Cultivating Harmony

子曰：「君子和而不同，小人同而不和。」

1.

Joel M. Hoffman had a wonderful post at Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives about the high price of conflict. He writes:

Confucius is the place to start, with his plea for harmony without conformity:

“Confucius said: A noble person seeks harmony but not conformity. A petty person seeks conformity but not harmony.”

Are you trying to convince people to agree with you (seeking conformity)? If so, stop it. Instead, seek harmony. You gain nothing by trying to get people to agree with you.

His post really resonated with me—as it might with a lot of people this week.

Conflict: it’s even at the heart of modern American fiction conventions.

Sheila Heti, a writer whose books I’ve long wanted to read (!) had this fantastic essay in the Paris Review about Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s new book about writing, The Cobra and the Key. According to Heti, “it is is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it.”

She says:

I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction.

How annoying is that?

As an aside, I am so happy to have my first essay coming out in Lithub in November, and one paragraph in the essay describes a bit about what a toll our culture of conflict has had on me over the past decade. I wrote about how I was diagnosed with an adjustment disorder when I first came home from Japan. In my case that just meant reverse culture shock. I had heard there was such a thing as “reverse culture” shock but mine was off-scale. I found life impossible to deal with and still am not really functioning at a very high level.

In my essay, I recall how in those early years thinking and conversing in English, I constantly felt that people were trying to persuade me of things--endlessly telling me what to think or what I should do or what I should be buying. Everyone in high persuasion mode, so confident of their opinions and choices. In Japan, in my experience people hesitated to give advice let alone tell people what to do, because an imposition of one’s will is an implicit acceptance of responsibility for the consequences. And endless opinions can be exhausting for others, especially when they are not based on a serious understanding of the topic, nor on a commitment to listen!

But maybe another way to say this is that, compared to conversations in Japanese, in English, there seems an obvious lack of reflection. People are less circumspect and loud in their opinions than what I’d grown blissfully used to in Japan.

My Lithub essay is about this and the contemplative life as expressed in Charlotte Wood’s Booker Short-listed novel Stone Yard Devotional and philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s new book, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. (Translated by Daniel Steuer)

Highly recommend both books!

2.

As I wrote about in this post about Daniel Bell’s wonderful memoir Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, in discussing the famous Confucian aphorism at the top, Bell explains the meaning of harmony in China as a balance between differing opinions, not the smothering of differences, which is how it is understood in Japan too. Harmony allows for differing voices as long as the common good takes precedence. This idea of the common good is key. So that suggests that if you believe the common good is at stake, you must speak out —but I would argue that talk is cheap. Or maybe it is meaningless if you are demonizing or mis-representing the other side. No matter what, listening and trying to understand is key to gaining consensus.

和 —which is the character used to write harmony in the aphorism, is pronounced as “wa” in Japanese. So “Wa” means harmony. It is also alternative word for Japan and things Japanese. For example washoku 和食 means Japanese-style food and washiki 和室 means a Japanese-style room, while waka 和歌 a traditional Japanese poem ….

和 can also be pronounced nagomi 和み and nagomi means harmony, balance, agreeableness.

According to Ken Mogi, who wrote a short book on the concept, nagomi is a fundamental Japanese ideal—one that reaches far back into Japanese history— all the way to the kojiki, considered to be the oldest extant literary work in Japan. In the kojiki there is a line citing the spirit of harmony 和譲の精神 as being something to be encouraged by Japanese people.

So, nagomi 和み is an alternative reading of “wa” 和 —which is the first character used to write my son’s name (Kazuya 和弥).

3.

I can't recall now where I originally found this, but several years ago I stumbled on an interesting Japanese translation for the words shalom and salaam.

1) 平和 (対国、対神、対人) ・・・和平、和解 Peace (no conflict; no fighting)

2) 平安 (個人的)・・・平穏、無事、安心、安全 Inner peace and calm; no inner trouble
3) 繁栄 (商業的) Flourishing (business)
4) 健康 (肉体的、精神的) ・・・健全、成熟 Physical health
5) 充足 (生命的) ・・・満足、生きる意欲 Satisfaction, fullness, sufficiency
6) 知恵 (学問的) ・・・悟り、霊的開眼 Enlightenment, wisdom
7) 救い (宗教的) ・・・暗闇から愛の支配へ To be saved (by Love)
8) 勝利 (究極的) ・・・罪と世に対する勝利 Triumph (over evil)

Does shalom and salaam really embody all that the Japanese translator was suggesting above? I have no idea, but the proposed translation really struck me, I felt it captured the wonderfully generous spirit of hospitality that I experienced in the Middle East.

Like the Pax in the Catholic liturgy

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum (The peace of the Lord be with you always)

It is a sign of goodwill for the other. But it is also, I am told, a reminder that we cannot flourish as individuals unless we recognize the humanity in the people around us. Hello, Confucius!

The pax dates to very early times in the Christian church and is an ancient practice informed by the hospitality codes that have such deep roots in the cultures of the Middle East (among other places).

And best of all, it is traditionally delivered with a kiss on the cheek.

Kissu!