To remind people of the creative, compassionate and cooperative, world-enhancing consequences of true, self-love.
As some of you will know, recently I started a small online group, to give people the opportunity to explore and take forward the work of Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei (1881-1988) who was a both an educator and an advocate of something he called “jiyū shūkyō” (自由宗教); a term which needs to be discursively translated into English as something like “a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion and spirituality.”
[NB: This necessary, but lengthy, definition is the reason I continue to encourage people, after learning the definition, then simply to use term “jiyū shūkyō” in the hope that, eventually, a new, and to my mind, much needed, term can be introduced into the vocabulary of English-speaking religion and spirituality. It’s be done successfully with terms like “Karma” (Sanskrit), “Zen” (Japanese), “Nirvana” (Sanskrit), “Tao” (Chinese), “Yoga” (Sanskrit), “Dharma” (Sanskrit), “Mantra” (Sanskrit), “Kabbalah” (Hebrew), “Sharia” (Arabic), “Jihad” (Arabic), “Avatar” (Sanskrit), “Buddha” (Sanskit), “Bodhisattva” (Sanskrit) and “Ashram” (Sanskrit), so I see no reason why it cannot be done with “jiyū shūkyō” once, of course, we have learnt that it means, all at the same time, “a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion and spirituality.”]
Now, one of the most easily accessible ways Imaoka-sensei attempted to further elucidate in what consists jiyū shūkyō was through his yearly explorations of what he called his “Principles of Living,” some versions of which we have been exploring together in the Cambridge Unitarian Church.
Given that jiyū shūkyō is a form of liberal, free-thinking, it should come as no surprise that the “Principles of Living” begins with an expression of faith in the individual. And, as some of you will know, the first of Imaoka-sensei’s 1973 “Principles of Living” reads as follows:
“I have faith in myself. I recognize my own subjectivity (主体性) and creativity (創造性) and feel the worth of living in life (生きがい ikigai). Subjectivity and creativity can be rephrased as personality, divinity, and Buddha-nature.”
In 1981, he revises this to include the category of sociability and his first principle came to be expressed as follows:
“I affirm (言ずる ta-sha) myself. I am aware of my own subjectivity (主体性), creativity (創造性) and sociability (社会性), and feel the worth of living in life (生きがい ikigai) through them. Subjectivity, creativity and sociability can also be referred to as personality, divinity, and Buddha-nature, respectively.”
But, as I hope we are all increasingly becoming aware, there has come to exist in our world forms of liberal — really libertarian — free thinking that are profoundly solipsistic and sociopathic. The primary and dominant expression of this is seen in the destructive and selfish actions of individuals and institutions committed to neoliberalism, the late-capitalist doctrine that, catastrophically, continues to shape — or rather, disfigure — our modern world.
Now it seems to me that one, serious, consequence of the slow waking-up to the horrors of the neoliberal self, at least in the UK, is that some people within the liberal political and religious tradition who are passionate about affirming the importance of the
love of neighbour and the need to build an ever more loving and
compassionate cooperative society — and who might, therefore, be interested in the basic ideas of jiyū shūkyō — have become very, very uncomfortable with the idea that to bring these things about we must begin with faith in, and a love of, oneself.
But, without the right kind of self-love in play in our world, a genuine love of others and the creation of a cooperative society is simply impossible. So one vital task facing us as advocates and practitioners of jiyū shūkyō — jiyū shūkyōjin (自由宗教人) — is to find appropriate, and profoundly non-neoliberal ways, to help all of us begin again to love ourselves.
We can begin by recalling, firstly, that Jesus, quoting a central text from his own Jewish tradition (Leviticus 19:18), taught us that we must love our neighbour as ourselves (Mark 12:31) and that this was one of the fundamental ways we were to express our love for God, which was the name Jesus gave to the divine, sacred and natural light that is in everyone and everything. We may also call it, as did Imaoka-sensei in his “Principles of Living,” Buddha nature.
We can also point to Thich Nhat Hanh’s important Zen Buddhist teaching found in his book about “Anger”:
“Self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person. If you don’t take good care of yourself, if you are not happy, if you are not peaceful, you cannot make the other person happy. You cannot help the other person; you cannot love. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself, for taking care of yourself” (Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger, Ebury Publishing, 2011, p. 40).
These examples help, I think, to illustrate why faith in, and the affirmation of, the self always-already has an immediate and inevitable consequence because, as the Japanese philosopher Wakimoto Tsuneya (脇本 平也 1921-2008) observed whilst interviewing Imaoka-sensei in 1974 for the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), since this subjectivity and creativity of the self, or the Buddha-nature, is universal, naturally, Imaoka-sensei’s second principle, ‘I have faith in my neighbour,’ and his third, ‘I have faith in the cooperative society,’ emerge. In other words, one has faith in the ‘self’ within the neighbour, and the ‘self’ within the cooperative society.
So, we can see that for Imaoka-sensei, and any jiyū shūkyōjin, i.e. any practitioner of jiyū shūkyō, a love of self is always-already, simultaneously, a love of others and the cooperative society; a love of others is always-already, simultaneously, a love of self and the cooperative society; and a love of the cooperative society is always-already, simultaneously, a love of self and others. And, of course, this affirmation of the trinity of self, others and cooperative society is always-already, simultaneously, an affirmation of the unity of all things, what Imaoka-sensei came to call a “universal cooperative society” (宇宙的共同社会 uchūteki kyōdō shakai). It’s vital fully to realise that none of these four things can be understood to stand apart from the others and that, together, they form an indissoluble quaternity.
Now, for me, one of many practical consequences of this is that, if we truly want to play our own peaceful part in bringing about the end of the world-destroying, neoliberal era, then one, assuredly good way to affect this is to become a jiyū shūkyōjin and to dedicate our lives to offering people as many examples as possible of the creative, compassionate and cooperative, world-enhancing consequences of true, self-love.
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