Transmigration is not a Japanese pattern of thought. The idea of nirvana, too, not only means nothing to the general public but the priesthoods themselves modify it out of existence. Priestly scholars declare that a man who has been ‘enlightened’ (satori) is already in nirvana; nirvana is here and now in the midst of time, and a man ‘sees nirvana’ in a pine tree and a wild bird. The Japanese have always been uninterested in fantasies of a world of the hereafter. Their mythology tells of gods but not of the life of the dead.
