"On Reading" by Miyaoi was part of a book of sort of introductory lessons into the ways of learning itself or how to live healthily in daily life. In other words, it's a sort of educational book for people who didn't have very, very high literary skills, perhaps, but were interested in bringing themselves up by studying and so forth. It was a manuscript, it was written in the beginning of the 1830s and distributed by hand. In other words, it was copied out, scripted and distributed in that way. Anyway, I've translated here one of the episodes from this. Most of the book itself is made of essays, but this story that we're gonna take a look at is really a story, it's almost like a short story. And it involves a man who was betrayed by his beloved, by someone he trusted very, very much in regards to the words that he wrote into the margins of the books, which he cherished and looked at, thought of, as being his staple in life. Let's read this text together as I've translated it. Okay? "Certain things need to be understood in order to read books. One example: though invisible to the human eye, when you read The Analects, Confucius's spirit is actually standing beside you, watching and listening to whether you believe or disbelieve his words. We should keep this in mind as we read. Whenever there is a passage that moves you, and makes you think it may help guide your life, it's important to offer thanks, within the heart, to the spirit of the writer." He begins in his first paragraph here by encouraging us to read and to believe what we read. But of course we need to have chosen the right books. Here he gives us an example, The Analects, which is perhaps the most important, the bedrock of Edo period, 19th century, ethical thinking. One of the first things that young students learn to read by rote when they start going to- when they've learned enough characters and grammar and so forth in classical Chinese to read. Anyway, it's one of the most important four great classics of China which were read in Japan. So, when you're reading The Analects, or Rongo in Japanese, he's asking us to imagine Confucius standing beside us and judging us, seeing whether we're going to be believing or disbelieving in reading. And of course The Analects is full of eternal truths. So, if Confucius sees us and sees that we're not believing it, we know he makes a judgment. Or any of the books, any of the authors of the readers of the books that we're reading will judge on us. Of course, that's a very bad way to be reading and so forth. "It's important to offer thanks within the heart," he says. So we should, as we read something, and we read in order to gain something from it that moves us, "It may guide our lives," he says. We should at the same time have a certain sort of interface or emotive, perhaps spiritual, interaction with the man or the woman, in this age almost entirely men, standing, in other words, on the other side of the page. "Scholars write books in the hope that they will aid the world and its people. Books are what these men devote themselves to; words and letters are what they leave behind for us. This is why even though a scholar may die and enter the netherworld, his spirit remains bound to any book he has written, so that he can peer into the hearts of his readers. This rule holds true for all kinds of books. If you ignore the rule, and go on reading something in a disrespectful way to the spirit of the author, no good can be gained from the experience. Let me give you an example of what I mean, told to me once a long while ago by my mentor." Here, the narrator is introducing us, he's carrying us on into a story, hearsay, something that he was told a long time ago by his mentor, whom obviously he respects a great deal. He's setting out this story, the frame of this story, the introduction to it that we have before we go into it, tells us that scholars all have something in mind beyond their immediate mission in writing something. They're trying to make the world a better place. Men devote their entire lives to these words and these letters, so then they're not just inorganic, inanimate objects, ciphers lying on the page, they represent something. Again, they don't represent something, I'd like to correct myself. They encapsulate something, they actually contain the essence of the spiritual commitments, beliefs, and discoveries of men who lived in the decades and the centuries before us and obviously who knew a great deal about the essence of what it is to live in society as a social human being. Anyway, what happens when you're disrespectful? This is the story that then unfolds in the paragraphs which follow. "Back then, there was a scholar of I Ching divination named Master Kokuzan, who lived in the Shiba district of Edo. He had a disciple named Nakagawa who rented rooms in his row house, and spent all his time and energies there pursuing the science of fortune telling. Nakagawa bought all sorts of books dealing with the I Ching, and would write dozens of ideas into the margins that no one in the past had ever thought of. He threw himself into these volumes, always keeping them close at hand. One day though, suddenly, the man died. His widow sold off each and every one of his possessions including – heartlessly – the well-guarded I Ching texts he'd scribbled into so passionately. She then moved in with another man she'd taken a liking to, and finally married the fellow." This is a multilayered story. First of all, we have the narrator telling us about, well, how we should interact with books, how we should read, the posture we should take when we're reading a book by someone who preceded us in life. Then he goes to tell us a story which he was told by his master, who knew this man named Master Kokuzan who lived in the southeast of Edo. One of the entrances into the city, there was a great temple in Shiba here where the mausoleum, one of the two mausolea for the Tokugawa Shogun, their family was. So there are lots and lots of temples around there. A lot of people come in and out, entering the sentry, it's one of the main, one of the four main entrances to Edo. And so anyway, he has a school there and he's teaching, this man is teaching someone named Nakagawa, a disciple. A simple man who decides to dedicate his life to fortune telling. You can be a fortune teller in a lot of different ways, but this fellow Nakagawa has decided to study the great classic, the great Chinese classic I Ching in order to hone his skills and to really help people to become a very, very good fortune teller. But also to leave behind a legacy to elucidate some of the secrets, the mysteries of the I Ching which remained, in his eye, unsolved throughout the centuries before him. So anyway, what he did was he gathered lots of books, he spent a lot of his time and money buying printed and, perhaps, manuscript books, all kinds of different interpretations, commentaries on the I Ching, and studiously scribbled all of his ideas into the margin, and, by doing that, discovered some things. We don't really know what his discoveries were, as we'll see through the story, but he was convinced that he'd come across a few things which no one before him had noticed before. Unfortunately, before he'd finished his work, perhaps he meant to gather together, collate all of his scribblings, write a book of his own. We don't really know. But as he was in the course of studying the I Ching, he passed away. Of course, all of his belongings, all of his books, his notes, everything, his brush, his ink, everything was inherited by his wife who, as we're told here, was a foolish woman or a selfish woman. She sold all of his possessions including his cherished books and then ended up falling in love with another fellow and marrying him. Let's end our lesson here on that strange and rather sad note, the fact that she sold his books and ended up with someone who had nothing to do with the I Ching scholar to begin with.
