Letter to a Japanese
by Leo Tolstoy
I received your very interesting letter and decided at once to answer it fully and fundamentally, but ill health and other things have until now kept me from that, which I regard as a very important matter.
Judging by your mention of your sermon in church, I conclude that you are a Christian. And as I am aware that several religious teachings are current in your country – Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism – I conclude that these religions are also known to you.
My supposition that you are acquainted with many religions makes it possible for me to answer your doubts in the most definite manner. My answer will consist in referring you to the eternal truths of religion. I am not referring to this or that religion based on the authority of this or that founder, be he Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, Christ, or Mohammed. Instead, I am referring to the one religion appropriate to all mankind, the indubitable nature of the truth that has been preached by all the great thinkers of the world, which every man not confused by false, perverted teachings now feels in his heart and accepts with his reason.
The teaching expressed by all the great sages of the world – the authors of the Vedas, Confucius, Lao Tse, Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed, as well as by the Greek and Roman sages, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, and Epictetus – amounts to this: the essence of human life is not the body, but that spiritual element which exists in our bodies in conditions of time and space. It is an incomprehensible thing, but man is vividly conscious of it. And though the body to which it is bound is continually changing and disintegrates at death, it remains independent of time and space and is therefore unchangeable. Life, therefore (and this is very clearly expressed in the real, unperverted teaching of Sakya Muni), is nothing but the ever greater and greater liberation of that spiritual element from the physical conditions in which it is confined, and the ever-increasing union, by means of love, of this spiritual element in ourselves with the spiritual element in other beings and with the spiritual element itself, which men call God. That, I think, constitutes the true religious teaching common to all men, on the basis of which I will try to reply to your questions.
The questions you put to me clearly indicate that by “religion” you do not mean what I consider to be true religious teaching, but that perversion of it which is the chief source of human errors and sufferings. As strange as it may seem, I am convinced that religion – the very thing that gives man true welfare – is, in its perverted form, the chief source of man’s sufferings.
You write that refusal to perform army service may occasion the loss of liberty or life to those who refuse, and that refusal to pay taxes will produce various materially harmful consequences. And though it is not given to us men to foresee the consequences of their actions, I will grant that all would happen as you anticipate. But all the same, none of these presumed consequences can have any influence on a truly religious man’s perception of the truth or of his duty.
Revolutionaries, anarchists, and socialists have a definite material aim in view: the welfare of the majority as they understand it. It is obvious that such people cannot admit the reasonableness of refusals to serve in the army or to pay taxes, which in their view can only cause useless suffering or even death to those who refuse without improving the condition of the majority. I quite understand that attitude in non-religious people. But for a religious man, living by the spiritual essence he recognizes in himself, it is different. For such a man there is not and cannot be any question of the consequences of his actions (no matter what they may be), or of what will happen to his body and his temporal, physical life. Such a man knows that the life of his body is not his own life, and that its course, continuance, and end do not depend on his will. For such a man only one thing is important and necessary: to fulfill what is required of him by the spiritual essence that dwells within him. And in the present case that spiritual essence demands very definitely that he should not participate in actions that are most contrary to love: in murders and in preparation for murders. A religious man, in a moment of weakness, very possibly may not feel strong enough to fulfill what is demanded of him by the law he acknowledges as the law of his life, and because of that weakness he may not act as he should. But even so, he will always know where the truth lies, and consequently where his duty lies. If he does not act as he should, he will know that he is guilty and has acted badly, and he will try not to repeat the sin when next he is tempted. But he will certainly not doubt the possibility of fulfilling the call of the Highest Will, and will in no way seek to justify his action or to make any compromise, as you suggest.
Such a view of life is not only not Utopian, as it may appear to people of your nation or of the Christian nations who have lost all reasonable religious understanding of life, but is natural to all mankind. If we were not accustomed to the temporary, almost mad condition in which all the nations now exist – armed against one another – what is now going on in the world would appear impossibly fantastic, but the refusal of every reasonable man to participate in this madness would certainly not seem so.
The condition of darkness in which mankind now exists would indeed be terrible if in that darkness people did not more and more frequently appear who understand what life should and must be. There are such people, and they recognize themselves to be free in spite of all the threats and punishments the authorities can employ. And they do, not what the insensate authorities demand of them, but what is demanded of them by the highest spiritual authority, which speaks clearly and loudly in every man’s conscience.
To my great joy now, before my death, I see every day an ever-increasing number of such people, living not by the body but by the spirit. They calmly refuse the demands made by those who form the government to join them in the ranks of murderers, and joyfully accept all the external, bodily tortures inflicted on them for their refusal. There are many such men in Russia, men who are still quite young and who have been kept for years in the strictest imprisonment, but who experience the happiest and most tranquil state of mind, as they recount in their letters or tell those who see them. I have the happiness to be in close touch with many of them and to receive letters from them. If it interests you, I could send you some of their letters.
What I have said about refusals to serve in the army relates also to refusals to pay taxes, about which you write. A religious man may not use force to resist those who take any of the fruits of his labor, whether they are private robbers or robbers that are called “the government.” He also may not of his own accord help in those evidently evil deeds which are carried out by means of money taken from the people in the guise of taxes.
To your argument about the necessity of forcibly protecting a victim tortured or slain before your eyes, I will reply with an extract from a book, For Every Day, which I have compiled, and in which I have repeatedly replied to that very objection from various points of view. I think this book may interest you, for in it are expressed all the fundamentals of that religion which, as I began by saying, are one and the same in all the great religious teachings of the world, as well as in the hearts and minds of all men. Here is the extract:
It is an astonishing thing that there are people who consider it the business of their lives to correct others. Can it be that these correctors are so good that they have no work left to do in correcting themselves?[1]
I will conclude by saying that there is but one means of improving human life in general: the ever-increasing elucidation and realization of the one religious truth common to all men. And at the same time I will add that I think the Japanese nation, with its external development, “civilization,” “progress,” and military power and glory is at present in the saddest and most dangerous condition. It is just that external glitter, and the adoption from depraved Europe of a “scientific” outlook on life, that more than anything else hinders the manifestation among the Japanese people of that which alone can give welfare: the religious truth that is one for all mankind.
The more in detail you answer me, and the more information you give me, especially about the spiritual condition of the Japanese people, the more grateful I shall be to you.
In spite of all external differences,
Your loving brother,
Leo Tolstoy
Yásnaya Polyána, March 17,1910
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[1] Translator’s note – Tolstoy does not appear to have quoted the extract he meant to give. What he generally said was that men fond of correcting others are apt to think they can decide who is good and who is bad, and that they may do violence to those they regard as evildoers, whereas they ought rather to correct themselves and not rely on or employ violence.