AN OVERVIEW FOR TRAVELERS IN JAPAN

CHINESE TAOISM & JAPANESE SHINTO are the only two historical religions that have remained close to their primal roots. According to Taoism, “The perfect way knows no difficulties.” Simply enter the realm of general agreeableness where you’re comfortable with conditions as they are. Thus, when a Taoist sage was asked to explain Tao, he answered, “Yesterday was fair and today it’s raining.” That is the matter-of-fact manner in which we should acknowledge and respond to whatever we are observing and experiencing at the moment, without imposing an emphatic reaction.

IN TAOISM personal purification is a long process of “reduction and further reduction” whereby an individual gets rid of all defilements until one attains forgetiuness of impurities. Next we must let go of any preferences for superior things until we finally achieve forgetfulness of goodness, thereby relinquishing our rigid judgments of good or bad, both of which are eventually forgotten as one passes beyond strict ideas of right/wrong. A neutral state of mind is attained, a condition of profound observation and non-reaction. We still participate in the proceedings of our everyday world, and nothing remains undone while we uphold our placidity, free of impure ego-motivated action.

THE CHINESE THINKER Wang Shou-jen (1472-1528) stated that the human mind is cosmic, and everything that exists is included in the mind of humankind, its range extending throughout the entire universe. But because of the obscuring effect of one’s immediate ego-driven activities, our awareness of the psyche’s expanse is deflected. However, every time we direct our mind toward practicing Elevation Of Consciousness, some of that ego-obstruction is dismantled, and when our spiritual impulse finally transcends our ego-barrier, our true nature is beheld as we attain the cosmic viewpoint, not seeing but profoundly realizing that everything is one.

When you do not make your experience into an object, then there is one unified being.

THE COSMIC SINGULARITY is the entire totality of the astronomical unity that humankind has identified as our Universe which also can be called poetically The Grand Unknown — often personified as God in the anthropomorphism of this planet we’ve named Earth.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL, American scholar of world religions, took his first trip to Japan in the mid-twentieth century and observed that the people have cultivated throughout their island nation a traditional atmosphere which combines nature-art-philosophy in a unique manner that transcends all three. He saw clearly how everyday living among the Japanese is replete with symbolic reminders of this nature-art-philosophy triad, emphasized in Japan’s indigenous Shinto religious practices, combined with ideas from Taoism and Buddhism, particularly Zen. Since the thirteenth century, the influence of Zen Buddhism in Japan has been vast in range and immense in depth.

According to Campbell, Japanese culture evolved as an inseparable blend of natural-aesthetic-spiritual values, these three always unified and ever-progressing in a single nationalistic movement regarded as sacred and necessary for reaching spiritual heights which are attainable only within oneself. This is difficult for persons outside Japan to understand because we tend to 100k at nature and art and philosophy as separate things to be kept apart. But primarily due to Zen teachings, nature-art-philosophy in Japan have become a triple viewpoint from which emerges the concept that art can fuse nature and human thought — carrying us beyond both — which is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of Japanese civilization.

In Buddhist thought, all things are real, but their transitory impermanence is itself the absolute state. Individual persons and other creatures and inanimate objects — and all the actions and processes in which they are involved - present revelations of Buddhist Enlightenment. So each moment is a manifestation of Buddhahood, and one’s spiritual illumination is not to be sought in the future, but to be realized where we are and as we are right now. Campbell told people, “You ARE the Buddha already but may not know it.”

PERHAPS THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT TEACHINGS from Buddhism are the last words of the Buddha as he lay dying, “work out your own salvation with diligence,” together with a later saying of his followers, “You cannot follow The Path To Enlightenment until you have become the path.”
— Alan Watts

AT THE END of your path to Spiritual Maturity you will come to a mirror wherein you’ll finally see your own emancipated countenance as far more rewarding and meaningful than any anticipated paradise. This personal religious culmination was understood by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he penned the final line of his short poem entitled Brahman:

"Find me and turn thy back on heaven."