permaculture

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

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.