Hajime Tanabe who succeeded Nishida’s philosophy and his position in Kyoto University developed his own thoughts on thanatology toward the end of his career. While still studying in Germany, he was interested in Heidegger’s idea of death and had an intention of follow up on it (Heisig, 175). He came to believe that “the philosophy of death” should be the core of philosophy. His “dialectics of death” involves that of dealth-in-life and life-in-death which forms the utmost self-awareness. He takes examples of the Zen samurai ideal (*3) and shows that by the death, “letting go of the self” turns out to be a mediation for coming to the affirmation of a new life (Tanabe: Existenz, Love, and Praxis).Tanabe’s thanatology was heavily influenced by the loss of his beloved wife in 1951. He then began to stress the importance of the fact that the mourned person resuscitates in the self. He states that “if the self dies, the existence bound by love is reborn in the “collaborative existence” beyond life and death and stays there eternally. (Collective work of Hajime Tanabe, Vol.13, p.170-171. Tanabe is said to have made a poem; “My wife who sacrificed her life for me is now living inside of myself for good.” Tanabe’s thoughts on death remind us of the discussion of Freud’s theory of identification where a lost object gets internalized with a new life and becomes a part of the ego of the bereaved.
Note 3 Mortality in
Bushido
Tanabe only passingly mentioned Bushido (“the Way of the Warrior”, Japanese Samurai swordsmanship) in his writing, but it is
worth commenting on in this note. Nothing represents more directly and vividly
the thanatology in Zen context than the one depicted in Bushido. Inazo Nitobe’s
work is a classic and one of the most widely referenced books on this topic
among English literatures（Bushido:The Soul
of Japan,1900）. Nitobe states that Zen is a foremost
teacher of Japanese swordsmanship, and explains its essence: “It furnished a
sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic
composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness
with death”.(Nitobe, emphasis added by this author).
In this context, Hagakure is also a well-known spiritual and practical guide for Samurai warriors, written by an eighteenth-century samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo in the Nabeshima clan in Japan. The book dictates how samurai were expected to conduct themselves, how they were to live and die. While Hagakure was for many years kept only to warrior vassals of the Nabeshima clan, it later came to be popularized as a fundamental textbook of samurai thought. The text illuminates the concept of bushido, including living and dying for bravery and honor which is the essense of Hagakure. (William Scott Wilson has selected and translated here three hundred of the most representative of those texts to create an accessible distillation of this guide for samurai. (The Book of the Samurai, Analects of
Nabeshima or Hagakure
Analects) In the famous opening of
the text, the author refers to bushido as “the Way of death,” a description that
has been interpreted in variously nuanced way, was even used as a way of
rationalizing self-sacrificial war spirit. It is to note, however, bushido as
depicted by Tsunetomo was under the influence of Zen Buddhism, especially
to its concept of muga, the denial or the “death” of the ego.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo (2012) Hagakure: Book of
the Samurai. Shambhala Translation.
