Japanese Philosophy Quotes

Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs.

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

Being a samurai is all about selfless service and if the lord abuses the servant, it is no longer a situation of service; it becomes the situation of a victim. It is never acceptable for a samurai to be a victim. It is never acceptable to allow a lord to abuse you or rob you of your dignity. In such a situation, it is acceptable to walk away.

To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?

Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.

If you write about the Asian culture, be accurate between what is the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Taiwanese, Indonesian, and many individual Asian countries' cultures. While there are many similarities, the differences in cultures will set your novel apart from what is an authentic portrayal to what is a westernized version. - Kailin Gow on Asian Portrayals through Literature and Media

There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn't make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world. Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there? At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego. Just what kind of narrative? It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.

Precisely because an encounter is ephemeral, it must be taken seriously. Life, after all, is filled with things that happen only once. The realization of the ‘onceness’ of life’s encounters and pleasures provides the foundations for the Japanese conceptualization of ikigai, and is central to the Japanese philosophy of life. When you take notice of the small details of life, nothing is repeated. Every opportunity is special.

No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools. Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.

The Game of Go was one of the 4 Arts of China. It spread to all over Asia and was even mentioned in the Japanese novel, Tales of Genji. More than an ancient board game, the Game of Go is an analogy of life and emphasize balance, challenge, and fun. Not only does my name Kailin Gow has the word "Go" in it, but my philosophy on life of balance, challenge, and fun is similar to the Game. Thus, Kailin Gow's Go Girl TV Series, books, and overall brand reflects this philosophy as well. - Kailin Gow in interview about Kailin Gow's Go Girl Books and TV Series.

Life in Japan, nowadays, is nothing like a Kurosawa movie, and only the contemptible Weeaboo thinks that it is. In order to be a whole, well-rounded Otaku, you need to be up on Japanese popular culture, as much as you may be up on anime, samurai philosophy or the canon of Square Enix games.

The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a little dalliance upset her so much that she shows her resentment openly. He has his adventures--but if he has fond memories of their early days together, his and hers, she may be sure that she matters. A commotion means the end of everything. She should be quiet and generous, and when something comes up that quite properly arouses her resentment she should make it known by delicate hints. The man will feel guilty and with tactful guidance he will mend his ways. Too much lenience can make a woman seem charmingly docile and trusting, but it can also make her seem somewhat wanting in substance. We have had instances enough of boats abandoned to the winds and waves. It may be difficult when someone you are especially fond of, someone beautiful and charming, has been guilty of an indiscretion, but magnanimity produces wonders. They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.

Life is pure imperfection, as the philosophy of wabi-sabi teaches us, and the passage of time shows us that everything is fleeting, but if you have a clear sense of your ikigai, each moment will hold so many possibilities that it will seem almost like an eternity.

We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed.

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.

So it is that time reenacts the most curious yet earnest spectacles within the human heart.

The teacher is a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.

Never make a cursed fetish for personal reasons. Never use a handmade object in a personal curse. There are reasons for the unwritten rules. There's a Japanese saying that goes, "Cursing other leads to two graves." Anyone who curses another person is sure to end up in a grave themselves.

Prizing elegance, sweet emotions, and fantasy more than morals and truth; wallowing in fleeting romance rather than trying to give meaning to life, when who knows what's going to happen to you anyway; ignoring virtue and conventions to cherish only the pleasures you are definitely experiencing now: this is the Cocoro of Rococo. No matter how much deep thought, hard work, and agonizing effort went into coaxing out some insight, if that insight is boring, or not beautiful, it doesn't matter. And even if something is made just for laughs, if you find it pleasing, it has value. Other people's opinions and labor do not figure into your assessment; choosing things with your own personal sense of "I like this, I don't like that" is the ultimate individualism that sustains the very foundation of Rococo. Rococo, therefore, embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any philosophy. Only in Rococo—elegant yet in bad taste, extravagant yet defiant and lawless—can I discover the meaning of life.

I remember a time in a class on a cold winter morning a Japanese girl came with a surgical mask & I thought “wow people would go to extremes NOT to get sick in Japan” afterwards on a break I approached her & asked in a cynical manner: why the mask? Are you afraid of catching a cold? & then she said “in Japan you use it when YOU are under the weather & you don’t want other people to get sick, it is the polite thing to do” wow! that's a lesson I will never forget

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming.

Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust.

the Japanese ministry of Education acted with inappropriate haste and unforgivable cavalierness, implementing drastic change before anyone realized what was happening. . . . In English it would be almost ad bad as enforcing a new spelling of philosophy as filosofee.

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

Humankind has accumulated generation upon generation of knowledge, the culmination of which is the vast and useful technological array we see everywhere in modern society. Despite this great accumulation of knowledge and technology, we still suffer from starvation and war. The difference between the past and the present is the difference between throwing rocks and shooting missiles. We are still in conflict. Suffering on a fundamental level hasn’t ceased. But we nevertheless persist in the notion that if we just amass a bit more knowledge, we’ll all be o.k. Maybe a new philosophy will do the trick, or a new system of government. But all of this has been tried many times. Knowledge builds on the past and has its place. Wisdom is beyond time. It’s the direct perception of reality as it is. And in this direct seeing of what is lies the potential of transformation—a transformation that is not merely a redecoration of the past but a transformation of humanity that embodies the eternally new.

Dear Jackalfax Jam Society, Sorry but don't you think there are worse things in life than bad marmalade?

Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.

Walk slowly and you’ll go far

However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces.

If one looks down on one's old village from a distant mountain pass, whatever details of that era may have faded from memory, the significance of having lived there becomes vividly apparent.

Hatsuyo ridiculed the movements of people like the socialists, or at best viewed them coolly. "I can't," she said, "hold a fixed philosophy about human society. What I do is gather people around me who feel like I do and live the kind of life that feels right. That is the kind of life that is most realistic and has the most meaning. One member of our group called that view "escapism", but I did not agree. I, too, believed that it was impossible to change the existing society into one that would be FOR the benefit of all; neither could I espouse any given ideal for society.

We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmopolitan" we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

Japanese contracts were vague; they wouldn’t stand up in Canadian courts, for in Japan they didn’t have to. If an agreement wasn’t working out for both parties, company managers would just talk it over and settle any differences.

In North America, some companies rotated purchasing agents so they didn’t get buddy-buddy with suppliers, for fear of kickbacks. I found company relationships in Japan to be so close that a Japanese manufacturer might have only one supplier for any one part.

As business people today, it's important to realize that from one perspective, we live in a global society. As executives and entrepreneurs and employees, we should embrace and cherish both diversity and unity. We should embrace the diversity of language from Spanish to English to Mandarin to Japanese... We should embrace the diversity of race and ethnicity.... We should embrace the diversity of philosophy and religion... Embracing the diversity opens up more business opportunities and it also allows you to cultivate more meaningful connections.

This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.

Schools normally schedule one subject, for example, Japanese, the first period, when you just do Japanese; then, say, arithmetic the second period, when you just do arithmetic. But here it was quite different. At the beginning of the first period, the teacher made a list of all the problems and questions in the subjects to be studied that day. Then she would say, “Now, start with any of these you like.” […] This method of teaching enabled the teachers to observe - as the children progressed to higher grades - what they were interested in as well as their way of thinking and their character. It was an ideal way of teachers to really get to know their pupils.

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. They physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming.

A shelf farther back contains general humanities—collections of Japanese literature, world literature, and individual writers, classics, philosophy, drama, art history, sociology, history, biography, geography. . . . When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages—a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.

...the manner of speech of everybody in the world — held strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating little maneuvers surrounding them. In the end I have felt past caring; I have laughed them away with my clowning, or surrendered to them abjectly with a silent nod of the head, in the attitude of defeat.

A woman was bargaining with the gardener for a piece of vine, half as big as her finger, for her miniature Japanese garden. It was just what she wanted to climb up the stone in her dish. I looked with wonder on the Japanese appreciation of all small things in nature. Is it because their country, beautifully and theatrically mountainous, hardly ever allows a long vista, letting them always see things at close range? Or have her strange and lovely mists some part in teaching them to see, falling often like a backdrop behind a single pine, separating it from the rest of the world? Or have the Japanese, from generations spent in one-story paper houses, learned a language, an alphabet of beauty in nature, that we, in our houses of brick and stone, have shut out? Or is it, again, only because they are always artists and see more than we do? If only I could stay here long enough, I would learn to see too. And after minutely watching the surface of things I would learn to see below the surface. I would see the essence of a thing.

All Japanese art forms, such as chado (the tea-ceremony), ikebana (flower arranging), shodo (calligraphy) and even martial arts are greatly influenced by the unique Zen philosophy, while the art forms themselves were transformed by Zen into a spiritual discipline focused on calmness, simplicity, and self-growth. In Japan, there is a tradition of studying art not only for art’s sake but also for spiritual purposes and when this is practised with Zen principles in mind, art can be a peaceful journey and a way of self-cultivation – leading to calmness, serenity and concentration.

We don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no, which is capable of explaining our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese "Mu." Mu means no thing, like quality, it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, no class, not one, not zero, not yes, not no. It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is an error and should not be given. Un-ask the question is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.

Historical accounts of philosophy deal with both the chronological development of ideas over time and the timeliness of those ideas in response to the specific social conditions and challenges of their eras. The chronological perspective follows a particular line of thought as it develops through the years, emphasizing the progressive aspect of philosophizing. New ideas build on former ideas by expanding, modifying, or even rejecting them. In this way schools of thought emerge and the chronological perspective focuses on a community of thinkers who may agree or disagree, but who always share common ground: a cluster of problems, technical vocabulary, forms of analysis, and points of departure.

Another element of his design philosophy is one he adopted from the ancient Japanese theory wabi-sabi, which is an “acceptance of the world as an intransient entity,” or in layman’s terms, it’s finding beauty in all that is imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent within nature. From wabi comes wa: the goal of total unity or harmony which is the ideal realization of the maxim “less is more,” humble by choice, not materialistic and peaceful. All our lives—as was Carolyn’s—should aim to be wabi-sabi, an acceptance of our imperfections which ultimately leads to perfection. Mr. Yamamoto compares the thought to reading a book—if you are a good interpreter, you can read between the spaces and lines, understanding more than the words themselves.

To sit in Meditation is not the only method of practising Zazen. "We practise Dhyana in sitting, in standing, and in walking," says one of the Japanese Zenists. Lin Tsi (Rin-Zai) also says: "To concentrate one's mind, or to dislike noisy places, and seek only for stillness, is the characteristic of heterodox Dhyana." It is easy to keep self-possession in a place of tranquillity, yet it is by no means easy to keep mind undisturbed amid the bivouac of actual life. It is true Dhyana that makes our mind sunny while the storms of strife rage around us. It is true Dhyana that secures the harmony of heart, while the surges of struggle toss us violently. It is true Dhyana that makes us bloom and smile, while the winter of life covets us with frost and snow. "Idle

I go into the high-ceilinged stacks and wander among the shelves, searching for a book that looks interesting. Magnificent thick beams run across the ceiling of the room, and gentle early-summer sunlight is shining through the open window, the chatter of birds in the garden filtering in. The books in the shelves in front of me, sure enough, are just like Oshima said, mainly books of Japanese poetry. Tanka and haiku, essays on poetry, biographies of various poets. There are also a lot of books on local history. A shelf farther back contains general humanities―collections of Japanese literature, world literature, and individual writers, classics, philosophy, drama, art history, sociology, history, biography, geography.... When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages―a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

Moreover, philosophizing—if by that we broadly mean the critical investigation of deeply perplexing questions, such as what is the best way to live, what is true and how can we best know it, and what are our obligations to one another—is a widespread and perhaps even universal phenomenon, especially among highly literate cultures. There is no a priori reason, therefore, to say that philosophy is limited to the way it has been construed in any one cultural context, whether it be the classical cultures of the Mediterranean basin or the modern cultures of the so-called western world. Rather, the challenge is to understand the context and rules of philosophizing in a variety of sometimes radically different environments. We can only judge how good a philosophical answer is after we are sure we have understood the question the answer is addressing. To do so, the most important thinkers to study are those who develop systematic philosophical articulations rather than ad hoc solutions to particular isolated issues. By understanding the projects of critical, systematic thinkers, we are better equipped to uncover the premises and rules of reasoning that inform their answers.

The teachings of impermanence and lack of independent existence are not difficult to understand intellectually; when you hear these teachings you may think that they are quite true. On a deeper level, however, you probably still identify yourself as “me” and identify others as “them” or “you.” On some level you likely say to yourself, “I will always be me; I have an identity that is important.” I, for example, say to myself, “I am a Buddhist priest; not a Christian or Islamic one. I am a Japanese person, not an American or a Chinese one.” If we did not assume that we have this something within us that does not change, it would be very difficult for us to live responsibly in society. This is why people who are unfamiliar with Buddhism often ask, “If there were no unchanging essential existence, doesn’t that mean I would not be responsible for my past actions, since I would be a different person than in the past?” But of course that is not what the Buddha meant when he said we have no unchanging atman or essential existence. To help us understand this point, we can consider how our life resembles a river. Each moment the water of a river is flowing and different, so it is constantly changing, but there is still a certain continuity of the river as a whole. The Mississippi River, for example, was the river we know a million years ago. And yet, the water flowing in the Mississippi is always different, always new, so there is actually no fixed thing that we can say is the one and only Mississippi River. We can see this clearly when we compare the source of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota, a small stream one can jump over, to the river’s New Orleans estuary, which seems as wide as an ocean. We cannot say which of these is the true Mississippi: it is just a matter of conditions that lets us call one or the other of these the Mississippi. In reality, a river is just a collection of masses of flowing water contained within certain shapes in the land. “Mississippi River” is simply a name given to various conditions and changing elements. Since our lives are also just a collection of conditions, we cannot say that we each have one true identity that does not change, just as we cannot say there is one true Mississippi River. What we call the “self ” is just a set of conditions existing within a collection of different elements. So I cannot say that there is an unchanging self that exists throughout my life as a baby, as a teenager, and as it is today. Things that I thought were important and interesting when I was an elementary or high school student, for example, are not at all interesting to me now; my feelings, emotions, and values are always changing. This is the meaning of the teaching that everything is impermanent and without independent existence. But we still must recognize that there is a certain continuity in our lives, that there is causality, and that we need to be responsible for what we did yesterday. In this way, self-identity is important. Even though in actuality there is no unchanging identity, I still must use expressions like “when I was a baby ..., when I was a boy ..., when I was a teenager. ...” To speak about changes in our lives and communicate in a meaningful way, we must speak as if we assumed that there is an unchanging “I” that has been experiencing the changes; otherwise, the word “change” has no meaning. But according to Buddhist philosophy, self-identity, the “I,” is a creation of the mind; we create self-identity because it’s convenient and useful in certain ways. We must use self-identity to live responsibly in society, but we should realize that it is merely a tool, a symbol, a sign, or a concept. Because it enables us to think and discriminate, self-identity allows us to live and function. Although it is not the only reality of our lives, self-identity is a reality for us, a tool we must use to live with others in society.

Fukuoka, more than any other city in Japan, is responsible for ramen's rocket-ship trajectory, and the ensuing shift in Japan's cultural identity abroad. Between Hide-Chan, Ichiran, and Ippudo- three of the biggest ramen chains in the world- they've brought the soup to corners of the globe that still thought ramen meant a bag of dried noodles and a dehydrated spice packet. But while Ichiran and Ippudo are purveyors of classic tonkotsu, undoubtedly the defining ramen of the modern era, Hideto has a decidedly different belief about ramen and its mutability. "There are no boundaries for ramen, no rules," he says. "It's all freestyle." As we talk at his original Hide-Chan location in the Kego area of Fukuoka, a new bowl arrives on the table, a prototype for his borderless ramen philosophy. A coffee filter is filled with katsuobushi, smoked skipjack tuna flakes, and balanced over a bowl with a pair of chopsticks. Hideto pours chicken stock through the filter, which soaks up the katsuobushi and emerges into the bowl as clear as a consommé. He adds rice noodles and sawtooth coriander then slides it over to me. Compared with other Hide-Chan creations, though, this one shows remarkable restraint. While I sip the soup, Hideto pulls out his cell phone and plays a video of him layering hot pork cheeks and cold noodles into a hollowed-out porcelain skull, then dumping a cocktail shaker filled with chili oil, shrimp oil, truffle oil, and dashi over the top. Other creations include spicy arrabbiata ramen with pancetta and roasted tomatoes, foie gras ramen with orange jam and blueberry miso, and black ramen made with bamboo ash dipped into a mix of miso and onions caramelized for forty-five days.

a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. For the image represents a number of qualities which are, in fact, aspects of the same thing. It represents the sage’s freedom and detachment of mind, a skylike consciousness in which experience moves without leaving any stain. As another poem says: The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, But stir no dust. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natural surroundings. The image also represents the fact that the way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions. But there is actually the most intimate connection between these two apparently separate uses of the metaphor—the way of the sage, on the one hand, and the impermanence of life, on the other. And the connection reveals the one deepest and most central principle of those Asian philosophies which so puzzle the Western mind by identifying the highest wisdom with what, to us, seems the doctrine of abject despair. Indeed, the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. We cannot understand how the Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss—unless, as we are prone to suppose, they are after all a depraved and spineless people, long accustomed to fatalism and resignation.

In about 1951, a quality approach called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came on the Japanese scene. Its focus is on maintenance rather than on production. One of the major pillars of TPM is the set of so-called 5S principles. 5S is a set of disciplines—and here I use the term “discipline” instructively. These 5S principles are in fact at the foundations of Lean—another buzzword on the Western scene, and an increasingly prominent buzzword in software circles. These principles are not an option. As Uncle Bob relates in his front matter, good software practice requires such discipline: focus, presence of mind, and thinking. It is not always just about doing, about pushing the factory equipment to produce at the optimal velocity. The 5S philosophy comprises these concepts: • Seiri, or organization (think “sort” in English). Knowing where things are—using approaches such as suitable naming—is crucial. You think naming identifiers isn’t important? Read on in the following chapters. • Seiton, or tidiness (think “systematize” in English). There is an old American saying: A place for everything, and everything in its place. A piece of code should be where you expect to find it—and, if not, you should re-factor to get it there. • Seiso, or cleaning (think “shine” in English): Keep the workplace free of hanging wires, grease, scraps, and waste. What do the authors here say about littering your code with comments and commented-out code lines that capture history or wishes for the future? Get rid of them. • Seiketsu, or standardization: The group agrees about how to keep the workplace clean. Do you think this book says anything about having a consistent coding style and set of practices within the group? Where do those standards come from? Read on. • Shutsuke, or discipline (self-discipline). This means having the discipline to follow the practices and to frequently reflect on one’s work and be willing to change.

On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resort. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night. Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana--epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments--the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. It wasn't all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance. As In Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and "unnatural." It began to sink in that this kind of "presentational" theater has more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance that traditional Western theater did. I was struck by other peripheral aspects of these performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren't paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over. The Balinese "shows" were completely integrated into people's daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn't have a strict religion--they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn't exist. The "religion" is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gestures and routines, unsegregated for ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is some what difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them. It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below—since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god. The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx. Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations. It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the rôle of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order. In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach. The racial instinct is so developed amongst the Japanese therefore compelled to act from outside. It would be to the considered interests of England and the United States to come to an understanding with Japan, but the Jew will strive to prevent such an understanding. I gave this warning in vain. A question arises. Does the Jew act consciously and by calculation, or is he driven on by his instinct? I cannot answer that question. The intellectual élite of Europe (whether professors of faculties, high officials, or whatever else) never understood anything of this problem. The élite has been stuffed with false ideas, and on these it lives. It propagates a science that causes the greatest possible damage. Stunted men have the philosophy of stunted men. They love neither strength nor health, and they regard weakness and sickness as supreme values. Since it's the function that creates the organ, entrust the world for a few centuries to a German professor—and you'll soon have a mankind of cretins, made up of men with big heads set upon meagre bodies.

10. Contain the fury; rein in the irate glare. Do not respond with anger at personal differences. People all have their own mind and all hold their own opinions. What is right for us can be wrong for them; what is wrong for them can be right for us. And there is no guarantee that we are the sages and that they are the fools. We are all just ordinary people. How can anyone set a rule for what is right and what is wrong? We all have our share of wisdom and of foolishness like an endless circle. This being the case, even though others glare at us irately, let us instead worry about our own failings. And even though we alone are in the right, let us go along with the multitude and offer them our support.

some Japanese philosophers have been eager to graft the newly introduced discipline of western academic philosophy onto its premodern Japanese antecedents. The conflict with traditional values proposed a whole host of new questions: Can one articulate an original yet comprehensive epistemology that would give western empiricism and logic an appropriate place but subordinate it to a dominant “Asian” basis for thought and values? Can one develop a viable ethics that places agency in a socially interdependent, rather than isolated and discrete, individual? Can one construct an interpretation of artistry based in a mode of responsiveness that is also the ground for knowledge and moral conduct? Can one envision a political theory of the state that allows for personal expression without assuming a radical individualism? Along with these fundamental issues, a great deal of attention was devoted to a still more basic question: What is culture and what affect does it have on philosophizing?

To begin with, philosophy by its nature is an evolving discipline, enriched by the plurality of perspectives that different times and cultures have brought to it, and impoverished by any attempt to harness it to specific political, economic, or religious regimes. In the context of its “western” heritage, too, we have always to speak of “philosophy in the making.” As such, the pursuit of philosophy is inseparable from the constant effort to reintegrate the past in the light of new modes of thought and new methods of critical evaluation. At the same time, insofar as philosophy is embedded in the very world it aims to understand, it is forever denied a definitive external standpoint from which to present ideas as if they were detached from cultural and linguistic expression. In this sense, the definition of philosophy is permanently bound up with the practice of philosophizing within distinctive cultures.

Meanwhile, at a Tokyo 7-Eleven, someone right now is choosing from a variety of bento boxes and rice bowls, delivered that morning and featuring grilled fish, sushi, mapo tofu, tonkatsu, and a dozen other choices. The lunch philosophy at Japanese 7-Eleven? Actual food. On the day we missed out on fresh soba, Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and I chose a couple of rice balls (onigiri), one filled with pickled plum and the other with spicy fish roe. For $1.50, convenience store onigiri encapsulate everything that is great about Japanese food and packaging. Let's start in the middle and work outward, like were building an onion. The core of an onigiri features a flavorful and usually salty filling. This could be an umeboshi (pickled apricot, but usually translated as pickled plum), as sour as a Sour Patch Kid; flaked salmon; or cod or mullet roe. Next is the rice, packed lightly by machine into a perfect triangle. Japanese rice is unusual among staple rices in Asia because it's good at room temperature or a little colder. Sushi or onigiri made with long-grain rice would be a chalky, crumbly disaster. Oishinbo argues that Japan is the only country in Asia that makes rice balls because of the unique properties of Japanese rice. I doubt this. Medium- and short-grain rices are also popular in parts of southern China, and presumably wherever those rices exist, people squish them into a ball to eat later, kind of like I used to do with a fistful of crustless white bread. (Come on, I can't be the only one.) Next comes a layer of cellophane, followed by a layer of nori and another layer of cellophane. The nori is preserved in a transparent shell for the same reason Han Solo was encased in carbonite: to ensure that he would remain crispy until just before eating. (At least, I assume that's what Jabba the Hutt had in mind.) You pull a red strip on the onigiri packaging, both layers of cellophane part, and a ready-to-eat rice ball tumbles into your hand, encased in crispy seaweed. Not everybody finds the convenience store onigiri packaging to be a triumph. "The seaweed isn't just supposed to be crunchy," says Futaki in Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice. "It tastes best when the seaweed gets moist and comes together as one with the rice." Yamaoka agrees. Jerk. Luckily, you'll find a few moist-nori rice balls right next to the crispy ones.

It is no easy matter to be the dictator of body. It is not a matter of theory, but of practice. You must train your body that you may enable it to bear any sort of suffering, and to stand unflinched in the face of hardship. It is for this that So-rai[FN#232] (Ogiu) laid himself on a sheet of straw-mat spread on the ground in the coldest nights of winter, or was used to go up and down the roof of his house, having himself clad in heavy armour. It is for this that ancient Japanese soldiers led extremely simple lives, and that they often held the meeting-of-perseverance,[FN#233] in which they exposed themselves to the coldest weather in winter or to the hottest weather in summer. It is for this that Katsu Awa practised fencing in the middle of night in a deep forest.[FN#234]

1. The Method of Instruction Adopted by Zen Masters. Thus far we have described the doctrine of Zen inculcated by both Chinese and Japanese masters, and in this chapter we propose to sketch the practice of mental training and the method of practising Dhyana or Meditation. Zen teachers never instruct their pupils by means of explanation or argument, but urge them to solve by themselves through the practice of Meditation such problems as—'What is Buddha?' What is self?' 'What is the spirit of Bodhidharma?' 'What is life and death?' 'What is the real nature of mind?' and so on. Ten Shwai (To-sotsu), for instance, was wont to put three questions[FN#229] to the following effect: (1) Your study and discipline aim at the understanding of the real nature of mind. Where does the real nature of mind exist? (2) When you understand the real nature of mind, you are free from birth and death. How can you be saved when you are at the verge of death? (3) When you are free from birth and death, you know where you go after death. Where do you go when your body is reduced to elements? The pupils are not requested to express their solution of these problems in the form of a theory or an argument, but to show how they have grasped the profound meaning implied in these problems, how they have established their conviction, and how they can carry out what they grasped in their daily life. [FN#229]

Ki-saburo, although he was a mere outlaw, having his left arm half cut at the elbow in a quarrel, ordered his servant to cut it off with a saw, and during the operation he could calmly sit talking and laughing with his friends. Hiko-kuro (Takayama),[FN#235] a Japanese loyalist of note, one evening happened to come to a bridge where two robbers were lying in wait for him. They lay fully stretching themselves, each with his head in the middle of the bridge, that he might not pass across it without touching them. Hiko-kuro was not excited nor disheartened, but calmly approached the vagabonds and passed the bridge, treading upon their heads, which act so frightened them that they took to their heels without doing any harm to him.[FN#236]

There are two postures in Zazen—that is to say, the crossed-leg sitting, and the half crossed-leg sitting. Seat yourself on a thick cushion, putting it right under your haunch. Keep your body so erect that the tip of the nose and the navel are in one perpendicular line, and both ears and shoulders are in the same plane. Then place the right foot upon the left thigh, the left foot on the right thigh, so as the legs come across each other. Next put your right hand with the palm upward on the left foot, and your left hand on the right palm with the tops of both the thumbs touching each other. This is the posture called the crossed-leg sitting. You may simply place the left foot upon the right thigh, the position of the hands being the same as in the cross-legged sitting. This posture is named the half crossed-leg sitting.' 'Do not shut your eyes, keep them always open during whole Meditation. Do not breathe through the mouth; press your tongue against the roof of the mouth, putting the upper lips and teeth together with the lower. Swell your abdomen so as to hold the breath in the belly; breathe rhythmically through the nose, keeping a measured time for inspiration and expiration. Count for some time either the inspiring or the expiring breaths from one to ten, then beginning with one again. Concentrate your attention on your breaths going in and out as if you are the sentinel standing at the gate of the nostrils. If you do some mistake in counting, or be forgetful of the breath, it is evident that your mind is distracted.' Chwang Tsz seems to have noticed that the harmony of breathing is typical of the harmony of mind, since he says: "The true men of old did not dream when they slept. Their breathing came deep and silently. The breathing of true men comes (even) from his heels, while men generally breathe (only) from their throats."[FN#245] At any rate, the counting of breaths is an expedient for calming down of mind, and elaborate rules are given in the Zen Sutra,[FN#246] but Chinese and Japanese Zen masters do not lay so much stress on this point as Indian teachers. [FN#245]

Again, the law of balance does not allow anyone to take the lion's share of nature's gifts. Beauty in face is accompanied by deformity in character. Intelligence is often uncombined with virtue. "Fair girls are destined to be unfortunate," says a Japanese proverb, "and men of ability to be sickly." "He makes no friend who never makes a foe." "Honesty is next to idiocy." "Men of genius," says Longfellow, "are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor when it descends to earth is only a stone." Honour and shame go hand in hand. Knowledge and virtue live in poverty, while ill health and disease are inmates of luxury. Every misfortune begets some sort of fortune, while every good luck gives birth to some sort of bad luck. Every prosperity never fails to sow seeds of adversity, while every fall never fails to bring about some kind of rise.

7. Calmness of Mind. The Yogi breathing above mentioned is fit rather for physical exercise than for mental balance, and it will be beneficial if you take that exercise before or after Meditation. Japanese masters mostly bold it very important to push forward. The lowest part of the abdomen during Zazen, and they are right so far as the present writer's personal experiences go. 'If you feel your mind distracted, look at the tip of the nose; never lose sight of it for some time, or look at your own palm, and let not your mind go out of it, or gaze at one spot before you.' This will greatly help you in restoring the equilibrium of your mind. Chwang Tsz[FN#248] thought that calmness of mind is essential to sages, and said: "The stillness of the sages does not belong to them as a consequence of their skilful ability; all things are not able to disturb their minds; it is on this account that they are still. When water is still, its clearness shows the beard and eyebrows (of him who looks into it). It is a perfect level, and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human spirit? The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things." Forget all worldly concerns, expel all cares and anxieties, let go of passions and desires, give up ideas and thoughts, set your mind at liberty absolutely, and make it as clear as a burnished mirror. Thus let flow your inexhaustible fountain of purity, let open your inestimable treasure of virtue, bring forth your inner hidden nature of goodness, disclose your innermost divine wisdom, and waken your Enlightened Consciousness to see Universal Life within you. "Zazen enables the practiser," says Kei-zan,[FN#249] "to open up his mind, to see his own nature, to become conscious of mysteriously pure and bright spirit, or eternal light within him." [FN#248]

The word Zen is the Sinico-Japanese abbreviation of the Sanskrit Dhyana, or Meditation.

Zen's object of worship cannot be named and determined as God, or Brahman, or Amitabha, or Creator, or Nature, or Reality, or Substance, or the like. Neither Chinese nor Japanese masters of Zen tried to give a definite name to their object of adoration. They now called Him That One, now This One, now Mind, now Buddha, now Tathagata, now Certain Thing, now the True, now Dharma-nature, now Buddha-nature, and so forth.

How wonderful is the Sermon of the Inanimate," says Tung Shan (To-zan). "You cannot hear it through your ears, but you can hear it through your eyes." You should hear it through your mind's eyes, through your heart's eyes, through your inmost soul's eyes, not through your intellect, not through your perception, not through your knowledge, not through your logic, not through your metaphysics. To understand it you have to divine, not to define; you have to observe, not to calculate; you have to sympathize, not to analyze; you have to see through, not to criticize; you have not to explain, but to feel; you have not to abstract, but to grasp; you have to see all in each, but not to know all in all; you have to get directly at the soul of things, penetrating their hard crust of matter by your rays of the innermost consciousness. "The falling leaves as well as the blooming flowers reveal to us the holy law of Buddha," says a Japanese Zenist. Ye

United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities—cities, not military bases—and drew virtually no protest from Americans.

Zen is not, in the end, a Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Indian path. It is a path for all human beings who are sincerely interested in coming to know themselves.

The Japanese word zen in fact means "meditation" or "state of meditative concentration." In Chinese, zen is pronounced chan. Chan is short for channa, which is how the CHinese pronounced dhyana, the Sanskrit word used in India for practices or rarified states of meditative concentration.

The importance of meditation for Zen is readily apparent in the fact that the word zen itself means "meditation." Zen (Chan in Chinese) is the school of Buddhism that more than any other prioritizes the practice of "seated meditation," called zazen in Japanese. The seminal thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen at times went so far as to claim that "you no longer have need for incense-offerings, doing prostrations, calling on the name of Amida Buddha, penance disciplines, or reading sutras. Just sit in zazen and cast off your body and mind.

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

Nishida has been sharply criticized after the war for lending his support to the imperial (ist) ideology of the Japanese government, but these criticisms have not led—as in Heidegger's case—to a thorough questioning of his philosophy.

Starting in the sixth century in China, Zen was formed by way of a creative synthesis of Buddhist teachings and practices imported from India with the Chinese traditions of Confucianism and especially Daoism. Centuries later, starting in the twelfth century, Zen was brought to Japan, where for eight centuries it has developed in conjunction with Japanese culture and Shintō sensibilities. Over the course of the last century, Zen has been imported to the United States and other Western countries, initially from Japan and later also from Korea, China, and Vietnam.

Transmigration (saṃsāra) means the repeated cycle of birth and death in this realm of delusion. Literally "flowing together," saṃsāra is an expression of living beings buffeted by waves and at the mercy of water, perhaps a powerful river whose current carries us from place to place. As we have seen, rebirth has five or six destinations. The Abhidharmakośa gives five—the inhabitants of hells, hungry spirits, animals, human beings, and devas. This is the Sarvāstivādin point of view; other schools gave six, the above five plus the asuras. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, the version favoring six paths gained popularity, and th expression "transmigration among the six paths" is well known throughout East Asia.

However important a role lineage has played in the Zen tradition, it has never been a historically based religion in the same sense as are the Abrahamic faiths. To begin with, it should be pointed out that "Dharma transmission" in Zen is really a matter of "recognition" of spiritual awakening, not the literal transference of anything, such as a robe and bowl, an esoteric teaching or ritual, or even a secret handshake or bowing technique. What is most important to practitioners is awakening itself, not the recognition they receive, however important the latter may be for the purposes of establishing teaching credentials and preserving institutional continuity. After all, one of the greatest Japanese Zen masters and the revitalizer of the Rinzai Zen institution, Hakuin, apparently never officially received a "seal of certification" (inka shomei) from any of the teachers he studied under, even though all Rinzai Zen masters today trace their transmission lineage back to and through him.

In the Abhidharmakośa, time units finish with "year" (saṃvatsara). There is, however, another enormous unit of time that we could add, the kalpa, which is so long that it cannot be calculated in years. (The Chinese transliterated kalpa as kiap and translated it as "great time." In the Japanese game of Go there is a rule known as kō [Japanese for kiap] to prevent stalemates through constant repetition. Without it, the game could continue indefinitely.)

Be teachable. You’re not always right." (@ML_Philosophy) "The tombstone of capitalism will later say: too much was not enough." (Volker Pispers) "Smiling mobilizes 15 muscles, but sulking requires 40. Rest: smile!" (Christophe André) "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift that"s why they call it the present." - (@TheWordicle) "When you realize how precious and fragile life is, it changes your whole perspective." (Ryan O’Donnell) "A kind word can warm up to three months of winter" - Japanese proverb "It’s better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction." (@wise_chimp) "The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth." - Lao Tzu "... We get old too soon, and wise too late." (@_AhmadHijazi) "Nothing in the world is worth turning away from what we love" - Albert Camus "I am allowed to say NO to others and YES to myself." (@Lenka49044040) "You can only live forwards, understand life only backwards." (Søren Kierkegaard) "Write your life - Or they'll wait till you're dead to write the lie" ... (@spectraspeaks)

Music was simply a way to teach them how to understand how to learn, and the key was kan, a difficult-to-translate Japanese term meaning something akin to a combination of empathizing and kinesthetic thinking—becoming one with the music and the instrument producing it. A well-known westernized and modernized version of this philosophy can be found in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a guide to understanding not just people but things through an empathic approach.

The purpose of this book is to help you find yours, and to share insights from Japanese philosophy on the lasting health of body, mind, and spirit.

Amanis a spiritual being made to.be an alloy of all the metals that have no value of diamonds or rubies. Man are taught to be malleable not brittle. My father told me never entertain a whore while drinking wine, always entertain your wife after a round of Pinot noir. If you have to buy a slice of flesh don't eat the stake, look for a boney meat. Never smoke thus ungentle and uncouth you are pleasing capitalism of unethics and destroying your lungs. After drinking whiskey, and always drink Scottish, if you are poor enough try Canadian. If you want to be a sage Japanese taste crazy but it makes you a man. Boys are not made but they are roasted in fires of bellies and they stay in barrels for maturity. Spend hours reading Greek philosophy, African methodologies and read the holy Bible. In doing business always despise free lunch and never drink brandy, sometimes act like a Vatican and be an integrity vulture. Stoicism is the ultimate master. Avoid to step on great man shoe and always be water.

Animal a spiritual being made to.be an alloy of all the metals that have no value of diamonds or rubies. Man are taught to be malleable not brittle. My father told me never entertain a whore while drinking wine, always entertain your wife after a round of Pinot noir. If you have to buy a slice of flesh don't eat the stake, look for a boney meat. Never smoke thus ungentle and uncouth you are pleasing capitalism of unethics and destroying your lungs. After drinking whiskey, and always drink Scottish, if you are poor enough try Canadian. If you want to be a sage Japanese taste crazy but it makes you a man. Boys are not made but they are roasted in fires of bellies and they stay in barrels for maturity. Spend hours reading Greek philosophy, African methodologies and read the holy Bible. In doing business always despise free lunch and never drink brandy, sometimes act like a Vatican and be an integrity vulture. Stoicism is the ultimate master. Avoid to step on great man shoe and always be water.

But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census. Once he arrived, he became deeply involved with the country’s reconstruction effort and ended up teaching hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars his theories about improving productivity. Among those who came to hear his ideas was Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp.—one of many Japanese companies that would apply his ideas and reap their rewards. Around this time, Toyota also instituted radical new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies.

There was no path to victory when you couldn’t attack into the heart of enemy territory for fear of collateral damage. Collateral damage! God help you if you killed some civilians, even if those were the very people supporting and enabling our enemies. Had that philosophy held sway in World War II, every American would now be speaking Japanese or German.

...Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that translates to remaining in a state of "continuous improvement." Always be open to new, different, and better ways of doing things, no matter how good or bad the circumstances are.

An old Japanese proverb put our managers’ role in a nutshell: “If they work for you, you work for them.

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap- ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard;

We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compare with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmopolitan" we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

The technique is called kintsugi and is Japanese in origin. It’s not just a method of repair but also a philosophy,” he explained. “It’s the belief that the breaks, cracks, and repairs become a valuable and esteemed part of the history of an object, rather than something to be hidden. That, in fact, the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

many firms adopted the Japanese philosophy of kaizen: “continuous improvement of everything, by everyone”.

Barthes announced, “I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay— allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.” The lesson of Japan for Barthes was “the possibility of difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.” Like Wilde, Barthes does not locate Japaneseness in a place called Japan. But if for Wilde Japaneseness offered a new way of seeing, for Barthes, more complexly, Japan offered a new way of seeing himself being seen, which resulted in a new relationship to language. About himself, Barthes wrote, “The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” Japan allowed Barthes to “descend into the untranslatable . . . until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the ‘father tongue’ vacillate—that tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into ‘nature.’”3 Barthes’s growing sense of the “repressive value” of text as the “level” at which “the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested” animated his delight in a Japanese “situation” that allowed freedoms he associated with images to trump the authority of text in the West.4 Reflecting later on this book about the “system of signs I call Japan,” Barthes emphasized that it “occupied a moment in my life when I felt the necessity of entering completely into the signifier, i.e., of disconnecting myself from the ideological instance as signified, as the risk of the return of the signified, of theology, monologism, of law.

In Zen there are fortunately none of those marvellously incomprehensible words as in Indian cults. Neither does Zen play about with complicated Hatha-yoha techniques which delude the physiologically thinking European with the false hope that the spirit can e obtained by sitting and by breathing. On the contrary, Zen demands intelligence and will power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real. Personal experience is everything in Zen. To get the clearest and most efficient understanding of a thing, it must be experienced personally. In the working of the Eastern mind there is something calm, quiet, silent, undisturbable, which appears as if always looking into eternity. The spirit of Buddhism has left its highly metaphysical superstructure in order to become a practical discipline of life. The result is Zen. In Zen are found systematized, or rather crystallized, all the philosophy, religion and life itself of the Far-Eastern people, especially of the Japanese. If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. The truth is, Zen is extremely elusive as far as its outward aspects are concerned. Unless you devote some years of earnest study to the understanding of its primary principles, it is not to be expected that you will begin to have a fair grasp of Zen. Anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained and a man lives as he ought to live. What more may we hope? What makes Zen unique as it is practiced in Japan is its systematic training of the mind. The great truth of Zen is possessed by everybody. Look into your own being and seek it not through others. The question: How can one always be with Buddha? called forth the following answer from a master: Have no stirrings in your mind, be perfectly serene toward the objective world. To remain thus all the time in absolute emptiness and calmness is the way to be with the Buddha. Zen thinks we are too much of slaves to words and logic. A quiet, self-confident and trustful existence of your own - this is the truth of Zen. The desire to possess is considered by Buddhism to be one of the worst passions with which mortals are apt to be obsessed. What in fact causes so much misery in the world is the universal impulse of acquisition.

Aside from the meanings the term annihilation possesses in popular language, it has meanings in physics, too, which are worth considering: '. . .the process whereby an electron and a positron unite and consequently lose their identity as particles transforming themselves into short gamma rays'. In this sense, annihilation means something more than the mere disappearance and end of phenomena: a stage of merging occurs before one thing is created from these two forms. Out of nothing does come something--at least in theoretical physics. In Buddhist philosophies too, annihilation of the ego is the highest state of being a human can attain. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, theorist of the uncanny valley, writes, 'human beings have self or ego, but machines have none at all. Does this lack cause machines to do crazy, irresponsible things? Not at all. It is people, with their egos who are constantly being led by selfish desires to commit unspeakable deeds. The root of man's lack of freedom (insofar as he actually lacks it) is his egocentrism. In this case, the ego-less machine leads a less hampered existence.

In the years following World War II, the Kaizen methodology continued to evolve thanks to the work of both Japanese and American managers—three of which are listed here: The Iowa-born statistician Dr. William Edwards Deming made many consulting trips to Japan during reconstruction efforts and was so influential in turning around Japanese industry that he was awarded the Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Hirohito in 1960. (We’ll be referring to Deming’s work many times throughout this book.) The business consultant Masaaki Imai published a management guidebook entitled “Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.” He also founded the Kaizen Institute Consulting Group (KICG) with the aim of introducing Kaizen techniques to Western companies. Dr. Jeffrey Liker (Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan) would bring Kaizen into the mainstream when he published his book of “manufacturing ideals” called “The Toyota Way.” The book showcased many Kaizen-related principles and described the philosophy and values that dictate the modus operandi of the Toyota Motor Corporation.

Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook.