Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection, Anniversary Edition

By Gregg Krech

• Naikan is rooted in the Eastern wisdom tradition. It was developed in Japan in the 1940s by Ishin Yoshimoto, a devout Buddhist of the Pure Land sect (Jodo Shinshu). His strong religious spirit led him to practice mishirabe, an arduous method of meditation and self-reflection. After Yoshimoto used Naikan to help prisoners in the 1950s, psychiatrists in the 1960s started to use it as a psychotherapy. Today in Japan it is the most popular psychotherapeutic method that originated in Buddhism.
• The author’s ToDo Institute has over 500 members and a mailing list of over 4,000
• Naikan is also used to train employees so they can interact better with customers and colleagues. The Toyoko Inn, for example, which has over 230 hotels throughout Japan, requires all its full-time employees to do intensive Naikan.
• Today, there are around 30 Naikan centers in Japan, and it is used in mental health counseling, and in rehabilitation of prisoners. It has also taken root in Europe, with a dozen Naikan centers now established in the UK, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781611729597

Gregg Krech

Gregg Krech is Executive Director of the ToDo Institute, a Naikan education and retreat center near Middlebury, Vermont.

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Published by

Stone Bridge Press

P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

TEL [phone] • [e-mail] • www.stonebridge.com

Text © 2022, 2002 Gregg Krech.

Calligraphy on front cover and title page: Naikan by Ishin Yoshimoto.

First edition published 2002. Anniversary edition published 2022.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

p-ISBN: 978-1-61172-079-2

e-ISBN: 978-1-61172-959-7

The unexamined life is not worth living.

SOCRATES

Dedicated to my parents, Ted and Michelle, who brought me into this world from nothingness, and to my teachers, Rev. Kenryu Tsuji, Rev. Shue Usami, Kinuko Yoshimoto, Akira Ishii Sensei, Masahiro Nagashima Sensei, and David K. Reynolds, who have escorted me on the return trip.

CONTENTS

Preface to the Anniversary Edition

Preface to the Original Edition

Introduction

What Is Naikan?

The Three Questions

Reflecting on Reflections

AN EXAMPLE OF DAILY NAIKAN

A Day of Reflection

Gratitude and the Practice of Attention and Reflection in Everyday Life

Unwrapping Life’s Gifts

You Saved My Life

Ordering a Pizza

A Matter of Distance and Degrees

In the Midst of Pain

Naikan at Work

Looking beyond Our Difficulties

Taking Things for Granted

Itadakimasu

The Expression of Gratitude

The Train

SAMPLE NAIKAN REPORT

A Man Reflects on Moving into a New House

NAIKAN MAXIM

Gratitude Disappears in the Shadow of Entitlement

Giving to Others

Compassion and Attention

Strategies for Giving Yourself Away

Service Is Attention

Reconstructing Reality

Panhandlers and Bridges

Don’t Thank Me . . .

A Fable: The Giving Princess

A Moral Self-Examination

Benjamin Franklin

The Troubles We Cause

Frogs, Princes, and the Third Question

NAIKAN MAXIM

Find Compassion for Others in Your Own Transgressions

Lying and Stealing

An Appeal on Behalf of Guilt

Apologies

Beyond Forgiveness

S(s)elf-Esteem

Even the Best of Intentions

Mysteries and Myths of Separation

Who Am I?

Many Mothers

The Roots of Stuff

My Heart Is Your Heart

Illness and Faith

Pine Needles

Salt and Water: A Parable of Healing

Intimate Attention

Softening the Heart

The Wrong Formulae

Gaikan: The Misdirection of Attention

Seeing Yourself through the Eyes of Your Partner

AN EXAMPLE OF NAIKAN

A Man Reflects on Himself in Relation to His Wife

Attention to What’s Not There

UNC Study on Gratitude and Self-Reflection for Couples

A Fable: Giving, Receiving, and Desire-Ring

The Amnesia of Conflict and a Way Out

Relationships as a Vehicle for Training

Please Remind Me

Who Will Do the Laundry?

Two Different Worlds

The Practice of Naikan

Daily Naikan

The Naikan Retreat

Journal Naikan

Relationship Naikan

Naikan on Parts of the Body

Naikan Exercises

Reporting Our Naikan Reflections

Holidays: Opportunities for Reflection and Celebration

Thanksgiving Blessing

Self-Reflection and Service

Boat-i-sattvas

Genza, the Myokonin

BY NICK CALLIE

Wicker in the Wind

Perspectives

Final Reflection

Naikan Self-Reflection: A One-Week Practice Program

For Mental Health Professionals: Naikan and Psychotherapy

Notes and Bibliography

Index

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This is the new Anniversary Edition of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection. It is being released twenty years after the book was originally published. It is revised, with new content, and reflects some of what I’ve learned over the past twenty years about this profound approach to self-reflection from Japan.

PREFACE TO THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Where were you at the turn of the century? Do you remember much about that time in your life? Could you have predicted that this is where you would be so many years later? Has life met your expectations? Exceeded your expectations? Or are you disappointed in how your life has unfolded since then?

Often, when we find ourselves in a moment of reverie, we quickly snap out of it and come back to our present circumstances. There are financial decisions to be made, repairs that are waiting impatiently, kids and dogs who need attention. Life moves on. We’re busy. The past is the past. What’s done is done.

Karma is the Sanskrit word for action—something that is done. If we say, this is my karma we’re really saying, this is my doing. When we do something, when we behave in a certain way, when we take action—it influences what will happen in the future. It influences the direction our lives will take. What you did at the turn of the century influenced the circumstances of your life today.

And what you did at the turn of the century has influenced more than just your life. It’s influenced the world and people around you. That’s because our lives are interconnected—interconnected with the people around us, but also with animals, with objects, with nature and the planet. In the words of John Donne,

No man is an island, entire unto itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

Karma and interconnectedness are two of the main pillars of Naikan self-reflection. We can think of our life as a book we have written. But the content of the book is not our ideas and feelings. It is based on our conduct in the world. The book of our life is a written record of how we have acted, of what we have done. It is a record of everything, from opening the door at the supermarket for a senior citizen to losing our temper and yelling at our partner.

It takes a bit of courage to read this book—the personal record of our life. In its pages we come face to face with our karma. Its text makes for a less comfortable read than the edited version we usually carry with us. We prefer a storyline in which we are a hero to a villain. We prefer to see our success as earned rather than given. And, too often, we prefer the role of victim to that of perpetrator. How often do we avoid responsibility by putting the blame for our challenges or problems on others rather than owning it ourselves?

But regardless of how we have edited this book, the unedited draft remains anchored to our being and dramatically influences our path forward. How will it end?

Though the pages are numbered

I can’t see where they lead

For the end is a mystery no-one can read.

—Sting

What we are unaware of is the value, the freedom, that comes from embracing our life as it is and as it has been, with all its twists and turns, with all its gifts and betrayals. The moments in which we sacrificed ourselves for others and the moments in which we selfishly took the last piece of pie.

We invest a tremendous amount of energy in trying to present an image of ourselves to the world that isn’t supported by how we have lived. We may think that if that image were abandoned our life would come crashing down. But the freeing up of all this energy opens us to a way of living that is lighter, lovelier, and more human.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen

We should be seeking the crack instead of trying to plaster it up. We should be developing an awareness of interdependence, rather than celebrating our independence. We should be examining our karma instead of turning away from it.

If you could step back and watch the workings of the world we live in, our interconnectedness would be obvious. But because most of us live in a relatively small bubble, we don’t always see the impact of our karma on the world. We are often preoccupied by how what we do affects me. We each speculate on how the changing circumstances of the world will affect our own individual life. So when we attempt to understand how our behavior impacts others, our normal perspective is turned inside out. This is the very foundation of compassion and empathy. Fundamentally, our capacity for compassion and empathy requires an awareness of interconnectedness. And our karma.

Naikan self-reflection offers a profound opportunity to cultivate an awareness of interconnectedness. It offers the rare chance to investigate the karmic residue of our life. It gives us the means to change the way we see life and the world around us. And it offers a shift from a complaint-based life to one of authentic gratitude for what we have been given.

Perhaps, at some point in your life, you had an experience where death was on your doorstep. I’ve had such an experience twice in my life. In its aftermath, we often find that we no longer see and connect with the world in the same way. Life is richer, more vibrant. We deeply appreciate the opportunity just to sip a cup of coffee or tea. We feel that our whole life is a gift, and we may feel overwhelmed by how much life offers us. We are deeply grateful just to be alive.

But, sadly, this sensation fades over time. We lose touch with the preciousness of life as our consciousness is drawn back into the common habit of taking life for granted while our attention is swallowed up by our problems and our dissatisfaction with our circumstances. We cannot schedule periodic brushes with death (nor would we want to), so we have no practical way back to a different way of seeing and understanding the preciousness of life.

Naikan self-reflection opens a doorway to such a path, though the mysteries of examining the underlying realities of life and human nature are never predictable. For the past thirty years I have assisted people in this journey through retreats or quiet reflection in their own living rooms. When we combine solitude, a questioning mind, and a sincere heart, we open a space for an awakening to something that goes beyond words and intellectual understanding. The silence of self-reflection is, in fact, a dialogue with a deeper truth.

When we give up on ourselves, we make space for something greater to enter our heart’s home.

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

In 1991 a movie was released called Defending Your Life, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. The story line centered around several characters who died and were transported to a temporary location where a decision was made about what would happen to them in the afterlife. The purpose of this place—which was a rather comfortable, almost resort-like city—was to give people who passed through a chance to watch film highlights of their lives. They had a chance to defend their conduct and the choices they made while alive. Depending on the outcome of these reviews, they might be sent back to earth to try again or, if their lives were generally laudable, they would move on to some higher form of existence.

What I found most interesting about the film was the idea of stepping back and observing your life. In 1989 I had the opportunity to do just that for the first time, at a center located amidst the rice paddies in rural Japan. It was a Naikan center. The word Naikan means literally looking inside. In the fourteen days I stayed at the center I spent about fifteen hours per day watching the films of my life run across the screen of my mind’s eye. Prior to this experience I had been to dozens of retreats and spiritual conferences. I had spent at least one week each year on a solo trip in the wilderness to simply be quiet in nature. I had meditated in forests and at Zen monasteries for days and weeks at a time. Yet I had never really stepped back from my life to simply see how I had been living.

The process used at the Naikan center was very structured. I reflected on important relationships with nearly all the key people that had played an influential role in my life. In each case I looked at three aspects of that relationship:

What had I received from that person?

What had I given to that person?

What troubles or difficulties had I caused that person?

I sat on Japanese-style cushions and faced a blank wall in order to limit outside distractions. Except for the time it took to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, I did little else for two weeks. In some ways I resembled the characters in the movie I have referred to, except that I had the opportunity to do this life review—fortunately—while I was still alive.

During my time at the Naikan center I had doubts. Why spend time reviewing my past, when there was so much to do now? Why spend time considering the troubles I was causing others when I was already striving so hard to be a good person? Wasn’t Naikan for others who were selfishly and blindly causing suffering to friends, family, and society? Wasn’t it for people who had unresolved issues from their childhood? Wasn’t it for those who had a bad attitude toward life? What was I doing here?

Notwithstanding my persistent questions and doubts, I persevered each day with the review of my personal history, as far back as I could remember. As the days passed, I began to understand what was attractive and uncomfortable about the Naikan process. Naikan involved self-examination; that is, we examine our own life, not the actions of others. How often is our attention wasted on judging, criticizing, and correcting others while we neglect the examination and lessons of our own life? While we can never know the actual experience of another, we know our own experience intimately. While we can do little or nothing to control how others treat us, we can do much to control how we treat others. And while we are often powerless to impose our choices on others, we make choices about how we shall live, moment to moment, day to day. Examining one’s own life is profoundly sensible, though not necessarily comfortable.

Naikan was originally developed by Ishin Yoshimoto (1916–88) in Japan. It is based on an austere method of self-examination called mishirabe and rooted in some of the ideas and principles of Pure Land Buddhism. This form of Buddhism emphasizes faith rather than effort. And the seeds of such faith are born from an awareness of two facets of one’s life: First, the limitless compassion that is bestowed upon us by life; and second, the inherent self-centeredness that permeates our actions and thoughts.

The source of this compassion is not Buddha or God (though, ultimately, it can be understood that way) but is rather the everyday efforts of others to support and care for us. Through the intense and reality-based examination of our lives, we can develop a natural and profound sense of gratitude for blessings bestowed on us by others. Blessings that were always there but went unnoticed, unappreciated. How could we live without the care of others? Life blossoms before our eyes, but we are now aware of it. Our attention is elsewhere. It is the joy, appreciation, and gratitude that often attract people to Naikan. We see how much we have received from life. We see the countless ways we have been loved and cared for. Despite our failures, life has not failed us. In spite of our mistakes, reality has supported us.

A Naikan retreat can be a profound and life-changing experience. It is a remarkable method for understanding and practicing self-reflection. But it must be complemented by a regular, ongoing practice of self-reflection, or the experience and lessons simply fade from consciousness. In this sense Naikan is similar to yoga, meditation, or prayer. The consistent practice is what fertilizes the seeds and allows them to grow.

In this book I hope to introduce you to the basic practice of Naikan self-reflection, to the ideas associated with self-reflection, the underlying issues, and the various ways of incorporating these methods and ideas into your life. I offer you a wide array of vehicles for understanding Naikan—essays, poems, fables, quotes, and actual reports of personal self-reflection (mine and others). As you study this material, be cautious of the apparent simplicity of this method. Naikan seems simple, though it is certainly not easy to do. Naikan appears Japanese, though it is firmly grounded in reality and the fundamental nature of the human condition. It seems superficial, yet it is capable of stripping away layers of ourselves and revealing truths previously hidden. It stimulates joy blended with guilt, faith stirred by doubt, and effort uncovered by surrender. As a method of inquiry, it is a creature of contradictions. But contradictions only exist within our minds. Reality is without contradiction.

As you read this book, I hope your innate curiosity and wisdom help you surmount the limitations of my words and lead you to actually try Naikan. In the first part of the book I have provided a series of exercises for doing this. Step back. Find a space. Quietly reflect on your life. See what can be discovered and what can be learned. The study of reality is a worthy pursuit. The study of your own life is a task no one else but you can do. And Naikan is a method of investigation, worthy of investigation.

Acknowledgments

The task of investigating all the people, objects, and forces of nature that made this book possible could generate another book. Not only do the seeds of these ideas come from so many different sources, but the ability to gather those seeds (reading, hearing, doing) and to put them on paper (writing) requires a supporting cast, all of whom are truly coauthors of this book.

If I began chronologically, I would begin with my parents, Ted and Michelle, who gave me life. Had they done nothing else, I would be deeply indebted to them. But throughout my childhood they cared for me while I failed to provide any appreciation in return. Thank you. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Meyers, was instrumental in helping me read. And reading has exposed me to the wisdom of some great writers. A short list might include Benjamin Franklin, Albert Schweitzer, R. H. Blyth, D. T. Suzuki, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Thomas, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Haya Akegarasu, La Rochefoucauld, Gyodo Haguri, O. H. Mowrer, Taitetsu Unno, Thomas Merton, and many others. As a young adult, I came across a book by author and anthropologist David K. Reynolds, and it provided me with my first introduction to Naikan. I began working with Reynolds directly, and he provided me with much of my early guidance in a world of self-reflection that was both new and challenging to me. He later made arrangements for me to study Naikan in Japan with experienced teachers. My job, my writing, and my family can all be traced back to the crossing of our paths. Thank you, David.

During my trips to Japan, I had the good fortune of experiencing Naikan self-reflection at different Naikan centers under the guidance of excellent teachers whose lives often were an example of the beauty of this art of self-reflection. These teachers include Rev. Shue Usami, Akira Ishii, Masahiro Nagashima, Yoshihiko