It is quite cold when I wake up in the morning.
Perhaps feeling the autumn, I suddenly feel lonely before dawn (it happens sometimes) and reread “I, Beautiful Japan” by Yasunari Kawabata (not “To a Beautiful Country,” by the way), which I pick up at such times.
Dogen, Saigyo, Basho, Ikkyu, Myoe, Ryokan, the people mentioned here who embodied the beauty of Japan in words are, if you think about it, mostly Zen monks.
I usually think that it is a wild act to simply say everything in short sentences, but if beauty is transience and fragility, then in the extreme, it becomes “nothingness. In other words, I become one with the heavens by losing myself.
And even that may be “empty. The more we lose our self, the closer we are to beauty. But beauty itself requires someone’s subjectivity to perceive.
As it is, we are taken into a world of absolute contradiction and self-identity.
At the end of losing oneself, one becomes one with the Buddha (Big Mind, Idea). As long as one has oneself, one can only be unhappy. Can we not be happy?
But no matter what we do, we have consciousness. It is there. We do not know why it exists. We have no way of knowing why it exists, and yet it “exists,” which is the source of absolute contradictory self-identity.
Whose consciousness is it? Is it not mine, or is it also the consciousness of Buddha? If so, one is destined to follow, even if unconsciously. What, then, is this Buddha consciousness? Is it true, good, or beautiful?
However, if we are unhappy as long as we have the consciousness of self, then true, good, and beautiful are also the product of unhappiness.
If, on the other hand, we reverse the concept and say that happiness exists only because we are conscious, then truth, goodness, and beauty are also forms of happiness that should be produced.
People can be either unhappy or happy, depending on their choices. And perhaps we are a fragile existence that vacillates between the two.
Is there true beauty or not, is it necessary for life or not? A country where the consciousness that can feel itself as beauty with its whole body remains as a tradition (language), that may be the “Japan” that Mr. Yasunari Kawabata wanted to talk about.
When I woke up after meditating, these idle thoughts came and went one after another.
Identical but different Autumn clouds
