As I have pointed out in a series of papers, which appeared about fifteen years ago in the Revue de l'histoire des religions, there are numerous resemblances between the ancient myths of the Indo-Europeans, on the one hand, and those of Japan, on the other. These resemblances, relating both to the fundamental structures of the two mythological systems and to a number of curious details, constitute an assemblage which seems too conspicuous to be regarded as either accidental or the result (...) of a similitude of human mentalities, manifesting itself, so it seems, through the creation of a great many similar myths and legends throughout the length and breadth of the surface of our planet. (shrink)

Studies of mythology and the philosophy of religions ascribe violence an important role in understanding traditional societies. Whether perceived as sacred and capable of renewing the world, or as oppressive and destructive, violence acquires a twofold valence, whose constituents are interpreted in a complementary relation of interdependence and entail a world outlook with profound implications. Retrieving this ambiguous dimension of religious violence, Kenzaburō Ōe’s novel imagines, against the historical background of post-war Japanese society, a game that enacts the eternal (...) rivalry between two brothers. Lest the history of this seemingly lost present should fall prey to political abuse, the Japanese writer proposes a return to myth, without, however, idealising it; instead, myth is revalorised and tradition is re-conceived from the vantage point of rationalism, with full and alert awareness of the dangers inherent in an ideology that is imposed by force and aggression. Kenzaburō Ōe’s novel is a lucid meditation on Japan’s modern and contemporary history. (shrink)

This book attempts to elucidate Japanese religious experiences by presenting an innovative interpretation of the oldest existing text of Japanese myth, the Kojiki. Iwasawa offers new insights into Japanese mythology regarding the relationship between the human and the divine.

In Legends of the Samurai, Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors. Through his masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments accompanied by insightful commentary, Hiroaki Sato chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power. For this purpose, Sato has chosen to translate, wherever possible, writings closest in time (...) to the actual event. His translations are a testament to his mastery of the language for they flow with lively ease that one might not expect from accounts, many of which are ancient. Legends of the Samurai covers legends from mythological times to the early eighteenth century. Through this book Sato describes men accomplished in martial arts, warrior-commanders in battle, and samurai's own views of themselves. It ends with a famous modern retelling of a mass disembowelment in the mid-seventeenth century. (shrink)

The present text is Letter No. 187 written for the Trialogue Project, whose first volume, containing 170 letters, was published in Moscow in 2012., Addressed to Nadežda B. Mankovskaya and Vladimir V. Ivanov, the letter uncovers the chief line of the artistic symbolism in a monumental film tetralogy by Aleksandr Sokurov, a famous Russian filmmaker. The author shows how through the artistic interpretation of such historical personalities as Lenin, Hitler, and Japanese emperor Hirohito as well as such cultural-mythological characters (...) as Faust and Mephistopheles, the film director reveals varying aspects of the social display of an irrational element of Power. (shrink)

Dōgen: Textual and Historical Studies is an impressive volume that marks a significant leap forward in the study of Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, founder of the Japanese Sōtō School. Dōgen’s life and thought are closely examined in light of the wider historical and religious contexts of Song dynasty China and the Kamakura era in Japan. This collection offers a careful consideration of Dōgen’s rich literary legacy by examining his significance situated as he was at the historical crossroads between the (...) Chinese Chan tradition and the birth of Japanese Zen. In particular, the volume contemplates the manner in which Dōgen’s historical — perhaps mythological — figure has been endorsed and cultivated by the Sōtō.. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the relationship between language and ethnic culture. It analyzes Bashkir toponyms associated with the cult of fire. The Bashkirs, like many nations, including the Turkic and Mongolian, have thought that fire symbolized home and was the protector of the family. The Bashkirs worshiped fire as cleansing and healing power, while at the same time the fire represented formidable and dangerous force. Fire in the Bashkir mythology is closely related to its opposite (...) element - Water, with the gods of the upper world - the Sun and the Moon and the deity of Earth, geographical names of Bashkortostan testify this. On the material of Bashkir toponymy and related beliefs it was attempted to do a semantic etimological-onomasiological reconstruction of the Bashkir deity of fire Otukan, which dates back to the old Turkic deity Yduk Otuken//Otukan. In Mongolian mythology, it corresponds to the deity Etugen//Otuken, associated with the cult of the mother goddess, earth and fire, and in Japanese mythology - with the god, the owner of the land, - Ootukonu-si-no kami. According to the author, the formation of names connected with ‘fire‘ in the Bashkir toponymy was promoted by the worship of the deity of fire, the tribal fire, the tribal habitat and the family by Tatar-Mongols. Interesting is the fact, that the base ‘ut‘, which is connected with the ancient Turkic beliefs, also builds a theonym, a toponymic term, a geographic name, an ethnonym and anthroponym, i.e. it permeates the entire onomastic and appellative vocabulary. However, at the appellative level, this lexical item has no religious significance. For example, Otukan, TÓ©kÓ©n, Ò®tәgәn, Ò®tәk, otaq in Turkic languages have the meanings of ‘home‘, ‘yurt‘, ‘mountain valley‘, ‘flat place in the mountains on the hillside‘, ‘southern winter quarters‘. This relationship is explained by the fact that, initially, perhaps, yet there was the worship of a female deity Otukan that embodied fire and was associated with the earth, with the habitat and the ancestral hearth, where the original base morpheme was ‘fire‘, then it was associated with the deification of family and tribal territory, and later with the deification of the person of the ruler, this lexic item has spread throughout the onomastic vocabulary and in the appellative lexicon within the meaning of the place of residence. (shrink)

Ever since the pioneering works by Chogyū Takayama and others in 1899 Japanese scholars have endeavored to elucidate the structure, meaning, and genetic connections of Japanese mythology, which was systematically described in the volumes on the “Age of Gods” of the Kojiki (compiled in 712 A.D.), the Nihon Shoki (720), and other works. In recent years the research has experienced a remarkable development, which owes much of its stimulation to the epoch-making studies of Indo-European mythologies by Georges Dumézil. (...) For Japanese mythology betrays much in common with the Indo-European ones not only in its motifs but also in its basic structure, as we shall shortly see. In order not to be misleading, however, it should be stated here that analogies to Indo-European mythologies are but one aspect of the Japanese tradition, which comprises many other components, especially South Chinese and/or Southeast Asian components, and current researches on Japanese mythology are not restricted to comparisons with the Indo-European mythologies, but are undertaken through a variety of approaches, including those of the historian, the philologist, and the ethnologist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters, and: The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen BuddhismEric Sean NelsonOpening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters. By Steven Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 200 pp.The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism. Edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 322 pp.The Zen koan is mysterious to many and its significance remains (...) disputed by scholars. Is it a challenging therapeutic device, to be left behind like a raft after crossing the river, or a self-transparent statement of the liberated mind? Is it a logic-defying paradox or does it have its own performative rationality? Is it a spontaneous and often irreverent oral expression or a complex and staged literary form understandable within its context? Is it a narrative with multiple levels of meaning or something that potentially interrupts the work of meaning, narrative coherence, and conventional understanding?Although paradoxical and even shocking language occurs in other traditions, these two provocative volumes illustrate the uniqueness, significance, and interpretive difficulty of one of Zen's primary practices. Both works are valuable contributions to understanding the context, development, and meaning of the koan from its origins and growth in T'ang and Sung China to later Japanese developments.Steven Heine's Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters includes translations of sixty koan cases, selected traditional commentary, and his account of each case. This rich work gathers significant koans about Zen's encounter with its "other" from a variety of koan collections compiled in Sung China and Kamakura Japan.The volume is organized around the theme of "opening a mountain." Masters opened up mountains for Zen by confronting and converting local spirits, hermits, and other forces that would prevent or endanger its practice. It refers more broadly to the confrontation and contest between Zen masters and figures representing supernatural forces, indigenous and popular religiosity, and rival forms of practice such as that of the isolated hermit without vows and outside the Buddhist community.The koans are presented and discussed in five sections concerning: (1) supernatural mountain landscapes; (2) irregular rivals such as hermits, wizards, and dangerous women; (3) supernatural experiences in which bodhisattvas, demons, and magical animals are encountered in dreams and visions; (4) the use of symbols of authority and transmission such as the flywhisk; and (5) experiences of confession, repentance, self-mutilation, death, and the afterlife.Heine argues that emphasizing the ritual, symbolic, and cultural dimensions of the koan complements understanding it as using paradoxical language to free one from the reification of language through aporia and double-binds. He insightfully shows through his translations and discussions the often ignored mythological and religious dimension of many koans. Even when koans use mythic or supernatural elements ironically, it is still in reference to such a context of belief. Since the outcomes [End Page 284] of these confrontations between Zen iconoclasm and irregular practices and unconventional beings are often uncertain, the koan embodies these tensions between supernaturalism and iconoclasm, ritual and meditative clarity, devotion and enlightenment. Zen masters are not always unambiguously victorious in their confrontations and competition with popular religion in these stories of opening mountains and taming and converting spirits, shamans, hermits, unconventional and rival women (such as the "Zen grannies" and the nuns of cases 23-26), and other irregular practitioners and dangerous forces.Zen iconoclasm is best exemplified by Lin-chi (J.:Rinzai), known for his advice to kill the Buddha and the patriarchs, who forbade travel to Mount Wu-t'ai, where popular devotional Buddhists believed Mañjus´rī appeared (see cases 13-15). Lin-chi's Mañjus´rī cannot be seen on sacred mountains but is manifested in your own activity. However, even some koans involving Lin-chi focus on his ambiguous success in dealing with P'u-hua (cases 16, 57), an irregular practitioner attributed with magical powers. Despite such warnings, the bodhisattva of compassion's sacred mountain continued to appeal to ordinary Buddhists and even Zen practitioners. In these koans, Zen is not simply demythologizing. It is playing a dangerous game of ironic ambiguity and... (shrink)

Early Heyen is interesting for religious scholars for at least two reasons. First, at this time in Japan there is an independent professional philosophy. Second, at this time the formation of the first of three religious-cultural-sociopolitical syntheses, which highlights in the history of the religions of Japan Dzh.Kitagava - the synthesis of Ritsurio: "paradigmatic form of immanent theocracy", ends. The religious and philosophical culture of early Heyana is a complex, multi-layered phenomenon. Its basis was the linguistic conceptualization of the world (...) of classical Japanese and, to some extent, classical Chinese, as well as mythological representations, inherited mostly from archaic times. On this basis, ideas developed from the continent in the previous period - Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, who managed to get well here for three hundred years Developed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters, and: The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen BuddhismEric Sean NelsonOpening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters. By Steven Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 200 pp.The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism. Edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 322 pp.The Zen koan is mysterious to many and its significance remains (...) disputed by scholars. Is it a challenging therapeutic device, to be left behind like a raft after crossing the river, or a self-transparent statement of the liberated mind? Is it a logic-defying paradox or does it have its own performative rationality? Is it a spontaneous and often irreverent oral expression or a complex and staged literary form understandable within its context? Is it a narrative with multiple levels of meaning or something that potentially interrupts the work of meaning, narrative coherence, and conventional understanding?Although paradoxical and even shocking language occurs in other traditions, these two provocative volumes illustrate the uniqueness, significance, and interpretive difficulty of one of Zen's primary practices. Both works are valuable contributions to understanding the context, development, and meaning of the koan from its origins and growth in T'ang and Sung China to later Japanese developments.Steven Heine's Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters includes translations of sixty koan cases, selected traditional commentary, and his account of each case. This rich work gathers significant koans about Zen's encounter with its "other" from a variety of koan collections compiled in Sung China and Kamakura Japan.The volume is organized around the theme of "opening a mountain." Masters opened up mountains for Zen by confronting and converting local spirits, hermits, and other forces that would prevent or endanger its practice. It refers more broadly to the confrontation and contest between Zen masters and figures representing supernatural forces, indigenous and popular religiosity, and rival forms of practice such as that of the isolated hermit without vows and outside the Buddhist community.The koans are presented and discussed in five sections concerning: (1) supernatural mountain landscapes; (2) irregular rivals such as hermits, wizards, and dangerous women; (3) supernatural experiences in which bodhisattvas, demons, and magical animals are encountered in dreams and visions; (4) the use of symbols of authority and transmission such as the flywhisk; and (5) experiences of confession, repentance, self-mutilation, death, and the afterlife.Heine argues that emphasizing the ritual, symbolic, and cultural dimensions of the koan complements understanding it as using paradoxical language to free one from the reification of language through aporia and double-binds. He insightfully shows through his translations and discussions the often ignored mythological and religious dimension of many koans. Even when koans use mythic or supernatural elements ironically, it is still in reference to such a context of belief. Since the outcomes [End Page 284] of these confrontations between Zen iconoclasm and irregular practices and unconventional beings are often uncertain, the koan embodies these tensions between supernaturalism and iconoclasm, ritual and meditative clarity, devotion and enlightenment. Zen masters are not always unambiguously victorious in their confrontations and competition with popular religion in these stories of opening mountains and taming and converting spirits, shamans, hermits, unconventional and rival women (such as the "Zen grannies" and the nuns of cases 23-26), and other irregular practitioners and dangerous forces.Zen iconoclasm is best exemplified by Lin-chi (J.:Rinzai), known for his advice to kill the Buddha and the patriarchs, who forbade travel to Mount Wu-t'ai, where popular devotional Buddhists believed Mañjus´rī appeared (see cases 13-15). Lin-chi's Mañjus´rī cannot be seen on sacred mountains but is manifested in your own activity. However, even some koans involving Lin-chi focus on his ambiguous success in dealing with P'u-hua (cases 16, 57), an irregular practitioner attributed with magical powers. Despite such warnings, the bodhisattva of compassion's sacred mountain continued to appeal to ordinary Buddhists and even Zen practitioners. In these koans, Zen is not simply demythologizing. It is playing a dangerous game of ironic ambiguity and... (shrink)

This study is an Asian ecofeminist reading of two Great Mother Goddesses, Seolmundae (the Creator of Jeju Island in Korea) and Nüwa (the Protector Goddess of Chinese mythology). Nüwa (yin) cannot be reduced to just a counter part of Fuxi (yang) while Seolmundae cannot be shadowed as one of many other creation myths. Rather, they are the Great Mother, the Divine Feminine as the fecundity of Life, the healing Spirit, and the caring Heart which we have to discover and rescue (...) from our forgotten histories to transform violent culture into caring and healing culture. The purpose of this study is to say yes to salim (enlivening, healing, caring-Life with a capital L) and to say no to disruptions of Life (war, violence, destroying nature) as we witness the physical and spiritual sufferings and degradation caused by oppression of those that rendered subaltern. Discovering the Goddess is our ethical imperative for expanding healing culture and loving nature and recognizing the agencies/subjectivities of the subaltern, including Asian women and nature. (shrink)

In 1945–46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about (...) the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes. (shrink)

In this chapter, the authors trace the epistemic challenge initiated by colonialism as part of its civilizing and modernizing missions, and the epistemological violence that undermined Africa’s knowledge systems. The chapter argues that the anticolonial and decolonization efforts have been more programmatic without pushing the boundary of decolonizing the epistemic basis of colonialism. The chapter then contends that decolonizing resistance can best be captured in the form of a reversed epistemic process that not only excavates Africa’s knowledge forms, Africanizes other (...) available knowledges, but more importantly generates an epistemological framework that establishes and reinforces a combative alternative Afrocentric mythology that subverts the existing Eurocentric mythology. Such an alternative myth constitutes a new vision of the African continent and all it can achieve outside of the grip of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony. (shrink)

Objective—To demonstrate Japanese doctors' and nurses' attitudes towards and practices of voluntary euthanasia (VE) and to compare their attitudes and practices in this regard. Design—Postal survey, conducted between October and December 1999, using a self-administered questionnaire.Participants—All doctor members and nurse members of the Japanese Association of Palliative Medicine.Main outcome measure—Doctors' and nurses' attitude towards and practices of VE.Results—We received 366 completed questionnaires from 642 doctors surveyed (response rate, 58%) and 145 from 217 nurses surveyed (68%). A total of (...) 54% (95% confidence interval (CI): 49-59) of the responding doctors and 53% (CI: 45-61) of the responding nurses had been asked by patients to hasten death, of whom 5% (CI: 2-8) of the former and none of the latter had taken active steps to bring about death. Although 88% (CI: 83-92) of the doctors and 85% (CI: 77-93) of the nurses answered that a patient's request to hasten death can sometimes be rational, only 33% (CI: 28-38) and 23% (CI: 16-30) respectively regarded VE as ethically right and 22% (CI: 18-36) and 15% (CI: 8-20) respectively would practise VE if it were legal. Logistic regression model analysis showed that the respondents' profession was not a statistically independent factor predicting his or her response to any question regarding attitudes towards VE. Conclusions—A minority of responding doctors and nurses thought VE was ethically or legally acceptable. There seems no significant difference in attitudes towards VE between the doctors and nurses. However, only doctors had practised VE. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Neither/Nor:Ruminating on the Metanoetic Pharmakon in Nietzsche and Other BuddhasTakeshi Morisato (bio)A Compliment to the Philosopher Chef and His table d'hôte intellectuelleIf a book title were comparable to the name of a restaurant, the table of contents would be their menu. Jason Wirth's Nietzsche and Other Buddhas (hereafter NOB) initially reminded me of a fusion restaurant with a strong "Asian" flavor, an ambiguous genre that we would see anywhere (...) in continental Europe. As one could easily imagine, this is not necessarily a compliment to the chef. By integrating various ingredients and different techniques from diverse culinary traditions, a fusion restaurant might claim to create a new dish or a unique course that transcends the conventional categories of our dietary practice. Like what Kant says about the uniqueness of nonsense, however, their end product could fail to be original or, what is worse, could even be offensive to those who are very familiar with any of the specific culinary traditions. If what comes after comparative philosophy results in this kind of "fusion philosophy," its success will have to feed on our ignorance of intellectual histories.1 Our feeding frenzy in this new, fashionable modus operandi may starve us to death of philosophy rather than liberate us from the hunger that has propelled us into a philosophical search in the first place. To borrow Wirth's use of the "felicitous analogy from Kierkegaard," it might as well be that "the last thing that we need is more food. Rather we need to lose something, to shed our gluttony. We need a medicinal poison to take away an unhealthy poison."2As you can see, I was initially skeptical about the soundness of a philosophical menu that mixes Zen, Schopenhauer, Hakuin, James, Pure Land, Shinran, Tanabe, Deleuze, Dōgen, and Nishida (in order of appearance) with an explosive spice or the deadly meat, Nietzsche. Could this be a process of ventriloquizing Nietzsche through Asian philosophical traditions? Or are we washing down the strong aftertaste of reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer with Pure Land or Zen water? How could we stomach all of these thinkers and traditions in one setting without causing serious indigestion in our hearts-and-minds? To my surprise, Wirth's text gives a performative proof that they can indeed be read together and examined with the purpose of giving us food for thought. What makes NOB particularly successful in referring to different thinkers is its emphasis on "rumination." It [End Page 1070] self-reflectively questions what it is to read any text philosophically and what it means to integrate texts into one's process of thinking such that its creative insight points toward the nutrients that it has found in the process of digesting ideas from diverse intellectual traditions.This philosophical process of "rumination" is not merely an external comparison of ideas from different philosophical traditions. Nor is it an imposition of one tradition over another. Rather, by harmoniously fusing together various insights, the author's very process of understanding the cultural, linguistic, and historical milieu of his existence delves into fundamental issues concerning our human condition in the world today. NOB, in this sense, renders a final form of "comparative philosophy," where a thinker is liberated from conventional categories of philosophizing (especially in reference to the almost obsolete distinction between "East and West") and proves that what philosophers can stomach and integrate into their process of (self-)understanding should count as "philosophy." That is to say, depending on the capacity of the thinker to deal with a variety of intellectual resources, some intellectual traditions or a combination of ideas that are seemingly counterintuitive to most scholars in the field of philosophy could generate a tremendous force that accelerates the (re)new (ed) sense of philosophy.3 The "philosophy of food" in chapter 5 especially demonstrates this excellence, and we should anticipate a longer sequel that would mark Wirth's original contribution to the history of philosophy.Two Counterfeit NegativesA food critic, however, must entertain the possibility of some improvement, even when the dish is well prepared and its overall presentation is exquisite. I would like to draw our attention to two... (shrink)