply: many contemporary Buddhist teachers, agreeing with psychologists and sociologists that the world itself, at least in several important ways, is undergoing a global transformation, believe that this transformation will affect also Buddhism, adding to it yet newer and more significant truths, and resulting in yet another unfolding, a Fourth Great Turning, of Buddhism itself. (Some people view the rise of Tantric Buddhism, or occasionally Vajrayana Buddhism, as a Fourth Turning, and from that perspective, we are speaking of a possible Fifth Turning. But generally we will remain with the more common Three Turnings and take it from there.) This Fourth Turning retains all the previous great truths of Buddhism but also adds newer findings from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and developmental psychology—but only to the extent that they are in fundamental agreement with the foundational tenets of Buddhism itself, simply extending them to some degree, as it were. Known by various names—from evolutionary Buddhism to Integral Buddhism—the Fourth Turning, like all the previous turnings, transcends yet includes its predecessors, adding new material while retaining all the essentials. And what is so remarkable about this development is that it is completely in keeping with this general understanding of itself that Buddhism has grasped—namely, that Buddhadharma (“Buddhist Truth”) is itself unfolding, growing, and evolving, responding to new circumstances and discoveries as it does so. Even the Dalai Lama has said, for example, that Buddhism must keep pace with modern science or it will grow old and obsolete.
A brief glance at Buddhist history will show what is involved. Original Buddhism was founded on such notions as the difference between samsara (the source of suffering) and nirvana (the source of Enlightenment or Awakening); the three marks of samsaric existence; that is dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (no-self); and the Four Noble Truths: (1) life as lived in samsara is suffering, (2) the cause of this suffering is craving or grasping, (3) to end craving or grasping is to end suffering, and (4) there is a way to end grasping, namely, the eightfold way—right view, right intention, right speech, right actions, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right unitive awareness.
The ultimate goal of Early Buddhism was to escape samsara—the manifest realm of life, death, rebirth, old age, suffering, and sickness—entirely, by following the eightfold way and attaining nirvana. “Nirvana” means, essentially, formless extinction. The prefix “nir-” means “without,” and “vana” means everything from desire to grasping to lust to craving itself. The overall meaning is “blown out” or “extinguished”—as if a lit candle were handed to you, and you leaned over and blew out the flame. What is extinguished or “blown out”? All the typical marks of samsara itself—including suffering, the angst that comes from craving for permanence, the separate-self sense, or self-contraction (often called “ego”), and its inherent fear, anxiety, and depression. The state of nirvana is sometimes said to be a state similar to deep dreamless sleep, in which, of course, there is no ego, no suffering, no hankering for permanence, no space, no time, no separation—if anything, there is simply the boundless peace or vast equanimity of being liberated from the torture of samsara and its suffering-inducing ways. According to some schools, there is even an end limit, or “extreme” form of nirvana, called nirodh—complete cessation—where neither consciousness nor objects arise at all, and that might be thought of as an infinite formlessness of pure freedom. Be that as it may, the goal is clear: get out of samsara and into nirvana.
According to Buddhist history, Gautama Siddhartha (“Buddha” is not a name but a title, and means “Awakened,” and was added to his name after his Enlightenment) was raised as a prince, with all the princely affluence of palace life, and with a father who protected him closely, so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the typical horrors of everyday life in India at that time. But then one day, Gautama escaped from the palace walls and, in wandering around the surrounding city, saw three sights that severely disturbed him—a very sick person, an old and decrepit person, and a dead person. “These are something my palatial life cannot protect me from,” he thought, and he promptly left the palace and began a six-year search, studying under various holy men, looking for an answer to life’s problems that he had witnessed wandering in his city. But after six years, nothing proved satisfactory, and, exhausted and frustrated, he sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to arise until he had discovered the answer.
Early one morning, glancing at the starry heavens, Gautama had a profound experience. “Aha! I’ve found you! Never again will I be deceived!” he exclaimed, as much with utter joy as complete exhaustion. What did he find? Whatever it was, it converted him from “ignorance” to “Enlightenment.” Different responses as to what he saw and understood have been given by various schools, all of them believable. One was the “twelvefold chain of dependent origination,” a profound understanding of the completely interwoven nature of all reality and the inexorable role of causality in tying them all together—all of which conspire to inevitably cause suffering when driven by grasping. Another was the three marks of existence itself (impermanence, suffering, and selflessness) and the eightfold way to end their hold on the human being. According to Zen, Gautama had a profound satori, a deep awakening experience, awakening to his own true Buddha-nature and his fundamental oneness with the entire Ground of Being (or Dharmakaya), ending his separate-self sense, and with it, suffering. Whatever exactly it was, it did indeed soon become formalized in the three marks of existence, the twelvefold chain, and the eightfold way. Gautama Siddhartha had sat down under the Bodhi tree an ordinary individual and got up from it an Enlightened or Awakened being, a Buddha. When Buddha was asked if he was a God or supernatural being, he replied, “No.” “What was he?” “Awakened,” is all that he replied.
Such was the basic form of Buddhism as practiced for almost eight hundred years—until, that is, Nagarjuna, who began paying attention to this strange duality between samsara and nirvana. For Nagarjuna, this duality tore Reality in half and didn’t produce liberation but subtle illusion. For him, there is no ontological difference between samsara and nirvana. The difference is merely epistemological. That is, Reality looked at through concepts and categories appears as samsara, while the very same Reality looked at free of concepts and categories is nirvana. Samsara and nirvana are thus not-two, or “nondual.” And this caused a major revolution in Buddhist thought and practice.
Gautama Buddha had discovered the “emptiness,” or ultimately illusory nature of, the separate-self sense; but he had not discovered the emptiness—the shunyata—of all of what is usually called “reality” (including not only all subjects, or selves, but all objects, or “dharmas”). Buddhism had just taken its second major Turn in its illustrious history, adding a novel and profound element to its already accepted discoveries.
Nagarjuna relies on the “Two Truths” doctrine—there is relative, or conventional, truth, and there is absolute, or ultimate Truth. Relative truth can be categorized and characterized, and is the basis of disciplines such as science, history, law, and so on. That a molecule of water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is a relative truth, for example. But ultimate Truth cannot be categorized at all (including that statement). Any category or quality or characteristic makes sense only in terms of its opposite, but ultimate Reality has no opposite. Based on what is known as the “Four Inexpressibles,” you can’t, according to Nagarjuna, say that ultimate Reality is Being, or not-Being, or both, or neither. You cannot say it is Self (atman), or no-self (anatman or anatta), or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s implicate, or explicate, or both, or neither. You can’t say that it’s immanent in Gaia, or that it transcends Gaia, or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s a timeless Now, or a temporal everlastingness, or both, or neither. And so on for any category or quality. The reason is, as we were saying, that any concept you come up with makes sense only in terms of its opposite (liberated versus bound, infinite versus finite, something versus nothing, implicate versus explicate, pleasure versus pain, free versus limited, temporal versus timeless, good versus evil, true versus false, and so on), yet ultimate Reality has no opposite. As the Upanishads put it, “Brahman [ultimate Reality] is one without a second” and “free of the pairs”—the pairs of opposites, that is—and thus can’t be categorized at all (including that statement, which would also be formally denied). Nagarjuna says, “It is neither void, nor not void, nor both, nor neither, but in order to point it out, it is called the Void.” The Void, shunyata, or Emptiness. It’s a radical “neti, neti”—“not this, not that”—except “neti, neti” is also denied as a characteristic.
Now what this does mean is that Emptiness, or ultimate Reality, is not separate from anything that is arising. (Technically, even that statement would be denied; but we are now talking metaphorically to get across the general gist of Emptiness—because the main point is that although it cannot be said, it can be shown, or directly realized. More on this as we continue.) Not being separate from anything (“not having a second”), it is the Emptiness of everything that is arising. Emptiness isn’t a realm separate from other realms, it is the Emptiness, or Transparency, of all realms. Looked at free from conceptualization or categorization, everything that is arising is Emptiness, or Emptiness is the Reality of each and every thing in the manifest and unmanifest world—it is their very Suchness, their Thusness, their Isness. Looked at through concepts and categories, the universe appears as samsara—as built of radically separate and isolated things and events—and grasping after those things and attachment to them causes suffering because, ultimately, everything eventually falls apart, and thus whatever you’re attached to will sooner or later cause suffering as it falls apart. But looked at with prajna (or jnana)—nonconceptual choiceless awareness—the world of samsara is actually self-liberated nirvana. (In the word jnana, the root “jna,” by the way, in English is “kno,” as in “knowledge,” or “gno,” as in “gnosis.”) Jnana is a nondual, unqualifiable knowledge or timeless Present awareness, the realization of which brings Enlightenment or Awakening. Awakening to what? The radical Freedom or infinite Liberation or radical Luminosity-Love of pure Emptiness, though those terms, again, are at best metaphors.
Since there is no radical separation between samsara and nirvana (samsara and nirvana being “not-two,” or as the Heart Sutra summarizes nonduality, “That which is Emptiness is not other than Form; that which is Form is not other than Emptiness”), liberating Emptiness can be found anywhere in the world of Form—any and all Form is one with Emptiness. It is not a particular state of mind or state of consciousness but the very fabric or “isness” of consciousness itself.
A commonly used metaphor to explain the relationship of Emptiness to Form is the ocean and its waves. Typical, limited, bounded states of consciousness—from looking at a mountain, to experiencing happiness, to feeling fear, to watching a bird in flight, to listening to Mozart’s music—are all partial states and thus separate from each other; they all have a beginning (or are “born”), and they all have an ending (or “die”). They are like the individual waves in the ocean; each starts, has a certain size (from “small,” to “medium,” to “huge”), and eventually ends, and, of course, they are all different from each other.
But Emptiness—the Reality of each moment, its sheer transparent being, its simple “Suchness” or “Thusness” or “Isness”—is like the wetness of the ocean. And no wave is wetter than another. One wave can certainly be bigger than another, but it is not wetter. All waves are equally wet; all waves are equally Emptiness, or equally Spirit, or equally Godhead or Brahman or Tao. And that means that the very nature of this and every moment, just as it is, is pure Spirit—Spirit is not hard to reach but is impossible to avoid! And one wave can last longer than another wave, but it is still not wetter; it has no more Suchness or Thusness than the smallest wave in the entire ocean. And that means that whatever state of mind you have, right here, right now, is equally Enlightened; you can no more attain Enlightenment than you can attain your feet (or a wave can become wet). Enlightenment, and the “Big Mind/Big Heart” that reveals it, is absolutely ever-present Presence; all you have to do is recognize it (about which, more later).
But this being so, one no longer has to retreat to a monastery—away from the world, away from Form, away from samsara—in order to find Liberation. Samsara and nirvana have been joined, united, brought together into a single or nondual Reality. The goal is no longer to become the isolated saint or arhat—looking to get off of samsara entirely—but the socially and environmentally engaged “bodhisattva”—which literally means “being of Enlightened mind”—whose vow is not to get off samsara and retreat into an isolated nirvana, but a promise to fully embrace samsara and vow to gain Enlightenment as quickly as possible so as to help all sentient beings recognize their own deepest spiritual reality or Buddha-nature, and hence Enlightenment.
In one sweep, the two halves of the universe, so to speak—samsara and nirvana, Form and Emptiness—were joined into one, whole, seamless (not featureless) Reality, and Buddhist practitioners were set free to embrace the entire manifest realm of samsara and Form, not to avoid it. The vow of the bodhisattva likewise became paradoxical, reflecting both members of the pairs of opposites, not just one: no longer “There are no others to save (because samsara is illusory),” which is the arhat’s chant, but “There are no others to save, therefore I vow to save them all!”—which reflects the truth of a samsara and nirvana paradoxically joined, no longer torn in two.
The Madhyamaka notion of Emptiness henceforth became the foundation of virtually every Mahayana and Vajrayana school of Buddhism, becoming, as the title of T. R. V. Murti’s book has it, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (although “philosophy” is perhaps not the best word for a system whose goal is to recognize that which transcends thought entirely).1
One of the most demanding challenges for the historian of any country is to explain the underlying processes of history and national character, what the British historian A. J. P. Taylor referred to as “the profound forces,” that impel a nation along one course rather than another.1 Modern Japan’s history has been particularly difficult to explain and understand. Japan’s international behavior has fluctuated widely and wildly—from isolation to enthusiastic borrowing from foreign cultures, from emperor worship to democracy, from militarism to pacifism. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, when its leaders abruptly ended national isolation and undertook the reorganization of their institutions after the model of the West, Japan has been marked by its pendulum-like swings in national policy. None has been more dramatic than the 180-degree turn from a brutal imperialism to withdrawal from international politics and a sustained drive for commercial prowess after World War II.
Japan’s role as a merchant nation brought astonishing results. Staying on the sidelines of the Cold War, it recovered rapidly from wartime devastation to become the world’s second-ranked economic power. Through its widely envied choice of avoiding the military spending and involvements that encumbered other nations, Japan was able to make the long-term investments in science, education, and technology that would speed its advancement. Japan’s financial markets garnered massive wealth and influence. Its mastery of the skills of organizing a modern industrial society provoked universal admiration as foreign observers grasped for superlatives to describe its achievement. In 1979, a Harvard sociologist ranked Japan simply “number one” in the world. Two years later, a popular French writer regarded it as “a model to all the world.”2
After 1990, however, the nation again surprised the world. Japan abruptly entered into a puzzling period of paralysis; its economic ascent stalled and its government ceased to function as effectively as it once had. Foreign observers were at a loss to explain Japan’s failure to take steps to revive its moribund economy. U.S. policymakers spared no opportunity to advise their slumping ally on the reforms required. The “Japanese economic miracle” was soon eclipsed by the rise of the neighboring colossus. The 1990s became Japan’s “lost decade,” and China’s emergence as an economic giant dimmed the memories of Japan’s achievement.
In retrospect, this period of stagnation may well be seen as a transition time. Early in the new century there are many indications that Japan is on the verge of another sea change in its international orientation. The belligerence of North Korea, the growing rivalry with a newly powerful China, and the uncertainties of an age of terrorism all have awakened Japanese security consciousness. A new generation of Japanese leaders is impatient with the low political profile that came with Japan’s role as a merchant nation. Japan is moving from a period of single-minded pursuit of economic power to a more orthodox international role in which it will be deeply engaged in political-military affairs. After more than half a century of national pacifism and isolationism, the nation is preparing to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the twenty-first century.
These recurrent wide swings in national policy raise persistent questions about the motivations of the Japanese in their national life. What are the common threads that bind together the divergent strategies of modern Japan? Japan’s national purpose and the perceived traits of its national character are subjects of scrutiny among its neighbors and can be sources of distrust. Japan’s imperialist depredations are still fresh in the minds of Chinese and Koreans. Memories of their bitter experience as victims of Japanese expansion are stoked by their rising nationalism. Signs that Japan might be abandoning its postwar pacifism are disturbing and cause for outcry.
For Americans, in contrast, the apparent readiness of Japan to adopt a more active security role is a welcome change and the fulfillment of a goal long pursued. The alliance with Japan, now extending more than half a century, has often frustrated U.S. leaders because it seemed to provide Japan with unfair economic advantage: While the United States provided security guarantees for Japan, Japan pursued economic growth, often in competition with U.S. interests. Preoccupied with the war on terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and at the same time aiming to maintain an effective balance with China, a rising power, the United States now seeks to rework the alliance with Japan to meet new conditions. Drawing Japan into a more active role in its global strategy is a major objective of U.S. policy.
Despite more than a century of alliance experience, American understanding of Japanese character, motivation, and purpose remains shaky. Japanese patterns of behavior have been a source of frequent puzzlement for Americans, whose history has been tightly intertwined with Japan but whose social values and national experience are utterly different. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, Japan’s unique civilization presents the United States with an ally possessing “intangibles of culture that America is ill-prepared to understand fully.”3 What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns in Japan’s modern experience that will help to explain how its leaders may respond to the emerging environment of world politics? These questions are relevant not only in looking back at Japan’s remarkable history but also in observing contemporary Japan and pondering its future at a critical time of change and uncertainty in Asia and the world. U.S. policymakers have been wrong about—or surprised by—Japan’s behavior many times in the past. As Japan returns to great-power politics and the alliance enters a new and problematic phase, a clear understanding of Japanese character and purpose and its new role takes on renewed importance.
“Yoga is the science of the self. It is a practical science that validates the knowledge that the self of the individual is the self of the universe. When you are one with the Source of existence, you are one with infinite abundance and with the unlimited potential of all manifestation. This jewel of a book will show you how to tap into your inner intelligence, the ultimate and supreme genius that mirrors the wisdom of the cosmos. Cultivate wealth consciousness, and affluence and prosperity will effortlessly flow toward you in all their manifestations.”
— Deepak Chopra, bestselling author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and You Are the Universe
“The Jewel of Abundance will inspire, challenge, and motivate readers to discover and express their innate potential to experience excellence in all aspects of life. Having known Ellen Grace O’Brian for almost four decades, I am pleased to affirm her good character and total commitment to living the principles she so clearly explains.”
— Roy Eugene Davis, founder and director of Center for Spiritual Awareness and author of Paramahansa Yogananda as I Knew Him
“The Jewel of Abundance lays out a well-defined perspective on prosperity, wealth, and abundance. It presents a balanced view that takes into account common human needs and shows us simple ways to find happiness and satisfaction that lie beyond the accumulation of material objects. Ellen Grace O’Brian carefully and simply presents ancient wisdom so that one can easily begin to make the necessary changes to one’s lifestyle. One does not have to be a saint to follow the path of righteousness; one simply has to learn the ways of dharma, kama, and artha and apply them to one’s daily life. The Jewel of Abundance is a very valuable book containing gems of wisdom. It can help the world change its course from the present crisis of materialism to a sustainable lifestyle.”
— Ela Gandhi, peace activist and founder of the Gandhi Development Trust
Gradually, bit by bit, India’s vast and venerable storehouse of knowledge has filtered into the West, informing disciplines from philosophy to psychology to medicine, and transforming how we understand religion and express our spirituality. Each new translation of a sacred or philosophical text, each new guru, each new scholarly article, each new pilgrim to swamis and yoga masters in India, and of course each new interpretive book, like this one, adds to the wealth of Indic resources for novice seekers and veteran yogis alike. The ongoing transmission of Vedic knowledge, now more than two hundred years in the making, penetrates our culture more widely and deeply every day. But while large numbers of Westerners are now familiar with concepts like karma and mind-body technologies like meditation and postural yoga, much of the Vedic treasure trove remains untapped or underappreciated. The four purusharthas — the proper aims of life or objects of pursuit — are among those neglected precepts. With this wise and practical book, Ellen Grace O’Brian admirably fills the gap.
Two of the purusharthas, dharma and moksha, are actually quite well known among yogis, meditators, and students of Eastern philosophy. This is because the purveyors of yogic knowledge have discussed those concepts at length in speech and writing and also because no precise equivalents exist in Western philosophical and religious systems. As a result, with varying degrees of depth and seriousness, seekers have delved into the understanding of dharma, a complex term that boils down to action that supports individual spiritual development and the well-being of the larger community; and of moksha, the liberation of the soul in yogic union with the divine. The other two purusharthas, kama (pleasure) and artha (prosperity, the focus of this book), have received far less attention.
The Indian teachers who journeyed West did not exactly neglect the human drive for material comfort and worldly enjoyment. They did not discourage anyone from enjoying life’s safe, simple pleasures, and as leaders of organizations, they were fully aware of the positive uses of money; they had to pay bills, after all, and raise money to finance their work. More important, their success in reaching Western seekers depended on their ability to adapt and articulate age-old wisdom to the people who came to them for guidance. Paramahansa Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (to cite the twentieth century’s best-known gurus in the West) emphasized that the yogic teachings they espoused had value not only for the rare ascetics but for people with jobs and families. They taught that material comfort is compatible with spiritual development and can actually support it by freeing one’s time and energy for spiritual pursuits. They also taught that the reverse is true: Yogic methods that expand consciousness and open the heart can enhance the kind of thinking, acting, and relating that supports material success.
Yogacharya O’Brian is in that lineage, both literally (Yogananda was the guru of her guru, Roy Eugene Davis) and because her perspective accords with the inner/outer, spiritual/material complementarity advocated by the yogic missionaries. Her interpretation of artha, the aim of life addressed in this book, is consistent with that of the gurus who directed their teachings to householders.
This book is commendable for many reasons, among them its unfailingly practical orientation and its lucid explanation of yogic concepts that are often rendered in obtuse prose. Also, O’Brian understands that the purusharthas are connected, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing. As with the legs of a table, when you move one, the others also move. Hence, when pursued correctly, growth in one of the four aims of life enhances growth in the others. In the case of artha, properly obtained prosperity enhances pleasure, the fulfillment of dharma, and progress toward moksha — and, similarly, growth in any of the other three can enhance one’s chances of becoming more prosperous.
Equally admirable is the author’s treatment of prosperity as something more than financial success and material comfort. In her view, spiritual abundance is part and parcel of the proper definition of artha. She recognizes that abundance acquired in the absence of spiritual growth is relatively empty and unfulfilling — and, she contends, ambitious seekers of wealth are advised not to ignore their inner lives, for doing so can actually be detrimental to their material goals.
If you think this sounds as though Yogacharya O’Brian is echoing the many voices that have, for years, urged Americans to find a balance between work and home, or career advancement and personal happiness, you are only partially correct. Her yogic perspective extends beyond ordinary happiness and mental health, pointing the reader to the highest levels of human development and encouraging action that serves the larger society as well as personal goals — not in addition to material success but as integral to the very definition of prosperity.
By presenting this elevated vision of life balance and human aspiration, The Jewel of Abundance is a useful antidote to the hyper-materialism that poisons modern life. And for those who seek the fulfillment of both their souls and their material desires, the book is a wellspring of inspiration and intelligent guidance.
— Philip Goldberg, author of The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru and American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West
We are born to thrive. If we look, we can see this — everything in nature, including us, is geared toward the growth and fulfillment of its purpose. The sapling Red Delicious apple tree in the garden stretches toward the sun, and given the right conditions, it blossoms and bears sweet fruit. How we delight to witness that same impetus of blossoming growth in a baby! We applaud as she first lifts her head, then rocks on all fours and crawls forth to pursue adventure and taste the world. What next? She stands up, speaks, falls down, gets up, and runs off to school with the innate imperative to thrive that is her birthright.
The inclination to thrive, prosper, and fulfill our potential is the natural impulse of our divine capacity as spiritual beings. The same energy that gives birth to stars in the cosmos inspires music, literature, architecture, medicine, dance, technology — any and all forms of creative expression and manifestation. That energy is unlimited; it pervades all of nature, relentlessly encouraging all of life to realize its full potential: Thrive! it implores. It whispers in our dreams and stirs our imagination with its evolutionary call: Prosper! Live your full life; do what you came here to do. Follow the impulse to prosper and become all that you truly are in your fullness.
As a child, do you remember being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Even as a young girl in the 1950s and 1960s, when career options were more restricted for women, I thought about what I might do when I got older. I dreamed of who I might become. But like many young people even today, I didn’t have a context for my dreams. I was not aware of a structure other than cultural expectations that could illumine the path ahead. Over the years, I’ve heard many spiritual seekers share a similar story. They often say something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if life came with an instruction manual?”
That seemingly missing instruction manual can be found in ancient Vedic how-to-live teachings for seekers of all ages. One of the most important instructions we find there is what is called purushartha — the four universal goals of human life. This sublime and practical guidance is one of the precious jewels of Sanatana Dharma. Also known as the Eternal Way, Sanatana Dharma is the traditional name for the Vedic philosophical principles and spiritual practices that became known as Hinduism. Based on our individual connection to cosmic order, this comprehensive approach to spiritually conscious living is for all people and for all time.
The literal meaning of the Sanskrit term purushartha is “for the purpose of the soul.”1 That’s it! What we do in life — our dreams, our aims, our goals, and our accomplishments — are to serve the soul, to support our spiritual destiny.
Pursuit of the four aims of life contributes to living with balance, integrity, and joy. When rightly understood and used as a guidepost, the four goals help us develop on all levels. We become both spiritually aware and worldly wise.
The first goal is dharma, which encompasses realizing our higher purpose and fulfilling our destiny in this lifetime. The word dharma is rich with meaning: the way of righteousness, purpose, duty, support, law, or a goal of life. Dharma is the fundamental law of life, the underlying cosmic order. Literally, it means “what holds together.” Consider this “holding together” as the connection between divine order and our individual lives and destiny. Our lives are intertwined with the cosmic order. An intelligent, enlivening power is nurturing our universe and we can learn to cooperate with it.2 Each of us has a purpose, a place, a duty, and a divine destiny.
The overarching dharma or universal purpose of life is to awaken to our essential spiritual nature. Waking up spiritually is Self-realization and God-realization — realizing the truth of our being and having knowledge and direct insight into Ultimate Reality. When we wake up, we can live in harmony with divine order, actualize our innate potential, and make a positive contribution to life. Beyond all else we are inspired to do, it is this highest priority that promises lasting fulfillment. Dharma is our north star. But dharma does not shine alone — its brilliance is set off by the three other life goals that surround it.
The second goal, artha, or prosperity, is the primary focus of this book. The aim of artha is to prosper in every way — to develop the consciousness and the skills to attract whatever is needed to fulfill our dharma or higher purpose. In this context, prosperity is understood as a spiritual goal — not for its own sake, but for the sake of the soul. It provides the means to live fully and freely. When prosperity is equated with material wealth attained for its own sake, the word prosperity loses its deep meaning. True prosperity is experienced in a spiritual context. Because this truth is frequently missed, the words prosperity and wealth are often narrowly defined or understood at the level of material accomplishment alone. But as you work through the teachings of this book with me, you’ll see that these words can rightly be applied and understood in the highest way as spiritual goals. And that makes all the difference.
The third goal is kama, which is pleasure or enjoyment. This, too, is for the sake of the soul. Our inclination to seek pleasure springs from the simple joy of being alive and is linked to our higher quest for ananda, the soul’s bliss. It doesn’t take that long to realize that playing with pleasure is playing with fire; pleasure and pain are linked. To effectively embrace pleasure as one of life’s essential goals without getting burned by it, we need to understand it. And we can. This requires discerning what enhances our joy and what depletes it. Ultimately, this life aim points us in the direction of the soul’s bliss, where our search for unending joy can be realized. Life is meant to be lived fully and enjoyed.
The fourth goal is moksha. Moksha is the absolute freedom that blossoms from enlightenment. It is the liberation of consciousness from the errors of perception that cause identification with our small, personal self. It is the realization of our true, divine Self that makes it possible to live spontaneously, freely, and joyfully in the world. The first three aims are oriented toward this one. Live with purpose. Prosper. Enjoy life. Set your sights on freedom. Living with higher purpose, doing what is ours to do, thriving, enjoying life — all are meant to point us in the direction of ultimate fulfillment and freedom. Jesus highlighted this so well with the question, “What does it profit us to gain the entire world if we lose our soul?” Or, as Paramahansa Yogananda encouraged, “Why not live in the highest way?”3
Artha and kama, the goals to thrive and enjoy life, are supported, clarified, and constrained by dharma — purpose and duty — and moksha — the liberation of consciousness. Seen in this way, we live both a full and a balanced life. Too much spiritual striving, as if fulfillment is found at the end, neglects the aim of kama — to live joyfully now. Without the illumination of higher purpose, unbounded pursuit of either pleasure or wealth ultimately leads to a life of distraction and pain.
These four universal life goals offer a context for our life, the guiding light we yearn for. Our desire for a meaningful life is even greater than our desire for happiness. It’s universal. No matter what our culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, spiritual path, or the particular time we live in — we are here to awaken and fulfill our potential. It’s the soul’s journey from the darkness of ignorance to the light of Self-realization, from confusion about who we are and what our purpose is to clarity and self-actualization.
Once we recognize the primary dharmic goal to awaken, we can see that our life is perfectly arranged to support us in doing just that. Not only that, we discover lasting fulfillment along the way as conscious partners in a world awakening to its potential. From the dark ages to the technological advances of today, we are ready for the greatest evolutionary jump the world has ever known — the awakening of our hearts and our minds to the unity of all life. Awakening, prospering, and fulfilling our potential is inextricably tied to the well-being of all. What we do matters. We are powerful agents, not only of personal prosperity, but of essential social change and planetary healing, so that all may prosper.
How do we do it? We wake up. We realize who we are as spiritual beings in a spiritual universe, joyously and inescapably connected in the one divine Ultimate Reality expressing itself as all that is. We grow up. We free ourselves from the shackles of blame and welcome responsibility for our life. We mature beyond the adolescent egocentric level of consciousness that fosters greed, the disease at the root of both personal and planetary malaise. And we show up. We discover how to prosper — how to realize our potential and bring forth our profound offering to life.
Gradually, bit by bit, India’s vast and venerable storehouse of knowledge has filtered into the West, informing disciplines from philosophy to psychology to medicine, and transforming how we understand religion and express our spirituality. Each new translation of a sacred or philosophical text, each new guru, each new scholarly article, each new pilgrim to swamis and yoga masters in India, and of course each new interpretive book, like this one, adds to the wealth of Indic resources for novice seekers and veteran yogis alike. The ongoing transmission of Vedic knowledge, now more than two hundred years in the making, penetrates our culture more widely and deeply every day. But while large numbers of Westerners are now familiar with concepts like karma and mind-body technologies like meditation and postural yoga, much of the Vedic treasure trove remains untapped or underappreciated. The four purusharthas — the proper aims of life or objects of pursuit — are among those neglected precepts. With this wise and practical book, Ellen Grace O’Brian admirably fills the gap.
Two of the purusharthas, dharma and moksha, are actually quite well known among yogis, meditators, and students of Eastern philosophy. This is because the purveyors of yogic knowledge have discussed those concepts at length in speech and writing and also because no precise equivalents exist in Western philosophical and religious systems. As a result, with varying degrees of depth and seriousness, seekers have delved into the understanding of dharma, a complex term that boils down to action that supports individual spiritual development and the well-being of the larger community; and of moksha, the liberation of the soul in yogic union with the divine. The other two purusharthas, kama (pleasure) and artha (prosperity, the focus of this book), have received far less attention.
The Indian teachers who journeyed West did not exactly neglect the human drive for material comfort and worldly enjoyment. They did not discourage anyone from enjoying life’s safe, simple pleasures, and as leaders of organizations, they were fully aware of the positive uses of money; they had to pay bills, after all, and raise money to finance their work. More important, their success in reaching Western seekers depended on their ability to adapt and articulate age-old wisdom to the people who came to them for guidance. Paramahansa Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (to cite the twentieth century’s best-known gurus in the West) emphasized that the yogic teachings they espoused had value not only for the rare ascetics but for people with jobs and families. They taught that material comfort is compatible with spiritual development and can actually support it by freeing one’s time and energy for spiritual pursuits. They also taught that the reverse is true: Yogic methods that expand consciousness and open the heart can enhance the kind of thinking, acting, and relating that supports material success.
Yogacharya O’Brian is in that lineage, both literally (Yogananda was the guru of her guru, Roy Eugene Davis) and because her perspective accords with the inner/outer, spiritual/material complementarity advocated by the yogic missionaries. Her interpretation of artha, the aim of life addressed in this book, is consistent with that of the gurus who directed their teachings to householders.
This book is commendable for many reasons, among them its unfailingly practical orientation and its lucid explanation of yogic concepts that are often rendered in obtuse prose. Also, O’Brian understands that the purusharthas are connected, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing. As with the legs of a table, when you move one, the others also move. Hence, when pursued correctly, growth in one of the four aims of life enhances growth in the others. In the case of artha, properly obtained prosperity enhances pleasure, the fulfillment of dharma, and progress toward moksha — and, similarly, growth in any of the other three can enhance one’s chances of becoming more prosperous.
Equally admirable is the author’s treatment of prosperity as something more than financial success and material comfort. In her view, spiritual abundance is part and parcel of the proper definition of artha. She recognizes that abundance acquired in the absence of spiritual growth is relatively empty and unfulfilling — and, she contends, ambitious seekers of wealth are advised not to ignore their inner lives, for doing so can actually be detrimental to their material goals.
If you think this sounds as though Yogacharya O’Brian is echoing the many voices that have, for years, urged Americans to find a balance between work and home, or career advancement and personal happiness, you are only partially correct. Her yogic perspective extends beyond ordinary happiness and mental health, pointing the reader to the highest levels of human development and encouraging action that serves the larger society as well as personal goals — not in addition to material success but as integral to the very definition of prosperity.
By presenting this elevated vision of life balance and human aspiration, The Jewel of Abundance is a useful antidote to the hyper-materialism that poisons modern life. And for those who seek the fulfillment of both their souls and their material desires, the book is a wellspring of inspiration and intelligent guidance.
— Philip Goldberg, author of The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru and American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West
We know what fear and hatred and bigotry would do. The question of our time is, what would love do? My book A POLITICS OF LOVE is a handbook for a new American revolution.
I believe that @MarWilliamson is a fresh, dynamic presence on the political stage and represents our deepest yearnings for a leader with authenticity, integrity, responsibility and the highest calling to serve. ❤️
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The Monk and the Philosopher: East Meets West in a Father-Son Dialogue
The most groundbreaking meeting of Eastern philosophy and Western culture to date.In this father-son dialgue, Revel and Ricard explore the most fundamental questions of human existence and the ways in which they are embraced by Eastern and Western thought. In this meeting of the minds, they touch upon philosophy, spirituality, science, politics, psychology and ethics. They raise the enduring questions: does life have meaning? Why is there suffering, war and hatred? Revel's perspective as an internationally renowned philosopher and Ricard's as a distinguished molecular-geneticist-turned-Buddhist-monk results in a brilliant, accessible and accessible conversation-the most eloquent meeting yet of Eastern & Western thought.
I wanted an introduction to Buddhism, this book is a back and forth between a father and his son and they are both so intelligent. It took me a while to read because I learned about so many things, also about the situation in tibet. It's really all the questions you can imagine asking next to a great, concise and very explained answer. It makes you want to be a better and more altruistic person.
つ星のうち5.0
A Warm and Insightful Dialogue
2010年7月19日 - (Amazon.com)
This dialogue between Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean-Francois Revel is similar to Ricard's other East/West philosophical dialogue (The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet), but with more depth, rigor and intimacy - thus real communication and exchange. Ricard and Revel are both well qualified for this exchange in two important respects - first is their philosophical/intellectual and experiential qualification. Revel is a respected thinker and author of both classical and post-modern Western philosophy. Ricard was raised in this mold (in France), but went on to embrace Tibetan Buddhism after completing his PhD in molecular biology to live with and translate for some of the greatest Tibetan Lamas of the 20th century (from 1972 to present). As a result he is perhaps the most qualified and
This dialogue between Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean-Francois Revel is similar to Ricard's other East/West philosophical dialogue (The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet), but with more depth, rigor and intimacy - thus real communication and exchange. Ricard and Revel are both well qualified for this exchange in two important respects - first is their philosophical/intellectual and experiential qualification. Revel is a respected thinker and author of both classical and post-modern Western philosophy. Ricard was raised in this mold (in France), but went on to embrace Tibetan Buddhism after completing his PhD in molecular biology to live with and translate for some of the greatest Tibetan Lamas of the 20th century (from 1972 to present). As a result he is perhaps the most qualified and able representative of the Buddhist tradition in a Western context.
The second qualification these two share is the love, respect and comfortable rapport of being intimately bonded as father and son. Revel's role here is primarily as the scholar interlocutor with a list of predetermined points designed to draw out Ricard's understanding of Buddhism. He is the clear thinking Western materialist and skeptic. Often he relates his son's responses to European philosophy and psychology from ancient Greek to the modern sciences, and appears genuinely surprised and delighted to learn of Asia/Buddhism's theoretical contributions (to human thought) long before Europe's. He is also quick to point out when Buddhism is merely covering old ground that European philosophy has mined extensively as well. Yet he consistently does this with passion and heart. It is especially touching to see his genuine appreciation of his son's deep and clear understanding.
For me this dialogue is very relevant (as a Westerner with longstanding involvement in Tibetan Buddhism). These materialistic questions are just the kind that I come up with on my own, or field from friends and family (and are probably similar to the ones Ricard would pose to his teachers in his role as the Western 'devils advocate'). The fact that Ricard is so well informed (and steeped in Buddhist culture) makes his responses especially instructive and reliable. (At times the two tread on very subtle ground, and Ricard's lifetime of learning and personal experience help keep it clear and on point.)
As in The Quantum and The Lotus there is a decided advantage for the Buddhist side, as Ricard concedes no ground, while his father's more open and dualistic point of view is gradually and steadily worn down by the gentle yet relentless presentation of the Buddha's Middle Way (yet in the end Revel too concedes little ground). My only criticism is that Ricard sometimes is too safe by presenting only the 'party line', with very little personal flavor. He also glosses over some of the Tibetan cultural traits which have contributed to their current situation (loss of national sovereignty and promotion of an easily misunderstood religious tradition steeped in magic and mystery). The result is that this book stays on safe and sometimes superficial ground.
Generally though this makes for a great intellectual beginner's book to Buddhism, the essence of the path and not the form of the traditions, as well as a comparative overview of it's universal message (vis-a-vis Western science, philosophy and religion). What makes this book unique and valuable is the combination of the range of inquiry, depth of clarity and genuine warmth of the dialogue.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
No adult is a mere product of childhood. There is always a forward momentum to the self that does not follow simple cause and effect. Each self becomes a constellation or a collage that is ever in motion, a “self-system” or “self-process.” There are, of course, powerful early influences on that self, but outcomes depend upon evolving combinations of experience and motivation that are never entirely predictable. This is especially clear with exceptional people: one would be hard put to explain the extraordinary actions of either a Picasso or a Hitler on the basis of childhood experience alone. With anyone, we can at best connect that childhood to later inclinations, attitudes, or passions, finding certain continuities of talent, destructiveness, or both. But precisely the quality that claims our interest here—what we usually call charisma—tends to leap out of the life narrative and create a special realm of its own.
The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found “the truth,” creating a general aura around him that “he knows.” The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, “new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience.”
But the guru, in turn, needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. We will observe a particularly bizarre and violent version of this in Asahara, and in the manner in which he disintegrated when his closest disciples turned against him. Disciples are crucial to all dimensions of a guru’s psychological struggles in ways that are seldom fully grasped.
What has also been insufficiently recognized is the life-death dimension that pervades the guru-disciple tie, a dimension I have stressed throughout my work. Moving away from the classical Freudian model of instinct, mostly sexual, and defense, mostly repression, I emphasize our struggles with the continuity of life and our ways of symbolizing life and death. At an immediate level these include experiences of vitality as opposed to numbing and inner deadness. But I also include an ultimate level of universal need for human connectedness, for a sense of being part of a great chain of being that long preceded, and will continue endlessly after, one’s own limited life span. This sense of immortality encompasses feelings of living on in our children and their children, in our influences on other human beings, in our “works,” in a particular set of spiritual or religious beliefs, in what we perceive as eternal nature, or in the oneness of transcendent experiences.
In the cult, the guru becomes a crucible for life-power. That life-power is experienced as a surge of vitality, or what was constantly spoken of in Aum as “energy.” One’s previously deadened life now has vigor and purpose, even if the vigor and purpose are borrowed from the guru. That life-power becomes bound up with larger spiritual forces, that is, with a fierce sense of death-defying immortality. This aspect was the most compelling feature of Asahara’s hold on his disciples. The charisma that a guru like him is always said to possess is usually described with phrases like “magnetic attractiveness” or a “naked capacity of mustering assent.” But at the heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to instill and sustain feelings of vitality and immortality, feelings that reach into the core of each disciple’s often wounded, always questing self, while propelling that self beyond itself. Such feelings can be as fragile as they are psychologically explosive.
In this book Asahara, the guru, will be everywhere, most of all inhabiting, even in the wake of Aum’s violence, the minds of the disciples I interviewed. At the same time he will be nowhere, his guruism a phantom force, wavering between hyperreality and nothingness.
Shōkō Asahara’s childhood brings to mind Erasmus’s aphorism “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But this particular one-eyed child was apparently an odd and uneasy king. Born in 1955 into the impoverished family of a tatami craftsman in a provincial area of Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, he was the sixth of seven children and the fourth of five boys. Chizuo Matsumoto (Asahara’s birth name), afflicted with congenital glaucoma, was without sight in one eye and had severely impaired vision in the other. Because he did have some vision he was eligible to attend an ordinary school, but his parents chose to send him to a special school for the blind. It had the advantage of providing free tuition and board, and a completely sightless older brother was already enrolled there.
Having some vision while his fellow students had none, and being bigger and stronger than most of them, he could be a dominating, manipulative, bullying, and sometimes violent figure in the school, where he would remain until he was twenty years old. He would, for instance, force his roommates to strike one another in a contest he called “pro wrestling,” and when he found their efforts unsatisfactory he would himself demonstrate how it should be done. He could be rebellious to the point of threatening teachers but, if challenged, would back down and deny any provocation. He always had a few completely blind followers toward whom he could at times exhibit great kindness, and his teachers observed that he was also capable of tenderness toward his older brother and a younger brother who later became a student at the school. But he was generally coercive, gave evidence of resentment over having been forced to attend this special school, and was prone to quick changes in attitude and demands.
In his early ventures into proto-guruism, this one-eyed “king” did not command wide allegiance. He unsuccessfully ran for class head on several occasions, and each failure left him dejected. Once, after being voted down by fellow students despite an attempt to bribe them with sweets, he accused a teacher of influencing the election by saying bad things about him, but the teacher pointed out to him that the other students were simply afraid of him.
While his actual background was humble enough, there were rumors of a further taint—that his family came from the outcast group known by the euphemism burakumin (literally “village people”) or that they were Korean, also a victimized group in Japan. These rumors, though false, suggest something of others’ attitudes toward him. Yet later he would sometimes himself imply that he was burakumin, in order to identify himself with a despised and victimized group and so to claim extraordinary triumph over adversity.
Most accounts of Asahara’s early years emphasize his preoccupation with money. He would charge other students for favors his partial sight allowed him to accomplish and insist upon being treated by them when he took them to food shops or restaurants. He is said to have accumulated a considerable sum of money this way by the time of his graduation. But whatever the complexities of his school life, he apparently obtained rather good grades as a student and achieved a black-belt ranking in judo.
One aspect of Asahara’s childhood is not frequently mentioned. He was attracted to drama of all kinds. From an early age, he loved to watch melodramas on television; later he acted in various school plays and as a high school senior wrote a play of his own about Prince Genji, a great romantic figure, taking the exalted leading role for himself. His stated ambition was to become prime minister of Japan. (One teacher remembered him avidly absorbing a biography of Kakuei Tanaka, the new prime minister in 1972.) He even reportedly said in those years that he wished to be “the head of a robot kingdom” (although in the context of the popular science-fiction culture of his adolescence, this fantasy might not have been as strange as it may now sound). His teachers generally came to think of him as someone who wished to “extend his own image into someone strong or heroic.” A former classmate made the interesting observation that as the school for the blind was a closed society, so in Aum Asahara would try “to create the same kind of closed society in which he could be the head.”
None of this can account for what he did later. Moreover, retrospective reconstructions always run the risk of evoking the past selectively in the light of subsequent behavior, particularly when that behavior is extreme. But every guru begins somewhere. Asahara’s childhood undoubtedly contributed to his sense of alienation, of otherness, to his generalized hatred of the world, to his tendency toward paranoia, to what was to become a habit of violence, to his cultivation of the art of performance, and to his aspirations toward the heroic and transcendent. Overall, he developed in childhood an inclination toward controlling and manipulating other people, and perhaps the beginnings of an identity as a “blind seer.”
A Guru's Journey -- A special report.; The Seer Among the Blind: Japanese Sect Leader's Rise
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF WITH SHERYL WUDUNNMARCH 26, 1995
As a boy attending a school for the blind, Shoko Asahara was weak-sighted but had better vision than his classmates. So he emerged as a king of the school, the one who would lead his buddies off campus when they wanted a restaurant meal.
In exchange, they would pay for the meal.
Mr. Asahara, now 40, has come a long way since then: He rides a Rolls-Royce instead of a bicycle, and he has built a multinational religious sect, a business empire worth tens of millions of dollars and a stockpile of chemicals sufficient to create enough nerve gas to kill perhaps millions of people. The chemicals have been found during police searches since the gas attack on the Tokyo subway system last Monday, in which 10 people died and 5,500 were injured.
The image of the teen-age Shoko Asahara as the manipulative guru of a boarding school -- where he is the one people must depend on, where he interprets the surrounding world, where he makes the money -- seems to hold true today. By some accounts, the communes of Mr. Asahara's religious sect, Aum Shinrikyo, are attempts to recreate the culture of his childhood school for the blind.
International concern about terrorism has traditionally focused on political groups with machine guns, plastic explosives and the backing of a pariah government. But Mr. Asahara shows that it is also possible for a bizarre religious figure with no governmental support to acquire in a few years the capability to engage in something closer to war than terrorism.
Japanese newspapers have estimated that Aum's chemical stockpile could create enough nerve gas to kill 4.2 million to 10 million people, though how they did their reckoning is not clear.
There is no evidence that this was Mr. Asahara's intention, and he has denied it vigorously. But by some estimates he could have created 50 tons of the nerve gas sarin and then achieved the kind of urban Armageddon that he has been predicting.
"As we move toward the year 2000, there will be a series of events of inexpressible ferocity and terror," reads one of Aum's booklets, picked up from its Tokyo offices a few days ago. "The lands of Japan will be transformed into a nuclear wasteland. Between 1996 and January 1998, America and its allies will attack Japan, and only 10 percent of the population of the major cities will survive."
In his writings and speeches, Mr. Asahara seems to reserve a special animus for the United States Government, and he has accused American military planes of dropping sarin on Aum's communes. But Aum is also bitterly hostile to Japan's Government. Last June the group set up a shadow government with a "Ministry of Finance," "Ministry of Education" and "Ministry of Construction." It is said to have planned to become an independent nation by 1997.
Intelligent, soft-spoken, married with six children, Mr. Asahara is a far more complex figure than the cardboard image of a cult leader would suggest. He may wear a long beard, shocking pink robes and a beatific smile, but what is striking about his sect is that it is not a one-man show. He has attracted a core of bright young university graduates and trained scientists to help him in his missions, whether those be attracting recruits or synthesizing chemicals.
Mr. Asahara denies any involvement in the subway attack on Monday. The police have not made public any evidence that he was responsible, but the police raids and discovery of chemical ingredients of nerve gas suggest that Aum is a prime suspect.
In any case, for a spiritual leader, Mr. Asahara has shown a remarkable fascination with the temporal and the chemical. And his speeches have often mentioned such nerve gases as sarin, which the police say was used in the subway attack.
"It has become clear now that my first death will be caused by something like a poison gas such as sarin," Mr. Asahara said a year ago, without explaining what he meant by his "first death." At that time, almost nobody in Japan had heard of sarin. The Beginnings A Younger Son Of a Poor Family
Mr. Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto in a village in the southern island of Kyushu. The son of a tatami-mat maker, he grew up as the sixth of seven children in a tiny house.
One of his older brothers had almost no vision and attended a school for the blind. His parents apparently decided to send Mr. Asahara, who had weak but adequate vision, and his younger brother, who had normal eyesight, to the same school for economic reasons: The children would receive a Government subsidy and free meals.
Shoko Egawa, author of a critical biography of Mr. Asahara, suggests that he was obsessed in school with acquiring money and power. Mr. Asahara had saved $30,000 by the time he graduated from high school, and he also ran unsuccessfully for student body president in elementary, junior high and senior high schools.
Mr. Asahara did show the first signs of his later mastery of physical fitness and body control, earning a black belt in judo while still in school.
Although he spoke of attending medical school, Mr. Asahara reportedly failed exams and never attended college. Instead he moved to a Tokyo suburb to work as an acupuncturist. It was at this time, in 1978, that he met a college student, Tomoko Ishii, and married her.
Mrs. Asahara is said to have become a senior executive in Aum Shinrikyo, and one of their children, an 11-year-old girl, is also said to be prominent in the sect. But very little is known of his family life.
Mr. Asahara has been accused by former sect members of making occasional sexual advances against female recruits.
"At about midnight one evening, I was called to go to the room of the Venerated Teacher," recalled a woman who later left the sect. She wrote her account in a pamphlet prepared by a lawyers' group critical of Aum.
"There were just the two of us in the room, and he asked me if I had had any experience with men," the woman wrote. "And he asked me how many men I knew, and then he asked me to take off my clothes. I didn't think he could do anything wrong, and I was nervous and didn't want to resist, so I did as he said."
The woman said that Mr. Asahara told her not to tell anyone about the liaison. Shift to Religion From Fake Drugs To Marketing Yoga
In the early 1980's Mr. Asahara opened up a shop selling Chinese medicine. He is said to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling potions like tangerine peel in alcohol, and in 1982 he was arrested and fined for selling fake drugs.
Mr. Asahara became interested in yoga, and scholars say he became an excellent yoga practitioner, with very good control over his breathing technique. In 1984 he launched a company called Aum -- the name apparently is based on a Sanskrit word -- that ran a yoga school and sold health drinks.
An expert in marketing, Mr. Asahara traveled to India and Nepal to study Hinduism and Buddhism, and he came back with photos of himself with senior Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama. He used these photos to portray himself as an internationally respected religious authority, and his yoga school became extremely successful.
In 1987, with just 10 followers, Mr. Asahara founded Aum Shinrikyo as a religious sect. It emphasized some Tibetan Buddhist teachings and yoga practices, including meditation and breathing control. But one of the central points of Tibetan Buddhism is compassion -- some Tibetans have trouble digging foundations for buildings, for fear that they will inadvertently slice apart a worm -- and compassion did not play a big role in Aum's theology
Of Japan's 185,000 religious organizations, most are Buddhist or Shinto shrines, but since the 1970's there has also been a growing number of sects like Aum Shinrikyo. Young people turned off by Japan's materialism and searching for something to believe in found a home in such groups.
Susuma Oda, a professor of psychopathology at the University of Tsukuba, suggests that one attraction of cults is that they offer young Japanese their first real father figure, because their own fathers were never home when they were growing up but instead were always at the office. Professor Oda also says that religious sects in Japan are to some extent the equivalent of the drug culture in America, offering people relief from stress and the opportunity to develop creative powers.
In its pamphlets, Aum says that it can help people develop supernatural powers. It shows photographs of Mr. Asahara and others "levitating" in a yoga position, a few inches off the ground, but videotapes of the group indicate that this is achieved by bouncing energetically on the floor.
Aum also emphasizes the use of computers and scientific experimentation, and it offers recruits special headgear of batteries and electrodes so that they can supposedly align their brain waves with Mr. Asuhara's. At each step of the way, followers are asked to donate large sums of money.
Perhaps because of the emphasis on science, Mr. Asahara was able recruit bright but discontented university students from such top institutions as Tokyo University. Many were trained in the sciences.
"There are many sophisticated people among the members," said Yoshiro Ito, a lawyer who has represented parents trying to recover their children from the sect. "They come from elite families."
As a result, Aum is not a one-man operation. Mr. Asahara's deputies are subordinate but still powerful, and there is no doubt about their intellectual prowess.
Aum's chief spokesman, for example, is a 35-year-old lawyer named Yoshinobu Aoyama, a graduate of prestigious Kyoto University. He passed the national exam for lawyers as a college junior, becoming the youngest person in his class to do so.
Mr. Aoyama took yoga classes from Mr. Asahara and then in 1989 renounced his wife and daughter and became a monk in Aum. Secrets of Success A Mix of Charm And Intimidation
Some scholars say Mr. Asahara was a third-rate theologian but a first-rate salesman and expert in mind control. Professor Oda says Mr. Asahara used methods like sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and food deprivation, and perhaps drugs as well. There have been persistent reports of Aum using drugs, probably primarily as hallucinogens to evoke the supernatural.
Practices in Aum emphasized control over natural impulses and the body. One man who said he was abducted into Aum, in part by his daughters, told the newspaper Asahi that he was given an infusion drip of some unknown medication for three months. The man said he was told to drink the equivalent of two and a half gallons of hot water a day and throw it up, apparently to purge his system. He was also forced to undergo a weekly bowel-cleansing procedure.
The man was finally allowed to leave only when he pretended that he had been converted and was prepared to turn over his money to the sect, Asahi reported.
Despite such experiences, it is clear that most members join Aum voluntarily and apparently believe in the sect with passion. Many find it fulfilling and liberating, and they are appalled by the critical news coverage.
When the police raided Aum's training compound in the village of Kamiku Isshiki a few days ago, they found 50 people in an advanced state of malnutrition and dehydration, some barely conscious. The police were horrified and arrested four doctors who were present on charges of imprisoning the others.
But instead of thanking the police for rescuing them, the malnourished followers have remained in the chapel and refused medical attention.
Aum demanded that followers live in communes and cut off relations with their families, and this led to clashes and lawsuits with family members. There have also been repeated cases in which Aum has been accused of harassing, attacking, kidnapping or even killing its opponents.
Earlier this year, according to Japanese newspaper reports, a woman trying to drop out of Aum was told she would be allowed to do so only if she signed over her property to the sect. She agreed, but her brother strongly opposed the idea. On Feb. 28, the deadline that Aum had set for the property transfer, he was kidnapped off the street.
The police subsequently located the rented van used in the kidnapping and found blood matching the brother's, as well as the fingerprint of a senior Aum member. The brother has not been found.
Mr. Asahara has denied any involvement in the kidnappings or killings. But the fact that many doubt his denials may offer him some protection, by making journalists afraid to write critical articles.
Japanese journalists say that there was some reluctance to write about Aum, because some reporters who had done so received threatening letters at their homes. Telephone taps have been found at the homes of some critics of Aum, although the group denies placing the taps.
Mr. Asahara increasingly has come to emphasize a Manichean vision of the world, in which good and evil are in a constant battle. He sometimes seems to see himself cast as the force that will rise up and destroy the evil --represented by the United States and Japanese Governments -- in order to save the world.
Many of Mr. Asahara's teachings are drawn from Buddhism and the occult, but he also emphasizes a Hindu god, Lord Shiva, whose role in Hinduism may bear an eerie connection to Aum's present interest in poison gases. Shiva is a god of destruction and creation, and his job is to destroy so that life can be renewed.
"Maybe he thinks of himself as a living Shiva," said Shinichi Nakazawa, a professor of religious studies who has met Mr. Asahara several times. "Shiva, you know, has two faces -- one is peaceful and one is destructive."
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
Introduction
I am an old man now. I was born in 1935 in a small village in northeastern Tibet. For reasons beyond my control, I have lived most of my adult life as a stateless refugee in India, which has been my second home for over fifty years. I often joke that I am India’s longest-staying guest. In common with other people of my age, I have witnessed many of the dramatic events that have shaped the world we live in. Since the late 1960s, I have also traveled a great deal, and had the honor to meet people from many different backgrounds: not just presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, and leaders from all the world’s great religious traditions, but also a great number of ordinary people from all walks of life.
Looking back over the past decades, I find many reasons to rejoice. Through advances in medical science, deadly diseases have been eradicated. Millions of people have been lifted from poverty and have gained access to modern education and health care. We have a universal declaration of human rights, and awareness of the importance of such rights has grown tremendously. As a result, the ideals of freedom and democracy have spread around the world, and there is increasing recognition of the oneness of humanity. There is also growing awareness of the importance of a healthy environment. In very many ways, the last half-century or so has been one of progress and positive change.
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
At the same time, despite tremendous advances in so many fields, there is still great suffering, and humanity continues to face enormous difficulties and problems. While in the more affluent parts of the world people enjoy lifestyles of high consumption, there remain countless millions whose basic needs are not met. With the end of the Cold War, the threat of global nuclear destruction has receded, but many continue to endure the sufferings and tragedy of armed conflict. In many areas, too, people are having to deal with environmental problems and, with these, threats to their livelihood and worse. At the same time, many others are struggling to get by in the face of inequality, corruption, and injustice.
These problems are not limited to the developing world. In the richer countries, too, there are many difficulties, including widespread social problems: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, family breakdown. People are worried about their children, about their education and what the world holds in store for them. Now, too, we have to recognize the possibility that human activity is damaging our planet beyond a point of no return, a threat which creates further fear. And all the pressures of modern life bring with them stress, anxiety, depression, and, increasingly, loneliness. As a result, everywhere I go, people are complaining. Even I find myself complaining from time to time!
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values.
By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness — or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge. We all appreciate in others the inner qualities of kindness, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and generosity, and in the same way we are all averse to displays of greed, malice, hatred, and bigotry. So actively promoting the positive inner qualities of the human heart that arise from our core disposition toward compassion, and learning to combat our more destructive propensities, will be appreciated by all. And the first beneficiaries of such a strengthening of our inner values will, no doubt, be ourselves. Our inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril, and many of the greatest problems we face in today’s world are the result of such neglect.
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
Not long ago I visited Orissa, a region in eastern India. The poverty in this part of the country, especially among tribal people, has recently led to growing conflict and insurgency. I met with a member of parliament from the region and discussed these issues. From him I gathered that there are a number of legal mechanisms and well-funded government projects already in place aimed at protecting the rights of tribal people and even giving them material assistance. The problem, he said, was that because of corruption these programs were not benefiting those they were intended to help. When such projects are subverted by dishonesty, inefficiency, and irresponsibility on the part of those charged with implementing them, they become worthless.
This example shows very clearly that even when a system is sound, its effectiveness depends on the way it is used. Ultimately, any system, any set of laws or procedures, can only be as effective as the individuals responsible for its implementation. If, owing to failures of personal integrity, a good system is misused, it can easily become a source of harm rather than a source of benefit. This is a general truth which applies to all fields of human activity, even religion. Though religion certainly has the potential to help people lead meaningful and happy lives, it too, when misused, can become a source of conflict and division. Similarly, in the fields of commerce and finance, the systems themselves may be sound, but if the people using them are unscrupulous and driven by self-serving greed, the benefits of those systems will be undermined. Unfortunately, we see this happening in many kinds of human activities: even in international sports, where corruption threatens the very notion of fair play.
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
Of course, many discerning people are aware of these problems and are working sincerely to redress them from within their own areas of expertise. Politicians, civil servants, lawyers, educators, environmentalists, activists, and so on — people from all sides are already engaged in this effort. This is very good so far as it goes, but the fact is, we will never solve our problems simply by instituting new laws and regulations. Ultimately, the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, corruption, inequity, intolerance, and greed — all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values — will persist.
So what are we to do? Where are we to turn for help? Science, for all the benefits it has brought to our external world, has not yet provided scientific grounding for the development of the foundations of personal integrity — the basic inner human values that we appreciate in others and would do well to promote in ourselves. Perhaps then we should seek inner values from religion, as people have done for millennia? Certainly religion has helped millions of people in the past, helps millions today, and will continue to help millions in the future. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today’s secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics. One reason for this is that many people in the world no longer follow any particular religion. Another reason is that, as the peoples of the world become ever more closely interconnected in an age of globalization and in multicultural societies, ethics based on any one religion would only appeal to some of us; it would not be meaningful for all. In the past, when peoples lived in relative isolation from one another — as we Tibetans lived quite happily for many centuries behind our wall of mountains — the fact that groups pursued their own religiously based approaches to ethics posed no difficulties. Today, however, any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
This statement may seem strange coming from someone who from a very early age has lived as a monk in robes. Yet I see no contradiction here. My faith enjoins me to strive for the welfare and benefit of all sentient beings, and reaching out beyond my own tradition, to those of other religions and those of none, is entirely in keeping with this.
I am confident that it is both possible and worthwhile to attempt a new secular approach to universal ethics. My confidence comes from my conviction that all of us, all human beings, are basically inclined or disposed toward what we perceive to be good. Whatever we do, we do because we think it will be of some benefit. At the same time, we all appreciate the kindness of others. We are all, by nature, oriented toward the basic human values of love and compassion. We all prefer the love of others to their hatred. We all prefer others’ generosity to their meanness. And who among us does not prefer tolerance, respect, and forgiveness of our failings to bigotry, disrespect, and resentment?
ダライラマの宗教を超えて
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (English Edition)
In view of this, I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion. The development and practice of this new vision of ethics is what I propose to elaborate in the course of this book. It is my hope that doing so will help to promote understanding of the need for ethical awareness and inner values in this age of excessive materialism.
At the outset I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek. Of course, all the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion.
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acclaim for
THE POWER OF NOW
“I heartily recommend this profoundly inspiring book to all seekers today.”
— Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within
“This seems to be the ‘right book’ for many people at this point in time. The writing is clear as a bell; the words ring true. Truly an exceptional book that promises to make a real difference in people’s lives.”
— Tom Oakley, Banyen Books, Vancouver, British Columbia
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acclaim for
THE POWER OF NOW
“The Power of Now was introduced to me by a customer. I read only one page and agreed that it rang true. It is a jewel of clarity and insight. The book has become a word-of-mouth bestseller here at East West.”
— Norman Snitkin, comanager, East West Bookshop, Seattle
“Tolle has succeeded on two fronts: synthesizing the teachings of masters such as Jesus and the Buddha into an easily accessible guide to achieving spiritual consciousness and making a strong case that the inability of humans to free themselves from dominance by the mind and live in the present is the root cause for misery in the world. . . . He makes enlightenment seem attainable and necessary for both individual peace and the health of the planet.”
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acclaim for
THE POWER OF NOW
“I have no hesitation in recommending Eckhart Tolle’s wonderful book. Everyone I know who has picked up a copy has ended up taking it home. The Power of Now sells on its own merit and by word of mouth.”
— Stephen Gawtry, Manager, Watkins Books Ltd., London
“Fresh, revealing, current, new inspiration. Out of the many spiritual books that cross my desk this one stands out from the flock. . . . If you are considering getting back in touch with your soul, this book is a great companion.”
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acclaim for
THE POWER OF NOW
“With intense and compelling clarity, Tolle’s guidance holds the promise of leading us to our own best and highest place within, to resonate with and reflect the energy of true transformation.”
— Spirit of Change magazine
“With Eckhart Tolle’s growing presence on bestseller shelves usually reserved for much lighter-weight fare, it will be interesting to see what time has in store for this unusual modern mystic.”
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO
THE PAPERBACK EDITION
Six years after it was first published, The Power of Now continues to play its part in the urgent task of the transformation of human consciousness. Although I was privileged to give birth to it, I feel that the book has taken on a life and momentum of its own. It has reached several million readers worldwide, many of whom have written to me to tell of the life-changing effect it has had on them. Due to the extremely high volume of correspondence I receive, I am regretfully no longer able to send personal replies, but I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have written to me to share their experiences. I am moved and deeply touched by many of those accounts, and they leave no doubt in my mind that an unprecedented shift in consciousness is indeed happening on our planet.
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nobody could have predicted the rapid growth of the book when Namaste Publishing in Vancouver published the first edition of three thousand copies in 1997. During its first year of publication, the book found its readers almost exclusively through word of mouth. That was the time when I would personally deliver a few copies every week to some small bookstores in Vancouver, something I found enormously satisfying, knowing that every book that I handed over had the potential of changing someone’s life. Friends helped by placing copies of the book in spiritual bookstores farther afield: Calgary, Seattle, California, London. Stephen Gawtry, the manager of Watkins, the world’s oldest metaphysical bookstore in London, England, wrote at the time, “I foresee great things for this book.” He was right: by the second year The Power of Now had developed into an “underground bestseller,” as one reviewer later called it. Then, after the book received a number of favorable reviews in various journals and magazines, its growth accelerated and finally became explosive when Oprah Winfrey, who had been deeply affected by the book, proceeded to tell the world about it. Five years after it was first published, it reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and it is now available in thirty languages. It has been very well received and become a bestseller even in India, a country considered by many to be the birthplace of humanity’s quest for spiritual enlightenment.
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most of the thousands of letters and emails that have been sent to me from all over the world are from ordinary men and women, but there are also letters from Buddhist monks and Christian nuns, from people in prison or facing a life-threatening illness or imminent death. Psychotherapists have written to say that they recommend the book to their patients or incorporate the teachings in their practice. Many of those letters and emails mention a lessening or even a complete disappearance of suffering and problem-making in people’s lives as a result of reading The Power of Now and putting the teachings into practice in everyday life. There is frequent mention of the amazing and beneficial effects of inner body awareness, the sense of freedom that comes from letting go of self-identification with one’s personal history and life-situation, and a newfound inner peace that arises as one learns to relinquish mental/emotional resistance to the “suchness” of the present moment. Many people have read the book more than once, and they comment that the text loses none of its freshness upon subsequent readings, indeed that the book’s transformative power remains not only undiminished, but actually becomes intensified.
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more the dysfunction of the human mind plays itself out on the world stage, clearly visible to everyone in the daily television news reports, the greater the number of people who realize the urgent need for a radical change in human consciousness if humanity is not to destroy both itself and the planet. This need, as well as readiness in millions of people for the arising of a new consciousness, is the context within which the “success” of The Power of Now must be seen and understood.
This does not mean, of course, that everyone responds favorably to the book. In many people, as well as in most of the political and economic structures and the greater part of the media, the old consciousness is still deeply entrenched. Anyone who is still totally identified with the voice in their head — the stream of involuntary and incessant thinking — will inevitably fail to see what The Power of Now is all about. Some enthusiastic readers gave a copy of the book to a friend or relative and were surprised and disappointed when the recipient found it quite meaningless and could not get beyond the first few pages. “Mumbo jumbo” was all that Time magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe found life-changing. Furthermore, any teaching that puts the spotlight of attention on the workings of the ego will necessarily provoke egoic reaction, resistance, and attack.
超時的現在の魔法の力
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
However, despite a certain amount of misunderstanding and critical dissent, the response to the book around the globe has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel confident that in the years to come millions more will be drawn to it, and that The Power of Now will continue to make a vital contribution to the arising of a new consciousness and a more enlightened humanity.
America is in the midst of a cultural-political civil war—a fight over our very identity as a people.
冒頭からこういう言葉が出てくる
まさに内戦真っ最中
For decades, this conflict has been fought quietly in city halls, classrooms, school boards, courtrooms, town squares, and state houses across the country. However, the election of President Trump has clarified the battle lines in this struggle and elevated these individual fights into a united national conflict.
アメリカのあらゆる場所で戦いが行なわれてきて、二つの陣営の戦いへとなってきたのが鮮明になってきた「into a united national conflict.」
On one side of this conflict is a factional anti-Trump coalition—a strange amalgam of radicals, liberals, globalists, establishment elites from both parties, and blatantly anti-American groups loosely held together by their hostility to and disdain for the president. On the other side is Trump’s America—the millions of hardworking people who are united by respect for our foundational freedoms, traditional values, and history of limited commonsense governance.
a factional anti-Trump coalition—a strange amalgam of radicals, liberals, globalists, establishment elites from both parties, and blatantly anti-American groups loosely held together by their hostility to and disdain for the president.
奇妙な人達の集り、面白い形容
by their hostility to and disdain for the president
On the other side is Trump’s America—the millions of hardworking people who are united by respect for our foundational freedoms, traditional values, and history of limited commonsense governance.
Before the president rallied Trump’s America and gave us a national voice, the various groups that would eventually form the anti-Trump coalition were winning on their own. For decades, they have meticulously undermined our traditions through politics and courts, entertainment and news media, and liberal schools and curriculum to quietly impose new worldviews on everyday Americans that are counter to our historic principles.
Under President Trump, America is experiencing a great comeback. After nearly a decade of recession and tepid job creation, our economy is booming. In addition, ISIS has been effectively destroyed, illegal immigration is down, our military is being rebuilt, and our veterans are getting the health care and support they deserve. The administration is achieving success across a variety of sectors daily.
Perhaps more important than these successes, however, is the reinvigoration of America’s patriotic sense of self, which the rise of Donald Trump has awakened. Our country is being reconnected to our founding principles, the values that made America the greatest country in the world, and in doing so, is coming to understand just how destructive the last few decades of elite leadership have been to our freedom, prosperity, and safety.
At the center of the fight I’m describing is ultimately one question: Is America an exceptional country? Or more specifically, is America’s historic prosperity and power due to our nation’s unique founding principles, and is it our duty as a people to uphold those ideals?
My daughter, Jackie Cushman, touched on this notion in a column she wrote in July 2009.1 She observed that in 2008, President Obama promised us “change we could believe in,” and it turned out he wanted to change what we believed.
President Obama promised us “change we could believe in,”
オバマはわれわれが期待している変化を約束した
he wanted to change what we believed.
われわれが信じていることを変えようとした
Jackie’s insight points out one of the few common-yet-tenuous threads that bind the members of the anti-Trump coalition together. In various ways, they all want to redefine America, and they would all be happier if the members of Trump’s America were once again ignored and forgotten.
they all want to redefine America
反トランプ陣営はアメリカを再定義しようとした、つまり、変えようということでしょうか
The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes (English Edition)
But over what issues might war against Russia or China erupt? And if war were to occur, how might it be contained before it took the world to the brink of thermonuclear catastrophe? These are the concrete questions, set within the broader context of hegemonic change and great power competition, that this book attempts to answer.
Specifically, I examine how a localized crisis started or stoked by Moscow or Beijing could expand and escalate. It is my contention that, especially in this period of history, such conflicts pose the greatest risk to great power stability and world peace. The signature case, which I have adopted for the title of the book, concerns the uninhabited and disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea, claimed by both Japan and China. But the general problem has many possible manifestations.
That one of these potential adversaries would launch a bolt-from-the blue, all-out attack against a U.S. ally seems much less likely than such limited aggression. It is hard to imagine a major Chinese invasion of the main islands of Japan or the metropolitan area of Seoul in South Korea, for example. And for all of Vladimir Putin’s recent adventurism, the forcible annexation of an entire NATO country, even a small Baltic state, strikes most as implausible. Such attacks, even if initially successful, would and should risk massive responses by the United States and its allies.3 President Donald Trump’s tepid support for NATO, and for U.S. alliances in general, may muddy the deterrence waters somewhat. But even under his presidency, U.S. alliance commitments remain formally in place and American troops remain forward deployed from Korea and Japan to the Baltics and Poland. It would amount to a huge roll of the dice for an aggressor to seek to conquer any one of these states. To be sure, U.S. defense policy should continue to display resoluteness and create capacities of the type needed to deter such large-scale attacks, not just wishfully assume them away. But on balance, deterrence failure on such a massive scale seems very unlikely. Strong American-led alliances, conventional and nuclear deterrence, and economic interdependence all militate strongly against any conscious decision by an adversary to initiate large-scale war.
However, smaller tests of U.S. and allied resolve by Beijing or Moscow and more patient, incremental challenges to the existing global order that do not threaten the lives or main territorial possessions of America’s friends and allies are much easier to imagine in the modern world, as I argue in more detail in chapter 2.4 With China and Russia both flexing their muscles near countries that the United States is sworn to protect, and both seeking to challenge and to modify the U.S.-led regional and global security orders that prevail today, the risks are real. The possibility exists that Washington could be forced to choose between risking war and appeasing Chinese or Russian aggression in ways that could ultimately lead to much graver threats to international peace.5
Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power (英語) ハードカバー – 2019/3/4
Sheila A. Smith (著)
MORE THAN SEVENTY YEARS after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese people remain deeply skeptical of the benefits of military power. When Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima in May 2016, he spoke of the horror of the use of force in the nuclear age: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself. Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past.” The Japanese people welcomed his visit and overwhelmingly approved of his message. As more nations gave into the temptation of acquiring nuclear weapons, Japan steadfastly resisted and became a staunch advocate of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.1
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Generations of postwar Japanese leaders have grappled with how to ensure their nation’s defenses in the nuclear age while limiting the power of its military. The Japanese constitution remains as it was written in 1947, with Article Nine committing the Japanese people to eschew the “use of force to settle international disputes.” Prime Minister Abe Shinzō reciprocated Obama’s visit to Hiroshima in December 2016 by visiting the site of the Japanese attack on the United States. At Pearl Harbor, Abe repeated a commitment that Japanese leaders have made for three-quarters of a century: “We must never repeat the horrors of war again. This is the solemn vow we, the people of Japan, have taken. Since the war, we have created a free and democratic country that values the rule of law, and have resolutely upheld our vow never again to wage war. We, the people of Japan, will continue to uphold this unwavering principle while harboring quiet pride in the path we have walked as a peace-loving nation over these seventy years since the war ended.”2
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
As both Abe and Obama noted in their long-awaited visits to these war memorials, the relationship between the United States and Japan has been transformed, from adversaries in war to strategic allies in the postwar period. The security treaty that codifies this alliance provides for U.S. defense assistance to Japan and for Japanese provision of bases and facilities for the United States. Allying with the world’s strongest military power has provided strategic protection for Japan, deterring its nuclear neighbors with America’s nuclear umbrella. In return, Japanese citizens host over 50,000 U.S. military personnel in their country, as well as the only U.S. aircraft carrier home ported abroad. The U.S. and Japanese militaries operate together not only in and around the Japanese islands but have also worked in coalition with other armed forces across maritime Asia to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Japan’s strategy of possessing limited military power and relying on its alliance with the United States has served it well, and yet in today’s Asia, Tokyo’s approach to military power is being tested. Northeast Asia has become a far more contested region as Chinese military power increases and as North Korea seeks to become a nuclear state. Japan’s Self-Defense Force (SDF) now regularly runs up against the expanding armed forces of its neighbors. China’s growing military has led to serious clashes with Japan. Chinese maritime and air patrols operate with increasing frequency and regularity in proximity to Japan, and Beijing has challenged Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in China), sending its coast guard and naval vessels to the East China Sea to assert its claims. The failure of diplomacy to resolve these tensions has at times all but broken communication between Tokyo and Beijing, and rising contact between Japanese and Chinese militaries has intensified concern that a miscalculation or unintended incident could easily bring the two Asian nations into conflict. The lack of agreement between Japan and China on their maritime boundary also exacerbates this risk. Tokyo has consulted with Washington on how to de-escalate tensions during these moments of crisis with Beijing. Japanese officials worry about “gray zone” contingencies—clashes below the actual use of armed forces but which could easily escalate to a military conflict.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Japan’s military is being tested not only by China, however. Other neighbors challenge Japan’s defenses. In the north, Russia continues to assert its military presence in and around Japanese air and waters.3 North Korea’s growing missile arsenal has raised serious questions about Japan’s ability to cope with a ballistic missile attack. In the face of these threats, the U.S. president has restated the U.S. commitment to Japan’s defenses several times. President Obama announced on a visit to Tokyo in 2014 that Article Five protections in the U.S.-Japan security treaty would extend to the Senkakus if force were used against Japan. When President Donald Trump met with Prime Minister Abe in Washington in February 2017, he restated this policy. Days later, when North Korea tested its missiles in the direction of Japanese territory, President Trump stood beside Prime Minister Abe at Mar-a-Lago to provide assurances that the United States would be “behind Japan, 100%” in dealing with Pyongyang’s threat. Part reassurance to the Japanese people, and part deterrence against China and North Korea, these declarations of American intentions reflect a growing worry about military activity around Japan.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
And yet for all of these assurances, the political mood in the United States has unsettled the Japanese. Just months earlier during the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump had suggested that Japan should defend itself against North Korea. A survey from Pew Research Center in spring 2017 showed only 24 percent of the Japanese have confidence in Trump’s foreign policy.4 Serious trade tensions also simmer just below the surface of the U.S.-Japan relationship. As Japan faces increasing pressure on its defenses, the reliability of the United States seems less certain.
Japanese thinking about their military is changing as the possibility of a military conflict in Northeast Asia becomes more easily imagined. However, Japan’s leaders are unlikely to use armed force before relying on diplomacy to resolve their grievances. Since the end of the Cold War, Japanese security choices have continued to be defined by the political tug of war over how to interpret Article Nine and how to meet alliance demands from Washington. Japan has relaxed its restraints on its military, and the SDF today plays a far more visible role in national policy. The SDF has been deployed abroad repeatedly and has extensive experience in U.S.- and UN-led military coalitions. Like Japan’s civilian leaders, SDF commanders now work alongside a variety of partners in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in maritime security cooperation.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Article Nine still organizes debate in Japan over its military, but it does not limit the size or the lethality of Japan’s armed forces. Threat perception, long dormant as a factor in Japanese military planning, now assumes a larger role in shaping decisions about Japan’s defense needs. The experiences of Japan’s SDF in recent years suggest it must prepare to be tested. Should armed conflict erupt in Northeast Asia, Japan’s choices with regard to the use of force will have tremendous consequences for the region. While Japan’s military has never engaged in combat, changes have been made to clarify when and how Tokyo’s leaders will order their armed forces to defend Japan. Japan’s leaders have become far more comfortable using the military as an instrument of statecraft.5
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Article Nine and Japan’s Defenses
The uniqueness of Japan’s constitution has drawn the world’s attention and is the focus of considerable scholarly inquiry.6 However, it remains a politically charged issue within Japan. Drafted under occupation, Article Nine was designed to demilitarize Japan. Imperial Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II led to an occupation headed by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur ordered the drafting of a new constitution. In a note to aides, he offered three principles to guide their efforts. The institutions that had led Japan’s modernization—the emperor, the military, and the aristocracy—would be reformed. The emperor would no longer exercise supreme authority in governing his nation, and Japan’s aristocrats would no longer inherit power. Japan’s citizens would choose their leaders and, through them, their national priorities.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
The “no war” clause offered a legacy of contention, one that remains today within Japan as well as beyond. MacArthur’s initial vision was the complete pacification of Japan, a revolutionary aim for a culture that had prided itself on its martial spirit. MacArthur’s vision for reforming Japan went hand in hand with similar U.S. ambitions to transform the world order. Tying Japan to the emerging architecture of collective security seemed just as important as democratizing political power. In his note, MacArthur wrote, “War as a sovereign right to the nation is abolished, Japan renounces it as an instrumentality for settling its disputes and even for preserving its own security. It relies upon the higher ideals which are now stirring the world for its defense and its protection. No Japanese Army, Navy or Air Force will ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will ever be conferred upon any Japanese force [emphasis added].”7 Thus, in the immediate aftermath of World War II’s devastation, the American idealism that informed the occupation’s reformers saw this new constitution as complementing the construction of a new global order, organized around the United Nations, which promised collective security and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The world changed quickly as the postwar peace brought conflict and a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. policy toward Japan shifted abruptly too, in what the Japanese refer to as the “reverse course.” Before the occupation was over, Americans were urging Japan to rearm, as war broke out on the Korean Peninsula.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
The Japanese government insisted on interpreting Japan’s new constitution to allow for self-defense. Even as the document was being drafted in 1946, Japanese leaders sought to temper General MacArthur’s zeal for pacifying their nation.8 The Committee to Consider the Problem of the Constitution, tasked with working with the occupation authorities on the draft, sought to tone down MacArthur’s language. Once the draft of the new constitution went to the Japanese House of Representatives, the chair of its Committee on the Bill for Revising the Imperial Constitution, Ashida Hitoshi, reportedly tweaked it even further to open the way to allowing Japan to acquire military force for self-defense. The final version of Article Nine, Japan’s renunciation of war, reads as follows:
“
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Like MacArthur, Japan’s drafters referenced the larger global effort to avoid indiscriminate use of force, yet they argued that the use of force for self-defense was legitimate under the charter of the newly created United Nations, which endowed all nations with the right to defend themselves. Japanese leaders ever since have interpreted Article Nine as allowing for military power sufficient to defend their nation. But they have done so cautiously and often in the face of deep domestic criticism.
Japan’s early debates in the Diet focused largely on this interpretation over the purpose of military power. In 1954, the SDF was established alongside the Defense Agency—a civilian bureaucracy that would manage military planning. Rather than debating Japan’s external security challenges, Diet debates focused on how to limit the growth of the SDF and curtail the political influence of the military over policy. Periodically, Japanese cabinets would be weakened by controversies over the behavior of the SDF, with opposition critics charging the ruling party with failing to exercise sufficient control over the military institution.9 From 1955, the LDP dominated Japanese politics and governed Japan as the majority party or in coalition, however, giving the conservatives the ability to define their country’s postwar defense choices. Nonetheless, tension between progressives and conservatives over the legitimacy of the SDF continued for decades.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
The language of Article Nine mattered in these legislative tangles. While few argued that Japan should be able to use force to settle its international disputes, the ambiguous second paragraph invited contention. For opposition critics, Article Nine banned armed force of any kind. They blamed Washington for urging Japan to rearm and accused government officials of concluding “secret agreements” with the United States that violated the spirit of the constitution and, even worse, would draw Japan into war. Japan’s conservatives continued to interpret it as Ashida had intended. Yet more recently, even conservatives take issue with the ambiguity, suggesting it is disingenuous and misleading. In 2017, a new approach was put forward by Prime Minister Abe: to add a third paragraph to Article Nine stating that Japan’s SDF is constitutional.10 Rather than addressing the core proscription on the use of force, Abe argues for ending domestic squabbling over the legitimacy of Japan’s military.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
In practice, Japanese government interpretation of Article Nine has always been elastic. The most consequential debates about the constitution’s influence over how to arm Japan and how to use force to defend it took place decades ago. At that time, questions such as whether it would be legitimate for Japan to maintain nuclear weapons or launch a preemptive strike if its security were threatened were directly addressed. Indeed, early postwar political leaders were unabashed in their concern with how to defend their country in the nuclear era. Hence the Japanese government has never argued that Article Nine would prevent the nuclear option or the acquisition of the ability to strike offensively with armed force should Japan’s security be threatened.
再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
Japan has been surrounded by countries with considerable military forces. The former Soviet Union, while not identified as a direct threat to Japan, had considerable military might positioned close by and maintained a substantial nuclear arsenal. The successful acquisition of nuclear weapons by China in the mid-1960s also raised a new source of concern for Japan. But it has really been in the wake of the Cold War that Tokyo has felt that it is increasingly facing adversaries who might use force against Japan. Thus, it remains difficult to know if the normative constraints of Article Nine defeated the impulse to respond to threat of the use of force by others. In theory, at least, Japan’s leaders have not excluded any type of military capability. Instead, they have wielded Article Nine as a statement of Japanese intentions.
日中の対立は不可避なのか。靖国問題、東シナ海の海洋権益の問題、中国製冷凍餃子中毒事件などの食の安全の問題、尖閣問題などをめぐって緊張が高まる日中関係について、米国知日派の研究者が日本側の動向を中心に冷静に分析し提言する。Sheila A. Smith, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China (Columbia UP, 2015) を全訳する。
I began to consider the idea of writing a book on Japan’s relations with China in the early 2000s while at the East-West Center in Hawaii. Tensions between Japan and China had erupted over the visits by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō to the controversial war memorial, Yasukuni Shrine, and policymakers in Washington were becoming increasingly concerned about the inability of Tokyo and Beijing to put their history behind them. An East-West Center alumnus, Otsuka Takao, president of the Hotel Grand Palace in Kudanshita, offered me the perfect setting for my frequent research trips to Tokyo with my boisterous young son. The hotel was located next to the Yasukuni Shrine, and we often walked among the beautiful gingko trees and towering torii gates in the early hours of the morning when jetlag made sleep impossible. Aged Shinto priests rustled in their robes from building to building, and I could not help but wonder how this rather anachronistic site had become a focal point in the diplomacy of Asia’s two largest nations.
Differences over twentieth-century history were not the only cause of Sino-Japanese tensions. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new difficulties arose. Trade tensions over the import of shiitake mushrooms and tatami mats began to complicate economic relations. Violence against Japanese at the Asian Cup games in Beijing in 2004 shocked many in Japan. When demonstrators in cities around China protested the revision of Japanese textbooks in March 2005, Japanese businesses also were damaged, further souring public opinion about China. In the corridors of Asian summit meetings, Chinese and Japanese leaders exchanged chilly stares and refused to speak. In 2006, in the midst of this “deep freeze” in diplomatic relations, Prime Minister Koizumi, dressed in full formal wear, paid an official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, the day of the Japanese commemoration of the end of the war. A few weeks later, he resigned after five years as Japan’s prime minister.
For a while, Koizumi was blamed for the downturn in Tokyo’s relations with Beijing, and his successors seemed to make progress in changing the tenor of the relationship. Other factors continued to plague diplomatic ties, however. Public attitudes toward China were hardening. China’s economy grew, and the economic interdependence that had anchored Japan’s relationship with China created unforeseen frictions. The new UN Convention on the Law of the Sea raised questions about maritime claims, and the East China Sea became more and more populated with survey ships and new, more modern, naval vessels. Even regarding the deeply sensitive issue of historical memory, the Koizumi era was not the first entanglement of China policy with Japanese domestic politics and popular sentiment, and it would not be the last. In Japan, this intimate contact with a changing China was unnerving to many and called into question the premises of Japan’s postwar identity.
I am an old man now. I was born in 1935 in a small village in northeastern Tibet. For reasons beyond my control, I have lived most of my adult life as a stateless refugee in India, which has been my second home for over fifty years. I often joke that I am India’s longest-staying guest. In common with other people of my age, I have witnessed many of the dramatic events that have shaped the world we live in. Since the late 1960s, I have also traveled a great deal, and had the honor to meet people from many different backgrounds: not just presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, and leaders from all the world’s great religious traditions, but also a great number of ordinary people from all walks of life.
Looking back over the past decades, I find many reasons to rejoice. Through advances in medical science, deadly diseases have been eradicated. Millions of people have been lifted from poverty and have gained access to modern education and health care. We have a universal declaration of human rights, and awareness of the importance of such rights has grown tremendously. As a result, the ideals of freedom and democracy have spread around the world, and there is increasing recognition of the oneness of humanity. There is also growing awareness of the importance of a healthy environment. In very many ways, the last half-century or so has been one of progress and positive change.
At the same time, despite tremendous advances in so many fields, there is still great suffering, and humanity continues to face enormous difficulties and problems. While in the more affluent parts of the world people enjoy lifestyles of high consumption, there remain countless millions whose basic needs are not met. With the end of the Cold War, the threat of global nuclear destruction has receded, but many continue to endure the sufferings and tragedy of armed conflict. In many areas, too, people are having to deal with environmental problems and, with these, threats to their livelihood and worse. At the same time, many others are struggling to get by in the face of inequality, corruption, and injustice.
These problems are not limited to the developing world. In the richer countries, too, there are many difficulties, including widespread social problems: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, family breakdown. People are worried about their children, about their education and what the world holds in store for them. Now, too, we have to recognize the possibility that human activity is damaging our planet beyond a point of no return, a threat which creates further fear. And all the pressures of modern life bring with them stress, anxiety, depression, and, increasingly, loneliness. As a result, everywhere I go, people are complaining. Even I find myself complaining from time to time!
It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values.
By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness — or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge. We all appreciate in others the inner qualities of kindness, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and generosity, and in the same way we are all averse to displays of greed, malice, hatred, and bigotry. So actively promoting the positive inner qualities of the human heart that arise from our core disposition toward compassion, and learning to combat our more destructive propensities, will be appreciated by all. And the first beneficiaries of such a strengthening of our inner values will, no doubt, be ourselves. Our inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril, and many of the greatest problems we face in today’s world are the result of such neglect.
Not long ago I visited Orissa, a region in eastern India. The poverty in this part of the country, especially among tribal people, has recently led to growing conflict and insurgency. I met with a member of parliament from the region and discussed these issues. From him I gathered that there are a number of legal mechanisms and well-funded government projects already in place aimed at protecting the rights of tribal people and even giving them material assistance. The problem, he said, was that because of corruption these programs were not benefiting those they were intended to help. When such projects are subverted by dishonesty, inefficiency, and irresponsibility on the part of those charged with implementing them, they become worthless.
This example shows very clearly that even when a system is sound, its effectiveness depends on the way it is used. Ultimately, any system, any set of laws or procedures, can only be as effective as the individuals responsible for its implementation. If, owing to failures of personal integrity, a good system is misused, it can easily become a source of harm rather than a source of benefit. This is a general truth which applies to all fields of human activity, even religion. Though religion certainly has the potential to help people lead meaningful and happy lives, it too, when misused, can become a source of conflict and division. Similarly, in the fields of commerce and finance, the systems themselves may be sound, but if the people using them are unscrupulous and driven by self-serving greed, the benefits of those systems will be undermined. Unfortunately, we see this happening in many kinds of human activities: even in international sports, where corruption threatens the very notion of fair play.
The first characteristic of Aum was totalized guruism,
which became paranoid guruism and megalomanic guruism.
Instead of awakening the potential of his disciples,
Shoko Asahara himself became his cult's only source of
"energy" or infinite life-power and its only source of
the new self that each Aum disciple was expected to
acquire ( as epitomized by the religious name every
disciple took as a renunciant ).
For disciples there was no deity beyond the guru, no
ethicalcode beyond his demands and imposed ordeals, or
mahamudras. When the guru invoked a higher deity it was
only in order to incorporate the god's omnipotence into
his own. Guru and disciples were both energized and
entrapped by their claim to ultimate existential truth
and virtue.
This megalomanic guruism, the claim to possess and control
immediate and distant reality, was not only wild fantasy
but a form of desymbolization--a loss, that is, of the
symbolizing function that characterizes the healthy human
mind.
The guru took on a stance beyond metaphor. He could no
longer, in the words of Martin Buber,"imagine the real."
The Hindu scholar Wendy Doniger points out that most
mythology consists of concrete narration in the service
of metaphor, of descriptions of behavior meant to suggest,
rather than express, primal human emotions and dilemmas.
In reading mytholgical stories, we seek to reconnect
their concrete details to the symbolized, metaphorical
world in which we exist psychologically. A megalomanic
guru like Asahara does the reverse: he embraces the very
concreteness of mythic narratrves so as to circumvent
the metaphor and symbolization so crucial to the functioning
human imagination.
The first characteristic of Aum was totalized guruism,
which became paranoid guruism and megalomanic guruism.
Instead of awakening the
(文字略)
1641:アクエリアン
19/06/16(日) 13:05:51
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This megalomanic guruism, the claim to possess and control
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In reading mytholgical stories, we seek to reconnect
their concrete details to the symbolized, metaphorical
world in which we exist psychologically. A megalomanic
guru like Asahara does th
(文字略)
The first shots had been fired in 1863, when the British had selled the southern port of Kagoshima, and in 1864, when a combined foreign fleet bombarded Japanese forces at Shimonoseki.
All subsequent history was in some way a repetition of those dramatic encounters on the eve of the Meiji Restration.
のちのすべての歴史は、明治維新前夜のこれらの劇的な衝突を、なんらかの形で反復しているのだという。
Japans war with Russia, her first defeat of the Chinese, and her later interventions in Manchuria and China had to be seen in the light of a grand purpose--to expel the barbarians--according to Hayashi.
It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
どの本を読むのか細心の注意を払って選ばなければならない。
書物は「心の薬」、エジプトの王様は書斎の表札にそう掲げていた
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,’The medicines of the soul.”
私はいつも怯えた人生を過ごしてきた。起こるかもしれないこと、起きなかった可能性があることに怯えていたんだ。50年間、私はそうやって怯えてきた。毎朝3時に目を覚ましていたんだ。でも、がんと診断されて以来、私はぐっすりと眠れている。気づいたのは恐れが最も悪いことなんだ。恐れこそが本当の敵なんだ。だから、立ち上がって本当の世界から出ていくんだ。そして、恐れを思いっきり蹴り飛ばすんだよ。／I have spent my whole life scared, frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen, 50-years I spent like that. Finding myself awake at three in the morning. But you know what? Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. What I came to realize is that fear, that’s the worst of it. That’s the real enemy. So, get up, get out in the real world and you kick that bastard as hard you can right in the teeth.
人とずっと共に生きる森づくり
more treesは、森林保全団体の一つ。急速な環境破壊に対して危機感を抱いた音楽家・坂本龍一さんらにより、「森と人がずっと共に生きる社会」の実現を目指して設立されました。日本は、国土に対して約７割の面積を森林が占める、世界有数の森林大国です。その一方、木材の輸入大国であることもまた事実です。現在の木材自給率は、35%程度。様々な要因から林業の採算性が悪化した結果、事業として成り立たなくなり、放棄される森林も増加しているのです。 日本の森が抱えるそうした課題の解決策として、同団体が取り組んでいることの一つが森づくり。林業従事者や地域の専門家と協働しながら、間伐や下草刈り、そして伐採跡地への植林など、森の健やかさを取り戻すための活動です。「more treesの森」は、日本全国に11か所。冒頭の宮崎県諸塚村も、その一つなのです。
