Prayer Without an Object: Faith Without a Religion

Applied to human beings, "non-religious" is a very strange word to begin with. For whatever reason, at a certain point in our distant past the human brain suddenly expanded, making us the creatures we are today, and from that moment the sublime capacity for faith was built into us. As I see it, faith lies at the root of what it is to be human; it is a defining mark of our humanity, not something to be brushed aside on the baffling grounds that it is "primitive." Nor has human faith ever been confined to the great world religions such as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. It has been born and has faded away without end, in place after place. Even when a given era brands its forms as heresy or superstition, some expression of religious feeling is unmistakably at work in the people who hold them. The notion that the legitimacy of a faith is decided by the number of its adherents has been a destructive error of the past two thousand years, and though those who cling to it still form the majority around the world, even they undeniably possess a religious impulse of their own.

That is why the casual, unreflective use of the word "non-religious" makes me want to pause. It is often said that the Japanese are non-religious, yet in truth they are nothing of the sort. What that label betrays is a particular view of religion which assumes that unless you can name a specific church, order, or denomination, there is neither religion nor faith. That assumption lies hidden at the root of conflicts over religion. Yet there is no need to name a denomination or sect at all; the capacity for faith is innate to human beings. That is the ground on which my own faith stands. I do not lean toward any particular sect, I have never belonged to a religious organization, and I have no ties to people who do — yet I live every day within a deep sense of faith.

The phrase "the eight million gods" has been worn so thin by casual use that it easily misleads, yet the "god" to whom I offer silent prayer each day is not a fixed, nameable entity. What is commonly called religion has a clear object to which prayer is directed; in my faith, there is no such object. Readers raised in continental traditions of faith may find this hard to picture, but the object of my prayer could be called "nothingness," which is at the same time kami (神) — I always feel the word needed here is kami rather than God — and at the same time "nature." Because my prayer has no object, it has no name. It is not that one substantive god swaps places with another according to the place, the hour, or the moment; it would be closer to say that everything shifts within the equation "nothingness = kami = nature." Having no fixed form, my faith requires no special place to go and no ritual implements to hold. I can offer prayer in faith at any time and in any place.

In short, this is one form of nomadological faith. It has no specific "object" — not in the negative sense of lacking one, but in the sense that none was ever there from the beginning. Because faith and prayer here trigger neither separation nor division, they remain within me in a primordial state, undifferentiated and unsevered: a centerless faith. In such a state, no gap in faith or prayer opens between myself and others, and because there is no separation, there is no way of arriving at conflict, the greatest malady that has plagued religion. How could there be, when prayer has no object over which to divide?

Prayer for me therefore needs no special words. It never breaks off, whatever the time or place — whether I am brewing coffee, absorbed in a book, walking through a cold winter night wind with techno in my ears, traveling, or spending time with someone I love. I visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples; when I travel in Europe I step into churches; when I am in the Middle East, though I cannot go inside, I sit near mosques and watch them for a long while. Because I feel a deep interest in and reverence for the human capacity for faith, whenever I travel in Europe I find myself indifferent to the pastimes people of my generation usually chase after; instead I spend hours inside churches, quietly watching the figures of those who come to pray. Nor does it even have to be an established house of worship. What makes shrines, temples, and churches so moving is that the traces of countless people who have offered their prayers there over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years have soaked into the very place. Sitting in a foreign land and holding a quiet dialogue with those traces — that, for me, is the richness of travel.

Seen in this light, calling oneself "non-religious" is deeply troubling. One reason so many young people today are in anguish, it seems to me, is that identifying as "non-religious" quietly leads them to let go of faith and prayer at the same time. The trouble with the word is that it bundles religion together with faith and prayer as a single package, feeding a strange, almost compulsive belief that to be non-religious is to cast faith and prayer aside. Yet even without subscribing to any established religion, so long as we are human, faith and prayer are things we cannot cast aside. The attempt to force them out of existence, to pretend they were never there, has torn the spirit in two, and I sense a violent confusion now breaking out, above all among the young. In response, movements that look for salvation in a reinterpretation of Christianity or a redefinition of faith seem to be gathering strength in many places. Yet before reaching for that, each person would see a way forward much more clearly by asking anew what religion is, what faith is, and what prayer is. It is the habit of collapsing all three into one and rejecting them wholesale that is cracking the contemporary spirit open.

Irritation hardens into restlessness, sadness hollows into emptiness, and before long a numbness sets in where we no longer even know what we feel. This is the true face of the insomnia and nameless anxiety so characteristic of our age, and it is the defining feature of modern society: self-domestication into the system.

The twenty-first century is "the age of religion and philosophy." By religion I do not mean only the major faiths of the past two thousand years, nor merely cultic movements, but an era in which people of a religious cast of mind will well up and vanish like liquid, one after another.

If I dare to speak of god, I would say it is "the primal experience." A god is not something to be thought of in the head. Put another way, in the state of thinking in the head there is no god, and in the state with no words that is the primal experience, gods exist, plural and countless.

What I came to understand by accumulating that experience is that awe is contact with a god, and a dialogue.

When we speak now of the restoration of faith, it is tied to going to temples, churches, and shrines, but without doing any of that we can believe in gods and offer prayer, and our ancestors kept this up, unbroken.

The gods and the buddhas are not so foolish as to hear a person's selfish wishes.

Musashi left the line "Respect the gods and buddhas, but do not rely on them." You honor gods and buddhas, and you ask nothing of them.

You deeply respect the unknowable, whether gods, buddhas or fate, but you do not count on salvation from it, and you do not hand your actions over to anything other than yourself. You pray, but you do not lean.