History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

III. Some Significant Facts in the Moral History of Japan

General influence of the ideal of Bushido

The Japanese knightly ideal, which, as we have said, constitutes the heart and core of theoretical Japanese morality, has a history somewhat like that of the ideal of European knighthood. It was a lofty ideal very imperfectly realized, yet realized to such a degree as to make it a chief motive force in the political and social life of Japan for several centuries.[212] It left a permanent impress upon the moral consciousness of the Japanese nation, an impress certainly deeper and more enduring than that left by the ideal of European chivalry upon the moral consciousness of the peoples of Western Europe. New Japan is directly or indirectly the creation of Japanese knighthood.

We have seen that loyalty to his chief was the preëminent virtue of the samurai. Upon the downfall of feudalism this loyalty was transferred to the Emperor. The spirit of the samurai came to inspire the Japanese nation. Since the time when the loyalty of Scottish clansmen to their chief was transferred to Scottish royalty, there has not been seen a more remarkable example of the absolute devotion of a people to their sovereign than that exhibited to-day by the people of Japan.

The samurai were taught to despise the love of gain, and thus these knights of Japan were strangers to those vices which spring from the love of money. To this circumstance may be ascribed the fact that the statesmen of Japan, who almost invariably are of the samurai class, have been so notably free from venality and corruption.[213]

Finally, Bushido held aloft a high standard of truthfulness. The true samurai regarded an oath as a derogation of his honor. It cannot be affirmed that this Bushido virtue of veracity has yet become the inheritance of the mercantile and peasant classes of Japan, but it has at least been retained by the samurai as a class, and is working to-day like leaven in the mass of Japanese society.

The Bushido code in action

There are two remarkable passages in recent Japanese history which well illustrate in what way and to what degree the spirit of the samurai, “the spirit of not living unto one’s self,” has become an inspiration to the whole Japanese nation. The first passage has to do with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which on the part of Japan was a struggle for national existence. It was the samurai morality, a morality of loyalty, of valor, of selflessness, of fidelity to duty, that formed a chief element of the strength of Japan in that critical juncture of the nation’s life. The Bushido code of honor showed itself equal to the Spartan code in creating a race of invincible warriors. Since the Spartan Leonidas and his companions died for Greece in the pass of Thermopylæ there has been no sublimer exhibition of fortitude and self-devotion in a great cause than that shown by Japanese soldiers in the trenches before Port Arthur and on the battlefields of Manchuria.

This war for national independence also afforded proof of how the gentle virtue of Japanese knighthood, courteous generosity to the vanquished, has passed as a noble legacy to the nation at large; for as an eminent Japanese statesman affirms, “In the tender care bestowed upon our stricken adversary of the battlefield will be found the ancient courtesy of the samurai.”[214]

The moral standard of the samurai in competition with that of the plebeian trader

The second passage shows the morality of the samurai in competition with the morality of the common Japanese shopman. Now the morality of the plebeian Japanese trader is about on a level with that of the ancient Greek shopkeeper.[215] And a chief cause of his low moral standard is the same, namely, the general disesteem in which the trader’s business has been held. This social stigma has resulted in the mercantile business being left in the hands of the lowest class socially, intellectually, and morally.[216] The great mass of the people have from time immemorial been engaged in the honorable business of agriculture; while the samurai class, as we have seen, regarded it as degrading to engage in trade or even to handle money. In these circumstances it was inevitable that the mercantile class should evolve a very low code of business ethics; for, as the author of Bushido very justly observes, “put a stigma on a calling and its followers adjust their morals to it.”

The strictly class character of this loose commercial morality is shown by the experience of the samurai after the abolition of feudalism in 1868. Upon that event many of them engaged in mercantile business, carrying with them their high moral standard, with results pathetically depicted by Nitobé in these words: “Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival.... It will be long before it will be recognized how many fortunes were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to business methods, but it was soon apparent to every observing mind that the ways of wealth were not the ways of honor.”[217] About ninety-nine out of every hundred samurai who ventured into business are said to have failed.

This passage out of the history of New Japan carries with it various lessons, but particularly does it teach how unjust it is to judge the morality of a people by the morality of a class.[218]

Notwithstanding the disastrous outcome of their first venture into the mercantile field, the samurai still remain in business, so that there is going on to-day in Japan in the commercial domain a competition between two moral standards. The triumph of the standard of the samurai over that of the plebeian trader would mean the development in Japan of a matchless business morality, which, in the increasing closeness of commercial relations between the East and the West, might well act cleansingly on our own business ethics.[219]

Moral education in the schools; the Imperial Rescript

The rapid transformation in the institutions and ideas of Old Japan after the revolution of 1868 created a crisis in the moral life of the Japanese people. The old basis of the national morality was destroyed. Reverence for the Confucian teachings was lost. Respect for ancestral customs was seriously impaired. Moral anarchy impended. In this critical juncture some proposed that Buddhism, others that Christianity, should be made the basis of the moral code.

Especially in the schools was the urgency of the need of some new sanction for morality felt, because moral instruction and training have always formed an essential part of the education of the youth of Japan. The Japanese have ever believed that it is possible to mold the character of the nation by education. “With us,” says a native writer, “education has meant moral education more than anything else for centuries.”[220] “The object of teaching,” says the official regulations for teaching in elementary schools, “is to cultivate the moral nature of children and to guide them in the practice of virtues.”[221] Because of this central place assigned moral education in the work of the schools, the necessity for removing all uncertainty as to what should be inculcated was all the more exigent.

To meet the crisis the following imperial rescript was issued—certainly one of the most remarkable state papers ever promulgated:

“Know ye, our subjects:

“Our imperial ancestors have founded our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory and the fundamental character of our Empire, and herein also lies the source of our education. Ye, our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious; as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the state; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of our imperial throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.

“The way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by our imperial ancestors, to be observed alike by their descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you, our subjects, that we may all thus attain to the same virtue.

“The 30th day of the 10th month of the 23d year of Meiji” [1890].[222]

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of this imperial edict. “Our whole moral education,” affirms Baron Kikuchi, “consists in instilling into the minds of our children the proper appreciation of the spirit of this rescript.”[223] The children learn it by heart just as the Roman children committed to memory the Twelve Tables of the laws.

Japanese believe that the effect of this instruction upon the national character, reënforcing the ancestral virtues of loyalty and devotion to duty, was exhibited in the recent war with Russia.[224]

A noteworthy feature of the rescript is that it is simply a reaffirmation of the teachings of the ancient moralists and the ethical traditions of the fathers—an inculcation of those virtues of loyalty and filial piety which the Japanese people have held in esteem and practiced from generation to generation.

A second feature of the edict which arrests attention is the universalistic and secular character of the morality inculcated. The virtues enjoined are universal benevolence, loyalty to duty, and self-devotion to the common good—a morality of the universal human heart and conscience, a morality, as the edict declares, good for all ages and for all places.

Japanese morals and Western civilization

The foregoing anticipates and gives answer to the questions: What will be the effect upon Japanese morality of those changes now going on in the life and thought of Japan through contact with the civilization of the West? What will be the effect upon Japanese public morality when the common belief in the divine descent of the Emperor, which is the root from which springs the primal duty of loyalty, is undermined, as modern science is certain to undermine it? What will be the effect upon Japanese domestic morality when Occidental conceptions of the family and of woman’s place in it come to modify, as they seem likely to do, those ideas and sentiments which from time immemorial have formed the basis of the family ethics of the East? What will be the ethical consequences when Western science renders obsolete the Shinto learning and the Confucian classics, which have hitherto formed the basis of so large a part of Japanese morality? What will be the effect upon the ancient ideal of character of the adoption of Christian ideas and teachings in place of those which have so long nourished the ethical feelings and sentiments of the Japanese people?

That the intrusion into the ancient culture of Japan of these various elements of Western civilization has deep import for Japanese morality cannot be made a matter of doubt. In the new environment, so different from that in the midst of which the ancient ideal of goodness was developed, this ideal must inevitably undergo important changes. Some of those qualities of character which have so long held high places in the ideal of excellence will cease to evoke the old-time homage, while other qualities at present assigned low places in the standard will be exalted. Virtues now practically unrecognized by the Japanese as virtues, but which among us are highly esteemed moral qualities, will certainly be incorporated in the modified ideal, giving it a new cast, yet probably without changing fundamentally the type; for the moral life of the Japanese people is too virile and too essentially sound to permit us to think that the new influences now coming in will produce such radical changes in the ethical feelings and convictions of the race as to result in a repetition of what happened upon the entrance of Christianity into the morally decadent Greco-Roman world—the displacement of the old ideal of character by a new and essentially different ideal.

CHAPTER VII
THE ETHICAL IDEALS OF INDIA

PART I. THE ETHICS OF BRAHMANISM—A CLASS MORALITY

I. Historical and Speculative Basis of the System

The conception of the First Cause​— ​Brahma

As in Judea so in India the conception formed of the Supreme Being reacted potently upon morality. Hence in naming the influences under which the moral ideal of Brahmanism was molded we must speak first of the Indian conception of the First Cause.

The Aryan conquerors of India originally held notions of the gods in general like those held by their kinsmen, the early Greeks and Romans. When they entered India they were ancestor worshipers and polytheists. They had earth gods and sky gods. The gods of the celestial phenomena gradually acquired ascendancy. Then, as in Egypt, there came a tendency toward unity. The various gods came to be looked upon by the loftier minds as merely different manifestations of one primal being.[225]

It is right at this point that we find the great antithesis between Indian modes of thought and those of all or almost all other peoples. When the thinkers of Egypt, of the Semitic lands, of Persia, of Greece and Rome, had at last through reflection evolved the lofty conception of a single great First Cause, they endowed this cause with conscious personal life. This mode of thought is our heritage from the past. It is to us almost or quite impossible to conceive of conscious personal life as springing from an unconscious impersonal cause. Hence we place behind the manifold phenomena of the universe a conscious personal being as the origin and source of all things and all life.[226]

It is wholly different with the thinkers of India. They seem to be able to postulate as the beginning of things an impersonal cause, a cause without perception, thought, or consciousness. They affirm that out of unconsciousness consciousness arises. They teach that out of Brahma, the unconscious, impersonal, passionless One, emanate all material worlds and sentient beings, gods as well as men.

How profoundly this conception of the First Cause has reacted on the ethical speculations of the Hindu sages and on the moral life of India will appear a little further on.

The god Brahma (Brahman)

But this incomprehensible, unconscious, passionless Brahma is not the Brahma of the popular faith. The masses and even the philosophers themselves must have something more concrete. So this impersonal, neuter Brahma is conceived as giving existence to the personal, masculine God Brahma (Brahman), “the progenitor of all worlds, the first-born among beings.”[227]

It is very necessary for the student of Brahmanic ethics to keep in mind the distinction between the uncreated, unconditioned, impersonal Brahma and the created, conditioned, personal Brahma, since there is here laid the foundation of a double goal for rational moral striving: the goal of the ascetic whose ultimate aim is deliverance from individual existence and absorption into the absolute, unchangeable, impersonal Brahma, which means a state of eternal unconsciousness—dreamless sleep; and the goal of the multitude, whose hope and aim is blissful, though temporary, union with the personal Brahma in the heaven of the mortal, conditioned gods.[228]

The system of castes

The ethical evolution in India was also profoundly influenced by a prehistoric event, namely, the subjection of the original non-Aryan population of the land by an intruding Aryan people. As a result of the long and bitter struggle the two races became separated by a sharp line of race prejudice and hatred. The dark-skinned natives were reduced to a state of servitude or dependence upon their conquerors. Intermarriages between the two races were strictly prohibited, and thus the population of the conquered districts of the peninsula became divided into two sharply defined classes. These constituted a model upon which Indian society was framed. Other classes were formed, and these gradually hardened into castes, that is, into classes between which marriages were prohibited. Four great castes arose: namely, priests or Brahmans, warriors and rulers, peasants and merchants, and sudras. Below these castes were the pariahs, or outcasts, made up of the most degraded of the natives. As time passed, still other divisions were formed, every occupation coming to constitute the basis of a new caste, till society was stratified like a geologic deposit.

Religion came in to consecrate this division of the people into privileged and nonprivileged classes.[229] The sacred scriptures declare that the Brahmans sprang from the mouth of Brahma, the warriors from his arms, the peasants and traders from his thighs, and the sudras from his feet.[230]

No institution known among men ever exercised a more fateful and sinister influence upon morality than this caste system has exercised upon the morality of the peoples of India. The rooted belief and dogma of the natural inequality of men has made Brahmanic ethics a thing of grades and classes, and has thus rendered impossible the evolution of a true morality, which requires for its basis genuine sentiments of equality and brotherhood.

The doctrine of transmigration

We easily realize the importance for morality of a belief in a life after death. But a belief in preëxistence may exert an even greater influence upon the moral code of a people than a belief in post-existence.[231] Now the morality of the Hindus has been molded by both these doctrines, for according to the teachings of Brahmanism a man has lived through many lives before his “birth,” and may wander through “ten thousand millions of existences” after death has freed him from his present body.[232] The class and the condition into which he is born here on earth is believed to be determined by the sum total of his merits or demerits earned in preceding existences. As a result of sin he may in his next birth be reborn in a lower caste, or may be imprisoned in some animal or vegetable form. He may pass a thousand times through the bodies of spiders, snakes, and lizards, and hundreds of times through the forms of grasses, shrubs, and creepers. And all this experience may come after the soul has passed through dreadful and innumerable hells for vast cycles of years.[233]

This transmigration theory was framed by the thinkers of India to explain among other things the seemingly unjust inequalities of human life.[234] It afforded an explanation why one man should be born a Brahman and another a sudra, one born in a hovel and another in a palace, by conceiving the place of every person born into the world as being determined by the manner of his life in former existences.[235]

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the profound influence which this doctrine of transmigration, or round of births, has exerted upon the moral life of India. The tendency of this theory, as soon as elaborated, was to render still more intolerable the position of the lower castes, particularly that of the sudras, since it made their low place and hard lot to be the merited punishment of crimes and misdoings in previous lives; while at the same time it fed the pride and enhanced the arrogance of the Brahmans, since their superior lot was, according to the theory, attributable to merit acquired in other existences. Thus did the theory tend to give a more sinister aspect to the baneful caste system, to make it appear a part of the unchangeable order of things, and to render impossible the growth of any other than a class morality.

Indian pessimism

Hardly less important than the doctrine of transmigration for Hindu morality is the Indian conception of life—of all individual, conscious existence whether here on earth or in other worlds—as inseparable from misery, pain, decay, and death.

The Aryan immigrants into India seem to have been, like their kinsmen the Greeks, a light-hearted folk, filled with a strong joy in life. But as in their journeyings they pressed southward into the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges and came under the influences of the hot, depressing climate, and of an oppressive social and political system,[236] they appeared to have lost their buoyant spirits. The skies seemed less bright and life less worth living, and, weary of it all, they at last came to regard eternal death, annihilation, as the greatest of boons.

This pessimistic view of the world and of life, as we shall see a little further on, forms the basis of large sections of Indian ethics, since it makes the ultimate goal of rational or moral effort to be the getting rid of conscious existence.

The conception of sacrifice

Another conception which has exerted a profound influence upon the religious ethics of Brahmanism is that respecting sacrifice. This conception is that the gods need sustenance, and can only exist through the gifts and offerings made to them by men.[237] “The gods live by sacrifice” say the sacred scriptures; “the sun would not rise if the priests did not make sacrifice.”

To understand this teaching we must connect it with the belief of primitive man that the spirits of the dead have absolute need of meat and drink offerings at the hands of the living, and remember that in India there is no sharp distinction drawn between the gods and the souls of men. The gods, like the spirits of the dead, are dependent for life and strength upon the offerings laid on their altars. Without these gifts they would die or pine away, and all the movements of the universe controlled by them would cease.[238]

From this conception of the gods came the emphasis laid by Brahmanism upon sacrifice, and the prominence given the religious duty of bringing rich gifts to the priests and keeping the altars of the gods heaped with food.[239]