Japan‐liness: Stereotypes and Difficulties in Dialogue

When it comes to popular images of Japan, one finds a dense mess of stereotypes‐in‐collision, spanning Western romanticism of Japanese culture and suspicion in equal measure. These collide with Japan's own self‐stereotyping, that is, with Japanese myth‐making regarding its own “Japanese‐ness” (nihonjinron). ⁱⁱ

In presenting an account of the Japanese arts, and attempting to conduct an encounter with Western thinking (whatever that means), one is faced—on both sides of the dialogue—with a web of generalizations, misunderstandings, ignorance, and errors, which requires great care to negotiate, and which can probably never be satisfactorily disentangled. That being so, it has proven to be the case that in the very collision of errors, mistranslations, and misunderstandings, one finds the most creative forces that have come to define the objects in question. In other words, whilst one must very much be careful in bringing Japanese culture and Western ideas into dialogue, one may console oneself with a curious truth: that error, gross simplification, and complete misunderstanding have been at least as generative in advancing the process of self‐understanding and self‐definition as anything else, for both the Japanese and the West (see Nicholas Ostler (2016) on the translation of religions across cultures, and how difficulties in translation became creative aspects of religions as they passed from culture to culture).

The last century of Japanese‐Western dialogue has created a particularly dense mess of misunderstandings on both sides. On Western misunderstanding, a mountain has been written. However, as James Heisig et al. (2011) note, Japan's concepts of its own Japanese‐ness were created as a counter‐image to perceived ideas of encroaching Western modernity, Europeanization and its purportedly nihilistic cultural values (especially within the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy). That image was every bit as hit‐and‐miss as Western concepts of Japan, and involved every bit as much mistranslation, simplification and error. Yet, these errors were profoundly creative of so much of what one takes as being quintessentially Japanese today.

Even so, to avoid accusations of problematic generalizations in this article regarding the Japanese, if indeed such an entity exists, this article will limit claims being made to specific philosophies behind specific cultural practices—avoiding any kind of statements about some Japanese essence, or claims about how the Japanese think, or how language differences might imply something about the Japanese brain, reducing any East/West essentialism to the minimum possible.

One other important point to make is that, although the arts considered here are often taken to be paradigmatically Japanese—it would be very wrong to think that most Japanese persons practice them. The Japanese arts are not majority practices, and not even necessarily grounded in a spiritual intention. Indeed, one might say that Japanese cultural arts, with all the implicit cultural knowledge imprinted within them, are something of an endangered species. Ironically, it is exactly a Western romanticism for Japanese aesthetics that has supported (not least financially, for there is a basic economic reality with all the arts) and fed back to Japan its own traditions, along with a sustained impetus for their preservation. There are Western eyes which pay lot of money to watch, admire, participate in, and project some profound inner yearning for that gentle, natural, simple elegance that these Japanese arts take as their fundamental aims.

Moreover, not only are the Japanese arts not so widely practiced (and thus not indicative of the Japanese people or the Japanese way of thinking), but it cannot be assumed that those who do practice these arts are doing so out of a strong connection to the deep spiritual and philosophical wellspring of the practices. It may just be that a person does Japanese calligraphy, or sumi‐e (ink painting), because he or she finds it relaxing, or enjoyable to do, or admires the aesthetic and the satisfying artistic end products.

The reality is probably that these cultural forms are, in some ways, as alien to many Japanese people (and have always been, in a sense, because many such forms were elite cultural practices, requiring degrees of literacy and leisure not at all accessible to the majority of people). Such arts serve today as much for the Japanese as an escape from the mundane, routine, mechanized, acrid, spirit‐destroying bureaucratically excessive orderliness that characterizes most people's everyday lives, as it is a like escape for the Westerners who so admire these Japanese cultural arts.

So, there is a tension to be kept in mind regarding the Japanese arts—they do have profound spiritual and philosophical underpinnings, and their practice is saturated with complex associations, implicit meaning, rich symbology, metaphysical ideas and views on the nature of the mind‐body relationship. However, it cannot be assumed that is why people engage with them. Nevertheless, given that these deep roots do exist, and that many such arts explicitly present themselves as means for self‐perfection having some spiritual significance, these practices do indeed merit close consideration for any rich investigation into spiritual practices, spiritual development or spiritual intelligence.

Dō (Way)

Whether most engage in the practice of the arts or not, the influence of the arts on Japanese culture remains strong. Nō drama, flower arranging, the Tea ceremony, the many martial arts, poetry (especially haiku poetry), pottery, landscape gardening and design, sumi‐e painting, paper making, the incense ceremony, calligraphy, and even traditional dance and music, among other forms, continue to exert strong influence. (Carter 2008, 2)

The Japanese arts are explicitly characterized as means of self‐perfection. While one must be careful with this word self, one can see that many of these arts encode certain values, condition a certain comportment, and rely on highly rigorous and ritualistic ways of performing those activities (kata, trans: way of doing something). Whether it be calligraphy, mending broken pottery, or attacking one's opponent with bamboo sticks—the Japanese arts are explicitly fashioned as vehicles for cultivating and perfecting oneself.

Significantly, because of a broadly Zen Buddhist influence, taking in ideas about nonduality and impermanence which undermine the self/not‐self distinction, one uncovers a substructure of metaphysical and philosophical ideas undergirding these practices. Such ideas are ritualized and conditioned into the very bones of the practitioner through lifelong practice.

Once ingrained, these practices cultivate a certain way of being present in the world. To put it another way, these practices cultivate a certain kind of embodiment, a certain way of being situated in one's body, situated within one's environment, and with respect to others. Part of the practices is to blur the boundaries between things (a theme with Japanese aesthetics, generally), to offer some confusion between objects by reflecting one thing in another, by having boundaries in motion, by softening gradients between things. This all serves to create an experience of blurring between the self and not‐self (see Kawai 2018 on how traditional Japanese architecture and spatial concepts are used to generate states of mindfulness and immersion within the environment).

Through practice of these arts, one comes to experience for oneself that the perceived separation between self and world is not so sharp as one had thought. One has the experience of that blurring between self and other in cultivating one's craft. Then, serving as vehicles for training traditional Japanese social norms, engaging in such practices teaches one a range of physical habits, a way of comporting oneself respectfully towards others, and in harmony with everything around one. As specifically self‐perfective practices, the arts need to be understood as offering ways of doing as well as ways of being, habits which also have a larger individual and social significance. The arts are not self‐contained practices, but provide life‐lessons, confidence, and various qualities that apply in life more broadly. In particular, these arts teach one about respect, self‐restraint, purity and discipline. ⁱⁱⁱ

In short: What one has with the Japanese arts is nothing less than a very real meditation‐in‐action, rigorously structured and guided by a range of cultural, metaphysical, and ethical ideals. Such practices locate one in a tradition, and are containers for a huge range of implicit cultural wisdom and knowledge. As social activities, interpersonally taught and practiced, they provide cultural training in which such ideals and traditions are modelled and passed on (teaching is usually grounded in a mimesis model, rather than by abstract teaching). The arts are full of symbology, multiple levels of significance are expressed through artisanal craft (e.g., self‐healing by mending broken porcelain, kintsugi, or through the various Japanese purification practices, with purity having resonances on many levels). The practices are full of indirect and nonverbal communication, nonobvious semantic resonances and the expression of emotions through codified systems of associative poetic meanings (overwhelmingly, through reference to the seasons and nature (Shirane 2012)).

With all the deeper meanings and self‐perfective aspects embedded in the Japanese arts, it should not be forgotten such crafts often generate beautiful end‐products of simple elegance (say, in calligraphy, or poetry, architecture, garden design, and so on). That is, on the simplest level, these arts are actually productive of beautiful artefacts, or, in the case of the more physical arts, provide physical training, body sensitivity, and mental mastery whose performance is designed to have aesthetically‐pleasing qualities. It is not at all inconsequential that the arts produce goods of concrete worth. Even the products have a spiritual dimension. The concrete products of the Japanese arts are explicitly intended to be extensions of the mind of the artist. Artistic products are intended to be models by which one might enter into, and even participate in the state of mind of the artist or creator. This is particularly so with Zen‐garden design—as Masuno Shunmyo, Zen monk and famed landscape garden designer, asserts: “Zazen, cannot be seen, but when one expresses Zen in a tangible form, a model of Zen is created … in the silence of the garden, people experience their selves” [2018)). Thus, even the concrete product of the arts is as much imbued with spiritual significance as the practice itself. ^iv

This holistic character of meditation‐in‐action, the dissolution of the sense of separateness between person and world (in this case, a certain dissolution between the artist and the artistic creation, between the observer of the art and the art itself, thus between artist and observer) are all part of the larger spiritual work being performed by engaging in the practices.

D. T. Suzuki is one of many Zen scholars to have pointed to the powerful connection between Zen Buddhism and the Japanese arts, the metaphysics and the aesthetic values, which seem to have found a mutually supporting home with one another for many centuries. Suzuki points to the seemingly preternatural fit between the spiritual in Zen and Japanese aesthetics. While other forms of Buddhism more or less limited their sphere to the spiritual life of the Japanese people, Suzuki asserts, Zen entered into every phase of their cultural life (Suzuki 1972, 25). Though Suzuki overstates his case at times, his outline of the connection between Zen metaphysics and Japanese aesthetics is striking. Suzuki gives an example of the Kamakura‐era importation of Song dynasty painting to Zen and Japanese culture:

Among things which strongly characterise Japanese artistic talent we may mention the so‐called “one corner style” … [this is] psychologically associated with the Japanese painters’ so‐called “thrifty” brush tradition of retaining the least possible number of lines or strokes which go to represent forms on silk or paper. … A simple fishing boat in the midst of the rippling waters is enough to awaken in the mind of the beholder a sense of the vastness of the sea, and at the same time of peace and contentment, the Zen sense of the alone. Apparently, the boat floats helplessly. … But, this very helplessness is the virtue of the fishing canoe. In contrast with which we feel the incomprehensibility of the absolute encompassing the boat and all the world. Again, a solitary bird on a dead branch, in which not a line, not a shade is wasted, is enough to show us the loneliness of autumn … It makes one feel somewhat pensive, but it gives one opportunity to withdraw the attention towards the inner life which, given attention enough, spreads out its rich treasures ungrudgingly before the eyes. Here we have an appreciation of transcendental aloofness in the midst of multiplicities. (Suzuki 1972, 26)

These points begin to touch on that untranslatable Japanese aesthetic wabi sabi, the deep sense of the perfection of imperfection, that appreciation for the rustic, simple, melancholic, solitary, passing, aged, semi‐broken, asymmetrical and otherwise imperfect (though, perhaps, this appreciative sense is not too far from that romantic sense of the love of semi‐decay which has drawn so many artists and poets to Venice).

Granted, values, aesthetics, and philosophy are embedded into the rituals making up the various arts, and are expressed through the physical enactment of the craft—but, in what ways can practicing these rituals genuinely change the way one is situated in the world? How is the change in embodiment brought into effect? Following Robert E Carter's (2008) work on the Japanese arts as modes of self‐transformation, the overarching goal of the artistic ways—dō (way, or path)—is to produce a distinct kind of “bodymind integration” (Carter 2008, 13). It is here that the discussion most closely connects with mindfulness as a practice. All of the Japanese dō, one way or another, involve a kind of synchronization of the mind and body through a keen but soft attention. Here, one needs to be careful when using the word mind. As Carter asserts, the mind is not generally located in the head in dō culture. Rather, the mind is generally considered to be a whole‐body faculty (in its original state, at least—though, if it is to be located anywhere, that is generally somewhere around the navel, where one's core life‐energy (ki) is thought to be pooled).

One of the central functions of the dō, is to recover the original connectedness between mind and body by forming extended habits of rooting one's attention in one's body, and synchronizing one's attention with one's bodily movements. The increasing unification of mind and body is achieved, not least of all, through by synchronizing the breath with the movements of the body. Over time, this leads to the “experience of the unification of the individual with the greater whole” (Carter 2008, 13). Therein, bodymind has some all‐inclusive sense: an experiential awareness of the oneness of self and other, and of self and universe (Carter 2008, 13) leading to the “sensitization of the practitioner, resulting in the capacity for heartfelt identification with the wonders of existence itself” in all its joy, banality and sorrow. As such, these dō, are meditation‐in‐action, moving meditations. As with mindfulness, the connection (or reconnection) of body and mind, their synchronization through body awareness, promotes a genuinely different quality of embodiment to the everyday habitual state of mind, a different sense of connection with one's world, others and self. ^v

Carter introduces the term bodymind to mark out this integration of attention and the body which is gradually cultivated through ongoing practice of one's dō. A better term might be body‐mind‐practice. It is helpful to draw practice into the definition. The practice is not just a vehicle for achieving mind‐body integration. The practice is not separate from the integration itself. Focusing discussion on attention any more than focusing on the structure seems to miss the point a little, which is precisely aiming towards the integration of attention with the body through action. Such integration might be achieved in pouring tea, mending pottery, drawing the bow, thrusting the staff forward, designing the garden or the building, mixing the ink and dipping the brush in the pot, composing the poem, throwing one's opponent onto the mat, or any of the particular disciplines through which this philosophy is expressed. There is no severing of the practice from the mind and the body at any point. Whether one is writing a poem, or taking a katana out from its sheath, the attention is gentle, it is calm, it is steady. The ritualized actions are extremely repetitive. It is the simplicity and the repetitiveness of the practices that facilitate the lifelong expansion of that state of embodiment into all aspects of one's life. One's whole life becomes a vehicle for expressing that kind of presence, that comportment, and is gradually interwoven with the values imbibed in the practice—ideally, at least.

In sum: these dō teach one how to be in the world, seeing and experiencing oneself in a grounded and integrated manner, emphasizing the experience of connectedness, rather than experiencing oneself as sharply disconnected from one's surroundings, as distant from others and oneself. Carter writes:

By “philosophical understanding” I mean the proper attitudinal stances to be taken in the living of one's life and in the religious practices that are meant to lead to self‐transformation, and ethical teachings concerning how one should relate to other people, to nature, and to the cosmos … … Each of the arts is a pathway, a road, which is what dō means … it also signifies a way of life … None of these is to be understood and undertaken merely as entertainment or distraction: they are all ways of self‐development, leading to a transformation of who the person is. In short, each of these arts, if seriously engaged in, is itself enlightenment in some form. (Carter 2008, 2)

Of course, enlightenment is a highly problematic word. Enlightenment, in this sense, is nothing other than practicing one's ritual, day after day, over the course of one's life. Whatever fruits do arise, it is the regularity of practice, one's consistent presence and awareness whilst practicing, that are central to the self‐cultivation being brought about. Such fruits gradually emerge over the lifetime as the practice and structure seep into the bones. For those with the dedication to pursue a practice with such diligence and seriousness of purpose, enlightenment is to be found directly in the practicing itself. Indeed, Sōtō Zen, which is the primary Buddhist framework referred to in this article, is less concerned with enlightenment as an epiphany‐type experience (satori or kenshō), or sudden awakening, and is more concerned with just carrying on with one's practice in all weathers. That is much closer to the idea of enlightenment expressed here as ritual in the Japanese arts.

Enlightenment, if one wishes to use the word, is nothing but the practicing itself. ^vi Moreover, if some exotic spiritual experience is what one is really chasing after, some state of flow, some grand peak moment, some unitive experience, there is no real difference between such seeking after enlightenment and any of the various daily distractions one might engage in so as to lose oneself. Such distractions, when taken too far (as Kierkegaard observed), are more likely forms of spiritual despair, ways of actually blotting out a spiritual calling by overfilling one's time, than structured paths for a slowly unfolding spiritual awareness through ethical bodymind integration. It is exactly to counter the blotting effects of such excessive busy‐ness and distraction that the Japanese arts emphasize the value of negative space, of emptiness, of blankness—it is as if such spaces expose the self in its nakedness, offering it no hiding place, forcing one to see exactly what is there. Certainly, this is one aim with zazen (sitting meditation) and the torturous monastic imperative to sit, facing a wall, quietly attending to what passes within oneself, unminding it for sometimes more than eight hours a day. ^vii

Finally, it is important to highlight some problems with contemporary discourse on mindfulness which presents the practice as intrinsically generative of a sense of goodness and connection with others, of gentleness and care. It is easy to get swept up in such cosmic enthusiasm, and much mindfulness discourse effuses some profoundly world salvatory flavor. Yet, this salvatory edge, as if merely practicing mindfulness were sufficient to make one a gentle and compassionate individual, is a deeply problematic falsehood not at all borne out by the facts. Compassion (karuna) meditation is a separate and distinct meditation all of its own. As Hofmann et al. write:

Whereas other types of mindfulness meditation encourage nonjudgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment by focusing on bodily or other sensorial experience, affective states, thoughts, or images, Compassion Meditation focuses awareness upon alleviation of the suffering of all sentient beings. (Hofmann et al. 2011, 1127)

While serious work in mindfulness continues, the more faddish aspects of interest in mindfulness on the part of Western psychology are now shifting to explore the benefits of compassion and loving kindness meditation, which are quickly becoming the new positive psychology self‐improvement bandwagons of choice.

Indeed, mindfulness, structured or otherwise, offers no guarantees for moral behavior, goodness, care, or connection. Mindfulness has no intrinsic moral component whatsoever (other than what happens to spontaneously bubble up as part of the practice). Even with structure and moral teaching, per the meditative traditions one finds in genuine Buddhist traditions, there is still no guarantee of moral perfection. This is testified to by the many accounts of institutional Zen Buddhism's strong and consistent support for militarism and imperial domination of Asia throughout World War II. As Brian Victoria (a Zen Sōtō priest) observed: “Zen served as a powerful foundation for the fanatical and suicidal spirit displayed by the imperial Japanese military” (Victoria 2006, iii). ^viii The intimate connection between samurai warrior bushidō, warfare (note: warfare is also a dō), and Zen was mentioned above. But the connection between Buddhism and violence is not just a Japanese phenomenon. An account of institutional Buddhist atrocity can be found in James Jones 2008 text Blood That Cries Out from the Earth. This is not a point about individual weaknesses, the failures of individual practitioners, or any particular individual mindfulness guru (as if such individual offenders are merely outliers, cynically betraying an otherwise universally efficacious Dharma). Rather, the point is that even with a moral structure (and sometimes because of it), the state of mindful, calm presence in the world can be turned into an instrument for callous and brutal harm enacted on some great scale. Mindfulness in itself cannot be considered morally productive in some magical or easy sense, and even with structure and time, a threat of distorted practice constantly looms.

Kyūdō (Japanese Archery) and “Effortless Effort”

In modern Kyūdō, … although every movement and element of the shooting offered an opportunity for self‐examination and relationship, it is however, the release [of the arrow] in which this is most evident … Any imbalance of power through gripping in either hand, or a collapsing of this tension will result in an unsatisfactory release that will affect the flight of the arrow. The moment before the release is the time to realise the balance of body, bow and spirit, and to allow negative feelings and disturbing thoughts to disperse. (O'Brien 2003, 4)

It will be helpful to contextualize the points made above in the light of a particular dō. Kyūdō is the art of Japanese archery. According to the main UK Kyūdō body, “‘The Way of the Bow’, is a traditional discipline that uses the art of shooting a Japanese bow for cultivating body and mind” (, emphasis added). The cultivation of body and mind is an explicit part of the discipline, one of the primary reasons for taking up the art. Yet, the spiritual aspects of Kyūdō are a relatively recent development. When the bow became obsolete as a weapon in Japan, its use was retained for competitive displays, for ritual ceremony and performance, and also as a way of cultivating excellence of technique (O'Brien 2003). It was only in the early twentieth century that Kyūdō was developed by Awa Kenzō into a vehicle for moral and spiritual training explicitly aimed at attaining “transcendent experience” (O'Brien 2003).

Kyūdō has become notorious in its association with Zen practice through Eugen Herrigel's famous book Zen in the Art of Archery (1948), generally credited with introducing Zen Buddhism to the West. This notoriety has led to the impression that archery and Zen have been conjoined since time immemorial. The irony is that Herrigel's teacher, Awa, the radical innovator of Kyūdō, was not a Zen Buddhist at all, and if anything was rather suspicious of Zen Buddhism. Kyūdō had no history at that point of contemplative self‐development nor any intrinsic connection with Zen. The connection between Zen and archery is one of those great pregnant errors which has been so creative and generative in advancing both disciplines. Because of Herrigel's poor Japanese language skills, mistranslation, and romantic projection (i.e., based on complete misunderstanding, Yamada 2001), archery has today become a paradigm Zen meditation‐in‐action art. The myth created the reality after itself.

For purposes of this article, Kyūdō helps one elaborate on the temporal element of the arts, the need for time, lengthy practice. The dō are ways of mastery. Cast in terms of mastery, one understands why the question of time cannot be separated from the question of spiritual unfolding. By looking at spiritual intelligence as requiring not just ritual, but mastery, one sees the need for a great deal of perseverance, discipline and consistency in one's practice. This lengthy temporal aspect of mastery is often obfuscated in popular literature through misunderstood concepts of naturalness, nondoing, noncontrivance, and effortlessness. Kyūdō helps clarify the relationship between mastery and effortlessness in the spiritual life. In Kyūdō, the highest ideal of mastery is a combination of technical excellence (hardwired through decades of practice), expressed through a mind‐body attention which makes possible the compression of one's entire being into a single, perfectly executed shot. Liam O'Brien, founder of the London Kyūdō Society, writes:

… the romantic mystical notion of Kyūdō sometimes gives the idea that you do not need to hit the target, or implies that it is hit by some mysterious process that happens without the struggle or effort of proper training … Training is the foundation of all of this. While the teacher pushes you when you are lazy, or avoiding yourself … the practice is the real teacher in which the truth of “seisha seishu” [one shot, one life] exists. ^ix Without the daily repetition of giving in to the practice, and confronting ourselves, then nothing is realised. But no one can do this for us. Only our own effort and perseverance can make this possible. (O'Brien 2003, 4, emphases added)

The kind of mastery that is needed is systematically, even programmatically, set down as a path of mastery into a series of grades, or ranks, through which one must pass through slowly, and with ever increasing scrupulousness. There is no shortcut to mastery here, no easy way to the top of the mountain. One cannot skip purgatory, as it were, and jump straight to heaven. There is a process: old habits need to be brought to light, they need to be pruned away, new habits need to be formed, and then, after a great deal of habituation, one slowly ascends towards mastery. “Effortless action” (O'Brien 2003) is not some lazy spontaneity, but the culmination of all this stripping down and building back up.

The sort of mastery involved in the martial arts, much like the system of grades in learning a musical instrument, is explicitly designed to take at least a decade to complete. It is systematic, and purposefully designed to slow practitioners down in order that their progress be made thorough, ingrained. This purposeful forcing a practitioner to go slowly is part of the great wisdom of the dō. There is no quick way through. Slow unfolding is the only way. Kyūdō, in locating the moral and spiritual excellence of the practice in the achievement of excellence in the art, absolutely severs any possibility of spiritual gains on the cheap. O'Brien concludes:

The shooting gradually becomes embodied and in the highest level of practice, the presence of an independent agent is not apparent. There is not a person performing the shooting, there is just the shooting itself. This “naturalness” … is the “effortless effort” mentioned by Herrigel in his book. Effort that has nothing added, which is not seeking for anything special. From the viewpoint of the person, this is complete effort with all your heart … Effort without definition – just effort itself. We should remind ourselves that although we seek the profound, it is also the ordinary. In the practice hall there is no philosophy, just training the body and spirit to find its true nature. (O'Brien 2003, 8)

One important insight with spiritual practices, then, is that it matters how one performs them. Practices can be performed superficially and with a poor mind‐set, and likewise, very simple spiritual practices can be performed with heartfelt depth. That sort of engagement is transformative in a positive manner. Yet, it is possible to engage in a range of spiritual practices in ways that either create no substantive change, or worse, which actually serve to further entrench the worse parts of oneself, galvanized through focused attention. Spiritual practices will generally change a person over time, but whether that is for the better or for the worse depends on many things. Again, structure, and at least some moral effort, are at the heart of separating bad practice from good. Having systems of mastery with values embedded in their structure (and, a teacher who can gently push the student against self‐deception), are crucial parts of the spiritually transformative work that is being brought about.

What then, does this picture of dō suggest about spiritual intelligence? Carter asserts: “The arts are designed to lead an individual to realize Buddhahood, or to release one's kami‐nature, the divine potential that is to be found in the depths of each and every individual who cares to discover it” (Carter 2008, 4). A similar idea is suggested by Sister Elaine MacInnes, one of the very few Catholic nuns to have become an authorized Zen teacher (and taught by the famed Zen master, Yamada Roshi). Viewed in the context of the Japanese arts, spiritual intelligence is nothing other than the work of diminishing the control of one's ego‐self over one's life. There is a switch away from the usual surface mind (“small mind” [Suzuki 1970]), such that the underlying, and more expansive “big mind” (Suzuki 1970) becomes more prevalent, the primary grounding force of one's life. Being grounded and settled in this “big mind” facilitates the movement of some deeper force (one's “true nature” [Suzuki 1970, 129]), which begins to work through the practitioner. ^x MacInnes writes:

A mystic is not an esoteric being beyond the clouds of delusion. A mystic can be a neighbor or even an inmate in prison who has experienced the powerful IT to some degree and has been able to faithfully allow IT to take over her or his whole life. Making connections with IT in all of creation. … In Christian terms my spirituality is contained in St. Paul's phrase … “I live now not I but Christ lives within me.” … The inner fires are a source of Power. The well‐known Japanese Ways are concerned with the using of this power, or better stated, allowing the power to act. When this is accomplished, the influence of the aggressive ego is cut down to size … no longer in the driver's seat. This process begins with breath‐awareness [which] paves the way for the spiritual within to return to its original spontaneity … After a deep kenshō [ken: to see, shō: one's nature, essence], which temporarily obliterates the I, the I expands to IT. … I used to feel the word “communion” was apt in describing Zen prayer, but now I feel perhaps “participating” is closer to what is happening. One's whole being is unimpededly infused with the divine power which is constant and everlasting … (MacInnes 2003, 81, 85–86)

It is this gradual, very gradual work of learning to move, not by “ego and muscle,” but by “IT,” by “not‐I” (MacInnes 2003, 81)—the unbounded reality of which we are a part—that best encapsulates the notion of spiritual intelligence that the Japanese arts foster. Spiritual intelligence is a gradual stripping away of the boundedness, allowing one's inborn spiritual fires, which are dynamic, to move. One is to cooperate with, to participate in, to Be this movement as it moves. Spiritual work is learning to let that reality gradually blossom throughout one's life. Spiritual intelligence, in this view, is already right here. Becoming spiritually intelligent is therefore a process of, as MacInnes puts it: “‘giving over’ to the Source of the power that animates all of life” (MacInnes 2003, 8), or, finally, as she cites Meister Eckhart as saying: “in prayer we must do nothing and let God do everything. … That is Zen. Allowing the Prime Mover to work” (MacInnes 2003, 67). The Japanese dō are all vehicles for this, entry‐points, ways of letting more of one's life be expressive of that “giving over.” Some persons are drawn to archery, some are drawn to arranging flowers, some are drawn to calligraphy, and so on. The arts have been developed such that all different characters and natures can enter into, to participate in, this “giving over.” Fundamentally, it is the participating that is the whole of it.

Shugyō (Commitment, and Learning as Deepening)

Shugyō … a term that applies to rigorous, dedicated, long‐term or life‐long practice. … (which) is always a sustained and spiritual undertaking stretching over a lifetime. (Carter 2008, 2)

In these final sections, the aim is to make explicit a profound clash between two fundamentally opposed concepts of spiritual development: first, as a process of ever‐deepening into a given practice (purity); and second, spiritual development as being marked out by creative transformation and renewal (improvisation and innovation). It would not be right to call this a Japan versus the West clash of values (for both cultures have voices for conservatism and innovation), though it is easy to construct the arguments in such a way. In order to grasp the profundity of this clash, however, it is necessary to explain the Japanese term: shugyō.

Shugyō combines two words, shu, discipline or work, and gyō, journey. It is presented as style of learning which relies on dedicated life‐long commitment to a very repetitive training regime. In Japan, this is often contrasted with a Western (so‐called) style of learning: that which is to do with endless accumulation of skills and trivia; achieving targets and quotas; prizing efficiency, brutal competition, a way of learning which is concerned, above all, with winning and dominating one's opponent completely. ^xi This purportedly “Western” approach to learning is conceived as being about learning an excessively wide range of things, which can only be done on a very superficial level, because one is never able to spend a sufficient amount of time with any one subject to go deeply into it.

In contrast, shugyō is a process of learning which is self‐consciously repetitive (like a musician committing to spending hours every day playing the same scales, over and over and over). More importantly, shugyō is self‐consciously selective. The idea with one's discipline is to pick a very narrow selection of practices and to endlessly deepen into them—to endlessly deepen through them, by means of them. Here one gets to the nub of a fundamental difference of ideals of what spiritual deepening consists in. The point with shugyō is purity—it is about the repetition of a set routine, without deviation, leading to an ever‐increasing deepening of the practice into one's bones. This highly selective and highly repetitive approach can be rather difficult for some to comprehend given how extraordinarily restrictive it is. If the aim of the dō is self‐transformation, whose activities contain lessons with broader life‐significance, the point with shugyō (as selectivity and repetition) is to drive those lessons in, and to commit one's life to centring one's entire being around them.

Einstein once quipped that education is what is left over when one has forgotten everything one learned at school. This touches the heart of the ideal of shugyō. Shunryu Suzuki, a Sōtō Zen teacher (not to be confused with D. T. Suzuki, the famed Zen scholar cited above), once likened the transformative aspect of ongoing practice to walking through a mist:

Whatever progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, “Oh, this pace is terrible!” But actually it is not. (Suzuki 1970, 41–42)

One does not get wet all at once, but over time, without even noticing it, one becomes drenched in one's practice. This is the slow approach of Sōtō Zen—persistent practice is constitutive of enlightenment. Spiritual work is not an endpoint, there is not something to be obtained after successfully solving a riddle or a problem, there is not a pay off that one reaches at the end of a particular span, it is not like running a marathon where there is a finishing line to cross at the end. There is no end to the practice, for it is nothing other than a process of lifelong deepening. Spiritual development is an ongoing formative process, a slow deepening, marked out by the tracks and traces left over through commitment to ongoing practice.

So selective and repetitive is the commitment of shugyō that it is exceptionally hard for some to see the value of the approach. One might say that it is one of the aspects of the Japanese arts that genuinely stands out against a modern Western taste. With shugyō one comes up against the ideals of purity of practice: tradition, protocol, accepted ways of doing things, and an extreme conservatism towards one's practices. In the Japanese arts, it is the person that develops, not the art. To the contrary, the art is the backbone, the guarantor, the pathway, through which an individual deepens. Indeed, the static nature of the art is exactly what casts the individual's development into such clear relief.

Purity and Change

The issue of purity (or conservatism) versus innovation in practice raises profound questions about what spiritual deepening really consists in. Is spiritual deepening a matter of extreme commitment to a certain practice and way of doing things (purity)? Or, is spiritual deepening about participating in a dynamic tradition, in which appropriate creative innovation of that tradition is an essential aspect of the spiritual path?

This is one of the core differences between shugyō and accounts of craft‐based practices given by Richard Sennett. One of the greatest satisfactions of craftsmanship, according to Sennett (2008), is the constant pushing of oneself to see what the next step in the craft might be, how to enrich and extend one's craft, one's mastery. The master of the craft is always asking: What next? with regards the art. For the likes of Sennett, it is precisely the flexibility of the craftsman, this openness to learning new ways of achieving the aims of the craft, an openness to new steps of development that constitutes a great deal of personal enrichment involved in craft. The great confidence of the craftsman, according to Sennett, comes in the proven ability to improvise, to overcome difficulties, to see missing pieces, to develop new ways of enriching the practices, new ways of extending the art form.

Notions of purity of practice in shugyō could not be more divorced from this view. The tendency for traditions to develop and be enriched by expansion is seen as the temptation for those who prize purity of practice—a temptation to be avoided at all costs. In talking about Zen practice, Shunryu Suzuki writes as follows (and this is the very first statement of his book, as such the headline point to be understood):

People say that practising Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross‐legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and practice pure in the fundamental sense. … Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life. (Suzuki 1970, 1, emphasis added)

Likewise, Master Eihei Dōgen (thirteenth century founder of the Sōtō Zen sect), writes on sitting meditation (zazen) as follows:

… the meditating of just one person at one time harmonizes with, and is at one with, all forms of being, as it tranquilly permeates all times. Thus, within the inexhaustible phenomenal world, across past, present, and future, the meditator does the unending work of instructing and guiding others in the Way of Buddhas. It is the same practice, in no way different for all, just as it is the same realization and personal certifying by all. (Dōgen 2007, 1253, Shōbōgenzō (on Zazen), 6 [emphasis added])

If one has a view that a certain practice is of universal and singular importance, regardless of time or place, that this certain practice unveils a universal mind, one and the same mind with all persons and at all times, then there is nowhere for the practice to go. If one thinks one already has the whole substance of right practice, perfect and complete, then purity of practice takes on a considerable weight. Once one has it straight that there is a certain way of doing things, then innovation has little place to find root. With zazen, the understanding is that, while time and personal circumstances all do change, the fundamental comportment will always remain the same—being grounded in “big mind.” With sitting meditation there is nothing to change regarding the practice, and every wish to change the practice is a fundamental temptation to be avoided. There is one mind, one experience, one awakening, now and forever.

This is not just a matter of Zen practice, purity is a central value in Japanese culture. O'Brien writes about the path of mastery in Kyūdō:

The process of learning is often seen traditionally in three phases; Shin, Gyo, and So. Shin is the character for Truth which represents the fundamentals and the essence of the practice, and at the Shin level the student must unreservedly copy the fundamentals of form without deviation or personal interpretation. This is essential training of the heart to establish right attitude and remove resistance. We must practice repetitively trying to keep to the established form and in so doing we meet our frustration and desire to do things in our own way. What we are taught are the fundamentals which are also the absolute possibilities of the form, so we continue to seek to make the correct stance, for example, to the end of our lives. Once the practice has become more accepting and more embodied, then the practitioner is as the gyo level, where the form is carried out with some level of naturalness. Following on from this, the ultimate condition of So is the state where the practitioner and form are one. (O'Brien 2003, 8 emphases added)

One cannot just do what one wants in one's practice, one cannot just make it up as one goes along, one cannot improvise, or free‐form, or move in whatever ways the mood takes one. There is a way of doing things that needs to be ingrained without deviation or questioning. One cannot pick and choose the way forward. The wish to do things one's own way is exactly the temptation to be overcome.

Today, bookstores are stacked with shelves of self‐help books on how to master any task in a day or less. YouTube channels promise to help one attain any skill from the comfort of one's bedroom. The wholly social‐interactive nature of the arts is lost thereby. The Japanese arts are social practices, learnt with others, and taught, in person, by someone who has mastered the art. The rigor of the art is lost without a teacher to spot where one is lacking and to push one to excel. The rituals become lax, imprecise. The temptation is always there to take and leave whichever portions one happens to not feel like practicing, or to leave one practice altogether for another when one gets bored.

With spiritual practices, one might observe something akin to the hedonic treadmill (i.e., the idea that one can approach happiness by constantly shifting one's activity, jumping from one pleasurable thing to another the moment one starts getting bored or losing the sense of satisfaction). Likewise, it would be fair to say that modern society offers a spiritual treadmill wherein seekers switch from one spiritual practice to another in a similar manner. One week there is mindfulness, another week is with the Rosary, another week is spent in Ignatian retreat, another week is spent on a shamanic voyage. This sort of impatient restlessness is what shugyō is so helpful for defusing. The insight at the heart of shugyō is that—to some extent—it matters less which particular practice one uses than the level of consistency that is given to the practice. The core insight, again, is time. The benefits of spiritual practices unfold over the course of years. Thus, it is perseverance that means most of all in spiritual practice. On this point, shugyō has things exactly correct with its emphasis on purity. ^xii

We return now, as a point of contrast, to Sennett's (2008) meditations of the artisan in his masterwork The Craftsman. Sennett and the dō converge on many points—they are both absolutely concerned with craft, with time, with mastery, with producing excellent works, with the larger social qualities that craft develops. However, regarding the attitude towards purity, the divide between these two ideals is stark, absolute. Once mastery has been reached, the artist is presented as creatively expansive, as always being open to surprises, open to the pregnant error, open to play, to trying things out, open to new possibilities, open to experimentation, open to getting things wrong, having an attitude which sees that mistakes can be genuinely more instructive than getting things right, that there is endless possibility in a craft for innovation. One might say that repetitive and selective exactitude of shugyō purity is as unthinkable to the advocate of creative transformation, as the reverse is true of the conservative.

These two approaches open up two exactly contrary notions of what spiritual deepening consists in. For one, development comes out of a monogamous commitment to a set path, without deviation, around which one unfolds (again: the person changes, not the art). Here it is precisely the stability of the art that allows the person to change and grow around it, like beans growing up a cane according to their own natural path. Here, one can naturally unfold because the structure one grows around is static, stable, reliable. The path is just a facilitator for that unfolding. For the other ideal, development is expressed in a spirit‐filled creative power of innovation of both art and person. The craft approach can respect tradition, and seeks to find a balance with tradition (there must be aspects of tradition in the crafts—mastery is required, and tradition is exactly that which needs to be mastered). Yet, even where there is a respect for tradition, development involves unfolding beyond the limitations of that tradition. In Sennett's vision of craft, tradition is a moving target to be creatively deepened through time. This is critical to the wellbeing that craft produces in the craftsperson. While there is surprising overlap in the descriptions of wellbeing presented in the Japanese arts and Sennett's account of the craftsperson's wellbeing—both are spoken of as embodying self‐confidence and some preternatural serenity in the practice of their work—for Sennett an essential part of the craftperson's wellbeing arises out of the flexibility, the curiosity, the playfulness and the urge to creatively expand the boundaries of the art being practiced.

Part of the motivation for having a clear, unchanging ritual is that one knows exactly where one stands. One does not need to think about (or worry about) where one is going to be tomorrow, or what to do with the system, or what happens next. All anxiety is removed by having a rigorously patterned system to follow, which, if the attention is in the right place, facilitates the mind's settling down into a state of great calm in its practice. In the Western medieval monastic traditions (and perhaps even into the present), this rigorous order, not unlike a military order, is explicitly purposed to remove the need to think about everyday practicalities. It is difficult, perhaps, for some today to take without great suspicion the idea that one should absolutely surrender one's own opinion and action to one's guru, or master, or spiritual director, rather than relying on some dialogue or inner conviction. Yet, this is exactly the idea that undergirds much of the practices in view here. In having a strict, unyielding order, everyone knows exactly where one is, there is no need to think, no need for anxiety, one simply follows the path, the same path as those before one, and the same path as those to follow. One does so unto death. Part of the value of such repetition is that one has felt sense that one is participating in the very same practice, com'era, as it was, as the respected elders or originators of the tradition. It is a similar inclination that leads pilgrims to holy sites, for example. There is something visceral in being present in a place touched by a venerated person, to step where a holy person stepped, where that person sat and spoke and taught. Likewise, there is something visceral in keeping as close to the original purity of a practice as possible. To practice the Tea ceremony today is to perform in the manner Sen Rikyu did. One is performing the ritual following the steps he laid out.

Yet, this lack of anxiety is what removes so much surprise too—and, surprise can be at the heart of the spiritual life. Repetition and routine may remove the worry of wondering what comes next but, for the likes of Sennett, it is the as‐yet‐unknown creative next moves that matter so much. In Sennett's account, part of the supreme value of craft resides in the surprise. To use Rowan William's terms: practice involves a “non‐identical repetition” (Williams 2014, 84) wherein each and every run‐through of one's practice is ever so slightly different, and always informed by what passed, by what is perceived to be coming, by what is going on in the life of the person practicing. By being rooted in the tradition and practicing it faithfully, the tradition gradually expands, there emerges a gradual elaboration of practice out from itself as each next step in the progression emerges in the practice of the craft. Creativity, in this view, never exists outside a tradition, neither does originality. Creativity is a case of working faithfully within a tradition and allowing something to emerge, seeing the next step, seeing what is implicit in that practice, and moving the conversation along.

While Sennett is not necessarily spiritual in his outlook, much the same propositions—spiritually expressed—can be found in Margaret Masterman's Religious Explorations (1989) which really helps highlight the striking, even tectonic, conflict between notions of spiritual deepening at play in this article. Masterman expresses a savage and absolutely critical horror of the monastic life as an expression of a dead contemplative existence. Masterman is vehement that contemplative existence should always involve some self‐critical analysis, should always be a process of rebirthing, re‐self‐chrysalising, moving rhythmically forward (Masterman writes: “the genius of Catholic Christianity is in the level at which it trains its own critics.” (Masterman 1989, v)). Masterman expresses an extreme contempt for the static life of the monastic contemplative, which she describes as “vegetative quietism disguised as contemplation” (Masterman 1989, 5). For Masterman, the Church is supposed to be a “passionistic society” (Masterman 1989, 60, 81), training its members for a mysticism of active risk and redemptive suffering. This is a mysticism that manifests a commitment to risk and to the reconstruction of authority, away from “the piety of the in‐group and the incestuous empty prattle of theologians chatting to each other” (Masterman 1989, Emmett and Williams introduction, v, vi‐vii).

For Masterman, contemplation and creative transformation are two aspects of the same infused tendency (ibid 23). The idea of a spiritual practice that merely repeats the same thing over and over again would be, in her view, a completely dead form of contemplation, a perversion of the contemplative life which exactly characterized monastic practice as she saw it. Masterman recognized ritual, but emphasized the need to see contemplation, live and infused contemplation, “as the creating force behind this ritual, giving it life and change, as similarly behind art or science or anything else” (Masterman 1989, 5). Ritual flexibility, adaptivity and innovation (not “stereotypy and fixedness” [Masterman 1989, 5]) are the values here. As Masterman put it: Christian monasticism “can't breathe because it can't change its skin” (Masterman 1989, 5). This is Masterman's emblem for spiritual development, changing one's skin. In this, Masterman regarded scientists as the true inheritors of the contemplative tradition, and exhorted scientists to take what they could from the monastic routine, but only insofar as it allowed them to get in touch with a creative rhythm for potent, life‐giving innovation in their fields.

It is striking that Masterman has not seemed to grasp that monastic rules were never really intended to generate hotbeds of creativity, to be productive of torrents of innovative genius. Because of her commitment to spiritual unfolding as a process of creative transformation and renewal, something she conceived as a revolutionary activity, how could Masterman have grasped the value of the purity in the ritual, cultus and repetition of the monastic life? Of course, she is not wrong—that kind of repetition is not outwardly creative. But does it need to be? The question all depends on what one thinks spiritual deepening is all about—is it a pathway of deepening into a monogamous commitment to a certain routine that one regards as sacred (much like the monastic vow of stability)? Or, is spiritual development shown in the dynamic and creative aspect that it yields? Both are life‐giving in their own way.

One might sum up Masterman's view with the assertion that to improve is to change, to be perfect is changing often. But the issue all hangs on what exactly one means by change—continually deepening in one's faith through singular unchanging practice is change indeed, a change in depth, but it is not necessarily the sort of gilded, obvious change that is particularly noticeable or liable to bring one notice, praise, money or esteem for creative genius. This deepening is not always visible, nor is it intended to produce colorful fruit. The fruits of this tree of simple repetition are a certain kind of intense depth which can only arise through being incredibly selective and perseveringly monogamous. Because of her commitment to revolutionary spirituality, that is the point that Masterman did not really grasp. Again, she is not wrong with her analysis of dead contemplation, but at the same time she did misapprehend and misjudge the value of monastic contemplative deepening. Indeed, in following the simplicity of repetition one might actually be practicing more of that which one preaches, coming a little closer to embodying the heart of one's faith. Perhaps that is an insight even more revolutionary than the urge for constant innovation.

It is one of the great ironies that Japanese culture, which so prizes mono no aware (the poignant sense of the transiency of all things), ^xiii should be so static in the purity of its rituals. The irony is that Masterman inherits a metaphysic of universality and timelessness, which she opposes through a praxis of process, dynamism and development; instead, the Japanese arts have a metaphysic of impermanence, transience, and change, but then try to impose a praxis of the static, a remorselessly strict set of protocols from which no deviation is accepted.

Needless to say, one is talking about ideals here. In reality, the Japanese arts are not static, no matter what the ideal is. In reality, these arts are in the process of cultural dialogue all the time (whether it is admitted or not). The point is really about a choice between which ideal of spiritual progress one seeks to cleave to. In effect, what we have here is a basic existential choice in one's craft.

One final question: is that kind of purity workable, even acceptable, in a multicultural world, a world in collision, a world of pluralism, a world of technological advances in communication, cyberspace, one in which dialogue and juxtaposition is always going on? Is purity even possible in the current world of dialogue—is not the very nature of dialogue disruptive, creative? Extreme purity may not even be a choice in a realistic picture of the contemporary agora (Traboulsi [2016] raises similar points with respect to the Eastern Orthodox church and its conservative rejection of modern technologies, like digital icons). One is in a digital era, a pluralistic age, a world of communication. It may simply be impossible to keep to any ideal of purity in the conservative sense without erecting a fortress around oneself. The suggestion has to be that such conservatism is not only unworkable, but in a way impossible—the zeitgeist is against it. Even if purity did offer a superior model of spiritual deepening, ever‐deepening into a monogamous commitment to a revered routine, such monolithic purity is no longer sustainable.

Traditions change—and with them there is a loss of the implicit cultural information packed into those traditions. That is unfortunate, but, as Traboulsi (2016) remarks, one no longer uses horse and cart for transportation, one no longer writes on scrolls. If one cleaves to purity and conservatism above all, then it is impossible to meet the needs and spirit of the world in which we live. What this means for monastic stability and repetition is an open question. ^xiv