We are all manifestations of the Great Spirit, children of God, containing infinite treasures within ourselves . . .
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| Imaoka-sensei, aged 104, still wanting to explore Emerson (click on the photo to enlarge) |
Just a few weeks ago a new biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) by James Marcus called, “Glad to the Brink of Fear,” was published in the UK and, as I write, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy. For those interested in knowing a bit about it, here are links to both the book itself and a couple of podcasts interviews with James Marcus about the book (HERE and HERE).
But, it’s a must-read for me because Emerson was my entry point into the kind of creative, liberating, free and inquiring religious tradition that has sometimes, but not always, been expressed by individuals and communities connected with Unitarian tradition. This latter point is something that Emerson painfully and quickly discovered first-hand after he became a Unitarian minister in 1829. To his dismay, he found it was a religious movement that had become “corpse cold” (his words, not mine!) and, by 1832, he simply had no choice but to leave the ministry and become the freelance essayist and lecturer for which he is most often remembered today. Just before his resignation, he confided to his private journal: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.”
It’s a reminder that Emerson needed — as do both I, and I suspect, you — not the calcified religion of our forebears, but a living and liberating form of religion and spiritual practice, and so he set out to follow his own advice that he gave to ministry students at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, “to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” (see “Divinity School Address”).
This attitude so thrilled his hearers at the time that many of them went on to bring into being, not only a still influential philosophical movement called “Transcendentalism,” but, later on, also something called the “Free Religious Association.”
Anyway, his words thrilled me as a young twenty-year old, and they thrill me still, even though professional ministry can often serve to make me think the thrill is gone . . .
However, fortunately, I was recently viscerally reconnected with this thrill thanks to my research and translation work connected with the key, and quite remarkable, twentieth-century Japanese Yuniterian (sic), Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988). This was because it is so clear just how powerfully he was influenced by Emerson. In fact, the influence upon him was such that he eventually came to be known by some as Japan’s Emerson. And the simplest and most accessible way to indicate to you why Emerson so attracted Imaoka-sensei is by reading this short passage found in a brief talk he gave in 1981 to his own Unitarian Church, the Tokyo Kiitsu Kyōkai, simply called, “Reflections on Emerson.”
“Emerson’s philosophy, born from the concept of the Over-Soul, particularly emphasizes the dignity and independence of the individual, trust in humanity, and the idea of human equality. He believed that we can understand and resonate with the thoughts of ancient sages like Plato, Christ, and Shakespeare because we share the same connection to the Over-Soul of the universe. Just as we all breathe the same air that fills the universe, one person is like an encyclopaedia, containing all the past, present, and future of the world within themselves. Therefore, all humans are dignified and equal. With this awareness, we should honour ourselves and have confidence in ourselves. He said, “To imitate others is suicide. To envy others is ignorance.” I remember being deeply impressed by this during my high school years, and I have never forgotten it. To imitate others is to abandon oneself and become someone else, essentially erasing oneself – it’s suicide. To envy others is not realizing the preciousness within oneself, which is ignorance. We are all manifestations of the Great Spirit, children of God, containing infinite treasures within ourselves. We must awaken to this fact, have confidence in ourselves, strive for self-reliance, independence, the development of our individuality, and the realization of our true selves. We learn from Plato and Christ, but it doesn’t mean we should imitate them. We should seek within ourselves, not externally. Reading books and listening to lectures are indirect methods; they are not the true path to understanding the truth. We must grasp the truth directly through intuition, direct experience, and insight. It’s similar to the enlightenment of Zen. A teacher is necessary, but we must reach enlightenment ourselves, not just by being taught by the teacher. This line of thought was expressed by the famous concept of “Self-Reliance” and personal conviction. However, his writings are not presented logically or systematically but are intuitive, poetic essays. Therefore, he is a philosopher, not in the sense of a logical philosopher, but more of a philosophical poet. His fragments are important, and they can be challenging to understand and to read his writing, one must adopt an experiential and intuitive attitude.”
I strongly resonate with Imaoka-sensei’s words and reading them to you today allows me to point to something that I think it is vitally important to foreground in the midst of my own community’s ongoing consideration and exploration of his ideas about jiyū shūkyō (自由宗教), which can be translated as something like “a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion and spirituality.”
This is because one of the important characteristics of jiyū shūkyō, at least as it is expressed by both Emerson and Imaoka-sensei, is that it does not look to any figure who can be considered foundational in the way, for example, traditional Judaism looks to Abraham, traditional Christianity looks to Jesus, traditional Buddhism looks to Buddha, traditional Islam looks to Muhammad, and so on. It’s vital to understand that this is true also of Emerson and Imaoka-sensei — they are absolutely not to be considered the founders of jiyū shūkyō!
Instead, the practitioner of “a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion or spirituality” (a jiyū shūkyōjin 自由宗教人), is always someone who believes that, in principle, it is possible for everyone, everywhere to experience a direct, creative and liberating existential encounter with God — or if you prefer it, an encounter with the really-real, Buddha Nature, divinity or the Light. Another way Emerson put this was to proclaim very clearly that all people should, and could, find ways to “enjoy an original relation to the universe” (“Nature”).
What this means is that for the jiyū shūkyōjin, all the great spiritual teachers of humankind, such as Abraham, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — and also later figures like Emerson and Imaoka-sensei — all of them were simply the most visible, pre-eminent and admirable examples of people who had enjoyed themselves just such an original relation to the universe.
It’s also important to see that following their profound experiences neither Abraham, nor Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad, ever intended then to go on and found a new religion. No! Not at all! This is because they were, I am sure, jiyū shūkyōjin who only desired that those whom they met could be helped to experience this original relationship to the universe without mediator or veil themselves. Given this, I hope you can see that it is only this original, living relationship with the universe that could ever be considered as being the “founder” of jiyū shūkyō — the kind of free and inquiring religion promoted, at least at its best, by every community belonging to the General Assembly of Unitarian & Free Christian Churches.
But the consequence of this is that, although unlike a traditional religion or spirituality, jiyū shūkyō is never going to give you an easy, off-the-peg religion or spirituality, what it will gift you is a way of continually becoming ever more deeply immersed in the unfolding of the universe with all its ebbs and flows and endless capacity for movement and creative change. Jiyū shūkyō is, therefore, something that we can call a “practice of immersion” in the working of universe that helps us begin to see what Jesus might have been talking about when, as recorded in the oldest extant collection of his sayings, the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 3), he said:
“If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.’”
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