Things themselves, by their very nature, belong to no one. All things belong to the whole.
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| Tenkō-san’s handwritten characters on the tengai (headscarf) that is worn both in worship and at work at Ittōen, the Garden of the One Light. A circle is drawn in the upper centre (signifying, perhaps, the “One Light” [一燈] of Ittōen [一燈園], or the “returning-to-one” [帰一 kiitsu]), and the characters read, from right to left: 古のこゝ路 この身 こ能くらし 八十八翁 天香 which means, “This heart, this body, this life — 88 year-old man, Tenko (with his monogram/signature).” 古のこゝ路 この身 こ能くらし is written in variant kana characters, and in standard kana characters it reads: このこころ この身 このくらし. My profound thanks to Miki Nakura for writing to Kimura Yayoi-san at Ittōen asking for this explanation of Tenkō-san’s hard to read calligraphy. |
—o0o—
Saying I from Tenkō Nishida-san’s Selflessness
物そのものは本來誰れのものでもない。凡て全體のものである。
Things themselves, by their very nature, belong to no one. All things belong to the whole.
* * *
We live in an age where possession of things is often deemed to be everything, where who we are is defined by what we possess. Of these possessed things, “real estate”—that is to say parcels of land and any associated structures which are the “property” of a person—is often seen as being the most important. Just consider the way Donald Trump looks at the world and sees places like Gaza and Ukraine simply as property, offering mere real estate opportunities for himself, his family and his current political “friends.” But, originally, the word “property” referred to something way more fundamental, namely, to those things which are possessed by all human beings, regardless of their social status and whether or not they owned land and buildings. Consequently, fundamental human properties were understood to be things like being able to walk upright, having language, being able to use tools and reason to shape world and the self, having self-awareness, consciousness, being inherently social and communicative, having the capacity for free, responsible action, and so on.
However, I hope you can immediately see that it would be very strange to talk about “possessing” these fundamental things; as human beings, we don’t really possess these things, instead we are these things. So, although it makes a certain everyday sense to say I possess, say, a bicycle, I am not a bicycle, and I can be fully human without owning a bicycle, but I cannot be fully human without, for example, language.
All well and good, but human beings are not the only things in the world; there are countless other sentient and non-sentient things, each with their own unique properties that they don’t possess, but which make them what they are. This raises the question of whether there is some more fundamental property—in the old sense of the world— that is shared, not simply by human beings, but by all sentient and non-sentient things?
Well, there is an ancient way of thinking that suggests the property shared by all things is that things don’t own anything, but are, in fact, the property of the whole. This is what Tenko-san means when he says:
Things themselves, by their very nature, belong to no one. All things belong to the whole.
This helps us begin to see that our fundamental property as an existing thing is that we have no fundamental properties, possessions, permanent form or self. And the only real “real estate” that exists is the whole cosmos, Great Life, or Great Nature which, of course, belongs to no one because everything belongs to it. These insights about us owning nothing are, of course, famously and explicitly taught by Śākyamuni Buddha, but I also think we can intuit that similar insights lie behind Jesus’ teaching that “whoever wishes to save [their] soul will lose it; but whoever will lose [their] soul for the sake of me and of the good tidings will save it. For what does it profit a [person] to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit [their] soul? (Mark 8:35, trans. David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd edition). Our “soul” is—in this pantheistic understanding of Jesus’ teaching anyway—nothing less than “the whole”, the cosmic cooperative community of all things that has, sometimes, also been called “God”, and who, in their right mind, would want to forfeit that?
And, when one is enlightened by this intuition of owning nothing but of only belonging to the whole and then tries, daily, to live by its One Light, how different the world begins to look, and how different are the possibilities that show up, not only for human life, but for all life on our common home, the planet earth.
Consequently, in the coming week, I think it’s well worth continuing to reflect deeply upon Tenkō Nishida-san’s intuition that:
Things themselves, by their very nature, belong to no one. All things belong to the whole.
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