The outer and inner life

Wherever you are in Japan, it seems you are never far from a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple. By the side of the road, behind houses, on a grand approach by a wide path or in a quiet lane the religious life of the Japanese springs into view.

From simple stone monuments of local protector deities to grand vermillion gateways, bold pagodas and halls with gilded Buddha altars, Japanese religion appears rich, textured and varied. And anyone who partakes is graced by the waft of incense, surrounded by the sound of chanting monks, led through the pleasing forms of a rock garden to purify the mind for the blessed experience of divinity. Leave the mundane you at the gate, enter with your true self.

So varied and fascinating were my visits to shrines and temples in a recent trip to Japan, I began to wonder what exactly it was that people were worshipping in all these places – what was the common object of it all?

My musing led to the observation that all the different sects of Buddhism and Shinto in all their rites, rituals and beliefs were human constructions of one form or another. What did this then say about the experience of the divine, of the feeling of depth and transcendence beyond the ordinary physical world? Was that also a human construct, an illusion (some would say) of the imagination induced and fortified by the edifices of religions?

I’m not a doubter when it comes to spirituality. It’s clear to me – intellectually and emotionally – that life is more than just matter, more than the sum of the material activity of various cells and particles. For most of the history of humankind, religious beliefs and practices have been a central part of living, and indeed remain so for the vast majority of the planet’s people. Even in Western countries, where a reductionist, materialist scientific worldview is dominant, the arts and culture express depths of meaning and experience well beyond materiality. It seems to me that it is healthy for a rounded and full life to acknowledge and embrace the spiritual – in whatever form that suits.

But a Western, critical view remains highly valuable when engaging with the realm of spirit. In service, it asks the faithful to stand back and see the human element in religious forms and understandings, to see the way those forms have been constructed by human minds and hands, to note that they are finite and transient. Spirit may be the inspiration, it may be present and deeply felt, but its potential expression in myriad ways is a necessary insight. Armed with this thought, we might avoid the common partiality of many religions and their followers seeing their own beliefs and rituals as divine to the exclusion of others. Spirit needs human craft and ideas to take shape in the world, and just as the world and its people change over time and according to place, so spiritual forms inevitably vary, religions rise and pass away.

This view of relativity need not weaken religion or spiritual practice. A person can still fully engage with their particular spirituality while accepting its finite and transient parameters in time and space. The key focus here is on spirit, the essence of the experience, which is boundless and can take a vast array of forms. The Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar DT Suzuki said: “The foundation of all concepts is simple, unsophisticated experience.” To the heart of the experience is where the faithful must continually return.

Critical, logical thinking can actually aid spiritual practice by restoring a vision of wholeness in which both matter and spirit are part of the one play of life. Maligned by Eastern religions as “ignorance”, logical dualism – the everyday phenomenal mind – is really no better or worse than the oneness of spirit. Both are the offspring of the one reality of the universe, and the task for wholeness is to bring about their alignment, their unity.

Perhaps the single greatest lesson of Buddhism relates to attachment, one it has been consistently hammering for centuries. Its message: “Don’t get hung up on the world of the senses, of words and ideas. Seek the truth within.” But just as we can be lost in the ordinary world of phenomena (taken perhaps to an extreme by modern Western rationalism), forgetting spirit, so we can lose ourselves in spirit (the tendency of Eastern religions) and forget the outside world and our necessary responsibility to it. Practising non-attachment means moving between matter and spirit, understanding their respective claims, until there is a purposeful resonance such that the two gradually become one in our life. The Buddha is then seen and experienced amid the noise and chaos of the city as much as within the emptiness of the individual soul in a meditation room.

Practical examples of spirit-matter synthesis abound in the various Zen-inspired arts of Japan: martial arts, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, haiku poetry and others. It is said that the great poet Basho achieved enlightenment when he once heard a sound in a monastery garden and produced the following: still pond/a frog jumps in/kerplunk! Simply, life unfolds in dazzling multiplicity, with its inner and outer faces, within and around us.