Drifting Smoke from the Cremation Grounds

【光る君へ】第9回 The meaning of "wuwei"

1. The ancient cremation grounds of Toribeno 鳥辺野

Located in Kyoto’s Higashiyama District, Toribe was the designanted place where bodies were disposed in the Heian period. In the Tale of Genji, both Genji’s mother, the Kiritsubo Empress, as well as his first wife Aoi, where cremated here. Seeing the smoke rising from the field was thought to be inauspicious and was mentioned several times in the Tale of Genji.

Perhaps the most famous mention of Toribeno is from Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, which is one of my favorites:

あだし野の露消ゆるときなく、鳥部山の煙立ち去らでのみ、住み果つるならひならば、いかにもののあはれもなからん。世は定めなきこそいみじけれ。

If we were to never fade away like the dews of Adashino or to never dissipate like the drifting smoke of Toribeyama.... but instead lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!— Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness 徒然草

Toribeno still exists —but back in Murasaki Shikibu’s day—at least till the 10th century, the bodies of criminals and the poor were not cremated, but rather were left in the fields to be eaten by birds.

鳥辺野 Toribe be no means “field of birds.”

In the drama, it is here, in the field of birds, where Michinaga and Murasaki Shikibu find Naohide’s dead body, already being pecked at by the crows. The two cannot bear to leave his body exposed in that way—and so they use their hands to dig down into the earth to bury him. This is something that takes many hours— ten, eleven, maybe even twelve hours to dig down deep enough to bury their loved one.

Remember what taboo it was in those days to touch a dead body. So this was an act of great daring and love.

Many years ago, I had the chance to meet the film-maker Lorne Blair in Ubud, Bali. He was in the process of building a gorgeous teak house with a huge pitched roof in a village outside Ubud. The interior was open and airy and everywhere there was art which he had brought back from his travels to remote places. In that beautiful space, we spoke of funerals the entire time. He agreed that remembering the dead is a form of deep reverence for life itself. To mark a life lived and to give voice to the great sadness of those left behind must be one of the most basic human instincts of all.. we discussed the ancient Persian towers of silence-- and, of course, the Tibetan sky burials.

2.

In the drama, Michinaga’s grief is off-scale, partly because he blames himself for his half-brother Naohide’s death. It was an unintended consequence. He was trying to do the opposite, asking the prison guards to go easy on Naohide—but for whatever reason, the bribe resulted in Naohide’s death. I was trying to come up with something from my own life where I was trying to do x but the result was the opposite of x…

Michinaga sobs unconsolably and says, 「余計なことをした！」

Yokei-na-koto means something like doing something unnecessary or meddling… like in this case, handing money to the guard to go light on Naohide’s treatment was mis-interpreted to mean to have him killed.

I am reading Yangsze Choo’s new novel, The Fox Wife—and in the beginning the plot kicks off by the random act of the protagonist buying two geese in the market. She says,

YOU NEVER KNOW how things will work out. The slightest change creates a swirl in the snowstorm of possibilities. Because I decided to buy two nice plump geese, the entire course of my investigation (that sounds so much better than words like “revenge” and “blood debt”) shifted.

Sometimes the smallest actions can have profound —and unintended—effects on our lives. Like stepping into the street at the wrong moment. Or buying two nice plump geese.

3.

When I think of phrases like yokei-na-koto, I try to understand the concept from within a context matrix. In this case, I want tunderstand yokei-na-koto as related to harmony (wa 和) and wuwei (non-action 無為 ).

Wuwei is infamously mis-translated as “non-action.” But that what we now have in English for general consumption. Translator David Hinton has a better explanation of wuwei in his book China Root. He says, “wuwei is not “not acting,” but rather is acting without the identity-center self, or acting with an empty and therefore wild mind.”

More simply but also to the point, Roger Ames translates the term as “non-coercive action.” I think it is up to the English thinker to keep in mind that an action is not coercive is one does not act from the ego—with ego meaning broadly all self-clinging.

When I first came home from Japan, I constantly felt that people here were trying to persuade me of things….endlessly telling me what to think or what I should do or what I should be buying. Always in high persuasion, everyone seemed so confident in their opinions and choices, I thought. In Japan, people hesitate to give advice or worse, to tell people what to do because in theory, by imposing one’s will that is to take responsibility for unintended consequences—

But maybe talk is cheap around here…

The goal of Zen meditation, according to Hinton, is to empty the mind—but that really means to remove or decrease the wall between self and other, inner and outer. Harmony, then, is achieving a better attunement between “self and other” and “inner versus outer.”

He calls the goal of meditation the mirror mind…. which is a wonderful image.

I found this book online by Akira Uenishi, which I now would love to read called, Zen Teachings: Tru to stop doing “yokei na koto” (try to stop all coercive action and unnecessary action based on self-clinging).

植西聰禅の教え 余計なことはやめてみる

Amen!

My essay of David Hinton’s China Root

Wabi Sabi had a lovely post on harmony…she says, harmony was her loadstar word this year. Mine was “peace.”