DURING THE WAR Honda used his spare time entirely for his own study of samsara and transmigration and found pleasure in hunting for old books on these subjects. As the quality of new publications gradually deteriorated, the dusty luxury of wartime secondhand bookshops increased. Only there were freely available the knowledge and the pursuit of a hobby that transcended the times. And compared to the increase in the cost of everything else, the price of both j.a.panese and Western books remained low.
Honda gleaned considerable information from these tomes which expounded on Western theories concerning life cycles and reincarnation.
One theory was attributed to Pythagoras, the Ionian philosopher of the fifth century B.C. But his ideas on life cycles had been influenced by the earlier Orphean mysteries that had swept all of Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries. Orphean religion had in turn evolved from the worship of Dionysus that had ignited fires of madness throughout the preceding two hundred years of war and instability. The fact that the G.o.d Dionysus had come from Asia and fused with the Earth Mother and agricultural rituals throughout Greece suggested that the two had really originated from one source. The Earth Mother"s vibrant figure still lived in the Kalighat in Calcutta that Honda had seen. Dionysus embodied the life cycle of nature that was manifest in the northern country of Thrace. He arrived with the beginning of winter, died at its height, and was resurrected with spring. No matter what lively, wanton figure he might simulate, Dionysus was the personification of young spirits of grain, of whom Adonis was one-beautiful youths who died prematurely. Just as Adonis indubitably had united with Aphrodite, Dionysus too unvaryingly united with the Earth Mother in mystic rituals observed in various lands. At Delphi, Dionysus was enshrined with the Earth Mother, and the chief deity in the mystic worship of Lerna was the holy ancestor of both.
Dionysus had come from Asia. His worship, which brought frenzy, debauchery, cannibalism, and murder, had its roots in Asia and posed the all-important problem of the soul. The paroxysms of this religion permitted no transparency of reason and no firm, beautiful form for either man or G.o.d. It was a religion that attacked the fertility of Greek fields in their Apollonian beauty like a swarm of gra.s.shoppers darkening sun and sky, ravaging them, consuming their harvests. Honda could not but compare this to his own experience in India.
Everything abominable-debauchery, death, madness, pestilence, destruction . . . How was it that such things could so entice the heart and allure the soul outward. Why did souls have to "exist," discarding easy, dark, and quiet dwellings? Why was it that the human heart rejected tranquil inertness?
That was what happened in history and with individuals. If men did not do thus, it was because they surely felt that they could not touch the wholeness of the universe. Inebriated, disheveled, tearing their clothes, and exposing their genitals, blood dripping from the raw flesh in their mouths-by such actions, they must have felt they could scratch the surface of that wholeness.
This was indeed the spiritual experience of enthusiasmus, being G.o.d-possessed, and extasis, exiting from self, which had eventually been refined and ritualized by the Orpheans.
What had turned Greek thought to the concept of samsara and reincarnation was this extasis experience. The deepest psychologic source of reincarnation was "ecstasy."
According to Orphean mythology, Dionysus was called Dionysus Zagreus, Zagreus being the child born to Zeus and Persephone, daughter of the Earth Mother. He was the favorite of his father and destined to be his successor and the future universal ruler. It is said that when Zeus, Heaven, fell in love with Persephone, Earth, he transformed himself into a great serpent, betokening the essence of earth, in order to make love to her.
His love for the maiden aroused the wrath of his jealous wife, Hera. She summoned the subterranean t.i.tans, and they enticed the baby Zagreus with a toy. Once captured, he was murdered, dismembered, cooked, and eaten. Only his heart was offered to Zeus by Hera. In turn, Zeus gave it to Semele, and a new Dionysus was reborn.
Meanwhile, Zeus was infuriated by the t.i.tans" act and he attacked them with thunder and lightning. When they were completely destroyed, man was born of their ashes.
Thus, mankind was given the evil character of the t.i.tans and at the same time possessed G.o.dlike elements transmitted by Zagreus"s flesh that the t.i.tans had consumed. Accordingly, the Orpheans proclaimed that man must worship Dionysus by extasis and reestablish his holy origin by self-deification. The ritual of the sacred feast persists in the Christian sacrament of the holy eucharist.
Orpheus the musician, murdered and dismembered by Thracian women, seems to reenact the death of Dionysus; and his death, rebirth, and the mysteries of Hades became significant Orphean doctrines.
As wandering souls who left their bodies by extasis were thought to be able to make contact for a short time with the mysteries of Dionysus, men were clearly aware of the separation of body and soul. Their flesh was formed of the evil ashes of the t.i.tans and their soul embraced the pure fragrance of Dionysus. Furthermore, the doctrine of Orpheus taught that earthly suffering did not end with corporeal death; the soul, having escaped its dead body, was obliged to spend some time in Hades before reappearing on earth and transmigrating into another human or animal body. Thus was it destined to traverse limitless "cycles of life."
The immortal soul, originally holy, must traverse such a dark pa.s.sage because of the original sin of the flesh: namely, the t.i.tans" murder of Zagreus. Man"s earthly life added new sins, and they renewed themselves. Thus, mankind is eternally incapable of escaping from the suffering of this cycle of lives. A man is not necessarily reincarnated in human form, but depending upon the gravity of his sins, may be reborn as a horse, sheep, bird, dog, or cold snake fated to crawl in the dust.
The Pythagoreans, who had been called the successors of the Orpheans and credited with developing their theories, held to the unique doctrines of samsaric reincarnation and Universal Breath.
Honda could detect a trace of the latter principle in King Milinda"s concept of life and the soul; he had long meditated on Indian philosophy. It also bore a resemblance to the mysticism of ancient Shinto.
Compared to the fairy-tale cheerfulness of the jataka, tales drawn from the various lives of the Buddha, in Theravada Buddhism, the Western theory of reincarnation, darkened by gloomy Ionic melancholy, depressed Honda in spite of the fact that both came from the same source. Consequently he tended to heed Herac.l.i.tus who had claimed that all things were in flux.
Enthusiasmus and extasis merged in this philosophy of transitory unity, according to which one was all, one came from the all, and all from the one. In the area which transcended time and s.p.a.ce, ego disappeared, unity with the universe was easily accomplished, and man was able to become through this divine experience every thing. There, man, nature, bird, animal, forests rustling in the breeze, streams sparkling with the scales of fish, cloud-capped mountains, blue seas dotted with islands-all were able to disengage themselves from their earth-bound existence and unite in harmony. It was such a world that Herac.l.i.tus talked about.
The living and the dead, The awake and the sleeping, The young and the old are all one and the same.
When the ones change, they become the others.
When those shift again, they become these.
G.o.d is day and night.
G.o.d is winter and summer.
G.o.d is war and peace.
G.o.d is fertility and famine.
He transforms into many things.
Day and night are one.
Goodness and badness are one.
The beginning and the end of a circle are one.
These lines represent the sublimity of Herac.l.i.tian thought, and when Honda came into contact with it, was blinded by its brilliance, he experienced a certain liberation; but at the same time he was cautious lest he remove too hastily the hands with which he covered his dazzled eyes. For one thing, he was afraid of going blind; for another, he felt that he was still too immature in his sensitivity and ideas to accept such boundless illumination.
14.
FOR THIS REASON Honda averted his eyes for a while and concentrated on his studies of the theories of samsara and reincarnation that had been revived in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy.
Tommaso Campanella, a monk living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, believed in the theory of the life cycle and reincarnation. This heretic and rebellious philosopher was welcomed in France after spending twenty-nine years in prison. There he was happy and much honored during the last years of his life. When Louis XIV was born, he dedicated to him an eloge in which he claimed that the royal birth was proof of his theory of reincarnation.
Campanella learned the Brahman theory of samsara and transmigration from Botero and there discovered that the souls of the dead transmigrated even into monkeys, elephants, or cows. Borrowing the Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul and in reincarnation, he designated the inhabitants of his princ.i.p.al work, Citta del sole, to be "wise men who had originally come from India to escape the pillage and atrocities of the Mogul." "Pythagorean Brahmans," he called them, yet he left their belief in samsara ambiguous. Campanella himself claimed that after death, the human soul did not go to h.e.l.l, purgatory, or heaven.
It is said that his Caucasian Sonnets vaguely suggest the theory of samsara. In these poems, he expressed his emotions of sorrow. "I cannot believe that my death will bring improvement to mankind; frequently, even if misfortune be averted, evil prospers more than ever. Human senses survive eternally after death; such senses simply forget the suffering endured during life in this world. If we cannot even know whether our former lives were spent in torture or in peace, how shall we know anything of the afterlife?"
In contrast to the jubilation Honda had witnessed in Benares, the Europeans who discoursed on reincarnation were especially depressed by the adversity and sorrow of this life. Furthermore, they did not seek joy in a hereafter, but hoped merely for oblivion.
On the other hand, the eighteenth-century philosopher Giovanni Batista Vico, a ferocious opponent of Descartes, advocated reincarnation and a return to eternity, and his bravery and militancy in his struggle made him a forerunner of Nietzsche, who held the same views. Honda read with pleasure one pa.s.sage from Vico, in which he praised the j.a.panese as being heroic, even though he had but a vague knowledge of j.a.pan. "The j.a.panese eulogize the heroic man as did the Romans at the time of the Punic Wars. They are fearless in military affairs and speak a language similar to Latin."
Vico interpreted history through his concept of recurrence. In short, he maintained that each civilization came to its final phase with "Premeditated Savagery," which is far worse than the earlier "Natural Savagery." The latter signifies a n.o.ble naivete, but the former indicates cowardly cunning and insidious trickery. Thus the venomous "Premeditated Savagery" or "Civilized Savagery" must necessarily perish, after centuries of progress, by a renewal of "Natural Savagery."
Honda felt that an example was to be found in the brief history of modern j.a.pan.
Vico believed in the order of the universe as propounded by Catholicism; yet he was close to the theory of causation through karma. "G.o.d the creator," he said agnostically, "and the created are separate ent.i.ties. The raison d"etre and essence of things are individual in each ent.i.ty; therefore, the created is an entirely different ent.i.ty from the G.o.dhead as far as its essence is concerned."
If one holds the created-that which appears to be an ent.i.ty-to be dharma and atman and if one regards its raison d"etre to be karma, then deliverance is simply attaining the ent.i.ty of the creator on another dimension.
Vico claimed in his theology that G.o.d"s creation changed "internally" into the created and "externally" into matter, and thus the world was created in time. He also said that the human spirit, being G.o.d"s reflection, was able to grasp the concept of infinity and eternity and was immortal. It is not confined by the body and consequently is not limited by time. But he did not provide an answer to the question why the limitless being was shackled by limited things, claiming this to be unknowable. But this is the very point at which the wisdom of the theory of samsara and reincarnation should begin.
On reflection, it is surprising that Indian philosophy, persistently insisting on the power of knowledge, did not reject fantasy or dreams and never developed its own agnosticism.
15.
WHEN HONDA DISCOVERED that a Western tradition of reincarnation had been feebly handed down by lone and solitary thinkers, he mused that it was only natural that King Milinda, who had ruled northwestern India in the second century B.C., seemed to have quite forgotten the Pythagorean philosophy of ancient Greece when he met the Elder, Nagasena, and plied him with questions. He was most interested in, and at the same time skeptical of, the more profound Buddhist theories of samsara and transmigration.
The first volume of The Questions of King Milinda, as it appears in the j.a.panese translation of the Buddhist canon, opens with the following description of the ruler"s capital: Thus I have heard: In one of the regions colonized by the Greeks, there is a city called Sagara. It is a great center for commerce and foreign trade and is marked by purple mountains and clear water, parks, woods, and fields, forming a pleasant, natural paradise on earth; and its inhabitants are devoutly religious. Furthermore, their enemies have all been driven away, so that they feel not the slightest insecurity or oppression. The king"s castle is surrounded by fortifications, a variety of ramparts, majestic, forbidding side gates, high white walls, deep moats, and the protection provided is complete. The city"s squares, crossroads, and marketplaces are most aptly designed: beautifully decorated stores are filled with countless invaluable merchandise. Several hundreds of charitable hospitals add dignity to the city, while several thousand mansions and high pavilions tower like the Himalayas high in the clouds. And in the city streets, throngs of people are visible, men like pines, women like flowers, priests, warriors, farmers and traders, serfs-people of all cla.s.ses pa.s.s by in groups.
All the citizenry welcomes scholars and teachers of various religions and doctrines. Thus, Sagara appears as a nest for elders and academicians of all persuasions. Also in the streets stand eave to eave both large and small dry goods merchants who handle goods woven in Benares called khotumbari and all other kinds of goods and fabrics. Lavish fragrance wafts from the flower and incense market, purifying the air of the city. Other shops handle wishing pearls and divers other gems and goods of gold, silver, copper, or stone. It is as though one has stepped into a dazzling mine of jewels. Then, as one turns in another direction, there are great stores for grain and ware-houses full of priceless merchandise, shops with all manner of food and drink and cakes; nothing is lacking. In short, Sagara rivals Uttarakuru in wealth, and its prosperity compares well with that of Arakamandar, the city of heaven.
Extremely self-confident and excelling in elocution and debate, King Milinda was contemptuous of Indians as being intellectual chaff. And it was in the midst of this ravishing and glorious city that he met the Elder, Nagasena, for the first time, a sage superior in intellect to the King.
"O Wise One, when I call you Nagasena, exactly who is this Nagasena?" asked the King.
The Elder answered with a question: "What do you think Nagasena is?"
"O Wise One, I think Nagasena is what exists within a body, a life or soul which enters it as wind or breath."
The King"s reply reminded Honda of the Pythagorean theory of the Universal Breath. That is to say, psyche in Greek originally meant "breath," and if human psyche was breath, man was sustained by air, and thus the whole universe was maintained by air and breath. Such was the Ionean theory of natural philosophy.
The Elder further asked why it was that the breath of one who blows a conch, flute, or horn never returned once it was released, and yet the blower did not die. The King was unable to reply. Thereupon Nagasena made a statement which pointed up the fundamental difference between Greek and Buddhist philosophy.
"The soul is not breath. Inhaled and exhaled, breath is merely the body"s latent energy or power."
Honda immediately felt he could antic.i.p.ate the dialogue that would follow; it did in fact appear on the next page.
The King asked, saying: "O Wise One, is anyone and everyone reborn after dying?"
"Some people do, some do not."
"What sort of people would they be?"
"Those who have committed sins will be reborn; those who are sinless and pure will not be reborn."
"Are you going to be reborn, O Wise One?"
"When I die, if I am attached to life in my heart, I shall be reborn; but if not, I shall not be reborn."
"I understand."
From this point on, a zealous desire for learning was kindled in King Milinda"s heart, and pertinaciously he posed question upon question concerning samsara and transmigration. The King pursued the Elder with the spiral investigation of Greek dialogue, asking for proof of the "selflessness" of Buddhism and the question why men who possess no "self" go through samsara, and concerning the essence that is subject to the law of samsara. Because if samsara occurs through a sequence of causes and effects-a good cause producing by reward a good effect, a bad cause a bad one-there must be an eternal host substance responsible for causal actions. But atman, which was recognized in the days of the Upanishads, had been categorically denied in the Abhidharma teachings that characterized the school to which Nagasena belonged. Because of the doctrine and because of his ignorance of the elaborate system of the Consciousness Only school that developed later, Nagasena merely answered: "There is no samsaric subject as essence."
But Honda saw an indescribable beauty in the parable which Nagasena used to explain samsara and transmigration, that of a sacred taper, whose flame is not quite the same in the evening, at midnight, and at dawn, and yet not different either as it continues on the same wick burning throughout the night. The karmic existence of an individual is not substantive existence but merely a succession of phenomena similar to the flame.
And so Nagasena taught that time was the existence of samsara itself, almost in the same manner as the Italian philosophers who espoused it many centuries later.
16.
IT WAS ONLY NATURAL that King Milinda should choose a Buddhist as his companion in these dialogues, for the ruler, being a foreigner, was necessarily excluded from Hinduism. One not born within the Indian caste system, sovereign or not, was arbitrarily rejected by this religion.
Honda"s first encounter with the words "samsara" and "reincarnation" had occurred thirty years before, at the house of Kiyoaki Matsugae, where, having listened to the sermon of the Abbess of the Gesshu Temple, he had on his own read the Laws of Manu in the French translation of Louis Delongchamps. These laws, which were compiled sometime between the second century before and the second century after the birth of Christ, inherited the idea of samsara established at the beginning of the eighth century B.C. in the Upanishads with their belief in the unity of Brahma and atman. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states: Indeed the person performing a good deed will become benevolent and one performing a bad deed will become evil; one becomes pure by pure acts and black by evil acts. Therefore it is said: A human being is composed of kama, or "desire"; by following kama, one creates will; by following will one creates karma; and through karma, samsara comes into existence.
In retrospect, Honda"s experience in Benares might have been predestined since that day when, at nineteen, he had become familiar with the Laws. The Laws of Manu encompa.s.ses all of religion, morality, custom, and law, beginning with the creation of heaven and earth and ending with samsara. During their rule of India, the British wisely permitted these laws to continue in effect as practical rules for the Hindus who resided there.
After a second reading of the Laws, Honda was for the first time able to touch upon the origin of the jubilation and adoration that he had witnessed in Benares. He read in the impressive first chapter the description of the birth of Brahma, the ancestor of the entire world, where it is told how a divinity coming into being spontaneously expelled the chaos of darkness and began to shine. First he created water and placed a seed in it. The seed grew and became a golden egg as brilliant as the sun. A year later, he broke the egg and from it Brahma was born. And the water that had nurtured the G.o.d was that of Benares.
The principle of reincarnation expounded in the Laws of Manu cla.s.sifies human rebirth as being roughly of three kinds. Three natures govern the bodies of all sentient beings: wisdom (sattva), which is joyous, serene, and filled with pure, shining emotions, is reborn as a G.o.d; ignorance (rajas), which likes business enterprises, which is indecisive and tends to follow dishonest works and is addicted to sensuous pleasures, is reborn as man; and anger (tamas), which follows a life of indolence and dissipation, slothfulness, cruelty, unbelief, and evil, is reincarnated as an animal.
Transgressions that bring about transmigration into animals are itemized in detail: the murderer of a Brahman will enter the body of a dog, pig, donkey, camel, cow, goat, sheep, deer, or bird; a Brahman who steals money from another Brahman will be reborn a thousand times as a spider, snake, lizard, or aquatic animal; one who invades the bed of a n.o.ble person will be born a hundred times as gra.s.s, bush, vine, or flesh-eating animal; one who steals grain will become a rat, a honey filcher will become a horsefly; a milk thief will be born as a bird; a herb scrounger will be a dog; a meat stealer will be reborn as a condor; a thief of fat meat will become a cormorant; a salt filcher will transmigrate as a cricket; a robber of silk will be a partridge; a linen stealer will be reborn as a frog; a cotton thief will become a crane; a cow poacher will be an iguana; a filcher of incense will become a muskrat, a vegetable thief, a peac.o.c.k; a stealer of fire, a heron; a furniture thief, a wasp; a horse thief, a tiger; a woman abductor, a bear; a stealer of water, a cuckoo; and a fruit poacher, a monkey.
17.
NONETHELESS, the Theravada Buddhism of Thailand was sustained by the naive doctrines of the jataka, or "birth stories," in the Southern Buddhist Canon that retained much of the flavor of the original Pali texts. It was not even considered strange for Shakyamuni, who had made no transgression as a bodhisattva in his former lives, to be reborn as a rat or a golden swan.
The southern teachings current in Thailand were unknown in j.a.pan until the late nineteenth century. Within one to two hundred years after the death of the Buddha, they were divided into many schools, usually called the Eighteen Theravada Sects; and their teachings, brought to Ceylon by Mahinda under the rule of King Ashoka in the third century B.C., are still practiced there and in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia.
In the Theravada Canon, written in Pali, the minute regulations set forth in the vinaya, or "rules" section, still regulate the daily lives of Siamese cen.o.bites. Monks are subject to two hundred and fifty precepts, nuns to three hundred and fifty.
Honda was anxious to learn about the Thai concept of samsara and transmigration, how it differed from the Yuishiki doctrine that attributes the existence of the exterior world to inner ideation, and what sort of characteristics it possessed. Whatever the little Princess"s belief, he wanted to know what ideas of samsara were entertained by the ubiquitous saffron-robed monks in Bangkok. He read voraciously.
Thus it was that he discovered that the doctrines of the Eighteen Theravada Sects had originated in the Abhidharma school to which Nagasena, the Elder who had conversed with King Milinda, belonged. As for the dissemination of the Questions of King Milinda, certain scholars claim that the work was probably compiled in northwestern India, where there were then Greek colonies, and later traveled eastward to the region of Magadha where it was transcribed into Pali. Ultimately, with the addition of some material, it reached Ceylon and spread from there to Burma and Thailand, becoming the Milindapanha of the Thai canon.
We may thus a.s.sume that the particular Thai concept of samsara is approximately the same as that advocated by Nagasena. The basic tenet of this sect is that the karmic essence that causes samsara is thought or will. This is consistent with the Agamas and is very close to primary Buddhist thought. The followers of this sect claim that in terms of motivation there is basically neither good nor evil in men or matter in the external world. What makes them good or bad is completely the product of mind, thought, or will.
So far so good. But in explaining "selflessness," or anatman, the Abhidharma school proceeds from the fact that the whole material world is avyakrita, "unrecordable" as either good or bad-neutral. For instance, imagine a carriage. Despite the fact that all the const.i.tuents of this carriage are simple material elements, they can turn into an instrument of crime if the driver runs over a man and escapes. Thus, as mind and will are causes for transgressions and karma, man is fundamentally anatman, "without self." However, thought rides in the vehicle of the body and produces samsara and reincarnation through the six karmic causes: pa.s.sion, anger, wrong views, indifference, non-anger, and correct views. Thought is the cause of samsara, but it is not the migrating body. What this body may be is never explained. The hereafter is merely a continuation of this world, and the taper light burning during one"s final evening in this world is the birth light of the next life with which it is linked.
On reflection, Honda seemed to understand better what must have been going on in the mind of the little Thai Princess.
With every rainy season, the rivers in Bangkok overflowed, the divisions between road and river, river and rice paddies immediately vanished. Roads became streams, and rivers boulevards. It was surely not an unusual event, even in the mind of a child, that a flood of dreams should invade reality, that past and future, breaking their dikes, should overflow into this world. The green spears of rice plants peeked out of the flooded paddies, and the waters of river and paddy were both bathed in the same sun, both reflected the same ma.s.ses of summer clouds.
Similarly, a flood of past and future might have occurred subconsciously in the mind of Princess Moonlight, and the isolated phenomena of this world, like islands dotting the vast stretch of water clearly reflecting the moon after the rains, might be the more difficult of the two to believe. The embankments had been broken down and all divisions had disappeared. The past had begun to speak freely.
18.