5 Yasunari Kawabata Quotes on Philosophy

Yasunari Kawabata quotes on philosophy

4. Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

10. Ryokan, who shook off the modern vulgarity of his day, who was immersed in the elegance of earlier centuries, and whose poetry and calligraphy are much admired in Japan today - he lived in the spirit of these poems, a wanderer down country paths, a grass hut for shelter, rags for clothes, farmers to talk to. The profundity of religion and literature was not, for him, in the abstruse. He rather pursued literature and belief in the benign spirit summarized in the Buddhist phrase 'a smiling face and gentle words'. In his last poem he offered nothing as a legacy. He but hoped that after his death nature would remain beautiful. That could be his bequest.

12. 'Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?' With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have 'that fellow', because the priest Ikkyu is known even to children as a most amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six, and early showed his genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. 'If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes.' Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. ... He gave his collected poetry the title 'Collection of the Roiling Clouds', and himself used the expression 'Roiling Clouds' as a pen name. In his collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, and to seek liberation from them, and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day civil war and moral collapse.

13. I myself have two specimens of Ikkyu's calligraphy. One of them is a single line: 'It is easy to enter the world of the Buddha, it is hard to enter the world of the devil.' Much drawn to these words, I frequently make use of them when asked for a specimen of my own calligraphy. They can be read in any number of ways, as difficult as one chooses, but in that world of the devil added to the world of the Buddha, Ikkyu of Zen comes home to me with great immediacy. The fact that for an artist, seeking truth, good, and beauty, the fear and petition even as a prayer in those words about the world of the devil - the fact that it should be there apparent on the surface, hidden behind, perhaps speaks with the inevitability of fate. There can be no world of the Buddha without the world of the devil. And the world of the devil is the world difficult of entry. It is not for the weak of heart.

14. 'If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.' This is a well-known Zen motto. If Buddhism is divided generally into the sects that believe in salvation by faith and those that believe in salvation by one's own efforts, then of course there must be such violent utterances in Zen, which insists upon salvation by one's own efforts. On the other side, the side of salvation by faith, Shinran, the founder of the Shin sect, once said: 'The good shall be reborn in paradise, and how much more shall it be so with the bad.' This view of things has something in common with Ikkyu's world of the Buddha and world of the devil, and yet at heart the two have their different inclinations. Shinran also said: 'I shall not take a single disciple.' 'If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.' 'I shall not take a single disciple.' In these two statements, perhaps, is the rigorous fate of art.