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In Bunron, written in 1 748, by the Japanese Confucian Dazai Shundai, there is an account of the making of Buddhist rag robes and woven brocade ones. In (liThe Eye

Storehouse of the True Law", completed 1253), the Zen Buddhist Dogen gives a fuller account. The contrast of Shundai's description of rag robes and woven robes

with

Dogen's texts brings out Shundai's very different focus. In tum, the contrast between Baien's use of the brocade robe model Shundai's brings out Baien's very different focus.

A chapter in called "Kesa kudolal', (liThe Value of Robes "), gives very detailed directions for the

makin

g of Buddhist rag robes. The following are a few short extracts from

this chapter:

According to the traditional teachings of the Buddhas a made of discarded cloth, that is, a is the best. -- The four types of cloth are those that have been burned by fire, munched by oxen, gnawed by mice, or worn by the dead. Indians throw

this cloth away in the streets and in the fields just as they do their excreta. The name comes from this. Monks pick up such cloth and wear it having washed and sewn the various pieces together. Although some of this cloth is cotton and some silk, no discrimination should be made between the two. We should deeply reflect on the meaning of a

....

When we believe that a is made not of silk, cotton, gold, silver, pearls, or jewels, we can realize what a true is ....

Continue washing the until all the dirt and grease has been removed. When this has been done, rinse the in cold water containing incense of aloes or beadwood, and so on. After having dried it thoroughly on a clean rod, fold it and put it in an elevated place. Then, b

urnin

g incense and scattering flower petals, walk clockwise around it several times, prostrating yourselfbefore it three, six, or nine times. Finally, kneeling before it in gassho, pick it up and, after having recited the stand up and put it on in the prescooed manner ....

People throw these ten types of cloth away when they have finished using them After having been picked up, however, they become the cleanest material for making a

All the Buddhas in the three stages of time have praised and used such cloth .... Materials obtained in this way are not silk, cotton, gold, silver, pearls, jewels, twilled silk, light silk, brocade, or embroidery. They are simply discarded cloth. A

kasaya

made of such cloth is not called a because of its appearance, whether ragged or beautiful. Rather it has been given this name simply because it is in accordance

with

the Law, having correctly transmitted the essence of all the Buddhas in the three stages of time, the Eye Storehouse of the True Law. [Yuho 1 976 94f]

Dazai Shundai's attitude to the in is as different from all this as it could be. Passages from Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 of are translated here:

Chapter 2:

Scholars who write in the ancient style themselves take sentences and characters one by one from the ancients .... They take set phrases of the ancients and just tie them together, with no bunri, and no sense. The words sound like voices in a crowded hall

with

people everywhere ....

I have heard of certain Buddhists priests in

India

whose custom it is to practice asceticism They pick up foul clothes from the dead, the sick, and women in labour, clothes retrieved from fire, clothes filthy with dirt and blood, or smeared with dirt and manure.

These priests do not wear woven robes. They take the vile soiled ones that people have thrown away, shake off the dirt, and wash them in soapbeans and water until they are as pure and clean as possible. Then they sew the pieces together to make robes. They are called "rag robes", or "dung robes" ("junzatsue") ....

So a single robe may contain brocade, floral work, embroidery, silk, gauze, damask, frayed silk, paint, white silk, thin silk and calico. Naturally the bright effect of the patches is pleasing, but the robes have no specific bunri, no unity of texture or quality.

The Buddhist take other people's rejects, so they might take several hundred pieces and sew them together to make a robe ... Where they were sewn up the seams could not be obliterated.

Compare one of these with a single piece ofbrocade before it is (,.'Ut up. Its quality is more like a con.tinuous discussion. Who would discard a brocade robe and take a patched one?

Moreover, take the Six Classics ... they are all remarkable for their style and grammar, and all these ancient texts are equally outstanding. They are like several robes of woven brocade. Their patterns and are each exceptional, yet each emerges from loom and shuttle. The beauty of these brocades lies in their texture. The patterns are varied, but they are all woven according to rule.

A beautiful brocade is the product of a skilful weaver. Because of the rules, texture is

even and design and colours match, embroidered patterns alternate from place to place, nothing is impossible. Here loom and shuttle may be worked at

will,

patterns are in place because jori is not disturbed ....

Bunri runs throughout because there is order and pointfulness. Compositions have ri, just as the h

uman

body has veins. If we did not have veins we could not use our arms

and legs, we should be called withered or deformed, we could not be called h

uman

. If a literary pattern has no ri, how could it form a pattern and be understood?

loom Bad writing is sewing that anyone can do by patching together. If one were to try to make a single brocade robe by patching together hundreds of pieces of brocade, however skilfully they are sewn together, could it equal a piece newly woven from the shuttle? It could not, because it would have no ri ....

We live in the present time and cannot go back to ancient times ... The only way to reach the ancients is through study .... Ifpeople should make literary works as those rag robes were made, how could we be content to call it literature? [Chapter 2]

Chapter 4, p. l O:

Sentences are put together to make chapters. Chapters may be long or short, but a single meaning must run through; with no gaps in the discourse and no surplus words ....

Chapters are put together to make books. Their import lies in the way they are

connected together. We must take care to do this properly. No matter how many folds and turns there are, jori is not disturbed. A single meaning runs through, and there are no gaps.

This is like a h

uman

body. No matter that there are joints, bends and folds, the veins are not disturbed. A single ki runs through, and there are no obstructions. This is the rule of books. The writings of the ancients are all so.

Whether or not Shundai's application of the robe model to literary prose was his own idea, the example of the manufacture and materials of Buddhist kasaya was not. Shundai has not

selected any artefact at hand for his simile, but one that was already a part of the scholastic pool No doubt Dagen was not the last Buddhist writer to use the symbolism, but the more commonly it is found the more reason there would be to suppose that Shundai's appropriation of the robe model was dehoerate. To Shundai's rhetorical question, "Who would discard a woven brocade robe to take a patched one?", Dagen's answer would have been that the patches of a being thoroughly cleansed of foulness by specified methods, are the finest and cleanest materials for making a robe, because they symbolise the purity of the ascetic life, the pure life according to the Law. The medley of materials in a is also symbolic, the robe is not to be descnoable as made of

silk,

cotton, or any other fabric; the range of posSlole materials, even more numerous in Shundai's list, conveys the wide compass of the Law.

(It should be noted that in Dagen's and Shundai's texts, the character "ho",

�to. ,

here properly translated as "Law", is elsewhere in the passage better translated as "method" (of making robes and washing cloth etc.), and as "rules" (for written composition, grammar, etc), so that the use of "ho", "law-method-rule" ties the texts together in a way which is lost in English translation. )

Shundai tells us here that a good literary work must be structured, by ''jori'', as though linked by a continuous thread, as in the ancient classical texts. Baien refers to Shundai, among others,

when he discusses reading methods in IT 327]. Iwami Teruhiko [1984] bas pointed out the significance of the fact that is included in Baien's reading notes for

1 755 when he was writing the last of the versions under the title ("the Angler"). Soon after, in the twelfth version of and under that final title, both the word ''jOri'' and the brocade model appear for the first time. The word ''jOri'' is also used by Shundai in what seems to be an original way. There can be no doubt that Baien read the passages from and thought about them.

Surely Shundai knew very well the symbolic meaning of the but with his commitment to the Classics and Confucianism we could not expect him to be sympathetic to Buddhism. Sbundai does not think that his readers should revere or bow to Buddhist symbols, instead they are urged to tum their attention to following the way of the ancient Chinese classics. His failure to acknowledge the symbolism of the patched robes is rejection by non-mention, as when people make very definite comments by the way they say "No comment".

Baien's use of Shundai's model of the brocade robe, and of the term ''jOri'', might also be seen as a kind of rejection by non-mention. Neither the term nor the model are found in the corpus of ancient Chinese learning that Baien shared with his contemporary readers and pupils. Although it was Baien's explicit policy not to refer to other writers in (excluding the

and other expositions), there is every reason to believe that many ofhis readers, including the person who quite recently had recommended, given or lent him a copy of

would know that Baien had borrowed the model and the term from there. Shundai was a writer whose views Baien believed to be contrary to his own, and the unmentioned contrast in Baien's case would be between taking heaven and earth as the teacher and taking the ancient sages as the ultimate authority. Baien's brocade tells us not how to imitate the ancient style, but how to look at heaven and earth. It emphasises Baien's claim that a philosophical text whose design reflects the jori system of nature that it outlines, is not

structured according to ancient classical tradition, but in a quite radically different way, by the jOri system of heaven and earth itself We should not revere or bow to the ancient classics:

When it comes to seeing heaven and earth with insight, some people have been called "sages" or "buddhas", but because they were nothing other than human beings, their place is in the long line of companions in our continuing discussion. Heaven and earth

is the teacher ....

Because heaven-and-earth is immeasurably vast, there is nothing that it does not contain, and because there is nothing that it does not contain, seeing heaven-and-earth with insight is not confined to any school

Once someone came to me and said "I have already absorbed heaven-and-earth". I replied "Heaven and earth is so vast that if you have absorbed it, how many millions of people who have also absorbed heaven-and-earth you must have inside you!", and he laughed ... However exceptional or superior a person may be, he still stands and moves

It is plausible that by echoing Shundai's model, Baien is urging his readers to tum their attention away from the ancient classics to the natural universe of which mankind is a very small part.

A credo attnl>uted to the Confucian movement to which Shundai belonged, and which Baien insistently disowned, could not be more succinctly expressed than the following quotations that Herman Ooms has selected from two of its most celebrated exponents [ 1 985 1 94]:

The books written by the Sages are complete: they have nothing left unsaid. (Yamazaki Ansai, 1 6 1 8- 1682)

The teachings of the Sages are complete. That which the Sages did not express does not need expressing. (Ogyii Sorai, 1666- 1 728)

Mencius says: I'The ten thousand things are complete within us", but this occurs in a passage on h

uman

virtues rather than natural phenomena. [Mencius VII A, 4] It is certainly not clear what either Mencius, or Sorai meant by the statements quoted above. The interpretation of

Sorai's attitude will be touched on again in Chapter 9. 1 .

The comments on Baien's and Shundai's "rejection by non-mention" should be qualified with the observation that it was a practice in Sino-Japanese tradition to draw on a common pool of literary references, imagery and tales to exemplify one's own ideas. Therefore we should not take every case of diverting an image or tale from its original purpose as implying criticism by contrast. Running imagery within a text is a common literary device, as is imagery that runs through different works of the same writer. The interesting phenomenon here is imagery that runs purposefully through works of different writers. This too may well be found in the literatures of other languages and peoples. In the Sino-Japanese case it is facilitated by the cOIpus of classical texts that persisted at the core of the education system

The rag robes have no role in but the features of woven brocade, so clearly delineated by Shundai's comparison of weaving with seWing up patches, are a gift to Baien as a model of the universe with: the seamlessness of the woven piece; its unity; its intricate composition; warp and woof as metaphors for time and space; and its two sides, which are parts but not pieces of the whole, one side a strange world of interlaced coloured threads whose Ii are concealed, the other side the vivid and lively world we know, mythical creatures

notwithstanding, in which the natural order stands out distinctly.

"ri" i.!

Shundai uses the character "ri" alone, and also in the compounds ''jori'' and "bunri". For him jori is that elusive but essential single line of thought, like the trunk of a tree, that unites the chapters into one book, no matter how much they branch from it. Nothing is to be

countenanced that does not stem from the trunk, or essence of the book, or nothing that is extraneous to the pattern of a skilfully woven robe of brocade.

Books and robes are human artefacts. A main part of Baien's thesis is that the universe is ordered by jori, but without h

uman

inteIVention. Again his departure from the ancient classics is emphasised by the deliberate appropriation of terminology from Bunron. In Chapter IV Shundai says that the structure of books is like the structure of the h

uman

body, in that all else depends on the veins and arteries in which ki (in blood, air, etc) circulates. Baien, however, does not say ri are like the veins and arteries, but rather that the veins and arteries m these ri, whether M apprehend them or not. (As mentioned earlier, ri as an all embracing principle or complex of principles has been replaced in Baien's system by jori, and ri are merely straight lines, important, but just one aspect of the physical world [see Chapter 1 . 1 n.

Even Shimada seems to have overlooked a difference between "like" and "are like" when he interprets "strangers are also parents" as "strangers are also � parents" [NST 68,7 and 400, 1]. Baien means that we cannot begin to understandjori ifwe take a self-oriented perspective. Strangers may be som�one's parents even though they are not our parents. The difference between "are" and "are like" here would not matter in many contexts, but it is important for Baien who works hard to persuade us that he is talking about IMl features of the universe.

On the topic of the relation between and it is worth mentioning another semantic nuance that ic;; lost in English translation and which lends itself to metaphors for the structure of the universe. The "bun" of Shundai's "bunri", which he uses to mean order in prose, is the character, "bun", "literature", alternatively read as "mon", "pattern". Baien does not use "bunri", but in the 12th version of , the topic under which the brocade model and the word ''jori'' make their first appearance is "bunsho", most commonly used as

"sentences" or "prose" [Iwami 1 984]. (Something of the meaning of "bunri" , "patterned prose" is retained ifit is translated as "composition", narrower in meaning, but similarly extended. )

The following obseIVation from Angus Graham is particularly pertinent to the translation of "bun":

Certainly no serious reader of Chinese philosophy can forget that his capacity to clarify in English never catches up with his understanding of the original, and that in analysing he always has to uncover metaphorical roots not only of the Chinese terms but of the English that he uses to explain them. [ 1 989 323]

To make a simjJar point, Hall and Ames quote IL. Austin on this same topic "a word never - well, hardly ever - shakes off its etymology and formation. In spite of all changes in and extensions of and additions to its meaning, and indeed peIVading and governing these, there will persist the old idea. (Phil. Papers, p. 149)" [ 1 987 4 1]. Michael Martin takes issue

with

the suggestion that this "old idea" is accessible, especially accessible to the Western interpreter of

In document Enseñanza de las ciencias a través de la experimentación (página 30-33)