MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Pitfalls of Progress
Spring's renewal has assured my recovery from serious illness, so that I can now fulfil my vow and accomplish my poetic task. But my birth once again into this world occurs significantly toward sunset, when my corporeal and creative powers are waning; and I begin to decline into age, just as the Dharma is sinking in this last period of Mappo-ji into indifference and neglect. Yet by calling the Name I can still draw upon the boundless store of the Other Power, for Amida has promised that the efficacy of the Nembutsu will continue for one hundred years longer, even after the Buddhist Tradition has been extinguished by the anti-spiritual forces of the modern world. And so the copper glow of the sun can still serve to remind me of Amida's Light and Life, even though now setting into the pall of smoke and dust that hangs in the humid atmosphere above Kyoto, so that this defiled counterpart, too, can prompt a faint far-off recollection of the delicate lilac clouds of the Western Paradise. For such is the inextricable mixture of opposites in this paradoxical world that, to the poet's eye, a ruined beauty can still be discovered in its industrial ugliness, now softened by the evening glow, whose colours of rose, purple, and gold signal the completion of the alchemical work.
Contrasted with my nostalgic look westward to the Pure Land is the approaching prospect of the vulgar noisy crowded city of Kyoto which grows more blatant and obtrusive. I can only view with abhorrence the ever-spreading ruination of the natural and architectural beauties of the Old Capital, which, even if they escape demolition under the bulldozers of economic development, are more slowly trampled into dust by a million-footed tourism. It is doubtful if, by the end of this century, a single traditional Japanese-style building will remain to posterity outside of a museum. For by then the modern descendants of those Japanese who were once celebrated for their love of nature and refined taste in the arts will have destroyed the last vestiges of that unique tradition, which it took their ancestors two millennia and more to create and preserve. All will have been eroded by the encroachments of a starkly utilitarian technology and replaced by commercial squalor of an incomparable hideousness.
This industrial wasteland of ferro-concrete incongruities, factory chimneystacks, steel-girdered pylons on every mountain carrying high-tension cables, and its tidal wave of infernal combustion engines is described, no matter how poetically trite, as typical of the visual and auditory poisoning of the natural environment and the pollution of our heritage of earth, water, and air. Progress is always popular because it flatters our contemporary mediocrity that it has surpassed ancestral genius. But before speaking of Progress, it is as well to check the direction in which we are facing, else it may be found too late that we have been progressing backwards. By disguising our spiritual impoverishment as a promise of unending material enrichment, it has enabled us to devastate our surroundings so successfully that we are now persuaded that nastiness is inevitable and the norm.
My task of preserving in verse and prose a little of what still remains of the Old Capital before its imminent death becomes more urgent than ever. But your poet's all-too-human nature fails to maintain its detachment and gives way once more, under the gravitational pull of the mundane, to disgust, indignation, and disdain. My only excuse is that perhaps these negative emotions are but the wrathful aspects of compassion for a people of whom it has been rightly said that they possess an exquisite sense of beauty but unfortunately no sense of ugliness.
These lines are meant at least to awaken and arouse the reader rudely to a realization that Mara the Distractor, the Buddhist Arch-fiend, whose dupes and accomplices augment mechanical and electronic cacophony, aims at nothing less than total abolition of the silence and solitude essential for the cultivation of spirituality and the artistically creative life, and that his blatant campaign against quiet and privacy triumphs throughout the ‘developed’ world.
An assured Faith threatens the consoling doubts of the sceptical convert to Mara's cohorts. He seeks desperately to preserve his comfortable disbelief at all costs, for secretly he wishes for extinction at death and oblivion ever afterwards. His habit of doubt is so inured to confinement in its self-created hell and so closed to the awful prospect of liberation into heaven that it can easily hoodwink him into believing that he is ‘scientifically’ impartial and detached and entertains no prejudices, unaware that the positivistic limitations of scientific method constitute not open-mindedness but a secular prejudice.
Instead of reading the sacred scriptures, once mankind's unfailing source of spiritual nourishment, we are force-fed daily by the media with mass misinformation. Neophiliac advertising and publicity exert their pressures to conform, stimulating our need to be thought fashionably contemporary, sophisticated, revolutionary, realistic, disillusioned, and the rest of the catchwords and phrases. By means of suggestions, both overt and subliminal, that multiply our desires and fears, the great lies are repeated so insistently and continuously that most are now convinced that they must be axiomatic truths. Belief in the disbelief in any form of survival after death has long since been generally accepted as an unquestionable dogma. But Mara's most subtle and successful stratagem is to persuade his disciples and devotees by this incessant barrage of diversions and distractions that he no longer exists. In the long historical view, the twentieth century may well become known to posterity, if any, as the Age of Gullibility.
Yet all such social conditioning to accept the received heresies of Grutopia merely affords pretexts and excuses for disbelief; and we must squarely face the fact that modernized man, East and West, has not lost his faith, as he thinks, because ‘religion has now been disproved by science’, or because ‘revolutionary politics is the religion of the twentieth century’, or because ‘faith is outdated by the sceptical spirit of our times’. No, everyman has lost his faith solely because he wanted to. By following the path of least resistance, an act of free will has given assent to his doubts and indifference, which are motivated by sloth and self-interest. All can be traced back ultimately to our illusory desire to be self-sufficient, without spiritual support or dependence on any power or principle higher than our own vain egoity. This is the short sharp answer to the inevitable worldly scoffer and perennial sceptic who is in duty bound to scorn all access to Faith. To paraphrase Lao-tzu:
'When the inferior man first hears of the Name, he laughs at it. If he did not laugh at it, it would not be the Name'.
Such inveterate professional doubters must be left to the grey mundane world of qualitatively impoverished existence that they mistake for the sole reality.
Although to have their Faith restored to them men need only abandon their self-will and egoistic illusion and allow the Other Power to bestow it on them as a free gift, already I foresee that this incredible news of hope for peace and joy will prove most unwelcome and unwanted by human ignorance, hatred, and greed. Messages brought back from that Other World in the past have almost always been deliberately distorted and misunderstood, ignored or suppressed by this world of conflict and impurity; for to the worldly-wise, wisdom must always appear as foolishness.
So I can scarcely hope for a better fate for my petit testament, which is almost certain to go to waste unheeded like the wind-blown cherry-petals that scatter their delicate transience haphazardly over the jade-green scum of the temple pond. Yet even though honesty to experience and fidelity to theme compel me to end my poem on this dissonance, so long as there remains the chance of a single listener ready to receive the gift of the Dharma, it has been no thankless task to reassert the timeless verities of the Vow and the Name.