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.(1990: 9)For him, thought remains a kind of pure experience only if it is an imme-diate, unwilled response to what is directly given in experience.This meansthat thought is not essentially distinguishable from pure experience suchas direct perception (although the nature of the object of thought mightdiffer from that of the object of perception).The notion bears strong similarity to the notion of immediate apodicticityin phenomenology, which is prior to the positing of the relation between sub-ject and object.Apparently, Nishida was not well acquainted with the workof Husserl, but they were both influenced by the work of William James (1890;1902).The main difference between the two is that Husserl proposed a methodcalled epochB in order to attain apodicticity, whereas Nishida stressed thevalence of practical activity.According to Husserl, the everyday self has aninnate tendency to think under the command of a natural standpoint(naturlische Einstellung) that things in the world outside the self exist as objects 9780415455206_4_003.qxd 6/6/08 4:44 PM Page 79The river of no return 79and the self exists as a subject opposing to them.He stated that when wesuspend such an innate tendency by a disciplined approach (epochB), suspendingall judgments concerning the relationship between the being of the selfand that of thing, a stream of immediate, apodictic perception will be dis-closed, a stream operating at the foundation of the world as experiencedin the natural standpoint.In contrast, Nishida s experience of immediateapodicticity is by means of cultivation and practice (Yuasa 1993).Nishida spure experience can be seen as an ecstatic state, and therein we find an ana-logy with the experience of Samatha meditation (Becker 1992; Austin 1998;Wallace 2003).Finally, pure experience is passive in the sense that it occurs spontaneouslyand it is unavoidable. 9780415455206_4_004.qxd 6/6/08 4:44 PM Page 804Meeting God in a nightclub?A popular tale in Japan tells the story of a fisherman who decided one dayto visit a dragon palace at the bottom of the sea.His name was UrashimaTaro.He was a daydreamer, one of those who are happy just to spend theday gazing at the sky, the shoreline, and the beautiful sea.For him the mostwonderful thing was to go out fishing with his boat and spend the entire after-noon admiring the water and imagining what it would be like to be in themiddle of the deep blue sea.He did not care about fishing and whenever hecaught something, he brought it back home at the end of the day to shareit with his old mother.One evening, when he was walking home, he sawa group of boys standing in a circle, shouting and poking at something witha stick.Taro approached them and saw that they were teasing a babytortoise.With an act of great courage and generosity he saved the babytortoise and returned it to the sea.A few years after, when he was on hisboat, he looked down at the water and saw a large tortoise swimming towardshim.It was the tortoise that he had saved from the nasty boys.She had comeback as a sign of gratitude to take Taro to the most beautiful place in theworld, the Dragon Palace at the bottom of the Sea.Taro didn t hesitate fora second, stepped out from his boat and sat on the tortoise s shell.Down,down, he went, and the deeper he went, the more beautiful the scenery became,until they reached the bottom of the sea.This was as Taro had alwaysimagined it, alive with thousands of brightly colored fish of every shape andsize, whose movements filled the water with shining, swirling bubbles, withwonderful flowers that bloomed on rocks and cliffs.Taro was spellboundby everything he saw.There he met the enchanting Oto-hime, the beautifuldaughter of the Dragon King, who invited him to live in her palace.Fromthat moment Taro began a new life immersed in pleasure such as no manhad ever known: dancing fish, mouth-watering feasts, strolls in the coral gar-den with the charming, lovely Oto-hime.It was a life beyond his wildest dreams.Wonderful as it was, however, it wasn t long before Taro began to miss hishome and his mother.Oto-hime noticed the change and told him that thetime had come for him to leave.She gave him a lacquer box as a reminderof the amazing time they had spent together and told him to open it only if 9780415455206_4_004.qxd 6/6/08 4:44 PM Page 81Meeting God in a nightclub? 81he should find himself confused by anything he might see.She also warnedhim that if he chose to open the box, he could never return to the DragonPalace.Taro called his tortoise friend and returned to his island.He ran alongthe beach towards his mother s house.Oddly enough, however, he didn t seemto recognize what he saw.People had changed, the village was no longer thesame, and when he came to the place where his house should have been,there was nothing but an empty field of wild flowers! He could not believeit.He was sure that this was his village and his house, but nothing seemedto be the same.And what had happened to his mother? Totally confusedhe opened the box that Oto-hime had given him.A great cloud of whitesmoke came out, and it was like all his strength and energy had drained away,as if he weighed nothing at all and was drifting in the wind.Inside the boxthere was a mirror.He looked at it and was astonished.He saw that his facehad changed and that he had a long, white beard! Suddenly everything wasclear.While he had been enjoying life in the Dragon Palace, hundreds ofyears had gone by on land.Urashima Taro looked slowly up to the sky.His life with Oto-hime in her palace in the depths of the sea had it all beena dream? Or was he dreaming now?When I first read this tale in a book entitled Once Upon a Time in Japan(one of the few available books in English at the Narita Airport in Tokyo!),I was fascinated by it, for it reminded me of the near-death journey inthe afterlife.In its simplicity, the story tells us of the possibility that wemay leave our everyday reality and enter a different dimension which ismuch more pleasurable than our present one, but which in a sense doesnot belong to us.This shift from one reality to another is known in Japanas the urashima effect [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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