Indra's Net: The Spiritual Universe of Miyazawa Kenji

Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was a multi-talented educator, poet and author of the Taisho era. In his introduction, Roger Pulvers describes him as “a dilettante typical” of his time, combining a profound appreciation for all the world's culture (he was an devotee of Beethoven, and translated more than one of his own works into Esperanto) with a deep commitment to the Buddhist tradition. His short story “Indra's Net,” for example, demonstrates a number of the trajectories of this fascinating character. The protagonist — an archaeologist at work unearthing the Buddhist artifacts of the ancient Silk Road — carefully describes the geological features of the Tsela Pass even as he seeks to affirm his community with the Buddhist culture of that place in a cosmic epiphany replete with heavenly beings. As the afterward by Jane Marie Law indicates, the core images of this story are grounded less in the personal idiosyncrasies of its author, however, than the canonical symbolism of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Kegon-kyō), a scripture that teaches the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings and all experiences. It is this image of “Indra's Net” that helps to locate, not only the story's protagonist, but one suspects, Miyazawa himself, in a larger world, a vision in which the diversity of societies and the physical environment is grounded in a fundamental unity, one not entirely incompatible with the imperialist trajectories of his day.