Westernized. It may therefore be a peculiarity of us Japanese to overemphasize the
uniqueness of the so-called Eastern spirituality. Our preoccupation with it is perhaps
only possible on the basis of the partial accommodation of the Japanese consciousness
to the European historical perspective.
It has been hitherto taken for granted that the United States of America is the most
representative country of the West. But when we seriously consider the fact that more
and more Americans become interested in Buddhism and remember the Buddhist
saying that Buddhism is always being transmitted to the East, it becomes less and less
self-evident that America is a Western country. Isn’t America already, geographically
at least, to the east of Japan? And what about Japan? Our country is proud of the
highest level of science and technology, and in international politics we are closely
allied with the countries of the West. Is Japan really an Eastern country? And then
what about the countries of the former Soviet Union? By giving only a little
consideration to these questions we can see that the East and the West are historically
defined entities; that the East and the West are therefore also quite relative.
To what does this awareness lead us? In other words, what would be more reliable
than the East and the West? Perhaps a concept of the world, the universe, or the
cosmos. Our age can be characterized by the growing consciousness of the world as
a whole. Our historical era is in essence cosmological. Despite or because of the
ubiquitous presence of severe collisions we may be, as a matter of fact, suffering from
our still slumbering awareness of the historical process in which we exist, willingly or
not. We can say nowadays that the so-called encounter between the East and the
West is taking place within Buddhism as well as within psychotherapy. No serious
problem of the contemporary world, be it politics or philosophy, can be simply said
to belong to either the East or the West, but must be recognized as a worldwide
problem because it necessarily concerns all the people of the world. In the
confrontation with any problem we already find ourselves permanently connected
with all people in the world, most of whom we do not know personally at all.
Historically speaking, the notion of the world is not new but as old as the history
of humankind, as it is part of our nature. Heidegger (1967) ontologically characterizes
the fundamental condition of human as ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-sein).
However, we must keep in mind that any Heideggerian concept is ontological, not
ontic, that is, not to be naively transferred into the realm of facts historically studied.
The notion of the cosmos played a decisively important role in the lives of the ancients.
The meaning of human existence for them was unthinkable without a reference to
the cosmos, because here the divine, supreme principle was believed to reside. It was
in accordance with the cosmic principle that the ancients measured their own behavior
and judged it as human or not human. Human was any act corresponding to the
cosmic principle, and not human any one going against it. They believed in its
universal validity in terms of their intuitive knowledge transmitted through the
process of tradition. It was an unquestionable presupposition of their lives.
BUDDHISM, RELIGION AND PSYCHOTHERAPY IN THE WORLD TODAY 21