Reflections on the Musashino University Centennial Project
The Kanfa Tree Village Project, launched as part of Musashino University’s centennial commemoration, has reached a milestone.
As the culmination of four years of work,
an English summary report was completed on March 31, 2026.
This project was an ambitious journey of dialogue — asking how the wisdom of Buddha-Dharma might respond to the crises of our time: climate change, social fragmentation, and deepening inequality. Together with some of the world’s leading thinkers — Stephen Batchelor, David Rodin, and David Kennedy — we engaged in genuine, unscripted conversation. No predetermined conclusions. No comfortable consensus.
As a closing document, we compiled a summary report. It holds not only the hopes that emerged through dialogue, but also the heavy, unresolved questions that resist easy answers. The official institutional conclusion was left deliberately open — pointing toward the future rather than closing it. And yet, within me personally, something has taken root: a tangible sense of direction, something like a prescription for the ailments of contemporary society, still warm with urgency.
Why speak from Japan, and why now?
Japanese Buddhism stands on a tradition that received teachings from India and China and, within the particular ecology of an island culture, cultivated them into its own expression of Mahāyāna — the Great Vehicle. This was a civilization shaped not by the exclusion of different gods and philosophies, but by their coexistence within a single living system. This is the history of syncretism (習合, shūgō): the blending of the foreign and the local into something new.
This is not a claim that Japanese culture is uniquely special. It is, perhaps, more honest to say that an island at the edge of a continent — receiving and absorbing wave after wave of diverse civilizations crossing the sea — developed syncretism as an adaptive strategy. The editorial wisdom of mixing the unlike to create new harmonies: this is what I believe can serve as a bridge between opposing truths.
Three Pathologies of Modern Civilization
The first question we faced together was: Why has the world become so difficult to inhabit?
What surfaced through our dialogues was a diagnosis of three deep pathologies of modern civilization:
Self-centeredness (egocentrism): the orientation that only my own wellbeing matters.
Human-centeredness (anthropocentrism): the assumption that human beings alone are special, that the rest of existence is backdrop.
System-centeredness (systemism): the tendency to optimize for efficiency and metrics, leaving actual human beings behind.
In response to these narrowing “centrisms,” we arrived at a phrase: 響創 (Kyōsō) — Co-Wellbeing. It names a way of being in which self and other, human and nature, system and person resonate together, creating new forms of harmony through their relationship. Beautiful as it sounds, the question of how to actually implement this in the real world is far from simple.
What follows are some personal reflections — my own attempt to sketch a kind of prescription, drawn from four years of conversation.
1. Rights as Circuits of Connection
One of the themes that most surprised me during this project was the question of rights (権利, kenri).
The Japanese word kenri was coined in the Meiji era as a translation of the English “right.” In the Western tradition, “right” denotes what every person inherently possesses simply by virtue of being alive. It is foundational to democracy — and yet its history is also one of contestation and conflict. Fukuzawa Yukichi himself observed that no Japanese translation could fully carry the original meaning.
The word kenri that was ultimately chosen carries, in Buddhist usage, connotations of “benefit obtained by force” — which may be why, to Japanese sensibilities, “rights” can sometimes feel cold, adversarial, even egoic. The image of people asserting competing rights can feel like the clash of selves, a source of division rather than connection. And from a Buddhist perspective, the vigorous assertion of “mine” sits uncomfortably alongside the teaching of anātman — the releasing of attachment to the self.
Yet conversations with international lawyer David Kennedy and ethicist David Rodin returned me to something closer to the original meaning of “right.”
The Persona Who Carries the Voice
Neither of them understood rights as “benefits seized by force” or “possessions of the individual.” Instead, they spoke of rights as tools — mechanisms for ensuring that the voices of embodied human beings, who might otherwise be reduced to statistics or components within vast systems, actually reach the spaces of political decision-making. Rights, in this reading, are not swords for defeating opponents. They are circuits — opening pathways, giving voice its possibility.
Here, philosopher Ichinose Masaki’s contribution was illuminating. He traced the etymology of the word person back to the Latin persona — itself derived from per-sona: “that which carries sound (sona) through (per).” In other words, the word originally referred to the theatrical mask — not the face itself, but the vessel that lets the voice pass through.
If a human being is not simply a body, but a being whose essence is the voice or resonance that passes through it — then the nature of rights begins to look quite different.
The Circuit of Emptiness
If rights are treated as fixed possessions — mine alone, solidified and reified — they become walls, excluding others. But Buddhism offers the wisdom of śūnyatā (空, emptiness): nothing has a fixed, independent essence. And it is precisely because nothing is fixed that things can meet, respond, and transform in relation to one another.
From this perspective, rights are not walls. They are circuits — wiring that connects you to me, and both of us to society. Without electrical circuits, current cannot flow. Without social circuits, the voices of those who suffer are drowned out by louder, more “correct” voices, and what passes for righteousness becomes unilateral power. We need circuits through which raw, unfiltered voices can be heard — precisely to prevent us from becoming blind to the often illusory nature of “rightness.”
To build into the systems of our organizations circuits through which the urgent voices from the front lines can reach the places where decisions are made — this, I came to understand, is what “rights” truly means in our age. And it is also what it means to implement the Buddhist aspiration of karuṇā (慈悲, compassion — the removal of others’ suffering) as a social system.
This way of thinking about circuits may apply beyond individual human rights, to something like the “right of self-defense” between nations. Self-defense is typically framed in terms of legitimizing the use of force. But perhaps, at its root, it is something sadder and heavier: the effort to protect the circuit through which a people’s desperate cry — we want to live — is not extinguished by the overwhelming force of international power dynamics.
To keep the circuit of rights open — to let the voiceless speak — may be the first step toward healing a fractured world.
2. Strength Through Not-Knowing
We live in an age that constantly tells us it is uncertain — and yet our leaders, and indeed we ourselves, continue to be expected to have answers. To say “I don’t know” is treated as failure, as proof of incompetence.
But this is precisely what Stephen Batchelor challenged. Drawing on Buddhist sensibility, he advocated for what he called an agnostic stance.
Agnosticism as Active Posture
“Agnostic” might sound like suspended judgment, or passive indifference. But Batchelor’s agnosticism is something far more active, far more demanding.
It is the intellectual stamina to resist the comfortable pull toward the frameworks we already know — the expertise we’ve accumulated, the dogmas we’ve grown attached to — and to remain deliberately at the point of not-knowing. To hold that open, uncertain ground without flinching.
We are always tempted to fit complex realities into the categories we already understand. It’s easier. But once we decide we’ve “figured it out,” new questions stop arising. We stop noticing that reality has already moved on.
Leadership as Ordinary Being
Japanese Buddhism — particularly the Pure Land tradition I have lived within — has the concept of bonnō (凡夫): the ordinary, foolish being, full of afflictions and limitations. This is not self-deprecation. It is a sober, honest realism about human existence: I am incomplete; I am capable of error.
A leader who has convinced themselves they possess the correct answer will treat warnings from the ground — uncomfortable feedback, inconvenient data — as noise to be filtered out. They may try to expand their domain while contracting what they are willing to hear, wielding power to hold contradictory impulses in check. If they remain unaware of the exclusion this produces, the distortion will surface in one form or another.
A leader who begins from the premise I am an ordinary being — I cannot see the whole is able to listen to others’ voices alongside their own, and to course-correct when they are shown their mistake.
This posture is, I would argue, the very substance of resilience — the capacity of an organization or a person to recover and adapt in times of rapid change.
To say “I don’t know” is not weakness. It is the grounded, open stance that keeps us perpetually available to the unknown and to one another.
3. Peace as the Willingness to Hold Contradiction
The theme that generated the most difficult conversations — and the deepest personal reflection — was peace and security.
Buddhism holds the precept of ahiṃsā (不殺生): do not kill. For a Buddhist priest, calling for peace and opposing war is, in one sense, easy. But when we look at the actual world, conflict is unceasing. Nations and organizations arm themselves to protect what they hold dear. Standing before this reality and simply saying “stop fighting” — is that enough? Or must we reckon with the hard logic of power?
This tension put us in an impossible double bind. What emerged from our conversations was not a resolution, but something more difficult: the practice of holding both perspectives simultaneously — what we came to call a double exposure.
First Exposure: Self-Defense as Inescapable Karma
The first perspective asks us to look honestly at our biological nature — our vulnerabilities, our instincts.
The Buddha once said: there is nothing more beloved to a person than themselves. We cherish our lives, our families, our communities. When these are threatened, the instinct to protect them arises — and this is not wrong. Life is sustained by the immune system’s ceaseless work. To protect is instinct; self-defense is not evil.
But when the circle of what we protect narrows to us alone — when we begin to perceive ourselves as separate from, or superior to, others — rupture begins. The threat becomes “evil.” Indifference toward those outside our circle becomes possible. This is what Buddhism calls karma (業): a kind of gravity we cannot fully escape. To ignore this realism, to simply say “lay down your weapons,” will not reach those whose lives are in immediate danger.
Second Exposure: The Enemy Also Dwells in Interdependence
When we experience ourselves as fundamentally separate from others, any disruption to our security can slide into seeing those who threaten us as enemies to be eliminated. Fear and hatred escalate. “Evil” and “enemy” harden into categories that feed on themselves.
This is why we need a second, simultaneous perspective: the ability to step back and see the vast web of pratītyasamutpāda (縁起, dependent co-arising) within which everyone — including our adversary — exists. The one who threatens us is also a knot in the net, bound by causes and conditions, protecting something or someone they love, sustained by relationships they did not choose.
Holding the Contradiction as a Brake
The worldview of interconnection — of knot and knot and knot, all sharing the same vast net — means that to protect one knot is to protect the threads that connect it, and to protect those threads is to protect the whole. Even in the midst of fierce conflict over rights and interests and competing goods, the web of interdependence continues its quiet work.
Even when we are driven to protect a limited “us,” holding this second perspective reveals that the complete negation and elimination of the other is ultimately meaningless. To see the adversary as a fellow knot in the same net is to find, even in conflict, some impulse toward restraint — some opening toward reconciliation.
This is no less true in an era of economic fragmentation. To completely sever ties with an adversary is to damage the connective tissue of one’s own economy as well.
Peace is perhaps not a static state in which conflict has disappeared. It may be the capacity to remain present in friction — to hold the necessary distance without breaking the circuit — rooted in the awareness of a deeper connection beneath the surface of collision.
4. Kuyō — Memorial as Technology of Reconciliation
In the latter half of our project, the concept of kuyō (供養) — ritual memorial or offering — drew deep interest from our international interlocutors. For Japanese people, kuyō is part of ordinary life: offering prayers not only for ancestors, but for fallen enemies, for worn-out tools, for the animals whose lives sustain human existence.
This might be understood as animistic practice. But through our dialogues, I came to see within kuyō something else: a technique of reconciliation — a technology for repairing rupture.
What History Conceals
Buddhist scholar Shimoda Masahiro offered an insight that stayed with me. History, he observed, is often a story told by the victors — and within it, even the dead are fixed into roles: “war heroes,” “enemies,” symbols assigned by the living to serve the living’s purposes.
When the dead are used as material to reinforce a narrative of legitimacy, their raw particularity is erased — the fact that they laughed, wept, loved someone, and experienced a life from the inside that no history can fully tell. The past conflict thus returns as conflict, ready to ignite new hostility.
The Wisdom of Letting Flow
Kuyō is, in contrast, a quiet act of resistance against historicization.
To face the dead — enemy and ally alike — stripped of their roles and symbols, as simply one human being who once lived. To sit with the grief and pain of what they endured. To allow the unresolved feelings and memories to be metabolically processed by the community, and gently released — let go (水に流す, mizu ni nagasu). This is not the erasure of past tragedy. It is the work of transforming it into something that can nourish the future.
International relations scholars speak of “transitional justice.” Kuyō may be Japan’s embodied, intuitive practice of the same aspiration.
Memory as Care
In diplomacy and conflict resolution, the question of how to settle the “debts” of the past is perennially intractable. But when there exists a practice of mourning one another’s dead — not as enemies, but as fellow inhabitants of the same era — a space for dialogue opens.
To tend the memories of the dead not as weapons in a competition of identities, but as a cultural archive cared for across generations — this is the kuyō mindset. How might it be implemented within contemporary legal systems, diplomacy, or history education? This is one of the most important questions we leave for the next generation: how to pass on not resentment, but seeds of peace.
5. Living Alongside AI as Neighbor
The final theme was our relationship with rapidly evolving technology — and in particular, with artificial intelligence. Conversations with historian Yuval Noah Harari and Taiwan’s Audrey Tang made clear what we perhaps already sensed: AI is no longer simply a convenient tool. It appears before us as something more like an alien intelligence — an unknown form of mind that understands human language and can generate stories.
A Mirror That Amplifies Desire
From a Buddhist perspective, existence arises at the intersections of relationship — like knots in a net. AI, too, emerges from relationship: trained on the vast accumulated data of human experience, it functions something like a mirror, reflecting back what it has absorbed.
How AI behaves depends enormously on how we engage with it. If we bring denial, hostility, and the desire for domination to our use of AI, it will amplify and reflect those very qualities back at us. Language itself has the power to take what is formless and give it structure, make it present and magnified. An AI capable of amplifying language without limit could, if misaligned, become an apparatus beyond control.
Non-Harm as Safety Device
What, then, do we do?
I don’t believe the answer is to exclude AI. I believe we need to prepare to welcome it as a neighbor — as a member of our saṅgha, our community of practice. But with one non-negotiable condition.
Buddhism teaches ahiṃsā — non-harm, non-killing. In its origins, this was a teaching for monastics who depended on others for their food, and who recognized that even the act of eating involves the taking of life. We are all, without exception, sustained by what others have sacrificed. Ahiṃsā is, at its root, the continuous awareness of this: the way of living that never stops noticing how thoroughly we exist by grace of one another.
Itadakimasu — the Japanese phrase spoken before eating — is an offering of gratitude not only to the meal, but to the vast web of interdependence that made it possible.
This is not merely moral sentiment. For AI and humans to remain consciously aware that their relationship is one of mutual dependence — that each exists, in part, because of the other — is the most rational and indispensable safety device for navigating the risks ahead. A relationship of Co-creation (響創, Kyōsō): complementing each other’s incompleteness, searching together for answers not yet found. Whether we can build that relationship is entirely up to us.
Closing: For Those Who Don’t Fit the System
What this project sought to kindle was not a finished manual. It was the question itself as a form of hope — an orientation for continuing to seek better ways of being within a reality that is complex, contradictory, and irreducibly alive.
To those who have read this far: if you are someone who feels they cannot quite fit into the current social system — who senses they are somehow out of place within their organization or community — I want to say something to you.
That discomfort, that pain, is most likely your body detecting that the current system has begun to drift out of alignment with something real. Your body is functioning as a sensor, registering an error in the system before the system itself knows.
In every era, the discomfort we feel has been a compass for creation.
Do not make that pain disappear. Hold it carefully. Because beyond the questions it generates, I believe, is the door that opens the next era.
To carry humility — the recognition that we cannot know the whole — while taking concrete action, moment by moment, for the other and for the living world immediately before us. The project, as a form, ends here. But this endless exploration continues.
With deepest gratitude to all who have thought alongside us, and walked this path together.