CHAPTER 2: THE FOLKLORE OF SPONTANEITY

The mountain is mountain. The mountain is not mountain. Thus it is we call it mountain.

WANSHI, 12th century Chinese Zen patriarch

The late Father S. Candau was a Jesuit missionary, and a very rare European in that he not only understood and spoke Japanese, but could also read it, write it, and give lectures in this language so foreign to his own. He once wrote in a magazine article, "The word ki is the most difficult thing to understand in the whole Japanese language."

It is true that the Japanese use the word many hundreds of times a day, without thinking, yet it is prac­tically, and I would also say theoretically, impossible to find its equivalent among the European languages.

While the word itself, taken out of context, remains untranslatable, it is nevertheless possible to translate the current expressions of which it forms a part. Here are a few examples.

ki ga chiisai -literally, his (her) ki is small; he (she) worries too much about nothing.

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ki ga okii

ki ga shinai

ki ga suru

warugi wa nai

kimochi ga ii

ki ni naru

ki ga au

ki o komeru

-his (her) ki is big; he (she) does not worry about little things.

-I do not have the ki to do . .. ; I do not want to , it is too much for me.

-there is ki for doing (something); I have a hunch , a feeling, I sense in­tuitively.

-he (she) does not have bad ki ; he (she) is not a bad person or does not have evil intentions.

- the condition of ki is good ; I feel comfortable .

-it attracts my ki; I cannot get it out of my head; something strange has "hooked" my attention.

-our ki matches; we are on the same wavelength .

-to concentrate ki. In the matter of concentration , nowhere else have I seen it taken to such lengths (or heights) as in Japan . The Japanese have their faults , it is true, yet I am grateful to be able to appreciate the Japanese tradition of sustaining concentration during the accomp­lishment of every act.

Among Westerners, however, concentration usually creates a mortal boredom, for they are only interested in the product, in the novelty of gadgets, in the tangible result of an action.

One can better appreciate the degree of concentra­tion if one sees a beautiful Japanese sword, say, in a museum. The Japanese swordsmith takes a long time to arrive at the concept of the sword he will make. Once he has decided he purifies himself for several days, then

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re tires to his workshop with his assistant. There is no co~tact with the ~utsi~e world , not even with his family, wh1le the sword Is bemg made. The sword is the soul and spirit of the samurai warrior. It commands respect.

kimochi no mondai -it is conditioned by the state of ki; it is not the object, the tangible result, that counts, but the action the intention. '

Whether we execute an act with pleasure in a spon­tane~:ms way, or do it calculatingly and unwillingly in a routme ma~ne~, ~he _result is the same, yet the feeling that goes with 1t IS different. On many occasions I have se~n Japanese people become angry at the way some­thmg was done;i~ ?ur modern societies we are becoming less ~nd less sens1t1ve to these different modes of doing. To give an example of this, the Japanese word kimochi has now become synonymous with a gift. Giving the gift ~e sa~ , "This is my kimochi" , which means the present Itself IS very small and is just a symbol of my deep gratitude.

I could give examples of several hundred more ex­pressions which use the word ki. Most Japanese them­selves _are. inc~pable of explaining what ki is , yet they know mstmctlvely when to use the word.

Ki belongs to the realm of feeling, not of knowl­edge . Knowledge can be defined and passed on to so~eone else. Feeling, though, is a primary experience which precedes any intellectual effort. No explanation can adequately transmit it to someone who has not shared the same experience.

The primordial question in the West is the one that begins with "why". The "why" leads us to a wider knowledge of the problem. It can help us to resolve it· but it can also mislead us. '

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Two Japanese writers, Rymosuke Akutagawa and Naoya Shiga, were invited to lmch one day. Akutagawa is the author of a short novel from which the famous film "Rashomon" was made, drected by Kurosawa. He was a highly intelligent man lut his end was a tragic one: running out of vitality ant inspiration he sought a way to die without suffering. H took drugs which even­tually put him into a deep slep from which he never awoke.

Shiga, on the other hand, was an intuitive type. l11ere was no theory or oratoryfrom him ; yet he would make apparently very casual remarks which had a powerful impact on the people vho heard them because they realized that they were pofoundly true. Coming from the meal to which they lnd been invited , Akuta­gawa said disdainfully, "They nvited us and served us herring!" In Japan , as in othercountries of the world herring is considered a very conmon fish. Akutagaw~ was indignant at the idea of invting people to eat such an ignoble dish. Whereupon Shi1a remarked, "Yet of all the dishes which they served, tht grilled herring was still the best."

It is said that after the literay conversations which they often had together, Akttagawa would emerge exhausted, pale, and crushed b1 the little remarks of this kind which Shiga made .

Discussions intoxicate us witt words, and prevent us from seeing what is actually haJPening under our very noses.

There is a Japanese story of :t thief and his son who burgled a house while the ownfts were absent. On the way back, a sack full of stolen ~bjects on his back, he asked his son, "No one has seen us, have they?" "No," replied his son, "but o-Tsuki san the honourable moon) is watching us." Hearing this :he thief took fright, dropped his sack and ran off.

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Talking of thieves, let me quote a Japanese proverb that means the opposite to the previous story: even for a thief, out of ten arguments there are three which are true.

The magic of words has always been a weapon for Man. A good orator can convince us that black is white and white is black.

I rem em bef a true story which happened in the United States. A young man was accused of a crime and brought to trial. The judge, an old , experienced man , saw at once tP.at the accused was innocent, but of course it was n<)t for him to say anything for or against until after the r.ormal procedure . In America they have a jury system, a§ in England.

The public prosecutor began his brief. The job of the prosecutor iS to accuse; to say not only that black is black, but also that white is black, too. He was more­over noted for 11is eloquence and to listen to him was to decide that then~ was no hope of the young man's being innocent. He requested a severe punishment for the accused. The jurY, after a brief discussion, voted the accm;ed not guilty, to the great astonishment of the public prosecutor.

To explain this story , I should mention another in­cident which rari parallel to the main action . During the hearing the judg~ had brought out a very long cigar and begarJ to smoke. At first no one paid him any attention and the assemblY went on listening to the report. As time passed , the ash on the cigar became longer and longe:r until it w·as positively disturbing : it was bound to faU off, and ctttention was instinctively drawn to it. But the ash did nPt fall.

In the end it became really worrying; the ash con­tinued to get lon.ger without falling. Had it fallen there would have been a sense of relief and everyone's atten­tion would have returned to the speech. The fact is that

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the jury's attention was distracted from the speech by the ash which never fell.

After the trial the judge revealed his secret: a small length of wire pushed through the cigar.

A few years ago I was asked to give a course of Japa­nese lessons to the cabin crew of an airline company . Hostesses, stewards, and other cabin staff were assigned for three months to the area serving Tokyo, and they needed to know the basics of the language in order to better look after the passengers who were increasing in number every clay .

I thought about the matter deeply . Is it possible to teach Japanese in ten lessons to a crew of Europeans? Especially to a group of people who would be re­assigned to a different area afterwards, and who would probably never again use what they had learned? Think­ing about the demands and circumstances of the job I decided there was something more important and useful than the knowledge of some rudimentary Japan­ese. So l incorporated , in addition to the language class, a class called" Knowl edge of Japan."

The first question I asked the crews was, "While giving the usual service to passengers on board , have you noticed a fundamental difference between th e general attitude of the Japanese and Western passengers ? "The answer was surprisingly unanimous: "Yes, but I can't explain why they are so different."

To give an example of this difference, if a Westerner asks for a glass of water and you bring him a whisky, what happens? He will say, no, I asked for water, not whisky. It is quite categorical. But a Japanese? It is never clear. He is not categorical. He will accept anyway, even if you bring him something other than what he asked for. Why?

As far as your job is concerned, the Westerner is interested only in obtaining the object of service which he requested. But a Japanese will see something else:

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the gesture, the intention , what we call the kimochi in Japanese. Once you have rendered him a service in good faith he will not dare to protest even if there is some mistake.

In 1945, after the war, a young lieutenant in the American Occupation Force often came to visit us and we liked to chat with him . One evening he said, " I no­ticed a very strange thing from an American point of view: Japanese don't seem to be able to say no . We have a Japanese lady in our lodging house, and we often invite her to drink sake. She accepts. Another cup? Yes. Another one? Yes . And so it goes until finally she's roll ing on the ground completely drunk . She's nice; we can sense very easily she doesn't want to say no. We think her reaction is very funny."

The poor lady was the victim of the American sol­diers' curiosity. They in turn got a free lesson in socio­logy.

Well , l said to the students, it is perhaps awkward for you to know that there is a difference of mentality between the Japanese and the Westerners, but we cannot do anything about it. We must accept the fact ; you are there to serve the passengers, not to educate them. The Japanese say yes out of their kimochi and when they say no it is also from their kimochi.

But it would be wrong of me to say that this behav­iour is exclusive to the Japanese and is due to the in­scrutable nature which you tend to ascribe to the mysti­cal East. Even Westerners have their kimochi, though they do not have a word flexible enough to express it. Let me give you a European example which actually happened.

There was an important customer of an airline company, who had an RA TP card, a sort of season credit ca rd of the company which enabled him to fly fre­quently and to pay the cost in a lump sum every month.

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He WIS therefore a frequent passenger and client of the compmy.

Ote day the accountants discovered that the man was m longer using his card, and yet it was known that he w:s still alive and still travelling a lot. An inspector was smt to investigate the reason for the sudden stop.

Tle customer received him coldly and replied evas­ively. With much tact and patience the inspector event­ually von his trust and heard the explanation.

It seems that, one day while travelling, he felt very thirst~ and asked for a glass of water as soon as he got on baud. He drained the glass and went to sit down. As he wa; still thirsty he called a stewardess; she came and said, 'What do you want now? " "No, nothing, thank you!" he replied; and that was the last time he ever flew vith that airline.

You can see that there are two quite different ways of exJressing desire . One is logical, systematic, and discunive . I feel a need. Hunger? No. Thirst? Yes. What do I need? Beer? No. Water? Yes . How much? Three glasses? No. One glass? Yes, etc. Everything is based on a binary system of yes or no. The need will be expresed in a clear language so as to be well understood and you will simply have to execute the message.

Btt the other way is neither systematic nor logical. It is a spontaneous expression of the person. It is not articuhted in a precise and knowledgeable way, but it is total, md it leads in a split second to an acceptance or a refusa. There is no more discussion possible. That is what the Japanese call kimochi.

Tlis lesson ohtained quite good results. Attendance was rrore than 8(() % although the class was not corn­pulsar{. Even ye:ars later my students came to visit me or ~ent me pos1tcards from distant ports.

There were also some exceptions, like Miss X, an air hoS:ess: "Oh, lbut really! We've quite enough to do

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on board without bothering ourselves with the men­tality of the passengers. Come on! No, thank you!"

She did not come again. One or two months later I happened to come across her name in an article about a violent protest from passengers. She would turn all the lights off at a fixed time without bothering to find out if any passengers were reading or writing.

Every country has its flora and fauna and folklore. If ki or kimochi were just a peculiarity of Japanese folklore, it would be of no interest except to a small group of Orientalists or amateurs of exotic things . But I firmly believe that this matter is of general interest, and this is how it appears on a more, let us say, theor­etical level.

When I look at European history from a distance sufficient enough not to be entangled in all the details, I think I can trace two main currents in the evolution of thought : Platonic and Aristotelian.

The Platonic one maintains that the world is a pro­jection of pre-existing ideas that is to say a projec­tion of a noumenal existence onto a phenomenal back­ground. The other, Aristotelian, begins with tangible reality and goes towards general ideas.

Historians would say such a simplification is ridicu­lous. Well, I am not a historian, and I am not insisting on the validity of my opinion. I hold these two currents as representative, even today , of the mental tendency of Western people.

It is tempting to say that ideas precede phenomena, when one considers the simple and sublime formulas of Newtonian physics. One can feel that it is not necessary to study all the cases of a phenomenon to verify the for­mulas. Gravity will work just as well in 17th century England as in 20th century Japan, and regardless of whatever stone, bottle, vase, or human body may fall. When we talk of a tree, an animal, or a machine, it

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is by teans of general ideas and concepts that we under­stand ~eh other. Science is always only of the general.

HcNever, I also notice another line Of thought no­ticeablr different from the others and slightly to one side ofwestern thinking: it is one represe11ted by Plotin and Bctgson, which talks of spontaneity, l:lnd which fits into nHher the category of noumenal ide:as nor that of genera ideas.

Anold friend suddenly pays you a visit. It is a pleas­ant SU1Jrise and you utter a cry of joy, q11ite spontane­ously. {et it would be false to say that the eternal law of frieJdship is such that you always utter a cry of joy when nu meet an old friend. It would b~ equally false to say that the meeting of two old frienC]s is generally accomJanied by cries of joy and that C<)nsequently I should in such a case utter a cry of joy. It is clear that sponta1eity has nothing to do with routine or commer­cial geS:ures.

In he West people are highly skilful at manipulating concer.s. This way of seeing the world has allowed scienceand technology to progress.

Insead of looking at the mountain whh a complex and illdefined feeling, which is a primary experience, we can translate it into the concept of mountain, which allows us to analyse it and observe it according to our particuar needs : measure its height, desChbe its shape, study is geological structure, vegetation, etc.

Th\ only mistake is to believe in the <:tbsolute value of the concept. Already at the turn of' the century linguis"lg began to discover the extraordinaty complexity of the languages of so-called primitive societies. Con­trary t) what has been popularly believe~;:], that is that human language began with simple signs <md grew to a more <eveloped and enriched form, it was discovered that P:imitive languages possessed very specific and concre1e terms without any generic or gen~ral ideas.

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IV[arcel Gran~t studied the non-conceptual nature of the (-.h. 1 ~ mese anll-uage· and Masson-Oursel came to the concl · h t " ' usion t a the languages of India were also of the

slame type. It ~;eems that the only truly conceptual angu · t .ages are 1~ .he European group. 111 1945 ' JU~t after the war, I was walking in the

stree~s of Pusan in South Korea, waiting to be repatri­a~ed to Japan, \then I noticed that the traffic lights at t e ~:rossroads \ere marked with "stop" and "go" in Englt_sh , and SLtsume and tomare in Japanese, but nothJ_ng in Kore<ln. My Korean friends explained that in Korean there ar.e no such words. There are different ~x~n~ssions for different purposes, for example, whether It IS a person o~ higher or lower status who is moving from here to th~re or from there to here · obviously all of tr · bl ' . ' . . .tese possi 'e expressions cannot fit onto a traff1c s1gna1.

~eneral terrns or concepts are admittedly very use!UJ and even indispensable if one wishes to bring a logJCql process of will into the confusion of reality so as to krww it or t'o act upon it. The danger is to believe, f~o~ force of !\ental habit , that the concepts have an a so ute value 'md are unequivocally defined rigidly formed, constant and unchangeable; and then 'to con­str~e parts of re~lity as unfortunate accidents hitting the per ection of out rational conceptions.

1 have discsvered that such an attitude is very

com;non in France . 1 also remember that France has ~0 ~Jced the ~ntithesis of this attitude in such as

1 ° erlos de La~los , J.-J. Rousseau , Voltaire , and Napo­~on. To theoretically place concepts in doubt is not dif-

ficult , and has been done often enough for half a cent­ury; ~he diffic~lty lies in putting it into practice.

Smce the mvention of the word "insomnia" many ~eop\e believe in this illness and take pills. Whereas sleep IS Slfhply a relaxing of the will people try and force themselves to sl'eep. The body then becomes a battle-

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ground between desire and counter-desire, and suffers. Someone who is not a prisoner of words will sleep when tired and will not sleep when not tired. The simplest thing in the world becomes the most difficult. Man is ravaged by the paradox, split between thesis and anti­thesis.

The novelist Somerset Maugham studied medicine before becoming a writer. One day while performing an autopsy, he was unable to find an internal organ he was looking for. He asked an experienced colleague about this and was told, "Oh, you know, in a human body those kind of things are never in the same place." He was thunderstruck by this reply, for until then he had had an ideally perfect image of man, drawn from the anatomy text book used by the students. His colleague's remark led him, not to the banal conclusion that acci­dents will happen, but to a shocking realization: each person is different.

This revelation brings the vibrancy to the people in his novels, and gives them each such a lively and spontaneous nature that the reader feels he has met them somewhere before: and that is true even for the marginal characters who figure only briefly in the vaga­ries of the plot. Great writers may be able to see through walls, Maugham wrote, but at least I can see what is under my nose.

Now, in Japan, although we have created innumer­able new terms to deal with the onrush of Western science, we have not been able to conceptualize the lan­guage nor to suppress that part of the folklore which springs from spontaneity; witness these words ki and kimochi, the importance of which I have tried to put across. If the doubting of concepts is relatively recent in France, with Bergson and the French School of Socio­logy it is only the first step in the teaching of Zen, a tradition which goes back several centuries in Japan.

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Faced then with human spontaneity, what do we propose? If certain kinds of spontaneity are socially acceptable , even desirable, many of them are not. When they are not, society imposes sanctions which lead only to stagnation and the death of dynamism, without successfully suppressing those acts which we are not supposed to produce. The threat of excommuni­cation does not prevent people from killing them­selves. The powerlessness of people of good will is fully shown up when faced with acts of determination whether they are good or bad. '

In Choderlos de Laclos' literary expression of his solution, the author condemns Valmont, his double, to die in a duel. Napoleon's solution gave France a sense of glory, but cost the lives of several million people. The Japanese solution is quite different : it accepts spontan­eity as a natural fact. The movement frees spontaneity from suppression; Aikido directs it; and Zen transcends it.

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