I always find it curious the way that people speak to one another; I'm not usually one to say much, but I like to sit back and observe people's tone of voice and choice of words, and see what I can deduce. It's amazing the things you can learn when you absolve yourself the great responsibility of speaking. Sometimes it's what's said that interests me; sometimes it's the way that it's said; and sometimes it's the things that aren't said. In any case, my dear friend Joseph Campbell recently introduced me to this extremely polite method of speech used by aristocrats in Japan called asobase kotoba that translates to a language of voluntary participation in the world. Instead of saying, "You are here," one would say, "You are playing at being here," and so on and so forth. It doesn't only apply to physical activities or states, but emotional ones too: "You are playing at being nervous for your presentation." One might even say, when you come to your last end, that you are only "playing at dying."
There are two parts to this. The first is the basic notion that life is a game that we partake in willingly. We buy cotton woven into obscure shapes and hung on a plastic stick in a whole society of such garments to hide our bodies from other people, and condone other humans acting funny and pretending to be people they're not when it gives us entertainment on a screen, and give our hard-earned money to people we've never met as a part of an agreement written in a document no one ever reads. Putting it that way makes it seem fun to buy clothes and watch movies and pay taxes because it's absolutely ridiculous that we do so! But we get lost in our little worlds, too lost to appreciate just how much fun all these little things are. Even worse, we succumb ourselves to the anxiety of "needing" good test grades and feeling compelled to do our hair just right and enslaving ourselves to make enough money to impress our friends. The majority of the world mourns and exalts all that which is only temporary, and we cause ourselves unnecessary suffering because of it.
But life is a game. The language, asobase kotoba, implies that the listener is not only aware of all this, but is completely in control of what is happening--that he or she is simply choosing to participate in this world where people do such funny things, knowing that none of it really matters. The world is certainly worth our time, but the little things are not worth grieving over; they're all just a part of the game. Everything we do should be with that same awareness that nothing is so grave as to warrant despair, not even death.
Now, as with any great philosophy, this one comes with several disclaimers.
Disclaimer 1: That certainly does not mean that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. This language of play does not condone manipulation, power-seeking, or any other behavior not allowed by the very strict moral discipline of Japanese Zen, or the Buddhist way of the samurai. It is an underlying philosophy of the Japanese world that all such action should be within the realm of what is accepted in society, and that we should be able to find freedom in the mind and in the Self. (The same way that eternity has nothing to do with time, freedom has nothing to do with physical action or inaction.) If anything, this way of thinking implies freedom from the gravity and suffering evoked from getting caught up in the temporariness--not freedom to indulge in more material and physical pleasure. It's freedom to do what's right and not worry about the personal consequences, because they would only be temporary. Think Nelson Mandela here.
Disclaimer 2: A life of play does not mean that life is meaningless. When I had just finished Myths of Light after reading that passage, I started to feel that same thing I felt when we first learned how to graph imaginary numbers in math (side note: where the hell are they?), but that's not the point. Buddhism is not existentialism. Sure, life is a game, but there's something much bigger than life, and it constitutes the second part of the asobase kotoba philosophy.
It's called Brahman. (I almost want to shout it, to put it in all caps or something, because it's such a powerful idea, so profound and unifying.) Brahman is the world soul, not unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of the "oversoul" or the OBS, the "one great big soul" in The Grapes of Wrath. It has to do with the idea of the self not being this shell of a physical body, but instead some indefinable spirit that lives within all of us and fuels the world. In Eastern mythologies, everything is divine. To be alive is to partake in this beautiful and mysterious force of Brahman, this wordless and self-less force of the world. The fact that the self is viewed as separate from the ego and separate from all temporal things allows the Japanese to believe in life as play, to choose the fall even when it leads to an abyss. The truly ethereal part of us can't feel, nor can it be hurt by anything in the physical world. Therefore, suffering is a very human state of mind more so than it is the concrete result of extrinsic forces; we can stop it if we put our minds in a different place. It's a beautiful sentiment. If one quenches the ego, the sense of "I" within us all, there will be no more desire and no more fear because it will have no subject. It requires absolutely detachment from life. Everything one partakes in is simply play, simply choosing to partake in the world like it's a masquerade ball. When we get home at night, we'll shed the masks and be unified with our true selves again, which is no self at all.
Of course, you have to be able to maintain that belief even in very dark times. This is one of those ideas that is beautiful in theory but takes quite a bit of discipline and practice to maintain. It requires a sort of detachment from life that's really hard to keep when life hits you in the face like a brick, and you're faced by great tragedy and crime and hatred. I'm going to be honest--I'm really not sure of what role Eastern mythologies can play in our contemporary Western society, at least on a macro scale. There is no uniform system of discipline and order here like Zen, no inherent sense of duty to one's state like the Hindu dharma. There is no universal myth that functions in the Western world to unite all of society under one moral code, and so there will be sorrows that are even less pure than those of old age and disease and death. There will be the bitter nuances of suicide and school shootings and terrorism. Joseph Campbell said that the world, in all its sorrow and despair, was exactly as God intended it; that we must accept of all aspects of the world, accept of the duality of good and bad, in order to transcend it, to live in it without desire or fear. I'm not yet sure of exactly where "acceptance of the sorrows of life" meets gross inaction of combatting these things. Still, when someone is the victim of a great tragedy or crime, maybe detachment is the only way to get past it. Accepting something does not mean condoning it; it means learning to live beside it. Speaking of crime and bravery...
They always blew me away, those last few sentences of Their Eyes Were Watching God, after Janie not only witnesses Teacake's awful illness and his deluded attempts to kill her, but also her response in shooting him. I wondered for so long how any of that could tie in with the rest of the novel. Such bitterness! Such hatred and sorrow was life, and yet they loved each other. He could've just died, I thought. She didn't have to kill him; they didn't have to face such a bitter end. But look at this--the last few sentences of the novel, when Janie finishes her story and comes to terms with it:
"The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the court house came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see."
So it was not the end; and maybe that is all that we can do. I like this idea of the play language, too, because it makes it so much easier to let go. Certainly, that is a part of Janie that does not mourn because it was never without him, and never would be. It is the human part of us that cries and grieves, but we all just have a little piece of a great big soul, as a wise man once said.
We can try to stop crime and poverty and hatred and death, but it may never be eliminated. It's about time we learn to live in this world, in all its rapture and despair. I'm not saying not to fight; but in the meanwhile, we'd better not waste our lives away deceiving ourselves that "one day" we can live in a world that isn't, and never will be. It's better not to suffer double, once for being a victim of a crime, and again for living in a world that we hate for allowing it. The world is the way the world is, and all we can control is ourselves. We have to find faith in something that'll give us such strength as to fight. It doesn't have to be this, of course, but for me, it's believing that life is play, that there is a truly special thing inside of all of us can't really be hurt. We will be with each other always, in Brahman or the OBS or whatever else you want to call it. And there would be endurance, and love, that would unite us all.
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