日本語版［地湧社設立趣意書］

1.　We are facing various severe crises unprecedented in recorded history. The most serious problem is nuclear weapons, the abolition of which is called for on a worldwide scale. If a situation ever occurs where nuclear weapons are used, the human race will definitively perish.

The crises we are facing include not only nuclear weapons but also other issues. Industrial modernization has caused air pollution and water pollution in our rivers and seas, which is gradually and inevitably undermining our lives. One of the basic foundations of life is food, yet we are suffering a food disaster, which is not only terrifying but eroding life itself. Farm land in Japan is being killed by agricultural chemicals and chemical fertilizer. It is not just agricultural products among the foods that threaten our health and lives. Society is awash with fake foods containing harmful, industrially-produced food additives. Those that consume them become like plucked flowers, severed from the very roots that give them life. It is fact that diseases resulting from the way we live in this civilization, such as cancer, strokes, and heart disease, are steadily increasing in number. They corrupt not only our bodies but also our minds.

It is obvious to everybody that ways in which we interact with nature, society, and others on Mother Earth are gradually taking us in the direction of ruining life for all of us without exception.

２.　Now, the question is what we should do to hit the brakes on the downfall of humanity.
Are politicians, business leaders, and people in a position of leadership in these modern times going to save us from this unprecedented crisis? I am afraid the answer is no. Abruptly changing their responsibilities might actually have the opposite effect of confusing society.

Are scholars, educators, doctors, and other cultured individuals going to play their role in saving our lives? Unfortunately, they have made academics and professions excessively specialized and have kept us away from ordinary lives, which is why they cannot nurture us either.

What of religious figures? Are they going to help us? No religious leader has ever confronted such critical problems. Although religion should involve the tenets to rescue us, the fact might be that they are still at the same outset as we are, searching for a concrete measure of how to save humanity from the escalating global crisis.
We have come to realize that we can no longer rely on those we respect as our leaders.

3.　In other words, we have relied on our shallow perceptions and intellectual pursuit alone, reasoning in science, culture, and the like. It is not that established culture has been totally meaningless for humankind, but that the intellectual pursuit may have been only a small part of the potential we have, if you consider the deep roots of life. Perhaps humans are supported by greater wisdom.

We have been the product of evolution since the earth was created. The equivalent history of the earth is compressed and contained in our lives; we are some three billion years old and also our actual age. Even if we take pride in a culture several thousand years old at most, it is a mere fraction of the history contained in our very lives.

Everybody is considered to potentially possess wisdom from when we were fish or monkeys, or even before, when we were the universe itself: far beyond the wisdom learned in our present culture.

Only a few people so far have reached this profound wisdom under special circumstances. We are presently at a complete deadlock however, and more people in this world regardless of where they are from are beginning to abandon the ship of human knowledge on which they have relied, and starting to chart their own courses to recover their lives.

Let us call them the self-awakened.

4.　They do not assume any particular leadership positions, but are practical people working to ground themselves. They are farmers, gardeners, homemakers, doctors in the suburbs, and religious figures.

You can say that they are ahead of all others in discovering a way of living based on life. The next stage of humanity rests on their shoulders, yet they live in a world where they do not need to be fully aware of that; their inner voice guides them in dialogue, and they do not contact each other.

They are you. It is you who are digging a well of profound wisdom.

These people, including yourself, with a way of living grounded in life, do not appear on the surface of society, yet are connected by a single underground water vein. This vein will eventually turn into a spring on the earth’s surface, and serve as a source of human life to enrich others. The revolution they bring to this world will be quiet and steady, instead of the drastic changes imagined by outdated people.

An era of self-awakening has begun.

(October, 1982)