Kasulis, Thomas Ohio State University Thomas P

Kasulis, Playing the Field
Kasulis, Thomas
Ohio State University
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Thomas P. Kasulis is University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of
Comparative Studies Emeritus at the Ohio State University where he taught
philosophy, religious studies, and East Asian studies. The founding director of
OSU’s Humanities Institute and director of its Center for the Study of Religion, he
has also held visiting appointments as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard, a Numata
Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, and a Distinguished Foreign Visiting
Professor at Ōtani University in Kyoto. His work focuses on the relationship between
culture and philosophical thinking with particular emphasis on Japan and the West as
well as the religious thought of Buddhism and Christianity. In addition to some
seventy articles and chapters in anthologies, his books include Zen Action/Zen
Person; Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (the 1998 Gilbert
Ryle Lectures); Shinto: The Way Home; and the co-edited Japanese Philosophy: A
Sourcebook. His current project, Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History,
will be published by the University of Hawaiʽi Press in mid-2016. He is the past
president of both the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the
American Society for the Study of Religion. His scholarly writings have been
translated into seven languages.
P LAYING THE F IELD : R EFLECTIONS ON THE T RADITIONAL S HINTŌ S ELF
Thomas P. Kasulis
The Ohio State University
In discussing the spiritual roots of Japanese philosophical ideas, we scholars often consider the
various Japanese forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintō. Although institutionally discrete
traditions, each with its own history, canons, practices, and historical leaders, in their ideas of the self,
they are more alike than different. The Japanese themselves commonly make statements such as: “We are
born and marry Shintō; we are socially Confucian at work and in formal social relations; and we all die
Buddhist.” Indeed, at the everyday level at least, the three Japanese spiritual traditions are each allocated
their own domains, although allowing for some seepage at the borders.
Yet, does a typical Japanese really have one concept of the self at a wedding, another at the
workplace, and another at a funeral? I think not. Rather, there is an underlying view of reality (what I will
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call “the Field”) that is shared, consciously or unconsciously, by most Japanese but which articulates
itself differently according to the context, in each case drawing on the most relevant heritage for its
vocabulary. For characterizing the Field itself, Shintō philosophy (which came into its own only in the
eighteenth century after some sputtering starts in the medieval period) is particularly adept. In this brief
account, I will focus on how eighteenth-century Shintō thought developed the Japanese concept of the self
in light of its understanding of the Field.
One caveat, however. In speaking of the “traditional Shintō” of eighteenth-century Japanese
philosophy, I am not referring to the State Shintō ideology that dominated Japan from the early decades
of the nineteenth century up through 1945 (and in some sectors of Japanese society even up to the present
day). I am speaking of the philosophy of MOTOORI Norinaga 本居宣長 (1730-1801) as contrasted with
that of his successor, HIRATA Atsutane 平田篤胤 (1776–1843), the progenitor of Hirata Shintō, the
cornerstone of the State Shintō ideology.* If Norinaga had lived long enough, he would have been one of
State Shintō’s most strident critics. He was a pacifist who ridiculed the samurai values of his day.
Assuming that all people, regardless of their virtue or faith, would upon death go to a Hades-like
underworld to rot for all eternity, Norinaga valued only life in this world, insisting that no principle or
virtue of loyalty was worth dying for. By contrast, Atsutane later developed a theory of the afterlife that
included a heavenly rebirth for those who died in service to the kami and the emperor.
Moreover, because of the intervention of State Shintō, Norinaga’s theory of the person was never
formally institutionalized within Shintō. Still, some of his vocabulary and ideas still resonate strongly
with the Japanese people at large (often without their knowing the source). My explanation is that
Norinaga was in touch with the vision of the Field that underlies almost all forms of Japanese spirituality,
both religious and aesthetic. Thus, he gave words and form to something the Japanese have always
*
For an overview of how proto-Shintō eventually evolved into State Shintō developed historically, see my Shinto:
The Way Home (Univ. of Hawaiʽi Press, 2004).
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believed to some extent. What then is this Field? I will initially try to describe it without privileging the
vocabulary of any one Japanese religious tradition, even Shintō.
THE FIELD
Reality (including the person) is grounded in a generative field that eludes conceptualization, but
which anchors our ideas and words. This field does not consist of fixed substances; nor does it follow a
strict set of natural laws or work toward a telos. It is more an autogenerative and probabilistic system that
takes form spontaneously (freely, of itself: jinen 自然) while adjusting to its own ever-changing
configurations, like rainwater’s settling unpredictably into puddles. (In that respect. the Field is more akin
to quantum mechanics or chaos theory than to Aristotelian causation or Newtonian physics.)
As subvisible resonances of matter-energy-spirit, the Field is fluidly changing its configuration as
its own forces repel and attract other. Thus, “things”—whether material, energetic, spiritual, mental, or
affective—are most fundamentally processes of change that coalesce for a time as stabilized subsystems
of these interconnected forces. If we want to think of ourselves as “in” this field, it is only as one of the
temporarily stabilized subsystems that will at some point, through a kind of entropic destabilization,
dissolve back into the undifferentiated field (and then can become part of some other stabilization). The
agency in this field can be “I” but only insofar as I names such a temporary configuration within the
whole Field. In a larger sense, the only true agency is the entire field’s working, including its stabilization
into subsystems that have their individuated functions only to eventually destabilize back into the total
field. Such a field allows for fluidity of identity and form across realms of the living and the dead, the
animal and the human, the celestial and the terrestrial.
Relations within the Field. Because of the nature of the field, two forms of relation are
paradigmatic. First, given the permeability of boundaries, internal relations generally better characterize
reality than external relations. As the diagrams below show, if entity a loses that with which it is in
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internal relation, it becomes intrinsically less that what it was before. Thus, relationality—specifically
internal relationality—is fundamental to identity.
An anecdote demonstrates how this plays out in everyday life within Japan. Some four decades
ago, I had hoped to make a summer research trip to Japan, but was failing in securing enough grant
money. When I had a chance meeting with a Japanese friend from graduate school, an economist working
for the Japanese Fair Trade Commission, he asked when I’d be in Japan again. As I explained my
problem, he told me to plan the trip anyway and “we” would find a way to address “our” problem.
(Notice the problem was no longer “mine,” but part of our overlap.) When I arrived in Tokyo a few
months later, he introduced me to a close friend who worked for a major Japanese electronics firm in their
imports division. Over a leisurely lunch, we three shared personal details about our families and our work.
At the end, the friend-of-my-friend told me I could stay at his father-in-law’s vacant Tōkyō condo for the
summer, leasing it for a pittance. I thanked him, paying the two months’ rent on the spot. As we three
jovially left the restaurant, he stopped short and said, “Oh, I forgot. You’re an American. You’ll be
wanting a receipt and he quickly scribbled one out on the back of his business card.” (The card serving as
an external contract linking him to me in what he considered the “American” way of doing things.)
The second key relational mode characteristic of the Field is that between the part and its whole.
The Field is not an atomistic system in which the parts, linked by external relations with each other,
constitute the whole (as, for example, the solar system consists of the planets and their orbits formed by
the influence of the external force of gravity). Rather it is what I call a holographic relation in which the
configuration of the whole (holo-) is inscribed (-graph)” in each of its parts. For example, the DNA
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blueprint for my entire body is in each cell of that body. The holographic relation reveals a recursive
aspect of the self-constituting of the Field (as the genetic code in each part of me patterns the
development of all of me). This allows for the rise of what has often been labelled “Japanese minimalism.”
Minimalism in this case does not mean leaving something out as much as it means highlighting a
particular to such an extent that the whole is revealed through it. A seventeen-syllable haiku expresses
the whole as well as the old strings of linked verses of protracted length.
The holographic paradigm also helps explain the meaning of the emperor in the modern imperial
ideology. The emperor’s relation to the nation as kokutai 国体 (a term referring to both the nation and to
the emperor) is not symbolic or a mere synecdoche in which a part rhetorically stands for the whole. Like
the DNA example, the relation of the emperor to the whole of Japan is literal and ontological. The
emperor is the special particular in which the whole is inscribed, making the relation between the emperor
and the people of Japan internal (neither would be fully what they are without the other).
The Japanese sensitivity to the Field likely derives from its preliterate island heritage, what I term
proto-Shintō.* It is characterized by animism’s lack of bifurcation between the spiritual and material and
by pantheism’s recognition of a ubiquitous, unsystematized array of sacred presences including aweinspiring natural objects, celestial deities, spirits, ghosts, and animal-human changelings—the kami 神.
Using the term kokoro to refer to the Field, Norinaga developed his understanding of the person in terms
of affect, creativity, and interresponsiveness.
KOKORO AS THE FIELD OF THE SELF
*
To reiterate: the Field is not intrinsically Buddhist, Confucian, or even Shintō aspects. Rather it supplied the
Japanese soil in which those philosophies took root. In fact, the aspects of the imported Buddhist and Confucian
philosophies that most appealed to the Japanese were those most consistent with their already existing worldview.
Examples include the Buddhist notions of impermanence (mujō 無常), no-I or no-substance (muga 無我), and the
interpenetration of things without the obstruction of discrete boundaries (jijimuge 時事無碍). Confucianism, on the
other hand, was the application of the vision of the Field to personal identity as social interrelations.
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Kokoro is a native word from preliterate Japan, later rendered by an array of sinographs
attempting to capture its full semantic range, including 心 (mindful heart), 意 (intentions, meaning), and
情 (feelings). Since no Chinese word and its sinograph was a perfect match, when the Japanese developed
a syllabary in the early ninth century enabling them to write their native words phonetically, こころ came
into common use as well. As suggested by its Chinese sinographic renderings, kokoro is, in one respect,
the faculty that expresses meaning. As such it is both affective and intellectual, both somatic and mental.
(As one would expect from the Field theory, bodymind is functionally a single entity or process.) It is
important to note, however, that in Japanese kokoro does not refer to a singularly human attribute insofar
as it characterizes also the total Field. So things as well as people display kokoro (the so-called mono no
kokoro), as do words (koto no kokoro) and events (also koto no kokoro) as well.
Analyzing those terms as a skilled philologist, poring over the ancient myths of Kojiki (古事記),
studying the classical works on Japanese poetics, analyzing ancient Shinto incantations (norito), and
reflecting on all that information as a philosopher, MOTOORI Norinaga developed a theory of kokoro that
contained within it a vision of the person. For Norinaga, kokoro involves a mutual propensity for
engagement found everywhere, a sensitivity expressed through being both in touch with something else
and being touched by it. The wind and cherry blossoms touch each other as much as we are touched by
them. Through such engagement, meaning comes into being. Hence, kokoro establishes a multidirectional responsiveness. When Norinaga analyzed poetics in terms of kokoro, he argued that the poem
was not the creation of the poet alone, but rather a resonance across the field of kokoro. For example, if I
write a poem about the mist in the mountains, I must myself express a genuine kokoro (makoto no
kokoro) that resonates with the kokoro of the mountain mist, the kokoro of the event of my being touched
by the mountain and the mountain being touched by me, and the kokoro of the words that take form as the
poem. Furthermore, Norinaga insists such creative expression is for and with others: a poem unread by
others is not a poem at all. The audience is included as its own part of the kokoro. Creativity must be not
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only from but also for the Field. For Norinaga that creativity in the poetic act is structurally like the
creativity that made the world through the involvement of the kami. Thus, through our own creativity we
participate in the creativity of reality, thereby establishing an internal relation between the religious and
the aesthetic as the basis for the Shintō conception of the person.
THE MEANING OF LIFE
The good life (and the bad life). The good life is the connected life, connected not by bonds that
one creates, but by internal overlaps and resonances that one discovers. Value lies, therefore, in my
cultivating the responsiveness to how I am connected, discovering how I, other people, other things, even
words are part of a single field of kokoro. To attain the good life, I should focus on knowing the world
through engagement, a form of knowing in which the knower to some extent becomes the known and
both the knower and know are thereby transformed. Such knowing is expressed, for example, in the
interresponsive way a potter knows clay, a poet knows words, or a meditator knows breath.
The bad life valorizes a detachment and disconnectedness that reinforces the egocentric idea that I
am a discrete, self-enclosed individual free to create or to not create bonds with other people, things, or
ideas. The path to a bad life might begin innocently by over exaggerating a detached “objectivity” in
which I move around things rather than immerse myself in them (so as not to “contaminate” the data). In
contrast to the engaged knowing I described in relation to the good life, detached knowing is the way a
geologist not the potter knows clay, the philologist not the poet knows words, and the pulmonologist not
the meditator knows breath. Such scientific detachment is not problematic in itself, but if it becomes so
dominant that it defines who I am and how I act, I find myself standing outside the world instead of being
an expression from within it. Others (whether people and things) are only things “out there” to be
managed for my egocentric use. With that false, inauthentic self, I slip into the anomie, isolation,
boredom, and cynicism characteristic of the self-centered person
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The best life/the worst life. Life is optimized or worsened by the community or collectivity in
which the individual person lives. So, the best life is one lived with others who recognize our
interconnections and who work together in a creative manner such that the innovative arises from the
whole process instead of as the work of an individual. In such a context, creative expressions reveal the
kokoro of its origins. Since we are each in our own domains and clusters within the same field,
engagement in the creative expression of others involves experiencing their part of the field as they do.
The worst life is one lived in the world but not of the world. It is a collectivity of individuals who
are not touched by the world and only touch it if, when, and how they want to. In such a life, people move
through the world without being moved by it. The world is be studied at a distance and engaged only
when we want to manipulate it.
The contrast could be exemplified to how we might respond to music with which we have little
familiarity or affinity. Suppose I am a member of a choral society and love the classical repertoire. At
some point I happen to hear some hip-hop. To me the sound is unmelodic, the rhythm coarse, and the
words offensive. So I don’t like it and I exercise my autonomy and right to personal choice by plugging in
my earpods to listen to good music from my smartphone, withdrawing into the safe cocoon of my
preferred sonic world, preserving the impermeable boundaries of my self-definition.
In another kind of community, however, I might have learned that in listening to music, the
question is not whether I like it, but whether I can be sensitive to its origins. If the music is authentically
composed and performed (music arising from the kokoro of those who make it), it reveals something of
the larger Field of which I am part but am up to now unfamiliar. I learn something about people I did not
previously know by engaging in their creative expressions, not being merely a passive audience to them.
Listening to music is not simply about enjoyment; it is also an opportunity for engaged knowing.
For Norinaga the ideal community is one held together by aesthetic appreciation of that sort, a
world where everyone is a poet and reader of poetry, where everyone shares their deepest resonances
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within the Field as they engage in it. In a society built on that sensitivity and responsiveness, Norinaga
believed there would be no need for legalistic regulation or lists of virtues to be imposed from outside or
transcendent mandates from beyond. It would be a harmonious society that relishes diversity even as it
recognizes that on a deep, intellectually unfathomable but affectively sensed level, we are all of a whole.
By celebrating the particularity, the particularity that challenges and surprises, we find the universal.
Responsibility/responsiveness. In the Shintō model of the self I am outlining, responsibility has
little role and is replaced by responsiveness. Responsibility suggests a discrete autonomous agent who
adheres to a sense of duty to some principles or who rationally calculates a cost-benefit analysis of the
consequences of actions. Responsiveness, by contrast, finds agency in system as a whole, working in
accord with what-is in order to create harmonious change. It relies more on sensitivity and imagination
(the ability to empathize) rather than rational calculation. The more we recognize our internal relations to
others, the less likely we will do them harm. We would recognize that to hurt them is to hurt part of
ourselves.
This life and after life. As I mentioned previously, unlike the ideology of State Shintō developed
by Atsutane, Norinaga had nothing positive to say about the afterlife, believing it (based on his reading of
Kojiki which he accepted in a literalist, fundamentalist fashion) to be inevitably and universally
unpleasant regardless of what one did in this life. For Norinaga, the whole focus was on life in this world,
engaging it with as much sensitivity and creative responsiveness as possible. There is for him no upside to
death and anyone who claimed there could be heroism or redemption in it was a deceitful manipulator of
others. He particularly mocked the samurai valorization of the heroic, virtuous death.
REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS
The first task would be to transform our present educational curriculum and its increasingly
hegemonic focus on detached knowing and scientific understanding as the primary or sole path to truth. If
Norinaga were alive today, he would see our educational system as headed for disaster, not because of the
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drop in literacy and mathematical skills, but because it is committed to a faulty model of learning.
Epistemics ( >epi: “above, alongside” + histasthai: “stand”) has come to mean that the best way to know
is by being by-standers instead of by becoming engaged. By stressing the detached modes of knowing
characteristic of the Wissenschaften that define the disciplines of the academy, we have implicitly
devalued the responsiveness, creativity, and open engagement that were once the hallmark of humanistic
studies and the arts. It should be noted that engaged knowing need not be alien to scientific pursuits. In
his introductory biology course at Harvard, Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) began by giving each of his
students a fish and drawing materials, asking them to draw a picture of the fish as accurately as possible.
He kept returning their efforts until they got it right. He assumed that by drawing (a form of engagement)
and not merely looking (with detachment), students would become better scientific observers.
When we reduce knowledge to detached empirical observation and logical analysis, we leave
imagination and sensitivity to the domain of personal subjectivity, a self-absorbed ego enhancement that
causes the retreat into the self-chosen music lists of smartphones and limits responsiveness to checking
the “Like” box on Facebook or YouTube. By contrast, if we can learn again the ways of public,
interactive imagination (not private fantasy), shared creativity (not individualistic subjectivity), and
responsiveness to the self-expression arising from the lived contexts of diverse people (regardless of
whether we like the form of expression of not), then we will enrich our capacity to live harmoniously and
sensitively with each other and with our natural world. For Norinaga, that would embody what he called
the “ancient Way” (inishie no michi) lived by the authentic Shintō person.
So much of our response to global problems today involves constructing models and then
applying them universally to particular situations. “Think globally, act locally,” we say. This has some
benefits but the dangers are enormous. By obliterating the particular with the superimposition of universal
principles and templates, we lose our ability to recognize diversity as the foundation for building a global
community. For example, based on a model of worldwide market analysis, we may convince Latin
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American villagers to stop trying to be self-sufficient with their little vegetable gardens and modest
husbandry and to instead focus exclusively on growing coffee beans, for which there is an expanding
world market. The rationale is that the income from the coffee would more than pay for their buying on
the open market whatever they need for self-sufficiency.
Superimposing such a universal model on particulars ignores three dangers. First, a slight
miscalculation in the price of coffee over the coming decades could result in a life-threatening decrease in
income for the villagers. Disguised in the garb of compassionate intervention is the arrogant faith that we
can figure out the whole Field and foresee all the consequences of our actions. Norinaga insisted on the
limits of human reason, maintain a humble awe before the profound unintelligibility of the field of kokoro.
Second, the universally applied model overlooks the changes in the local biosphere that would result from
such a switch in agricultural production. Much of the environmental havoc we face today comes from
ignoring the impact of our grand plans on local conditions. And third, what would be most important to
someone like Norinaga, the change would disrupt the rhythms of the local culture (family life, community
organization, seasonal celebrations, etc.). By obliterating the previous model of daily life in the
community, the universalized model creates a void in the internal connections among people as well as
between people and nature.
What is the alternative? We can imagine a vision of a global economy that proceeds more like
assembling a jigsaw puzzle than making a picture from independent pixels arranged according to
externally applied formulae. In the case of the jigsaw puzzle, we discover the whole by zeroing in on the
particularities of the individual pieces. If we could study carefully enough the individual phenomena and
if we were trained to engage the details of particulars without referring to an external template, we would
find that, like a jigsaw puzzle piece, each event is really part of an adjoining event, a process that
continues until we get the whole. The internal relations among the pieces is revealed within the individual
pieces themselves and the whole is built up from the particulars. Think locally to act globally.
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When my son was six, his science teacher took the class on a field trip to study the health of
various streams. First, they learned to collect data by examining PH levels and running a few simple tests
for toxins. In so doing, they could classify the streams as clean or polluted. Then the teacher showed them
a picture of a particular species of water spider and they went back to examine the same streams.
Wherever the spider was plentiful, it was one of the previously determined clean streams; where it was
missing, it was one of the polluted streams. By learning to look for one particular, the students could
engage the biosystem of the stream holistically, using the water spider to holographically reflect the
whole. That’s the kind of education Norinaga would endorse.