"In all their glory, orchids bloom, under the daytime star so clear, mushrooms spring from the earth in bloom.”
kyosi Takahama
Living organisms have evolved to perceive and adapt to various noises and information from the environment on Earth through their nervous systems and the five senses. Amoebas perceive and respond to pleasure and discomfort by approaching or distancing themselves from stimuli. Frogs perceive the world as being composed of rapidly moving shadows and instinctively catch prey or leap accordingly. As mammals, they recognize objects existing in space and act accordingly to feed and live. Herbivores move in search of food, plants or fodder, while carnivores move and hunt for those herbivores.
humans and their primate counterparts, such gorillas, lived in the forests like their companions in the African savanna.While spatial awareness was well developed,the concept of time did not exist.To adapt to new environments outside of the African savanna ,Homo sapiens, human developed language.
Language cuts, fits, and organizes the world, allowing us to create infinite new things through the use of metaphors. This symbolic manipulation gave birth to a cosmology with space and time. Humans began to construct time in the same way they do with space, enabling them to reference the past, anticipate the future, and acquire the ability to prepare for it. The capacity to abstractly recall and conceptualize events that have never occurred, treating them as if they were real experiences, enabled the creation of the future.
This extends to imagining oneself in a world beyond one's own existence. Contemplating one's family after death, considering how one will be evaluated or whether they will be held in esteem, gives rise to a perspective on life and death. Death is seen as the soul departing the body and being reborn in another world. Eventually, it becomes evident that one's body is not solely their own. It is connected to the deceased and the remaining individuals. This connection is fostered through practices like lighting fires during the Bon Festival, and the narrative of reincarnation and the cycle of life emerges.
Moreover, humans gain the ability to imagine, understand, and empathize with others and treat them with the same consideration as themselves.
For humanity, the initial cosmology perceived time as an infinite cycle of interconnectedness, repetitions, and patterns. The entire world was seen as a small, enclosed space where events were perceived to rhythmically repeat and recur. During the Jomon period, a life dominated by hunting, characterized by instability, solitude, and dependence on chance, gave rise to a worldview governed by this perception. When faced with unsolvable problems, narratives and rituals were born to make them comprehensible and provide solutions.
In this Jomon period's mystical worldview, everything possessed spirits that governed the world. Within this world governed by spirits, magic was employed through rituals to imbue prey with supernatural powers, attracting and capturing them for sustenance through hunting. After the hunt, efforts were made to appease the spirits of the slain animals, seeking protection from their vengeance and praying for blessings to ensure success in future hunts.
This practice persisted until recently in the Ainu bear festival. Participants would sing and dance, performing a dance that symbolized the killing of a bear. They would actually strangle and kill a bear, then worship its spirit, offering gratitude, solace, and ultimately consuming its meat. This ceremony, known as "Iyomante," remained a sacred ritual until recent times. In Ainu society, bears were considered both primary deities and a vital food source, while also being formidable creatures that could pose a threat to humans. The act of killing the bear, consuming its meat, and comforting its spirit encompassed the paradoxical nature of this relationship, bringing a sense of tranquility to the conflicting emotions through the practice of magic and ritual.
Language, once it emerged, shaped the world in which we reside through its symbolic function. The concept of the "real world" is constructed based on the linguistic customs of a particular community. During the Jomon period, as seen in present-day Papua New Guinea, language varied from region to region and was not unified as Japanese. Language not only serves as a means to express the external world and transmit information through words but also plays a role in metonymy, where the original meaning is replaced by a different concept within the same language.
It is through this linguistic ability in human beings that art emerged alongside magic. Jomon pottery, which served as artistic creations of that era, was not characterized by small and harmonious styles. Instead, it exhibited asymmetry, dynamic patterns, and a three-dimensional composition, going beyond flatness. The patterns depicted on the pottery became art imbued with a sense of the magical.
During the Jomon period, which lasted for over ten thousand years, people looked up at the stars and moon in the sky and lived surrounded by the forests of Jomon. They relied on hunting and gathering for their livelihoods, and in coastal regions, they thrived on the abundant resources from the sea. They worshipped the moon in nature, revered living creatures, and shaped their way of life based on an understanding of the animistic world. The practice of magic, aimed at harmonizing the conflicts between the celestial and earthly realms, as well as the creation of monumental artworks, played significant roles in their lives.
In the Japanese archipelago, the culture of the Jomon period, with its ritual system, encountered a new influx of people, the Yayoi, from the continent, who brought with them the use of Chinese characters. People migrated to the Japanese archipelago through various routes. Subsequently, the introduction of rice cultivation led to the establishment of settled communities, and the scattered populations across Japan eventually coalesced into a unified country. It was within this context that mythology and religion emerged as narratives that bound together the communities.
With the transmission of writing, these communities began recording their traditions and cultures, creating belief systems to preserve and transmit their cultural heritage. Buddhism also arrived, and as the diverse communities across the archipelago became unified, ancient animistic beliefs and magic gradually gave way to the incorporation of religion into society. Over time, within the unique cultural landscape of Japan, Shinto and Buddhism merged, and Confucianism, along with other beliefs, became intertwined and underwent transformations.
In the subsequent history of Japanese religion, Ryunosuke Akutagawa described in "The Smiles of the Gods" that "the political philosophy of Laozi and the teachings of Confucianism, born out of fierce struggles with reality, as well as the teachings of the Buddha on the cyclical nature of rebirth and resignation, and the dream of Christ rejecting reality to pursue eternity—all of these have quietly been absorbed within the beautiful scenery and gentle climate over the course of two thousand years." Thus, the spiritual history of Japan's worldview was born.
As human brains developed, language emerged, allowing us to perceive and understand the world through the power of metaphor. This enabled us to analogize with animals, plants, stones, and nature itself, giving rise to a world of animism where stories, poetry, and art were created. Understanding the world involved embracing an animistic worldview, and the creation of magic, art, and poetry emerged alongside language."One aspect where this remains strongly present today is perhaps in the haiku poetry of the Edo period. In the Manyoshu, there are even instances where snow is described as the incarnation of the ice deity, brought down by a dragon.
However, subsequent tanka poetry tended to depict more realistic human emotions, gradually distancing itself from nature. During the Edo period, the haiku of Basho and Buson, which were unconventional, revived the expression of Japanese animism, asserting that animals, plants, stones, and the sea possess souls, rather than relying on personification.
Buson's haiku"Behold the springtime sea – an endless flow, a ceaseless becoming, ever the same, ever renewed.”
Bashous haiku "The octopus pot, under the summer moon, harbors fleeting dreams – a testament to our transient existence.
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