THOSE of you who have been following my posts on Nishitani Keiji will have noticed that, unlike here in the West, the Japanese do not like to separate religion and philosophy and the subjects are broached jointly in the way that one might speak about a composer and a piano manufacturer in the same breath. Part of the reason, of course, is that everything is seen as a unitary whole and it was D.T. Suzuki who once said that “Zen is not a religion, Zen is religion.” The logical implication that we may draw from this statement in light of the present discussion, being that the realms of spirituality, philosophy and in fact every other sphere of human endeavour are irrevocably fused in the same manner. When Nishitani speaks of philosophy, therefore, he is not stepping outside the transient boundaries of religion in order to do so. Similarly, as we shall see, the same approach is used with regard to political, social and economic trends.

To begin with, although many of my posts have explored Nishitani’s approach to Christianity, some of which may seem very unorthodox, he was often critical about what he perceived as the concomitant decline of Eastern spirituality in the face of the modernity that is actively poisoning both:

“Japanese Buddhism is having little influence upon people’s lives in our time, and this is taken as proof of the decline of Buddhism. The impact of Buddhism upon society has become weak because it has penetrated too pervasively into our daily life itself; it has changed into a sort of social custom, and has stagnated. The major reason for this may perhaps be traced back to the religious policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate.”

As he suggests, the rot first set in during the seventeenth century, but although it would be easy to assume that Buddhism’s more contemplative nature has found it difficult to compete with the promulgating character of both Christianity and Islam, it nonetheless exerts a huge influence on large swathes of the world by transforming the inner state of its adherents. In other words, its impact has worked in a more indirect fashion. This is not to suggest, however, as Nishitani is quick to point out, that the transformation of the individual and the transformation of a society are two separate things. Indeed, as he says in relation to the materialistic perspective of Japanese Marxists in the 1960s:

“Many ‘progressives’ in this country, for instance, hold that the present crisis surrounding atomic warfare is a result of modern capitalism, which obstructs the inevitable course of history, or especially, of international monopoly capitalism’s imperialism. They believe that the only way to overcome the crisis lies in a social revolution. But is this really so? Is it not rather that the crisis is not to be blamed on capitalist society alone, but is caused equally by the very thought that the crisis must be blamed exclusively on the capitalist system? The very viewpoint from which the conflict of social ideologies is seen as ultimate, and social revolution as necessarily having priority over anything else, constitutes one of the major factors in the very crisis that it is attempting to overcome. The very idea that social revolution should take precedence over man’s inner transformation is a not insignificant part of the crisis itself.”

Revolution in the social sphere, therefore, is completely unviable if the hearts and minds of its protagonists have not been transformed in a more profound and all-encompassing sense. Buddhism, Nishitani contends, is far more revolutionary than anything Marxism has to offer and a simple ideology cannot possibly compete with an individual – or group of individuals – who have been radically awakened in a more absolute and thoroughgoing regard:

“According to Buddhism, all that is needed is to become emancipated from the innumerable attachments that arise spontaneously from within ourselves and tie us to things of this world. Hence it speaks of nirvāṇa as the extinguishing of the fire. The Buddhist way of transcending the “world” as well as the ‘self-in-the-world,’ is not a mere ‘otherworldliness,’ but an awakening in which we become aware of our original and authentic nature (our Dharma-nature) and may thus live in accord with it. The possibility of attaining this enlightenment depends upon ourselves alone.”

This determination to reject the trappings of worldliness is clearly very different to that of the Marxist homo economicus who becomes little more than a dehumanised machine in order to adapt to the mechanised world in which he finds himself. In a social context, one must remember that Buddhism originally developed within a caste system and yet had a different perspective towards human solidarity than that of the modern communist:

“They must have been fully conscious of the fact that their establishment of a ‘brotherhood’ was a historical event of revolutionary character, and that it was made possible only by a wholly new basis of human relationship being initiated beyond the rigid Brahmanic framework of caste—a basis on which men, freed of all bondage, are ultimately independent and truly equal.”

Nishitani saw this form of brotherhood as something which goes beyond the confines of the world, and which is certainly far superior to the class divisiveness that one finds among Marxists and which is never resolved by the well-documented excesses of state socialism. The Buddhist interpretation of man as a fulfilled social being thus involves a transformation that is internal, rather than external. At the same time, this leaves the question of hierarchy.

What Nishitani describes as the “idée fixe” of the caste system, something that originated among the Aryans, is discussed within Buddhist philosophy (or at least as far as it can be distinguished as ‘philosophy’) as an example of man entering history as a realisation of the ego. A similar process happened in relation to the Occident:

“In the West, the realization of ‘man’ came into being mainly through the process of the ‘secularisation’ of culture, in which man became separated from his religious view of self. The result was that man came to see himself as an independent, self-centered, self-motivated being, rather than as a God-centered being, subservient to the Will of God. The ‘self’ thus became aware of itself as an autonomous being whose independent existence is sustained only in relation to itself, not as a ‘created’ being whose existence is grounded on its relationship to God. This is why I go so far as to say that the self-realisation of man took the form of the realisation of ‘ego’.”

I have already dealt with Nishitani’s analysis of Christianity, which relies on its main events having occurred within the context of human history, and this eventually led to the secularisation that detached man from God and ushered in a new era of nihilism. These are the consequences of the “self-realisation” that pursues a false autonomy in complete detriment to the true self. Nishitani argues that this accentuation of the ego led to the abandonment of the warmth and devotion that one finds in religious love (agape):

“Thus, liberty and equality without the ingredient of love came to be claimed as the ‘rights’ of man inherent a priori in his being a man. Liberty and equality were insisted upon as ‘human rights.’ With man’s grasp of himself having taken the form of the realisation of ‘self’ as ego, love became manifest as the fraternité of the French Revolution, as the ‘love of humanity’ of Ludwig Feuerbach, as the ‘spirit of service’ of modern America, and in any number of other disguises. But this love never assumed the essential dynamism to break through the boundaries and enclosures of the ego; it did not succeed in becoming—as did the assertions of liberty and equality—a driving force in the formation of societies and individuals.”

Interestingly, there is a fascinating connection here in that the a priori status of man under the Aryan caste system is similar to that of the Christian who has already been shaped by an objectified God. In other words, it seems inevitable that class war would arise in relation to the former and secularisation with regard to the latter. Both examples denote the inevitable rise of the ego in the face of hierarchical imbalance. If this rejection of objectified systems and divinities sounds questionable, consider those Buddhist monks who

“voluntarily take up the mendicant way of life and have no private property except for an alms bowl and a robe that was no more than a bundle of rags. They were following their Master, who was reputed to have rejected the throne of Cakravarti-rāja, the world ruler, and to have chosen instead the life of a beggar.”

When Marxists seek to replace their exploiters, often becoming exploiters in their stead, they are merely displaying another form of the self-realisation of the ego. In Buddhism, the true realisation of man is fulfilled as non-ego and what people imagine to be ‘class’ is thus presented with a challenge at both ends of the perceived spectrum:

“Even when the proletariat has reached the highest possible standard of living, has ceased to be a proletariat, it may, from a more essential viewpoint, still remain proletarian. Needless to say, aristocracy and bourgeois are equally proletarian from this point of view, whereas the lowliest remain ever capable of possessing the kingly characteristics of the true man.”

Whether aristocratic, capitalist or communist, the history of mankind displays a collective failure to recognise that a more authentic humanity must be centred on tempering the false, egotistical remedies that proliferate in the modern world in the form of objectified religions and ideologies.