by Minoru Sonoda

In contemporary society the very shape of what constitutes a "family" has been in flux in many ways.

It was the renowned German-born American philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) who once observed: "In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead" (The Dogma of Christ, 1963). At present, our twenty-first century world is facing the destruction of the environment, wherein ecocide against all life on the face of the earth, not only human beings, is a possibility.

One of the root causes of this is a long-standing one: confused by an objective view of life, humans have lost sight of their intrinsically subjective life view. What ails us today is that we are leaving behind, so to speak, the concept that life is a phenomenon of reality, and have reduced it to a mere material fact.

In the Japanese language, the word seimei (life) refers to the bio-phenomenon of life that can be defined objectively only when it is seen through the eyes of a third party; but the word inochi, the traditional expression for "life," is a concept that connotes an existential approach to life as beheld by the subject. For example, seimei involves all the phenomena surrounding an organism from birth to death, whereas the connotation of inochi extends to the fundamental contradictions of "living," in addition to existential issues related to one's self before being born into this world as well as one's death and after-death experience. That is to say, being aware of inochi causes a reverence for the emotions of human existence and for the mystery of living, which is none other than the restoration of man's original religious nature. And furthermore, the most important setting for people to directly experience the reality of the existence of such inochi is the family, which has been the "living community/unit" since ancient times. I would like to examine these ideas below.

It goes without saying that in contemporary society the very shape of what constitutes a "family" has been in flux in many ways. In the 1960s in the United States, anti-establishment youth called "hippies" broke up the family and formed communes; in the large cities, the mass media has been carrying on as if a "society of singles" were the mainstream of the times; and today we are in an age when same-sex marriage is recognized. Furthermore, an examination of the ethnographic examples of the variety of family structures that have come about throughout the world over human history shows that the commonly accepted "nuclear family" of today is by no means universal. In other words, the basic units of the cooperative communities that are called "family" vary considerably according to differences in the era, the culture, and the civilization, making it impossible to determine from the internal structures themselves what sort of membership structure was commonly accepted and considered appropriate.

If one asks, then, if the communal unit called "the family" is necessary or not, the answer is that it definitely is. In past human history, the vital unit that is the family has existed without exception, however varied the forms it has taken, and it is also certain that for the present and the future it remains an indispensable communal unit of human life.

As to what the reason for this is, it is because the family is the primary community unit that shares the inherent nature of human existence, that is, the reality of inochi. People are born into and raised in families, and then, after having walked on all sorts of paths, they fulfill their lives by leaving their families behind. That is in accordance with the objective facts common to all living beings on earth, and, where the concept of inochi is involved. It is a reality that only human beings are capable of experiencing.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, the family has existed under many conditions throughout history, and has taken on the appropriate forms to meet the differences of cultures and civilizations. More than anything else, the families made up inochi communities only when the form that they took was based on the religion-oriented worldviews of the various cultures.

The confusion and fluidity surrounding the image of the family in our civilized societies of modern and recent times is a reflection of the harm done to the family by the sweeping secularization of society; the family had been supported by the older religion-based societies, but has lost its earlier nature as an existential community unit. The inevitable result is that the family has become demoted to being simply a part of consumer life. Formerly, children would first become aware of their relationship to others by defining themselves as an "other" in relation to their mothers, and, while being raised in the love and affection of the family, they would grow into being "people" as social beings, which the Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1889-1960) described as "beings of betweenness." Man continues to seek ego-identity in the "ontological primacy" (M. Heidegger) called concernedness, and, in the process of doing so, encounters the contradiction of life and death and the mystery of inochi.

From this point of view, old religious cultures should have provided traditional responses appropriate to the mystery of inochi that fit into the particular forms of the family and the social structures of those cultures. The ideal family should be, regardless of its form, first and foremost a biogenic unit in which the function of physical reproduction--passing on one's life (seimei) to the next generation through giving birth and raising children--works as its nucleus. At the same time, the family must also be, so to speak, a spiritual unit in which the reality of inochi is shared.

However, in the single-hearted pursuit of the ultimate goal of human salvation, religions seem to have somewhat left behind both the physicality and spirituality of the family unit. Indeed, Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, required that disciples leave home and become monks and seek enlightenment in order to be freed from the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness, and death. Christianity's savior, Jesus Christ, while he was preaching on the road, advised his followers to be prepared to quarrel with their families.

Both of them required that their followers be reborn into the absolute realm of God and the Buddha through "rejecting the world"--abandoning their families and renouncing their ordinary lives, in order to overcome the conflicts and discord of inochi, with which the traditional community units, including families, are involved.

But it is impossible, even for a world of religion that is free from worldly concerns, to be disconnected from the secular world as long as it is related to the human conduct of mundane matters. Generally, through the actions of preaching and propagation, the existing families and community units are reorganized along the lines of churches and lay supporters of Buddhist organizations and are imbued with a new sense of inochi. This can be called the rebirth of the family unit, basking in God's love (agape) and the Buddha's compassion.

Unlike such organized religions, Japanese Shinto is by nature a communal religion based on the religious nature inherent in ethnic cultures. Based on traditional kinship groups such as families and groups of relatives, as well as local groups in settlements, Shinto is a religious culture that worships multiple natural and ancestral deities.

Also known as "the religion that predates religions," Shinto, rather than being a religious organization wherein people become believers of a propositional doctrine and form a group of like believers, comes down to us today as the successor of the "life communities" that, as part of culture, have continued to coexist with the natural environment, and also has inherited the cult of deities that interact with the deceased. Incidentally, the English word culture derives from the Latin word cultus, which also serves as the root for such words as cultivation and cult.

The cult of Shinto also prays for the symbiosis of the inochi of gods, nature, and people, making the best of one another, while living in a rice-producing culture. Within this context, Shinto quite naturally became a spiritual community of inochi with the family as the core. Inochi is not merely life that has been regarded as simply an individual "thing"; rather, precisely because it is a spiritual quality that has come down from our ancestors to our children, family members cooperate in having and raising children, entrusting their afterlife to the next generation, and assuring peace of mind after death.

The great early-modern scholar of Japanese classics, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), discerned that the Shinto mythological classics (compiled in the eighth century) do not actively mention the world of the afterlife and, concluding that in Shinto "the absence of the assurance of peace of mind in the afterlife is itself reassuring" (Tomonroku, "Record of Dialogues"), wrote that his remains were to be buried in the nearby mountains and his bereaved family and disciples were to conduct a ritual to console his spirit without respite. Without regard for his fate in the afterlife, he entrusted his peace of mind in the afterlife to the connectedness of inochi to his bereaved family and relatives in this world.