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CONTENTS VOL. XII FALL 2005 No 2 THE IDEA OF NATURE, EAST AND WEST Hajime Nakamura (1912-1999) 2 Hajime Nakamura, chairman of the department of Indian philosophy and literature and director of the Eastern Insti- tute, Tokyo, and professor emeritus at the University of To- kyo, has gained international reputation as a student of Japanese and Indian philosophy and letters. His writings in English include Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan (1964); A History of the Development of Japanese Thought from 592 to 1868 (1967); and Religions and Philosophies of India (1973). In Japanese he has published a History of Vedanta and Early Buddhism (both in five volumes), among other works. In many of these writings, as in the present article, Professor Nakamura takes the position that intellectual and social de- velopments within any given culture are to be found in other cultures as well, and that the student will find common human themes in all of them. Professor Nakamura is the first writer from outside the Western tradition to be published in The Great Ideas Today. What is nature? The term nature is known to everybody, but the concept of nature is hard to define. Many different words for it are to be found in the languages of the Far East, such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The English word nature is derived from the Latin natura, which means “birth,” “origin,” “natural constitution or quality of a thing,” and that in turn is derived from the verb nasci, to be born. Nature in common English use has fundamental meanings, as follows: 1. the essential character of a thing; quality or qualities that make something what it is; essence; 2. inborn characters; innate disposition; inherent tendencies of a person; 3. kind; sort; type; as when we say “things of that nature.” It is with these meanings in mind that we shall discuss the idea of “nature” first in the different contexts of various Eastern traditions. Natural phenomena and the deities that preside over them In the first stage of the development of human intelligence, natural phenomena were personified in various countries of the East. I shall confine myself mainly to the mythologies of ancient India and Japan, with only occasional references to other contexts. 3 The mythologies reflected in the Indian Rgveda and the Avesta of Iran have many points of similarity, e.g., in the names of gods and other terms—indicating that both mythological systems had a common source in ancient times. Both mythologies had a god as- sociated with the sun, a deity called the “son of waters,” and a divine being connected with soma. From the earliest Indian and Ira- nian texts it is clear that the united Indo-Iranian peoples recognized two classes of deity, the Vedic asuras or Avestic ahuras, on the one hand, and the Vedic devas and Avestic daevas on the other.1 The former were conceived initially as mighty kings, drawn through the air on their war chariots by swift steeds, benevolent in character, and almost entirely free from guile and immoral traits.2 The texts indicate that Vedic man’s religious experience was fo- cused on this world. There was a correlation between the world of nature, the cosmos, and man’s own communal life. People made sacrifices to the gods, and natural phenomena themselves were ei- ther deified or at almost every point were regarded as closely allied to the holy or sacred. The Vedic seers delighted in sights of nature and were lost in the wonders of natural phenomena; to them, the wind, the rain, the sun, the stars were living realities and were in- extricably a part of spiritual life. Many of the hymns are not ad- dressed to a sun-god, a moon-god, a fire-god, or anything of the sort, but to the shining sun itself; the gleaming moon in the noctur- nal sky, the fire blazing on the hearth or on the altar, or even the lightning shooting forth from the cloud were all manifestations of the holy or numinous. This spiritual interpenetration of the phenomena of nature and man’s corporeal life can be regarded as the earliest form of Vedic religion. Such an attitude also characterizes Shint_. The religion of early Japan emphasized gratitude to the beneficent forces of nature while also to some degree appeasing the malevolent forces. These forces were indiscriminately called “kami,” which is usually translated as “gods” or “deities.” Subsequent to this stage there occurred various speculations re- garding the meaning of the religious life. Vedic poets sought to penetrate the essence of natural phenomena. They projected their own experiences into divine images and sought to explain phenomena by causes analogous to their own experience. Natural phenomena were gradually sharpened, transformed into mythological figures, even into gods and goddesses. 1 The Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, ed. R. C. Zaehner (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1959), p. 210. 2 Arthur Anthony Macdonell, Lectures on Comparative Religion (University of Calcutta, 1925), p. 60. 4 The higher gods of the Rgveda are almost entirely personifications of natural phenomena, such as Sun, Dawn, Fire, Wind. In India the sun was deified as S_rya. S_rya (cognate in name to the Greek Helios) is the most con- crete of several solar deities. As his name also designates the luminary itself, his connection with the latter is never lost sight of. The eye of S_rya is often mentioned. All-seeing, he is the spy of the whole world, beholding all beings and the good or bad deeds of mortals. Aroused by S_rya, men pursue their ob- jects and perform their work. He is the soul or guardian of all that moves and is fixed. He rides in a car, which is generally described as drawn by seven steeds. These he unyokes at sun- set: When he has loosed his coursers from their station, Straight- way Night over all spreads out her garment. (i. 115,4)3 S_rya rolls up the darkness like a skin, and the stars slink away like thieves. Another solar deity, Savitr, known as the “Stimulator,” “represents the quickening activity of the sun. He is preeminently a golden deity, with golden hand and arms and a golden car. He raises aloft his strong arms with which he blesses and arouses all beings, and which extend to the ends of the earth. He moves in his golden car, seeing all creatures on a downward and an upward path. He shines after the path of the dawn. Beaming with the rays of the sun, yel- low-haired, Savitr raises up his light continually from the east. He removes evil dreams and drives away demons and sorcerers. He bestows immortality on the gods as well as length of life on man. He also conducts the departed spirit to where the righteous dwell. The other gods follow Savitr’s lead. Savitr is extolled as the setting sun: Borne by swift coursers, he will now unyoke them: The speeding chariot he has stayed from going. He checks the speed of them that glide like serpents; Night has come on by Savitr’s commandment. The weaver rolls her outstretched web together The skilled lay down their work in midst of toiling, The birds all seek their nests, their shed the cattle: Each to his lodging Savitr disperses. (ii. 38) He was in ancient times invoked at the beginning of Vedic study 3 Arthur Anthony Macdonell, A History of Sanskrit Literature (New Delhi: Mo- tilal Bunarsidass, 1971), p. 64. 5 and is still repeated by every orthodox Hindu in his morning stanza prayers:” May we attain the excellent Glory of Savitr the god, That he may stimulate our thoughts. (iii. 62,10). “Prosperer,” P_san, “seems to be the beneficent power of the sun, manifested chiefly as a pastoral deity. His car is drawn by goats and he carries a goad. Knowing the ways of heaven, he conducts the dead on the far path to the fathers. He is also a guardian of roads, protecting cattle and guiding them with his goad. The wel- fare he bestows results from the protection he extends to men and cattle on earth and from his guidance of mortals to the abodes of bliss in the next world.”4 Visnu is one of the two great gods of modern Hinduism. He seems to have been originally conceived as the sun personified. The essential feature of his character is that he takes three strides, which doubtless represent the course of the sun through the three divisions of the universe. His highest step is heaven, where the gods and the fathers dwell. For this abode the poet expresses his longing in the following words (i. 154, 5): May I attain to that, his well-loved dwelling, Where men devoted to the gods are blessed: In Visnu’s highest step—he is our kinsman, Of mighty stride—there is a spring of nectar.5 In later Hinduism, sun-worship became an important religious rite. In the Pur_nas, mention is made of royal families who claimed to be the descendants of the sun. The Buddha himself was said to have belonged to a family descended from the sun (_dicca- bandhu). In Japan the sun was deified as the goddess Amaterasu-_- Mikami (lit. the Heaven-Shining-Great-August Deity), who was worshiped as the ancestor of the imperial family. It was thought that the sun at midday was deified. The myth of the solar ancestry of the imperial clan was widely accepted among the various clans resident in Japan, including many clans of Chinese and Korean de- scent.

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