A Human History of Emotion by Richard Firth-Godbehere

Author:Richard Firth-Godbehere [Firth-Godbehere, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-10-11T12:00:00+00:00

This poem was composed by the Japanese Buddhist monk Jakuren, who died in 1202. Here, Jakuren is dissolving his personal loneliness into the world around him. But he isn’t really alone; he is surrounded by the beauty of the mountains and the setting sun. Mono no aware is a path to nirvana that doesn’t require the expulsion of all feelings: instead, you understand how those feelings relate to the world around you. You use them to dissolve into the emptiness of the universe. Become one with it. Realize how the way you feel interacts with the illusion that is the world.

But what does that have to do with haji? In the case of Japanese Buddhism, haji occurs when people see you in a way you’d rather they didn’t, when their knowledge of something you’d rather keep hidden makes it impossible for you to dissolve neatly into the void. You might call this a sort of attunement disruption.

A Japanese form of dance-drama known as Noh might help to illustrate the point. In one such drama, called Eguchi, two characters, a monk and an asobi—a member of a group of wandering dancers once associated with prostitution but later a quasi-order of Buddhist nuns—are speaking to each other. At this time in Japanese history, sex work was thought of as a source of great haji. The monk recognizes the asobi and remembers when she was a sex worker. He recites a poem asking her for “lodgings” and “refuge.” (I’m sure it’s not too hard to work out what “lodgings” and “refuge” mean in this context. He wasn’t just asking for a bed to sleep in overnight.) She, of course, refuses and is overcome with haji.[10] Being reminded of who she once was is a source of shame for the asobi. More powerfully, it’s the haji born from the monk’s ability to remind her of a past actual self that brought feelings of shame when contrasted with her ideal self, which she was striving toward.

Historian Gary Ebersole has pointed out that the asobi’s haji is a lot like the shame Izanami felt when her husband saw her corpse: “The emotion of shame is produced in a character when someone views her in a way that does not match her own sense of identity or her public self-presentation.”[11] You become fearful that someone knows something about you that you want to keep hidden—for example, that you are decomposing or used to work in a profession thought of as taboo. According to linguist Gian Marco Farese, the fear of people finding out something you’d rather they didn’t is a central part of haji, even today.[12] In a religion whose goal is to evaporate out of a world thought of as an illusion, haji had the power to make everything feel mighty real.

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