Letter from Kyoto

I studied religion in graduate school and to tell you the truth it’s a point of pride for me. I was taught by David Hall who was taught by Edmund Morgan who was taught by Perry Miller who pretty much invented the historical study of Puritanism in the United States. I’m boasting, true, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think I learned religion all that well. Nothing Professor Hall taught me resonated as deeply as the immutable Hoosier truths preached by my grandmother in Terre Haute, Indiana, when I was a boy. She was into a kind of generalized protestant evangelism that was light on theology and heavy on judgment. You behave, or else.

All of which is a round-about way of excusing myself in advance for not really knowing what I’m talking about when it comes to Japanese religion. Because if all those years of Puritan studies resonated less than my childhood evangelism, the few weeks I spent researching eastern religions in grad school resonated still less. So that when I found myself in Kyoto, the lovely religious center of Japan, speaking all of five dependable phrases in Japanese and reading and writing not one character, the entire place was a mystery.

Not that years of study would have helped. In The Japanese, former ambassador Edwin O. Reichauer tells us that religion is "peripheral" in Japan. Reichauer also says that Confucianism, which he describes as an "ethical" secularism, has supplanted Buddhism and Shintoism as the dominant mindset of the Japanese. But even he would admit that figuring out what is what in Japanese theology is pretty difficult, because the Japanese, as best I could tell, have fused and confused Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism, much as my grandmother took Methodism, Baptism and Catholicism and synthesized them into a serviceable dogma with which to terrify children. The Tokugawas, the military dictators who closed Japan off from the outside world, were Confucians, temples are Buddhist, and toriis, the H-shaped gates found at most religious sites, are Shinto. Beyond that I can’t distinguish one religious tradition from the other, despite the fact that I spent an entire day marching through the hills of Kyoto visiting toriis and temples and department store dummies of Tokugawas, kneeling and on display in the Shogun’s chamber at Nijo castle. It was completely unlike the experience I had driving from Mont St. Michel to Chartes, visiting medieval churches. In France every icon, work of art, and flying buttress sustained and amplified the symphony of prairie Christianity I absorbed in my childhood: kneel, you despicable wretch, and pray for your salvation. I understood that. In Japan, I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. Why were these people tying white strips of paper to trees? Who cares if the Buddha’s glancing backwards? And why do you always have to take off your shoes?

When you can’t speak or read the language and don’t know the traditions, you focus on the superficials, and end up thinking like a comparative religion major. So here goes: Japanese religion struck me a none too spiritual—that is, if you define spiritual in my grandmother’s sense, as an excessive concern with the status of your salvation and the possibilities of your afterlife. Sure, Kyoto was green and peaceful and meditative. I would rather be a Buddhist monk in the gardens at Nanzenji than a Catholic brother in the cloisters of Mont St. Michel. And they had candles and incense and all that there. But maybe because I don’t speak or read the language and don’t know the icons, I didn’t see all the spiritual freight there. I never felt like I wasn’t going to pass the bar; that I’ve been an apostate; that St. Peter was going to punch me a one-way ticket to eternal damnation. Oddly enough, in a country so known for its discipline, I didn’t get the sense that Japanese religion was all about self-discipline and self-punishment. About guilt, in other words.

Japanese religion seemed more this worldly, in the here and now, and scaled to imminent need than Western Christianity. The temples and shrines are scattered all over Kyoto and Tokyo like ATMs in Dallas and Chicago, practical and convenient and available for immediate use. The shrines are generally tiny, a stone with cloth or statue on the corner of a small home. They fit into the landscape. They are not, like churches in the United States, special places set apart from daily life (abandon all hope, ye who enter here). The big temples in Kyoto are special places, but somehow they seem more part of the quotidian. The streets and approaches leading to them are usually lined with stores and shops, some peddling religious goods, some appealing to more common needs. And commerce is inside the walls of the temples: I bought a postcard pack within Nanzenji temple (480 yen—I only wanted one or two postcards, but those shrewd Buddhists only sold the deluxe eight-pack).

Of course, my assessment of the scale and spirituality of Japanese religion is completely wrong. The landscapes in most Catholic countries in the world are peppered with plastic statues of the Madonna (made in Taiwan); souvenir shops line the roads to Chartes; the nuns of Notre Dame sell postcards (1 Franc—for one!) to housewives from Iowa. It just seemed different in Japan. Enough so that I began to think that my association of the religious with the spiritual was wrong, and that my concentration on nuances of theology and liturgy missed the point. The point being that religion is always more social than individual, always more about power in this world than salvation in the next. A point that should be obvious to a student of comparative religion, but, as I’ve said, I’m not that good a learner.

In Osaka many shrines are devoted to Fudomyo-o, a deity who brings success in business, and from my superficial perspective the Buddhist temples in Kyoto seemed primarily useful as places to go and pray for luck or wealth or health. It made me rethink my unconscious prejudice that every time someone goes into a Christian church they’re going in to insure everything is right with the ever after. I can hold this prejudice because I’m not a churchgoer and so don’t understand the social aspects of religion, the here and now, the utility of religion in this world. I can hold this prejudice because I believed Nietzsche, whose anti-Christian polemics were directed against a faith that he described was otherworldly and powerless. I adopted his definition and forgot that for about 1500 years Christianity was a power in this world, immanent, and adopted by men for the aid it brought in war and commerce.

The Romans became Christian. I was taught that their conversion lessened their imperial ambitions and their bloodlust, and led to the decline of Rome. But in Kyoto I began to suspect the Romans converted to augment and strengthen their imperial ambitions and bloodlust. They stayed the same; they found a better God to kill for. It’s only a narrative convention of historians to posit conversion first and decline after. The truth is that in the early medieval period, after they converted, the Romans still saw themselves as part of an empire, and that the church not only brought success in war, but landholding and wealth and prestige. The Christian God was a god of success in this life, and the Christian compounded his power by arrogantly postulating that Christ was also a god of success in the afterlife.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno tell a marvelous story about how the fetish developed. When primitive hunters discovered that by wearing the skins of the animals they hunted they were more successful hunters, they assumed that there were magical powers in the skins, and they began to worship the skins and the animals they hunted as fetishes. They never suspected that the skins masked their scent and was the reason they were better hunters. The story illuminates the relation between the visible and invisible world that is at the heart of religious worship. And it is always: my appeal to invisible powers brings me success among the visible.

In the history of Japan, this relationship between secular power and sectarian religion is a constant motif. The introduction and promulgation of Buddhism to Japan from the mainland in the 5th and 6th centuries was a political act, one complexly tied to the dynastic struggles of families and clans. Here’s how the Japanese scholar G.B. Sansom describes it: "There is a somewhat ironical interest in the fact that this gospel of gentleness (Buddhism) was recommended to the Japanese by a hard-pressed monarch begging for the loan of troops, and owed its adoption by them to great measure to the bitter jealousy of political rivals." Of course, it’s not ironic if the Buddhism adopted by early Japanese wasn’t a gospel of gentleness, but a method of invoking the necessary forces and powers from the invisible world to triumph over your enemies in this one. Sansom misunderstands the motives for Japanese conversion the same way I misunderstood the motives for Roman conversion—and both errors are rooted in the assumption that religion is an individualistic method for attaining peace and serenity.

There are new Gods today. The English language channels on hotel televisions in Japan are filled with CNN Business Asia, BBC Business Asia, etc. Across the Pacific, the astrologic invocations of Wall Street and global capitalism seem even more ritualistic and incantory than they do in North America. Greenspan speaks, high priest connected by mystic reason and Ayn Rand to the invisible forces that deflate currency, immiserate the workers and make the rich richer. His acolytes and devotees are swarming Shinjuku, busily trying to coerce the Japanese government into throwing over its social contract and adopting the necessary sets of liturgies to make global capital secure in the face of its Asian investment debacle. They will succeed or fail based on their ability to convince the Japanese that these incantations will call forth more effective demons than those taunting the body politic today.

The ease with which American, European and Asian liberals abandon the political ideologies of their past (best exemplified by the Clinton and Blair administrations) and adopt the new ethos of multinational capital illustrates the efficacy of the new faith. Democracy was the magic incantation that made the American Century; that it should be jettisoned for The Free Market of the Corporate Century should not be surprising, because every morning true believers boot up their computers, and, as visitors to oracles once did, consult their divines and in the process gain wealth, power and prestige. They read the Wall Street Journal as the seers of Kyoto once read the tea leaves, for sight into, and command over the future. The Romans have found new Gods.

Me, too. My service to the new Gods has brought me to Kyoto, something that probably would never have happened in the days when I worshipped education and education rewarded me with a string of adjunct professorships at wages below the poverty line. But I find it hard to transfer, whole-heartedly, my loyalties. Because walking through the gardens of Nanzenji, like walking through the transept at St. Peters, I keep thinking about those for whom religion was less directed toward power in this world than it was understanding the limits and dimension of the personal experience. Who meditated on stars not for their signs, but because they felt small before them.

And in the end, even though Kyoto is lovely and I appreciate the opportunity to see it, I can’t count myself among the loyal. Because even though religion is primarily used to gain power and wealth and prestige, there are, and have been those for whom religion was about serenity and salvation. And while global capital can make you rich, it can never give life meaning. At least, that is what I believe.

But as I’ve said, I’m not that good a learner.