The Zen rebels: obscure hermits and existential reformers (part 26) - Tanabe Hajime.

 

(Image:  Tanabe Hajime circa late 1950s)

There is no doubt Japan, within its history, is an isolationist country, holding on to its cultural imprint and identity that has been of a deep rooted cultural significance of idealisms which are very unique to the Japanese ethos and way of life.  And yet, there is also a paradox aspect with is equally attuned that has influenced their politics, social and creative dynamics, more importantly the impact it had on its own spiritual foundations.   This could be seen in the modern Japan of the early at the dawn of the 20^th century, under Emperor Meiji, the modernization of Japan was seen as a urgency, with the end of the Shogunate (Tokugawa regime) which was the archaic military order of Japan, the era that followed was now known as the Meiji Restoration of 1868.   And it it was this period that Japan began to heavily be influenced by the West, to unify the country and implement a Western style democracy to which Emperor Meiji, who embraced the modernization of Japan, saw that the country moving away form its feudal system, needed to draw from European and American technological prowess and to the extent also embracing Western dress and customs to which he believed, that over time proved to be correct, would turn Japan into country of power within the modern world. 

When Buddhist teachings were brought to Japan from China in the 5^th Century, it was Mahayana Buddhism, more so the Chinese Caodong and Linji teaching styles that had a significant impact on Japan in the 11^th Century, later forming into the distinctly Japanese Zen schools of Rinzai and Soto. As the linages grew throughout the centuries, Japan as a feudal country began to fluctuate within its self isolation and outside influences, melding and forming variants of Buddhist thought and practice, seen with the many iconoclastic Zen masters over the years.  However, it was Japanese aesthetics that, over a hundreds of years of Chinese influence, began to originate into its own distinction.   This trait of redeveloping art, writing and philosophy, to which early Confucianism molded a lot of Japanese thinking, in line with modern dynamics of how a country should emerge, socially and politically from its warring system of feudalism.   Under Emperor Meiji, the restoration of Imperial rule was imperative to craft a modern Japan, he laid down the political ground work so that it could instigate these grand industrial ambitious, transforming the country into a global superpower.

Under the Meiji period and its mandates the Japanese schooling system was reformed, incorporating the German teaching standard whilst making it compulsory for children to be educated, Japan was now galvanizing a direct Western investment into its country, also, encouraging a democracy, that for hundreds of years, the Japanese lived purely under a Shogunate class of rule.  Yet, there was very little resistance to these changes, in fact the industrialization and its modernization of Japan was embraced by the populous, to which Emperor Meiji encouraged the many academic Japanese to travel abroad, to study the sciences, monetary systems, languages and philosophy.   The Meiji period also began the forced separation of Buddhism from Japanese culture, as Zen Buddhism was considered the spiritual guide of the Samurai, with the Restoration now in full affect, the removal of Buddhist power that was shared with the previous Tokugawa regime now facing a crisis from a violent suppression under Emperor Meiji, monasteries and their adjoining lands were confiscated, temples were converted to Shinto and Confucius places of study or destroyed completely.  The government ended all support for Buddhism throughout Japan, as the Japan governments began to centralize, the Buddhist clerics remaining were to either assimilate into the Confucius, Shinto even Christian beliefs or perish all altogether.  This forced reformation of Buddhism in Japan between 1871 and 1912 created an urgency among the clerics that remained to adjust to these dramatic changes, this lead to the beginning, through the new education system, from the schools to the Universities, to create a study of Buddhism as a academic style of reform.  This meant that they could retain the philosophy of Buddhism, yet meld it with the forced changes that the Meiji period instilled particularly Western philosophy and Japanese nationalism, providing the groundwork for one of the most important schools of thought in 20^th century Japan; the Kyoto School.

And it was a philosopher that emerged in the decades that followed the Meiji Restoration by the name of Tanabe Hajime, who was able to bridge Japanese Zen Buddhist thought to both Greek philosophy and Christian beliefs, yet also controversially, during the 1930s he was, like most of Japanese society at the time, caught up in the extremity of its nationalism.    But in a later remorseful awareness of the error of his earlier philosophical justifications of the Japanese aggression during World War Two,  Hajime completed his most important work titled Metanoetics. An attempt at answering the philosophical dilemma that humans live within a realm or Universe of nothingness, that the Zen Buddhist see as the void that could be considered devoid of meaning, but in a Christan sense is to understand that the divinity of nothing is also the ability to repent before it, to be forgiven for sins, the folly of the human condition.  Hajime wanted to remove what could be deemed the nihilism of Zen Buddhism of absolute nothingness and give an existentialism meaning to this Void.