Love, the Law of Life

This book was at first planned to include only a brief treatment of the subject, “The Creation of Love,” in five chapters; but feeling that some important matters were omitted, I have written the additional chapters while ill. Fortunately, Mr. Y. Murashima, my friend, came to my assistance, and the book was completed. There is more or less a lack of unity in the composition, because parts I have written myself and parts I “ have dictated. Portions of the material have appeared in magazine articles, but three fourths of the book are newly written or dictated.

I regard this book as the statement of my System of Love.

To Mr. Murashima, who worked on the editing, and to Mr. K. Yarita, who did the proof reading, I wish to express my gratitude. avoure cies

Ah, this famine of love! How it saddens my soul!

In city. and country, in hospital and factory, in shop and on street, everywhere this dreadful drought of love! Not a drop of love anywhere: the loveless land is more dreary ‘than Sahara and more terrible than Gobi. When the last drop of Love has dried away all men will go mad and begin to massacre all who have ever thought of love or appreciated it. Behold them armed with guns, swords, spears, and even ancient maces, hating and suspecting one another!

Japan is assailed by a whirlwind of fear, and its organization is shaken from the very foundation. I do not mean to say that Japan has no army or no government. What I mean is, there is no spirit here: the soul of Japan has been shaken, as was the land itself in the great earthquake. Japanese people are not trusting each other. They are tasting the sorrows of the conqueror: they have discovered that in the very heart of their capital city there is living a horde of traitors. Japanese people no longer believe in themselves. This saddens me.

There was a time when we Japanese thought that the nation was created by the sword; when we used to think that the sword was the soul of Japan—but that time is no more. Henceforth, in the spirit of Japan, love must be regnant.

‘Love is the supreme sovereign. Love alone can

“subdue the world. All those men who dreamed of

/ world empire have failed: the first Emperor of China,

Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Ceesar, Napoleon, the Kaiser—all have vanished like a dream. Conquest by the sword is but for the moment; it

. has no validity whatever.

Love binds society together from within. It is both linchpin and girdle; and Love can never be annihilated.

Japan does not believe this, and hence cannot subdue the world. Would-be world conquerors can subdue merely the surface of a globe 7,900 miles in diameter; but the conqueror of men’s spirits subjugates the very core of the cosmos.

Where can I walk in Tokyo and find love? Everyone’s face is expressionless. The young girls, the newsboys, the street-car conductors, the ministers of state—all the people that I saw as I walked from the Premier’s official residence down to the rustyroofed hovels in the slums of Fukagawa seemed to have lost the light of Love from their faces. In theaters, concerts, banquets, parks, I discovered only the empty shells of souls. I saw a singing girl wearing a gorgeous embroidered obi of silver thread over a long-sleeved kimono of purple silk crépe. How lovely she was! But it was all display, with nothing below the surface. How could she dress in this way when near-by in the slums were her sisters weeping in their poverty?

In the great earthquake a wine shop on the bank of the Okawa was thrown over into the river, and a crowd fleeing from the flames were drowned on that spot. Several days after the fire a mob of drunken idiots were to be seen diving into the water reeking with the dead bodies in order to salvage the bottles of sake, hundreds of which were lying at the bottom of the stream. They piled them up on the bank and were diving for more, when along came a gang of cleverer sake-thieves who ran away with the whole lot. But think! What are wars and economic conflicts but large-scale imitations of this sordid disgrace?

Oh, do not rehearse to me the horrors of the European War. My heart is sick with them. They were not the doings of humankind: they were rather the deeds of nationals—of Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen—not of human beings. Those men had become mere machines. They were beasts without souls. For beasts do have souls, but they!—they had sold their souls for passion, for gold, and had bound the sons of men in front of the mouths of cannon. The mere recalling of it all makes me swoon. Why did they, in order to purchase destruction, poverty, and adultery, murder eight million souls and wound twentytwo million people?

Why? It was retribution. It was the vengeance of Heaven. Thus did the loveless recompense themselves. For seventy-seven years they had been teaching hatred and strife, and the world naturally became what they had prayed it might be. When the trees are felled, the springs of water fail; and when love had dried up, the very next day the Great War began.

I stand against all learning, all institutions, all governments, all arts, all religions, which reject love. * I protest against every so-called church which preaches faith and fails to love. I oppose the politicians who rely on force and know nothing about Love. If I have to be arrested for saying this, let me be handcuffed, for I had rather die quickly by the sword than die of thirst in a loveless desert.

Never talk to me of any doctrine of communism that is based on hate, for I wish to love. Show me how any communism founded on hate can even exist! Is not communism that is maintained by the sword mere tyranny? Revolution may break out in a day. Czar Nicholas was frightened by the booming of cannon on the Kronstadt; Kerensky fled without fighting; and the fall of Kiel made the crown topple from the head of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.

But Love cannot be born in a day. Therefore the mob chooses the easy way of the sword. Thus humanity is forever being forced to walk on the naked edges of drawn swords, while those who fail to get across are forthwith cut to pieces. Come, you conjurors, you sorcerers, you magicians! See if you can. calculate how many battalions can pass abreast on the edges of all the naked swords in the world! Behold communism balanced on the edges of swords, and crowns set up on top of rifle balls!—both alike too hideous to behold!

Well, then, in place of the sword shall we substitute gold, and try to buy men’s souls therewith? What do we see in modern cities? Prostitutes, purveyors of syphilis remedies, alley delinquents, and the police and gendarmerie who control them! If these be the stuff that the modern state is made of, then it is a state that is next door to hell.

As for me, this famine of love makes me faint and sick.

Look at the faces of those United States senators. How eloquent sound Borah’s ‘Justice’? and Hiram Johnson’s “ Patriotism’! When men live next door to hell, it is true, I suppose, that hate and disdain do sound like justice and patriotism.

Clans mistreat one another; races slaughter one another. Where they live close by the door to hell their eyes are scorched and blinded by the flames of hate which are blown out. Americans are blinded in this way.

My soul, whither wilt thou flee, and find an oasis - in this parched, loveless waste? Where wilt thou find a fountain of love?

Child, search not for springs of love in the deep valleys, nor yet in the bosom of another being. The spring of love, ah, it must well up in thine own heart.

I was wrong when I tried to quench my thirst with, love from another. I should have sought for the | healing spring of love in my own breast.

I ask, who will love those who fail to love others? When will they be moulded into personalities, if they do not mould themselves? Ah, poor soul, grasp a handful of clay and shape therewith a nose. Then the eyes, the mouth, and last the ears—and you have aman! Love is a sculpture: it is a carving chiseled upon the soul of a man.

Therefore, I do not lose hope, nor do I fear when I see this drought in the land. I shall dig down deeper, still deeper, into my own soul, and there, in my heart of hearts, shall I find the spring of love which can never be found on the surface. I shall dig down to God who is within me. Then, if I strike the underground stream that murmurs softly in the depths of my heart, I will tenderly cherish this oasis of the soul —go rarely found—and to it will I lead a few thirsting comrades.

Away, day of mourning! Begone, you sword and gun jugglers! For I must work with God to set up the Kingdom of Love in the earth, where not a single sinner shall be molested, nor a single beggar be despised. |

Ah, dreamer, think you that the Kingdom of Heaven will come easily and soon? Your Utopian phantasies will be rudely jolted!

But, my child, never fear. The Kingdom of Love has begun in my own soul; and little by little it is growing. Yet I do not expect it to grow without sacrifice. A cross awaits me on before. Then, let the cross, and death, too, come! If it be for the sake of Love, I will gladly die. |

I have only one gospel, only one way of salvation: it is that the cross be overpassed by Love.

Through love all things are born again. Love alone is all-powerful. Love creates, rears, leads. Love alone is eternal. Love created the world, and Love maintains the world. Love is the very essence of God.

When I must suffer, to Love I entrust my body; when I must die, to love I submit my soul. Love is the final conqueror of my heart. I am Love’s bondslave. Oh, glorious bondage!

If any man desires me to revere him, let him offer me love. To the loving I shall grudge no word of reverent praise. Even if his love be but imperfect, for me it is a revelation and a way leading me toward God.

Where Love is, there is God.

“Greece taught Wisdom,”’ it has been said, ‘Rome taught Organization, and Christianity, Love.” What, then, is that which we call love? Is love merely a sentimental, feeble feeling of regard for the object of one’s affection? Or is it mere weakness in facing evil and inability to struggle? ‘‘The ethics of Jesus,’ says Nietzsche, “was born in the period of Roman decadence. Hence, it is a morality of selfdistrust which makes one regard oneself a sinner. It is, in other words, the morality of an age in which only the weak had survived, while the strong had vanished.” In my view, however, criticisms such as this are all wide of the mark.

Before we discuss the love of Christianity, we must determine first what in its essence love is.

In the very early ages of primitive man, when Nature was in full control of man’s life, his spiritual nature— the first emergence of conscience—was extremely feeble. Consequently, the meaning of “life”? was not understood. Man was awed by the phenomena of Nature.

To him everything was fear-provoking, all was fate, oppressing him under a cruel yoke. Man was simply doomed to bewilderment.

In the religion of India the doctrine of Karma set its deterministic seal upon life and conscience. It meant nothing less than a strangling of spiritual growth and the absolute defeat of man by Nature.

When man’s conscience functions thus feebly and lacks inner dynamic power, it follows inevitably that his efforts are frustrated by external forces. If by chance anything does defeat these external forces, it is merely accidental. The accidental that is lucky leads a man on to fortune, and life of this sort is merely aimless existence. In this blind struggle for existence, what opportunity is there for decisions of conscience? If perforce decisions are made, they are merely fortuitous, unrelated to conscience, without any creativeness, arrived at by accidental combinations of circumstances—decisions made by a chance throw of the dice. ‘

Howbeit, there is a development from the plane where decisions are made by a throw of the dice, up to the practice, more accordant with reason, which Kropotkin termed ‘Mutual Aid,’ whereby the individual is no longer crushed by external fate or defeated by internal chance. For example, in time of flood individuals unite their efforts and mend a bursting dike with a wattle-work stockade. In his Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin thus refers to the necessity for mutual aid in the struggle for existence:

“With many large divisions of the animal kingdom mutual aid is the rule. Mutual aid is found even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of microdrganisms. Of course, our knowledge of the life of the invertebrates, save the termites, the ants, and the bees, is extremely limited; and yet, even as regards the lower animals, we may glean a few facts of well ascertained codperation. The nature of the associations of locusts, vanessee, cicadeele, cicade, and so on, has never been thoroughly studied; but the very fact of their existence indicates that they must be composed on about the same principles as the temporary associations of ants or bees for purposes of migration. As to the beetles, we have quite well- _ observed facts of mutual help amidst the burying beetles (genus Necrophorus). They must have some decaying organic matter to lay their eggs in, and thus to provide their larve with food; but that matter must not decay very rapidly. So they are wont to bury in the ground the corpses of all kinds of small animals which they occasionally find in their rambles. As a rule, they live an isolated life, but when one of them has discovered the corpse of a mouse or a bird, which it could hardly manage to bury itself, it calls four, six, or ten other beetles to perform the operation with united efforts; if necessary, they transport the corpse to a suitable soft ground; and they bury it in

a very considerate way, without quarreling as to which of them will enjoy the privilege of laying its eggs in the buried corpse.’”!