Parents’ Words Are Our Eternity

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2023-03-17

This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.

Aphorism: “Parents’ Words Are Our Eternity”

Seishu Hamano, at カフェ・テーロ in Hayama

Before the war, “filial piety” was placed first among the virtues. Today, perhaps because of a tendency to approve of the ego of individualism, the attitude is that I come first: what is wrong with seeking happiness for myself? Yet, when people grow old and their bodies approach their end, they often realize with regret that nothing will remain. Do you resign yourself to the thought that your efforts will naturally disappear? The body is like a withered garden tree, but your heart and all that you have cared about, which last no more than a hundred years or so, will die along with it.

Elderly parents know this. That is why, like me, they leave books behind. Mine are not personal histories, but most of my books are of that kind. A young son might find them a nuisance and dispose of them as if they were junk. It clears things away, after all, for a time. But as you live on, your own existence begins to feel uncertain. You are steeped in the mire of the world, your heart starved and shivering in the cold, with no future fate but death. You are nothing more than a decaying body. All that remains to you is how to use the time you have left. First you want a warm meal. So you wander about, this way and that through the mire. … As a parent, I grieve to see you like that.

Those books were left in the house bequeathed to you so that a parent’s love could take the form of words, bringing stability to your old age and leaving you something of that parent’s “heart.” Please read them with care. If you ruthlessly cast them aside, you may feel temporarily liberated, but gradually you will begin to doubt even the reason for your own life. The fear of being abandoned by your own child will arise. In the mire, you and your child will once again be caught in an ugly struggle for survival.

So you, my son, keep the books that carry your parent’s words, even if you resist them for a while. You too will avoid becoming a withered garden tree; you will gain the breath of an everlasting life. You will feel this for yourself when you reach eighty-five.

You who have read this, leave worthy words to your descendants. If your parent’s words and your own are safely kept in the Buddhist family altar, they will endure forever, and future generations will read them from time to time and bring them back to life. Because your parents existed, you exist. And you, my children and grandchildren, make it possible for us to live into the future and, beyond it, to live forever together, you and I. Well then, I’ll go on ahead and wait for you.