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Cultivating the Mindful Heart

What We May Learn from the Japanese of Kokoro

Thomas P. Kasulis

For the past two or three decades, Western thinkers have increasingly discussed the of emotions and what role pedagogy should play in training or educating people’s affective natures. The are- nas for these discussions have ranged widely from academic philosophical analyses, to theories of public school , to popular psychological advice in the mass media, to legal debates concerning criminal culpabil- ity and rehabilitation. Programs in anger management have become so widespread that they are even the stuff of Hollywood comedies. This contemporary emphasis on educating the emotions generally arises from two radically different agendas. From one direction we find the continuation of the scientistic ideal of “” so much a part of modern . This line of

* Acknowledgements: This essay appeared in a slightly revised version as “Cul- tivating the Mindful Heart: What We May Learn from the Japanese Philosophy of Kokoro” in Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, eds., and Their Pur- poses: A Conversation among , Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008, pp. 142–56. It is also available on the GPSS project website of the Nanzan Institute (nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/Purojekuto/GPSS/GPSS-Reference.htm). Reprinted with permission.

1 2 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart argument is as follows. If true emerges only out of detached observation and methodical reason, we must learn to think with the head and not the heart or, even worse, with the viscera. Yet, human expe- rience has time and again shown the difficulty of achieving such emo- tional detachment. So we obviously must learn better how to discipline the emotions, submitting the heat of the passions to the coolness of the mind. The end of such training is to make us—emotionally at least—less that what we were before. That is, we are trying to decrease the affective portion of our personalities, if not to the point of elimination, at least to the level of rational control. The other direction for the concern about educating the emotions arises from radically different premises. The argument in this case is that rather than restricting the emotions in our modern society, we need to enhance them. That is, we need to find an appropriate role for emotions not only in daily life, but even to some extent in cognitive . Hence, there is a growing literature not only about “ in touch with our feelings,” but also concerning the importance of hunches, gut expe- riences, and acquired intuition as a way of understanding and success- fully operating in the .1 From this point of view, to educate the emotions is to help them flourish as a constructive form of relating to, and responding within, the world. Yet, what do we mean by “emotions” in this case and how can they be understood as having cognitive value? With what educational techniques can we cultivate such emotions while restraining mere egocentric self-indulgence or mawkish sentimentality? In this paper we only be able to explore these questions in a pre- liminary fashion. Our specific objective is only to open up our thinking about these issues by drawing on an and cultural outside the parameters of the West, namely, the classical Japanese phi- losophy of kokoro. What is kokoro? For starters, we can say kokoro is the center of both emotive and cognitive sensitivity. So, translators often render the word

1. Malcolm Gladwell’s work Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) is a recent best-seller that suggests cases wherein certain kinds of snap judg- ments and hunches are to be favored over more deliberative, fact-finding kinds of analysis. Thomas Kasulis | 3 into English as “heart and mind.” A problem with this rendering, how- ever, is the conjunctive “and.” It might lead one to think kokoro is the combined function of two separate faculties, one affective and one intel- lectual, but this is not the case. To translate kokoro as “heart and mind” is like translating the Japanese word for “water” (mizu) as “hydrogen with a half portion of oxygen.” It is not that the translation is inaccu- rate exactly, but rather that it misses the point, at least in any ordinary context. When requesting a class of mizu, a Japanese does not think of it as a compound of two elements. Similarly, in ordinary Japanese con- texts kokoro is a simple, not a compound. If we need to use a compound expression to translate kokoro into English, that fact tells us more about the web of English concepts than it does about the nature of kokoro in the Japanese worldview. In modern Western philosophizing, we have drawn such a wedge between the affective and the cognitive that we too easily slip into believing the universality of the bifurcation. Hence, we assume that kokoro must have a dual rather than singular function and we translate it as such. To sum up: the “heart and mind” translation hides as much as it discloses. We think we know what kokoro means only by occluding its most threatening suggestion, namely, that our modern Western bifurcation between emotion and cognition may be at best lim- ited and at worst simply wrong. Such concerns might have motivated the once common attempt to find a single-word Western translation for kokoro. The most notable included “soul,” “psyche,” “anima,” and “spirit.” Those renderings have their own problems, however. Such words run throughout the history of Western philosophy, accruing a variety of nuances along the way. (For example, if kokoro means “anima,” are we to take that in a Thomistic sense, a Cartesian sense, or a Jungian sense?) Most troubling, though, the Western terms tend to suggest substantial entities. Kokoro, though, is not a fixed faculty or organ that relates to its objects. It is more a mode of relating than a thing that relates. In short: neither a conjunctive nor a single Western term fits the Japanese word all that well. When the situation requires an English translation, I often use the term “mindful heart” as a way of capturing kokoro’s being a cognitive form of affective sensitivity. Yet, even that rendering might lead one to think of a faculty rather than relation. Furthermore, it also fails to suggest another aspect 4 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart of kokoro crucial to the traditional Japanese context, namely, that not only humans but also an entity like a mountain, a tree, or even a word can have or express kokoro. Given these difficulties, it might be wisest to leave the term kokoro untranslated and for the most part, we will do so in the rest of this chapter. In view of the historical isolation between and the West, it is not surprising we have found a Japanese term that does not correlate well with any Western term. We might assume that the situation would be different if we were looking for a parallel term from Chinese instead of English. On the surface, this assumption seems validated by the fact that the Japanese word kokoro is commonly written with a character bor- rowed from China: 心 (pronounced xin in Chinese and when in com- pound words taken from Chinese, often pronounced shin in Japanese). So, the correlation between the Chinese word xin and the Japanese kokoro might seem to be like that between the Chinese shui and the Japa- nese mizu. Both shui and mizu are written 水 and both refer to the same thing, water. The situation with xin and kokoro is more complicated than this, however. Kokoro like mizu is an indigenous Japanese word. Since they go back to preliterate times, the Japanese had no native way of writ- ing the words. When the Japanese decided to develop a written form of their language, the Japanese used Chinese characters or graphs for that purpose. In theory at least, this was similar to Saint Cyril’s using the Greek alphabet to develop Cyrillic as an alphabet for Russian. Yet, the Chinese written language is not only a phonetic system. The graphs may convey meanings as well as sounds. For example, if the ancient Japanese wanted to write the word for “three” (mittsu), they had two options for drawing on the Chinese writing system. They could either use two Chinese characters to render the phonetic sound of each syllable, the mi and the tsu, or they could use the Chinese character that means “three” even though in Chinese it sounds nothing like mittsu, that is, 三 (pro- nounced san in Chinese). The options would be somewhat comparable if the ancient Japanese were using our English writing system and could write their native word for “three” as either mittsu or “3.” The former is a transliteration of the word as sound. The latter more like a translation that assumes English writers use “3” to refer to the same thing as mittsu does for Japanese writers. Thomas Kasulis | 5

What happens, however, if the native word does not have a perfect correlate in the language being used as the basis for its writing system? There are two options: using only the phonetic rendering or using mul- tiple words for translating the meaning, varying them depending on the context. The latter is a common strategy among translators between any two languages. For example, the German word “Geist” might be trans- lated into English as “mind” or “spirit,” depending on the contextual use of the German word. In our present case, it is noteworthy that the ancient Japanese commonly used not only xin 心 but also yi 意 to trans- late their native word kokoro. So, as a clue to uncovering the original nuances of the term kokoro, let us consider what semantic range is sug- gested by the two words xin and yi. Today the character for xin is the more common choice of the two when a Japanese writer uses a Chinese character to write kokoro. The Chinese xin typically refers to the faculty for thinking and feeling. In fact, when kokoro came to be translated into English as “heart and mind,” it is likely the translators were thinking as much of the Chinese character as the native Japanese word. An important association that xin shares with kokoro is the reference to the faculty for constructing meaning or value. As with kokoro, xin’s constructive aspect can be both affective and intel- lectual. The Chinese yi (pronounced i as well as kokoro in Japanese) high- lights this meaning-generating activity or faculty even more explicitly than xin. In translating yi into English, we would say it means “inten- tion,” “inclination,” and “meaning.” Combining the semantic range of the two characters, we can surmise that in rendering kokoro into a written form, the ancient Japanese were probably looking for Chinese charac- ters/words suggesting an affective or cognitive openness or readiness to express meaning. Depending on the emphasis at any given point, they might use either xin or yi. Yet, the ancient Japanese must have thought that even those two Chi- nese-derived characters somehow fell short in communicating all the nuances of their native word. Once they developed a simple phonetic system for writing words without direct reference to Chinese characters, the hiragana phonetic rendering こころ became quite common as well. Even today that non-Chinese, phonetic rendering for writing kokoro is 6 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart often preferred when an author wants to highlight the indigenous (or presumed indigenous) Japanese senses of the word.2 There is one other detail concerning the Chinese character xin 心 that further illustrates how that Chinese word/character does not mesh per- fectly with the Japanese meaning of kokoro. In China xin was sometimes used to translate the Indian Buddhist term . In English this citta is usually translated as “mind” or “consciousness” and it is easy to see why the Chinese would associate it with xin. Citta, however, is a somewhat more limited term than xin in that it is more specifically mental. There are times, however, when the did include something like an affective dimension to the function ofcitta , but in those cases, citta— now rendered with the Chinese character xin—often assumed negative connotations. In particular it often referred to a delusional meaning- bestowing activity permeated with thirst or desire. In such contexts, the term xin alone meant the deluded mind of ordinary sentient as distinguished from the explicitly “awakened mind” (佛心 foxin; Japa- nese busshin) of a buddha. By this roundabout route, the Chinese xin sometimes assumed negative connotations in Japanese Buddhist con- texts. Hence, in medieval Japanese the term mushin or “no-mind” (無心—literally not having xin, i.e., not having citta) was a positive ideal since it meant being free of the deluded consciousness typi- cal of ordinary beings. That is to say, no-mind (mushin 無心) acted as a virtual synonym for buddha-mind (busshin 佛心). Yet, at the same time in medieval Japanese aesthetic terminology, the term mushin was often used negatively. It contrasted with ushin 有心, literally, “having xin.” In

2. Writers of the contemporary ideological movement called 日本人 論, “theories of Japaneseness,” often emphasize the ethnic uniqueness of kokoro well beyond what any objective reading of the historical or cross-cultural data would justify. The philology of the ancient Japanese language has been linked with Japanese nationalistic for over two centuries. For a spirited (and itself sometimes overstated) critique of this phenomenon, see the works of Roy Andrew Miller, for example, The Japanese Language (1967) and Japan’s Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond (1982). In my discussion here I am not making any claim about the uniqueness or even distinctiveness of Japanese language or . I am merely using the problems of translation as a cue to helping us understand the nuances of a particular word/concept. Thomas Kasulis | 7 this case, the xin that one has is not the delusional citta, but instead the responsiveness of kokoro. Hence, in the medieval aesthetic context, mushin meant something like “insensitivity” or “heartlessness” but in the contemporaneous Zen Buddhist context, the same word meant being “devoid of delusional consciousness.” To my knowledge, the term kokoro こころ , unlike shin 心, seems to have been uniformly positive in value. Let us now try to penetrate the concept a little more deeply by going beyond the simple issue of translation. In many contexts a key character- istic of kokoro is that it involves a propensity for engagement, a sensitivity expressed as either being in touch with something else or being touched by it. Through such engagement, meaning—whether factual or valua- tional—comes into being. Hence, kokoro is what makes responsiveness possible. Indeed, in many if not most contexts, kokoro involves both being in touch and being touched. That is, the responsiveness is bi-directional. In the Japanese case this mutual responsiveness undoubtedly had its his- torical roots in an ancient , a vision of as a field of intersensi- tivities and interactions. In that ancient perspective, the world was feeling and responding to us as much as we were responding to the world. But even if we moderns would prefer to bracket out the implied in such an animistic worldview, we can still make sense of this claim to mutual responsiveness on the experiential, phenomenological level. I have already used the phrase “being in touch with and being touched by.” Even when we consider touching in its most mundane and limited physicality—the experience of tactile touch—we find reciprocal respon- siveness. When my finger is in contact with the table in front of me, my finger puts pressure on the table while the table puts pressure on my finger. My finger is simultaneously touching the table and being touched by it. In my touching the table, it is as if the table meets me halfway, imposing increasing pressure as my finger moves forward. From this per- spective, the touch is in the betweenness of my finger and the table. We would not find it strange to say the “table resists” my finger’s passage through it. If this is still difficult to imagine, consider pressing a lump of clay or squeezing a balloon instead of touching a table. The action in these cases is even more obviously an inter-action between the hand and its “content.” So, even though we might want to avoid animism’s meta- physical claim that the table, clay, or balloon is acting as an agent, our 8 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart

Figure 1. External and Internal Relations ordinary language suggests an experiential awareness of some such inter- action. We commonly use sentences in which inanimate objects function as subjects of actions: “the life preserver kept me afloat;” “the headwind held us back;” “the thin mountain air sapped my energy.” Of course, one might say these are only “personifications” of imper- sonal things, but such a locution only reflects our modernist presuppo- sition that persons alone can be agents. Others might say the language is metaphorical and in speaking such things we do not really mean that non-living things can be agents. But that comment is divorced from the way we often experience things. For example, suppose I was body surf- ing and I describe my experience as follows: “the waves smashed my face into the coral below and held my head down so I could not come up to breathe.” That is not a poetic metaphor or a personification, but an accu- rate description of my experience. I really felt I was in a life-and-death struggle with the waves. Admittedly, some physicist might say that the reality of the situation was something quite different: that the hydrau- lic forces in the wave action set into play vectors of energy that contra- vened the forces in the buoyancy of the water that would have otherwise brought my head to the surface. That scientific account is not false, but it is inappropriate. It would be like translating the cry for “mizu!” from a Japanese man dying of thirst as “the man is asking for a portion of hydrogen compounded with a half portion of oxygen in liquid form.” Thomas Kasulis | 9

The phenomenological character of things-as-agents is the way we actu- ally experience them. In contrast, the objectivist or scientific account is an abstraction from the experience. This abstracted account accords with a metaphysics that informs us about “what is really happening.” We will never understand kokoro if we begin by saying the character of our experience of the world is fundamentally misleading. The philosophy of kokoro requires us to trust, not abstract away, the way we touch and are touched by things. Whatever the ontic nature of kokoro may be, we have to admit that the kokoro account at least tells us something about our human experience. This experiential being-in-the-world fits well the cultural orientation of “intimacy” rather then “integrity.”3 For example, in cultures or subcul- tures stressing intimacy, the philosophical modes of discourse and analy- sis favor internal rather than external relations. In an external relation the two relatents (a and b) exist independently and are connected via some third category or entity (R). By contrast, in an internal relation of the sort favored by the intimacy orientation, the two relatents exist interde- pendently, sharing some part of themselves. In that case the relation of a to b is itself part of what a is and b is (see Figure 1). When the intimacy orientation is emphasized particularly strongly as a cultural orientation, it affects the basic relations within various philo- sophical fields in that culture. For example, knowledge will be construed as overlap between the knower and thing known. The knower is not an external observer to the world, but is rather so intimately engaged in it. So, knowing the world and knowing oneself cannot be sharply distin- guished. In the field of , we will find an ethics not of responsibility governed by overarching rules, principles, and maxims that define the external relation between self and others. Instead, the intimacy orienta- tion establishes an ethics of responsiveness arising from the shared identi- ties of self and other. In politics the will be construed not as a social contract among independent individuals, but rather as a sensitivity and nurturing of a shared space. In the arts, on the other hand, creativity will lie not in the subjectivity of the artist but in the resonance among art-

3. For a detailed analysis of intimacy and integrity as cultural orientations, see my Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural (2002). 10 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart ist, subject, and artistic medium. In Japan the philosophy of kokoro—as a philosophy of intersensitivity—functions in such a cultural orientation of intimacy. It is no surprise, therefore, that the ideal of kokoro influences various philosophical domains including , ethics, politics, and . To give us a feel for this intersensitivity of kokoro, we can consider a few lines from a well-known poem from the eight-century collection called Man’yōshū, The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves. The poem, “Elegy on the Death of a Wife” (Man’yōshū, 794–799), is by Yamanoue no Okura (660–ca 733). The poem begins by relating how the man’s wife had fol- lowed him on a journey to Tsukushi, but she fell ill and died. Our inter- est here is on the lines expressing the widower’s state of grief.

Now I know not what to do or say, 言はむすべせむすべ知らに Vainly I seek soothing words 石 木 をも問 ひ 放 け From trees and stones. 知らず In the envoy (hanka) attached to the end of the poem, he writes:

Over Mount Ōnu [or Ōno] the fog is rising; 大野の山霧立ちわたる Driven by my sighs of grief, 我が嘆くおきその風に The fog is rising.4 霧 立ちわたる Two points in the poem special attention. First, we must ask why the speaker in the poem sought soothing words from trees and stones. The speaker literally cries out (tohisake) to these natural objects for some comfort or understanding, seeking dialogue with them. But he receives none. There is a distance between the speaker and the natural world, a gap where there should be a locus of intimacy. The response may look like a Christian widower’s looking up at the sky and asking: “God, why did this happen?” In both cases, the man is seeking meaning and conso- lation. Yet, the Christian looks to a heavenly deity; the ancient Japanese to a spiritual presence in the natural world. Furthermore, whereas the Westerner might ask for the “why,” the Japanese poet is apparently seek- ing consolation, not explanation, from the sacred. The Japanese does

4. The English translation here is from deBary, The Man’yōshū: The Nippon Gaku- jutsu Shinkōkai Translation of One Thousand Poems (1965, pp. 198–99). Thomas Kasulis | 11 not necessarily associate the sacred with teleology, perfect , or any supramundane purpose. Instead the speaker in the poem is seeking resonance with the sacred. The poem’s envoy reveals a second point about the nature-humanity relationship in the poem and the ancient worldview in which it was embedded. The speaker’s exclamation of grief is interfused with the nat- ural force driving the mist upward. “Driven by my sighs of grief” trans- lates wa ga nageku/okiso no kaze ni literally, “by the wind (kaze) of my roaring breath (okiso, i.e., oki “breath” + uso “blow forth”) which I sigh” (wa ga nageku: the verb “nageki” probably deriving from “naga” + “iki,” that is, a long breath). In short, the verbal image relates an interpenetra- tion of the breath and wind, a correlation found in many ancient cultures around the world.5 Perhaps the last line tells us that in the poet’s experi- ence at least, the natural world is magically and empathically respond- ing to his grief after all. It is not, though, a response from an external divine entity (the sacred does not “answer” the poet’s “” nor does the fog represent a divine “sign” like the rainbow’s function in Genesis 9:12–13). Instead, the poet discovers the natural harmony between the physical and affective, the material and spiritual. Although silent, the nat- ural world resonates with the man’s sighs. The lost empathy between the human and the natural has been restored through the mutual movement of air and the affect’s capacity to connect the psychological and material. The human sigh and the rising mist in the wind are inseparable. We have thus far analyzed the kokoro of the poem in terms of its subject matter. But what about the poetic creation of the poem itself? How did it come into being and what was the role of kokoro there? Here our inter- pretation will benefit from the theories of the Japanese Native Studies () philosopher, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). According to Norinaga, we must not limit our understanding of kokoro to the side of the experiencer alone. There is also kokoro in things (mono no kokoro) and

5. See the entry on “Breath and Breathing” by Ellison Banks Findly in Mircea Eliade’s The Encyclopedia of (1987), vol. 2, pp. 302–308. For a brief analysis of the biblical use of ruah (Hebrew) and pneuma (Greek), see my “Philosophy as Metapraxis” in Frank Reynolds and David Tracy, eds. Discourse and Praxis (1992), pp. 169–96. 12 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart events (koto no kokoro) as well as words (also koto no kokoro).6 If a person has sensitivity (kokoro ga aru hito—a person with heart), he or she will be aware of the kokoro of things as well and the kokoro in words. An affec- tive knowledge occurs when the person’s kokoro somehow merges with the kokoro of the event and of the words. Perhaps the best way to think of this is that kokoro is a field of mutual responsiveness among person, world, and word. Therefore, kokoro (意) is the site of meaning (意). Following the Native Studies analysis, the world of which we are a part is a web of intimately related affects. For many Native Studies thinkers, this had spiritual as well as aesthetic implications. The world was born of intimacy. We mean this not only in the sense of the physical acts of among the gods that led to the creation of the world, but also that creation itself was the fortuitous expression of the gods’ inner selves. According to Japan’s ancient myths, parts of what we know as the world were originally sometimes no more than pieces of the gods that were washed off while bathing, for example. For Motoori the key point is that there was no clear rational plan for creation. Instead, out of the gods’ being touched by each other, the world spontaneously took form. This resembles the moment of poetic creativity in which the words-things come into being through their spontaneous expression in the poet. Again, for modern Westerners, it might be best to bracket out the reli- gious metaphysics inherent in such a claim and to focus instead on this theory as a phenomenological account. That is, it is a description of how we experience. For example, as I am writing these sentences, words are appearing on my computer screen. How does this happen? Ordinarily, I might say the objects of my thought (say, the texts that discuss the Japa- nese theory of kokoro) are “out there.” Literally, there are books opened on my desk, laid out in front of me. Then there is the process of my

6. Norinaga considers it highly significant that the Japanese koto can refer either to events or to words. When distinguishing the two in ancient Japanese texts, one can use different Chinese characters forkoto: 事 for “events” and 言 or 語 for “words.” In an oft-quoted statement, he says that we should regard “kokoro 意, events 事, and words 言 as ‘things in reciprocal response’ (みな相称へる物)” (see Ōno Susumu, ed. Kojikiden [1968], vol. 9, p. 6). For a good translation of Book 1 of this work, see Ann Wehmeyer, tr. -den, Book 1 (1997). Wehmeyer’s translation of the sentence partially quoted above occurs on page 22. Thomas Kasulis | 13 thinking about those texts and what those Japanese graphs on the page seem to express: the eyes sense the black splotches on the page and my mind turns them into words that I then think about and interpret. To interpret, I bring to bear various remembered facts about Norinaga’s per- spective and the meaning of particular Japanese words. I am, of course, trying to get it right, to explain what Norinaga really said and meant. As I think through what I want to say, I search for words and expressions in the databank of my English vocabulary. I try out these words as symbols to convey what I am thinking Norinaga wrote. Finally, my fingers move across the keyboard and the words appear on my computer screen. This account follows an analysis steeped in integrity: Norinaga’s book, Nori- naga as author of the book, the Japanese language, the English language, my thoughts, my factual knowledge, my fingers, and the computer each exist as discrete entities with their own integrity. Meaning occurs, by this analysis, when appropriate links are forged among those distinct entities. We can say this account assumes that “to make meaning is to make con- nections.” Such an account is a common way to think about this situation in terms familiar to our contemporary Western philosophical context. Now let us try to describe this meaning-event from the standpoint of the kokoro theory. I find myself in an interdependent, inter-responsive field extending in all directions. I am writing about kokoro and do not know how it will all turn out. A passage—some phrasing remembered from a previous experience—comes to me and my hand reaches out. Before me is a book with Norinaga’s Japanese words imprinted on it. In focusing on the page that beckons, the experiential field collapses its periphery at the same time as the book’s page zooms to fill the experi- ence to its edges. In my reading, I meet Norinaga’s text halfway—my mind concentrates on his words and his words sound in my own head in my own voice. As I interpret more deeply, I bring my interests to the text and the text responds with its interests in relation to my own. Atten- tion shifts to hands on the computer keyboard and eyes fixed on the monitor. I look for the words to express the situation being experienced, but in my seeking out the words, the words also come to me, as if from nowhere. All the words I use I have written before, but whenever they come to me as they do now, they bring their own configuration, resonat- ing with each other in ways both surprising and yet obvious. My fingers 14 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart

Kokoro of words

Kokoro of Kokoro of person things

Nexus of meaning as kokoro

Figure 2. The Nexus of Meaning as Kokoro move at the periphery of my awareness and as the words sound in my mind, they mysteriously appear on the computer screen. By this account, meaning does not make connections. Instead, meaning arises from the internal connections already there and springing forth in the kokoro. We can diagram this as Figure 2. The two accounts describe the same event, but in very different ways. The first account is given as if there were an external standpoint from which I am watching myself and explaining what is happening. In the second account, by contrast, the description is given as if it were arising from inside the experience as it is happening. In fact, if the second account were given in Japanese, because of the nature of Japanese syntax, I could Thomas Kasulis | 15 have given the description without using any personal pronoun for “I,” or “me,” or “my.” This would make the distance between the narrator and experiencer seem even less in the phenomenological account. Now we can finally turn to the question that initiated the discussion of kokoro. How can one nurture kokoro through education or training? Obviously, the pedagogy cannot simply involve a curriculum by which one accumulates factual knowledge alone because kokoro requires a response, at least in part, to the newness and uniqueness of each situa- tion. Nor can the curriculum be one that tries to eradicate all emotion or affectivity as scientism might advocate. As we have seen, kokoro involves an engagement in a field of inter-responsive meaning that is affective as well as cognitive. Lastly, the educational plan must also avoid the other extreme (akin to some strands of Western romantic subjectivism) that advocates immersion in one’s own personal, ultimately ego-centric feel- ings. In what respects has the Japanese tradition developed a theory for cultivating kokoro such that it avoids both cold-hearted detachment and self-indulgent sentimentality? Different schools of thought, both aes- thetic and spiritual, have developed their own particular courses of train- ing, the details of which would take us far beyond the limits of this paper. For our purposes here, however, we can consider four general points that most Japanese share. These four points are 1. apprenticeship under a master; 2. immersion in tradition; 3. elimination of ego; and 4. engagement with community. 1. Apprenticeship under a master. It is unarguably true that East Asian traditions have often used master-student narratives to buttress claims to for their respective schools. Various political, social, and economic contests for power have used lineages as cultural capital in arguing for the superiority of one school over its competitors. Yet, we should not let the dust kicked up by these culture wars blind us to the original rationale for the master-apprentice relation. The cultivation of kokoro occurs through activity, through acting in accord with a paradigm supplied by masters. The same character 学 is used for the word manabu which means to study and manebu which means to imitate or mimic. In the cultural orientation of intimacy, one learns about internal rela- tions by accompanying a master who enacts the ideal mode of relating, whether that relating be to an art, to words, to nature, or to other peo- 16 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart ple. The master’s gift to the student is not knowledge about something, but instead a model for a wise course of living. Therefore, the pedagogy for cultivating kokoro requires on the part of the student trust in the teacher’s mastery and an admiration for how the master enacts wisdom in his or her relations. In return the teach- ers recognize that their authority derives not from knowledge but from exemplary behavior. If the masters know their students are learning by emulation, every action of every day becomes part of the lesson. This is why Dōgen (1200–1253) writes that in Zen “students and masters practice together.”7 The student’s practice and the master’s prac- tice are mutually responsive and intertwined. This master-student rela- tion in Zen is emotionally charged, but through their interaction, the student learns by example the proper expression of affect. 2. Immersion in tradition. Although kokoro requires engaging the par- ticularities of each event in its uniqueness, the student’s response is always partially informed by the absorption of tradition. To express kokoro, one must first be impressed by kokoro and its previous expressions. If this seems paradoxical, we need only think of language. The more I study words and see how they have been used to express the kokoro of previ- ous events, the more likely the “right word” will present itself to me at the moment of my own expression. All of us have a native language, but that language can be expanded by our steeping ourselves in the clas- sics of the past. Those classic expressions become part of our second nature, functioning as unselfconsciously as our legs when we walk. When Motoori Norinaga told his teacher, (1697–1769), that he wanted to study the ancient poems of the eighth-century collec- tion called Man’yōshū, Mabuchi required that all future correspondence

7. In the “Kattō” fascicle of Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen reconstrues the meaning of the traditional Zen Buddhist term kattō 葛藤. In common Zen parlance the term kattō (“entangling vines”) refers to the Zen student’s getting tripped up and entangled in concepts and words. Dōgen reinterprets the phrase to mean that the master and student get entangled in each other’s words, so that ultimately they work through the problem together. Thus, “entangling” becomes something more like “entwining.” For a discussion of this fascicle in light of these themes, see my “The Incomparable Philosopher: Dōgen on How to Read the Shōbōgenzō” in William LaFleur, ed. Dōgen Studies (1985), pp. 83–98. Thomas Kasulis | 17 from Norinaga be written in the syntax, orthography, and vocabulary of that work. That is, Mabuchi insisted that the language of Man’yōshū become so second nature to Norinaga that he would not have to deci- pher the ancient passages. Rather, they would speak to him as naturally as his native language. Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), a famous writer of traditional Japa- nese poems (waka), wrote extensively on the training of poets wishing to emulate the classical style. His theory of poetics set the standard for the ensuing centuries. Teika placed particular importance on achieving a depth of sensitivity (the term he used was the previously discussed ushin, that is, “having kokoro”). He explicitly discussed how important it was for the aspiring poet to immerse oneself in the traditional classics of the great poets of antiquity. In fact, those long-dead poets themselves were to be the masters for the students to emulate. In the following quo- tations from his Guide to the Composition of Poetry, Teika discusses the relation between traditional words and the novelty of the sentiment that gets expressed. In the expression of emotions originality merits the first consideration. (That is, one should look for sentiments unsung by others and sing them.) The words used, however, should be the old ones. . . . One should impregnate one’s mind with a constant study of the forms of expression of ancient poetry. . . . There are no teachers of Japanese poetry. But they who take the old poems as their teachers, steep their minds in the old style and learn their words from the masters of former time—who of them will fail to write poetry?8 3. Elimination of ego. This pedagogical goal is already implied by what has gone before. To entrust oneself completely to a master—whether that master be living or even, as Teika suggests, be dead—is an act of submission requiring at least some degree of egolessness. To immerse oneself in the expressions of the traditional masters means giving up the notion of oneself as the agent of creativity. For a poet to recognize one’s

8. From Wm. Theodore Bary, et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. I. (2001), pp. 203–204. 18 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart own words as the resonance of others is to dissolve oneself in a field of kokoro where words, events, things, and tradition all speak together with the self. One does not refer to reality, but instead one confers with it. Only then will the expression of the kokoro ring true. In Japan both artistic and spiritual traditions advocate slow breathing and meditation as ways to quiet the ego. One must quiet the passions so the softer emo- tions of kokoro can come forth. To be fully in touch with things, one must give up the ego; but in being in touch with things, one is in turn touched by them. This is the reciprocity and mutuality of cognitive affect that typifieskokoro. 4. Engagement with community. It might seem that our description of kokoro can be a solitary affair. Perhaps after some training with a master (who Teika suggests might be no more than a book of classic poems), one can go off on one’s own and cultivate kokoro. This is not correct, however. Norinaga criticizes such an ideal as a “Daoist” aesthetic totally divorced from kokoro. According to Norinaga’s essays on the Tale of Genji, the genuine kokoro (makoto no kokoro) was best exemplified not by some mountain but by the denizens of the Heian court. From an unsympathetic standpoint, we might today see the Heian courtly lifestyle as permeated not by genuine affect, but by the phoniness of affectation. The Heian aesthete lived a contrived lifestyle away from the distractions of ordinary life. Relieved of any requirement to work, the aristocrats read and wrote poetry, celebrated each change of season and phase of the moon, and delighted in arranging the colored layers of their kimono according to the high fashion color-schemes dictated by “elegance” (miyabi 雅). That is not the Heian court that Norinaga saw, however. For him reading and writing poetry was immersion in tradition. The cel- ebrations of nature were not boisterous partying, but the quiet reflec- tions on the evanescent here and now. The aesthetic of miyabi was the ideal of getting it right, of using the patterns of tradition as a vehicle for celebrating something new. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the importance of aesthetic com- munity for cultivating kokoro is to think of the community as the audi- ence for one’s expression of kokoro. After all, if kokoro is a sensitivity that leads to expression, to whom is the expression directed? In one sense, the expression is an end in itself: it is kokoro’s self-expression for its own Thomas Kasulis | 19 sake. But in another sense, the performative aspect of the expressive act is a call to further participation. The audience for the expression of kokoro is not a static spectator who observes the expression from out- side. The audience is not in an external relation to the expression. No, the audience—at least ideally—is engaged in the expression itself. The audience is part of the kokoro in the largest sense. Yet, for that expan- sion and melding of the kokoro, the audience too must be trained. One does not refer to an expression; one confers with it. And the capacity to confer is not innate; it is acquired through cultivation. Hence, Norinaga envisioned the Heian court as an impressive-expressive dynamic among highly trained aesthetes who were reciprocally both artist and audience. However naïve or idealistic Norinaga’s vision of the of the Heian court might have been, he did see in it the possibility of a communal kokoro. To be in touch with others is to know them; to know them is to be touched by them. This reiteration of the inseparability of the cogni- tive and affective is the core assumption of the theory of kokoro. And therein lies its relevance to our presentday concerns about pedagogy and the emotions. The purpose of this essay was to analyze the Japanese theory of kokoro as a way of provoking us into rethinking the supposed bifurcation between the intellectual and the emotional, the cognitive and the affec- tive. Once we consider the possibility that at least sometimes in some ways the affective plays a critical role in cognition, it is striking how some antiquated aspects of Western pedagogy take on new significance. Only decades ago, teachers were often called “schoolmasters.” Trade schools emphasized the master-apprentice relation. Students in grade school memorized long poems and passages of edifying prose. Repetitive drills on grammar, spelling, and vocabulary were considered prerequisites to even beginning to think about developing “one’s own style.” Students everywhere read the same old classics that gave them at least some shared aesthetic experience. I am not necessarily suggesting we go back to the old ways. Yet, as philosophers we should at least think about what assumptions about learning and cognition might have been behind some of those practices. And as we continue to update and revise our peda- gogical practices, we might want to think about what new assumptions we may be making and whether we want to stand by them. For example, 20 | Cultivating the Mindful Heart when we use cut-and-paste and hyperlinks instead of rote memoriza- tion to evoke the texts of the past, have we only changed the way we access them or have we also changed their purpose? When we diversify the grade school’s required reading list, have we expanded our list of classics or have we changed how a “classic” functions? When a teacher is no longer an exemplar but has become a facilitator, what exactly is being facilitated? In the information age, what is the role of aesthetic sensitivity and affective responsiveness? One benefit of comparative philosophy is that it may help us raise questions we might never have raised otherwise.

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