A Transcendent State: How The Traditional Japanese Understood Time

Throughout time, civilizations formed ideas to explain why things are the way they are, and they participated in life according to their conceptions. Over ages and across lands, people have come to a range of conclusions surrounding the existential questions of the universe; sometimes conclusions are gleaned through religious doctrine, and other times they are derived through philosophical reasoning. If one looks through history, major civilizations and religions offer a colorful web of schemas surrounding the world and how it works. This web contains many intersections of ideas in addition to a wealth of contradictions. When one traces their finger across the web, overarching themes arise. Such themes include the shape of time and the relationship between nature (or the cosmos) and humans. Further hindsight analysis brings for other connections; for example, the idea that ancient people lived in order to embody archetypes. While the major civilizations and religions—like the Greeks, Romans, Indians, Chinese, Judeo-Christianity, and Buddhism—contributed important views on these themes, there are a myriad of other past societies with their own modes of thought. One of these more minor civilizations were the Japanese. The Japanese offer an interesting case; an island nation, they enjoyed some geographical isolation from other societies. Still, they experienced influences from outside nations throughout their history. Indeed, upon examination, one discovers a multilayeredness to Japanese views, which is the synthesis of internal tradition and foreign teaching. This essay will explore how the ancient Japanese prior to the Meiji Era viewed time and participated in archetypes. This essay suggests that, unlike most ancient civilizations, the Japanese did not have a cyclical view of time, yet they still embodied the archaic form of participating in archetypes.

How past civilizations view the structure of time is often dichotomized into two views: first, the linear view of time, which is most clearly prominent in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the modern view of time; second, the cyclical view of time, which present in most ancient traditions and many religions; for example, the Indian, Greek, Roman, and Buddhist traditions. The linear view of time expounds, as George Macklin Wilson (1980) describes, that “time is history.” In other words, every temporal moment exits within a single line of time and each moment is in some way unique from all other previous and future moments. Thus, the moment is in and of itself a historical moment, because it will never be repeated. On the other hand, the cyclical view of time broadly asserts that nothing that occurs in the universe is unique; everything has occurred before and will occur again in some archetypal fashion. Cycles may be large in scale or small in scale. For example, in the Indo-Hellenic traditions, there exists a cosmological cycle of the universe and an individual (human) cycle. Additionally, in the Chinese tradition there exists a long-term cultural cycle and a short-term dynastic cycle. These cyclical views of time are generally regarded as how ancient people viewed time.

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Mircea Eliade (1959) argues that the cyclical view of time is the view of the archaic man. Indeed, the cyclical view is evident across many of the major civilizations of the ancient world. According to Eliade, the archaic man’s cyclical view of time is attached to the importance of embodying archetypes and performing rituals. Japan, however, may break this mould somewhat. Evidence suggests that the ancient Japanese view of time did not tend toward a cyclical one. This does not necessarily mean that Japan was not, in the words of Eliade, “archaic”, but it is a curious occurrence that, while so many ancient civilizations had a cyclical conception of time, Japan was not obviously among them. Indeed, in Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, the mentions of Japan, while they do support Eliade’s ideas of the importance of rituals in ancient cultures, do not seem to support the notion that the Japanese had a cyclical view of time. Why this is the case may have many explanations, but one major factor may be the ethnic religion of Japan.

The traditional religion of Japan, Shinto, provides one explanation as to why the ancient Japanese did not have a cyclical view of time. Shintoism was (and is) widely practiced in Japan in ancient times; its influence was so great, it extended to the political sphere. (Wilson 1980) Interestingly, Shintoism—which was founded circa. 500 B.C.—is not mentioned in Eliade’s account of The Myth of the Eternal Return at all. (JTAST 2019) While the omission of Shintoism from Eliade’s text is not by any means proof that the Japanese did not have a cyclical view of time, it does suggest that Shintoism may not have supported his thesis that cyclical time was the time of the archaic man. It is more compelling if one considers that Eliade did not shy away from providing a litany of examples to support his idea that the cyclical view of time was the view of the archaic man (save for the Christian, and, to some extent, the Chinese). In other words, Eliade was not aiming to be laconic, so it seems his omission of Shinto was not in pursuit of an authorial style. In contrast, other ancient religions, like Buddhism and Jainism, are clearly described by Eliade as having cyclical views. These religions believe in individual cycles of rebirth, and they believe in greater cycles of the universe. Shintoism, on the other hand, does not subscribe to any idea of reincarnation nor does it show evidence of belief in a greater cosmological cycle. (Econdolence 2019; Wilson 1980) Shinto, instead, centers upon devotion and interaction with kami, or invisible spiritual energies. While they are not always, kami may be the spirits of ancestors. These spirits, however, are never to be reborn; there is no individual cycle. Death is both an end and not an end, but there is nothing cyclical about death and life in the Shinto view. Additionally, as stated before, there is no concept of a great cycle of the universe in Shintoism, unlike religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which both believe in a cosmological cycle where the universe falls into some sort of destruction or corruption and is subsequently reconstructed or returned to its former goodness. (Cite readings) Shintoism, on the other hand, offers mythology about the creation of Japan; however, it provides no teachings regarding the ending of the cosmos, nor does it suggest that any great temporal cycle of the universe exists. (The Ancient Shinto; Wilson 1980) The absence of individual or cosmological cycles in Japan’s indigenous religion suggests that ancient Japanese did not have a predominantly cyclical view of time.

Although the nature of the Shinto religion suggests that the ancient Japasese did not hold a cyclical view of time, one should not assume that Japan was a society of purely linear views of time, nor that Japan did not fit into Eliade’s thesis that archetypes were of great importance to archaic people. When one thinks of linear time, it is likely that either the Christian tradition of time or the modern view of time comes to mind. For Christianity, time is generally thought of as linear, since the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ is purported to be a completely unique occurrence in all of history. Alternatively, the modern view focuses on the idea that humans are in a continuous state of progress, and, thus, humans are moving along a track of linear time. The ancient Japanese view of time does not match either of these views; instead the Japanese had their own conception of time. According to George Macklin Wilson (1980), for the Japanese “time [was] neither a limiting factor nor an enabling factor.” Indeed, Japan before the Meiji Restoration has been described as possessing a “heavenly time” where “Japan’s spirit moved through time even while it ‘existed’ as time—without conceivable end.” (Wilson 1980; emphasis added) The reason for this idea may be largely due to the creation myths of Japan and the longevity and consistency of the Japanese imperial line. The infusion of the Japanese creation myths into their political state and greater daily life seems to have allowed ancient Japan to exist in a sort of transcendent time. This idea is further supported by the Jinmō shōtō ki, or Record of the Orthodox Succession of Divine Rulers, which was written in the fourteenth century by Kitabatake Chikafusa. It decrees that: Japan is the divine land, the land of the kami. The original heavenly ancestor laid the foundation, and the sun goddess will forever transmit the succession. Only in our country does this situation exist. In other dynasties its like is not to be found. This is why we call it the divine land. (Kitabatake 1965)

This account clearly raises up Japan as a physical entity that is uniquely connected with the divine, spiritual, and transcendent in a way that no other nation enjoys. Furthermore,

Mircea Eliade (1959) suggests that when the archaic man performed archetypal acts, he consciously partook in a transcendent reality. These moments of ritual and archetypal embodiment were the moments which contained meaning for Eliade’s archaic man. Whatever life occurred outside those pockets of time were, according to Eliade, meaningless. The ancient Japanese, however, seemed to never leave their transcendent world. The infusion of Japanese creation myths into Japan's political sphere energized this idea of transcendence. Additionally, Japanese Shinto ascribed to the belief that the visible and invisible (spiritual) worlds did not exist on separate planes, but were intertwined and in coexistence in this world, and spiritual encounters were able to occur ubiquitously (BBC 2011; Wilson 1980). Thus, instead of a collection of discrete archetypal moments, Japan in and of itself was a perpetual archetypal moment. For the Japanese, their land was always in communion with the spiritual and transcendent. In this way, the traditional Japanese were something beyond the framework of the archaic man which Eliade described.

Historically, a cyclical view of time is traceable through many ancient civilizations and religions, and the same groups derived meaning through archetypal acts. The Japanese people prior to the Meiji Era, however, had a unique synthesization of their understanding of time and their place within the universe. The Japanese conception of time was special; it was largely the belief of the archaic Japanese that time was not cyclical; however, it is not enough to conclude that their view of time was, then, purely linear by default. Indeed, the Japanese had an air of existing in a transcendent time unique to their nation, which was initiated by the gods of creation. Such a transcendent state suggests that all of Japan existed in a continuous archetypal moment of meaning; if Japan were in a perpetual transcendent state of time, it is not accurate to say they had a wholly linear view of time. Transcendence describes something that is not easily understood; a line is too simple to capture Japan’s state of transcendence. All in all, the traditional Japanese offer an understanding of time not found elsewhere in the major civilizations.