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  • From: Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] One Straw Guiding Questions
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:15:07 -0800 (PST)

I have been involved with Natural Farming for quite some time, but I try to
stay out of Fukuoka discussions because Fukuokans have the irritating
tendency of wanting to bash in each others head. Curiously enough that is
the case even in Japan. I’m member of about 5 Japanese mailing lists on
Natural Farming. The ones dedicated to Fukuoka discuss doctrine more than
farming. Anyways, I will make an exception here.

> ... I am a junkie for information that moves me to a higher plane
> of spiritual awareness within the context of nature. For me, that
> requires my responsibility to incorporate information into that
> spiritual awareness that moves me away from anthropocentricity.

Fukuoka’s take on what you describe could be summarized by a few lines from
the Iroha Kakumei-ka which I translate as “Revolutionary Verses”. This is
the last text Fukuoka wrote in the form of a series of aphorisms to summarize
his view of life:

First of all, throw it all away,
the handcuffs of time and the shackles of money.
...
Knowledge is not wisdom,
collecting knowledge, we destroy wisdom.

The fruit from the tree of wisdom is the wisdom of the snake,
idly we are led astray.

Pointless reasons and arguments, like the straw shoes of a horse,
changed daily, they are discarded after use.

No ears to listen and no speech, mountains, rivers, grasses and trees,
the hidden language knows the heavens, knows Earth.

Don’t look around with two eyes,
the one eye of the mind is enough.

The desire to see, listen and know will be your ruin,
the ocean of wisdom gets weak and dies.

There are different versions of this text because he kept on rewriting it in
the years before he passed away. The one I used for my translation is dated
about 1993.

Cheers,
Dieter

PS: Regarding the questions to ask your students, I have a hard time to
distinguish in my mind what is written in the One Straw Revolution from what
is written in his other works. Anyways, one question could be about what the
term “revolution” means to Fukuoka. The word revolution, or kakumei in
Japanese, appears in the title of 3 of his 9 works, including his first and
his last. Another question could be about his rejection of science, which
always baffles Westerners. But I’m not sure to what degree that can be
understood from the One Straw Revolution.

As an oriental, his way of thinking is synthetic more than analytical, that
means he has no problem incorporating different traditions including Taoism
and Buddhism. But his spiritual home is Mahayana Buddhism. Therefore, his
idea of “do-nothing farming” finds its spiritual root in the Mahayana
doctrine of “nothingness” (sunyata) rather than in Taoism, as is often
assumed. In fact, he is supposed to have qualified the key experience he had
when he was working as a young man as plant pathologist at the Yokohama
customs authority with the words: “nani mo nai”, ie. “there is nothing” or
“nothing exists”. He only talks about this experience many years after the
fact. Hence, it isn’t possible to say to what degree the actual experience
has been transformed in his memory over the years. Anyways, it is easy to
see the context of the physical fatigue after his near-death illness, that
led him to this realization and made him decide to
leave the busy city life and return to the quite of the family farm. He
never described his experience in terms of “satori” or enlightenment known in
Zen, but it is clear that his cultural background, which includes the
Mahayana doctrine of nothingness, influenced his choice of words.





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