Reading various books by Keiji Iwata, focusing on 'Kami and God: A Journey through the Animistic Universe' - Reading Levi-Strauss's 'Mythologiques' through Deep Semantics (Extra Edition)
For the past few years, I have been thinking about modeling Levi-Strauss's Mythologiques as a movement that separates and connects an eight-term relationship in the form of a 'mandala'.
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When it comes to cultural anthropology and mandalas, one thinks of Keiji Iwata. For example, there are
'Cosmos + Mandala of Asia' (1982) and 'Asian Cosmology' (1989).
From the perspective of mythologiques, I would like to focus on the sun and moon depicted here, the snake and turtle intertwined at the bottom, and the eight-term mandala at the top. The amplitude of the separation and combination of these four 'multiplexed terms' defines the position where the world (this world) settles.
At the beginning of 'Asian Cosmology', Iwata writes as follows.
'We sometimes lose our way in our own place.'
And some people among humanity who have lost their way in their place try to draw a 'worldview.'
'Encountering such a time, our predecessors, and we ourselves, strove to construct a certain, tangible worldview. [...] However, in this case, it was not enough to just make a map of the sea and land. It had to be something that could simultaneously entrust one's heart, or one's very existence itself. An accurate description of the outside world had to be, at the same time, a free expression of one's entire body and entire heart.'
Worldview means not only that which sensory objects are placed at which points of spatial coordinates, but it must also be a model that expresses the state of the 'heart', or rather, the way the 'heart' moves must be.
And this ' heart', the world as a heart, the world that is a heart, the heart that is a world—the mandala is what models these things.
The mandala is an expression of the 'heart', a skillful means that becomes a top-level clue when one tries to know the figure of one's own heart clearly.
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Let us explore where the worldview discussed by Iwata resonates with Levi-Strauss's mythologiques.
Iwata writes the following in 'Kami and God: A Journey through the Animistic Universe'.
'The discovery of Kami, and therefore the discovery of one's own identity, is different from mere surprise. There must be penetrating insight within the surprise.'
Penetrating insight. To look through and perceive. From where, through what, and what are we looking at? Yes, we are looking at 'Kami'. By the way, the difference between the katakana 'Kami' and the kanji '神' is discussed in detail in 'Kami and God', so if you are interested, you should read it.
'For that, one must be able to see the essence of the ethnic worldview that one sensed during the long days of suffering.' essence of the ethnic worldview
Seeing Kami.
It seems that this Kami only emerges on the surface of our consciousness when it is seen through the 'essence of a worldview' and is made transparent by that 'essence of a worldview'.
Let us read what Mr. Iwata writes about 'worldview' here. This is interesting.
“It may sound grandiose to speak of a 'worldview',but one must be well-acquainted with thedualistic worldview as its simplest form—that there is an afterlife alongside this life, a reverse side alongside the front, death within life, or day and night, figure and ground, pattern and non-pattern, phenomena and non-phenomena; one must have these extremely simple yet most fundamental patterns of the world, and aconstant questioningof them.”
The essence of a worldview, in its simplest form, is binary opposition.
This life / Afterlife
Front / Back
Life / Death
Day / Night
Figure / Ground
Pattern / Non-pattern
Phenomena / Non-phenomena
Let us note that these two terms are always 'together,' and that one is included in the other, and the other in the one, mutually encompassing each other. These binary relations are not something where terms that existed separately as individuals in their own right gathered later to form a binary relation.
In other words, these binary relations only stood out as two poles after they began to be distinguished, from a state where there was no distinction.
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First, bring the binary opposition to the surface.
Notice the binary oppositions that emerge unknowingly when you try to speak about yourself, the world around you, things, or others.
And, constantly re-examine this binary opposition.
'Why this binary opposition?'
'Where did this binary opposition come from?'
'Is this the only binary opposition? Are there other possibilities, or not?'
By reversing the movement that attempts to divide the undifferentiated into the differentiated—something like the algorithm of the 'simplest' worldview that emerges as these binary relations—we can imagine and think about a place where the opposing terms are neither separated nor unseparated.
“As long as one has this framework for perceiving the world,one must surely be able tosee throughat once theliving form of the worldwhere,two becomes one and one becomes twowith the same surprise as the discovery of Kami.”
Two becomes one and one becomes two.
That is the 'living' state of the world.
That living movement is usually hidden and made invisible by the static terms fixed at the two poles of binary opposition. However, by vibrating the boundaries of these empirically and sensually solidified binary relations, and by trying to combine them excessively or separate them again, we can begin to think about being one yet two, two yet one, neither one nor two—that is, neither undifferentiated nor differentiated.
From the point where we can think about this state, which is unattainable by either side, we open up an intelligence that can freely re-examine the self-evidence of our own worldview.
And Kami suddenly appears when one looks through this binary opposition.
“The traditional worldviews of various peoples were established through the accumulation of long, long years of experience, but if one strips away all the cultural embellishments, one eventually arrives at the dualistic view mentioned above. Is that not the most fundamental spatial structure of ethnic culture? And because this space exists, Kami sometimes dwells there.”
Assuming that binary oppositions are demarcated, one encounters Kami in the 'between.' Mr. Iwata writes about this using shamanism as an example as follows.
“What is characteristic of shamanism is that the boundary line between the earthly world and the heavenly world, the world of humans and the world of gods, is clearly drawn in advance. It is a strict dualistic world. Therefore, the shaman's intense leap is necessary to break through the framework of that dualistic world arranged vertically.”
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Precisely because it is a dualistic world, divided into two, one becomes able to think and feel that it is 'not divided'—that is, that even though it is divided, it is connected.
That is where one encounters 'Kami'.
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It is a significant thing just to be able to encounter 'Kami,' but Mr. Iwata goes further from here to consider pre-Kami.
If Kami is seen in the 'between' of the binary oppositions that form the basic structure of culture, then pre-Kami is, in other words, a place where these binary oppositions do not yet exist—no, perhaps it would be better to say that there is neither 'yet' nor 'already,' neither 'existence' nor 'non-existence,' but in any case, it is a place where there is no binary opposition (no, since 'existence' and 'non-existence' are also a binary opposition, I must say that it is neither a place where binary opposition exists nor does not exist).
Therefore, there is also 'no' 'between' those two terms there.
“There, a world of pre-Kami opens up. That is not a world of the afterlife versus this world, the next life versus this life, or existence versus non-existence
as viewed by such an observer. [...]”
Here, life/death, the living and the dead, also cannot be completely separated in advance as opposing binary terms.
“The dead do not go to the 'afterlife' on the other side of 'this world.' For the dead, there is no 'this world.' The dead go to the 'afterlife of the afterlife' that transcends 'this world' and the 'afterlife', the 'afterlife of the afterlife'. After that, with the passage of time, they might return to the 'this world of this world'. Both are the same world. There, 'figure' and 'ground' are seen simultaneously. No, they are lived simultaneously. That is the world of pre-Kami.”
The 'afterlife of the afterlife' and the 'this world of this world'
—'figure' and 'ground' are 'lived' simultaneously.
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I recall the words of the 'Sutta Nipata'.
The practitioner who has completely dried up the flowing water current of delusion and left nothing behind, abandons both this world and the next.
Around this part, in the opening 'Chapter of Snakes' of the 'Sutta Nipata', the phrase "abandons both this world and the next" is repeated over and over.
Leaving behind the two extremes.
These two extremes are every possible pair of extremes.
Existence / Non-existence
Difference (distinct) / Identity (same)
Emerging / Vanishing
I am thinking about how even the discrimination = duality = binary opposition, which seems to be the very life of a human being itself, located at the extremely deep level of such a worldview, is unattainable in either aspect.
And from this place where neither is attainable, the oppositional relationship branches out.
Perhaps the Mandala is what expresses the movement where that connection and that separation are neither separated nor unseparated.
That place is 'pre-Kami', and there, every possible Kami appears—a Kami for whom it makes no difference whether one makes the distinction between singular and plural or not.
For those who wish to delve thoroughly into this logic, I recommend reading Kobo Daishi Kukai's 'Unjigi'.
Regarding 'Unjigi', Takashi Shimizu's 'Kukai Theory / Buddhist Theory' is also very helpful.
Now, finally, let me touch upon the relationship between the discussion so far and Levi-Strauss's 'Mythologiques'. Levi-Strauss writes the following at the beginning of 'Mythologiques 1: The Raw and the Cooked'.
"The raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the burnt, etc., are empirically definable distinctions that an ethnographer can observe simply by placing themselves within a specific culture. These distinctions (Note: empirically definable distinctions) become tools of concepts, used to extract various abstract ideas, and furthermore, these ideas can be connected to form propositions. The purpose of this book is to show how that is done."
Making empirically definable distinctions into tools of concepts means, in other words, taking empirical distinctions like the raw and the cooked, and by superimposing them onto the distinctions and oppositions of various other things, it becomes possible to discuss the 'meaning' of those other various distinctions and oppositions (this is what 'forming propositions' refers to).
Thinking of binary oppositional relationships not as things where two independently existing matters happen to be set together, but rather, by thinking of them as something like a shadow where the movement of articulating the two-as-one and one-as-two, which divides while connecting, is wriggling, the thinking of us humans becomes free and flexible.
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In the myths analyzed by Mr. Levi-Strauss in 'Mythologiques,' these very 'Kami'—those that exist in the 'between' of empirical dualities, being both and neither, and those considered creators of the world—appear one after another. Examples of such myth analyses are posted below, so please refer to them.
Now, regarding the movement that Mr. Iwata describes as something that can be schematized as a 'mandala'—separating while connecting, and connecting while separating such oppositional relationships—he writes that this is precisely what brings us 'freedom from the self.'
Freedom from the self.
This is a very important matter.
Especially in cases where the 'self' has become adhered to one side of some ready-made binary opposition, one is compelled to think about becoming free from the self.
Incidentally, Mr. Iwata has also written a book titled 'Freedom from the Self.' I highly recommend it.
'Cosmos + Mandala of Asia', Hizumi-san, who is currently conducting joint research, has attempted a creative 'reading' of this work.
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