Culture? Must we maintain it even if it brings about a crisis? All these great and grand things will be worth nothing after we are gone. It is the same for the prosperity of the nation-state, the elevation of national prestige, the flourishing of a people, and for convenience, extravagance, and ease, as well as traditions and customs. Even while humanity is still around they are not worth a pig's tail (this is because they come about by oppressing and exploiting the country, and by destroying and contaminating the environment, or they are the means whereby such things are accomplished). How can there be a reason for preserving such things when it means our own ruin? ANDO SHOEKI: A Great Sage Who Taught Us to Eradicate the Cities "Scholarship and learning steal the way of tilling and gain the respect of the people by means of idleness and gluttony; since they are created by means of private law they are plots to steal the Way. Therefore the more one engages in learning, the more one glorifies the stealing of the Way. Learning is that which therefore conceals this theft... Learning is scheming words meant to deceive the people and eat gluttonously, and is a great fault. Therefore the idleness and gluttony of the sages and Buddhas is a stinking and filthy evil. Learning is a means of hiding this stench and filth." (This quote and the following are taken from The Struggle of Ando Shoeki by Terao Goro.) Ando Shoeki lived during the Genroku Period (1703-1762), and was a doctor in northern Honshu. A great pioneer sage who took a path taken by no one before him, he is the only revolutionary thinker which Japan can boast of to the world. [30] Learning is not the Way of Heaven, but a means of achieving idleness and gluttony which human beings created with private law -- this is the truth which Shoeki expounded. We must not, I should think, preserve the cities for the sake of that which "conceals theft," thereby driving humanity to catastrophe. "The sages of all the ages, the Buddhas, the bodhisattvas, the arhat, Zhuangzi, Laozi, physicians, those who created the laws of the gods, all scholars, ascetic practitioners, priests and monks -- they are all the idle and gluttonous, the dregs of society who steal the Way. Therefore all laws, the preaching of the Dharma, and storytelling are all ways of justifying theft, and nothing more. Their books, which number in the millions, all record justifications for theft; the more wise their aphorisms, and the more clever their turn of phrase, the more they justify theft, and the more we must deplore them... They steal the Way, establish their private laws, and live lives of idleness and gluttony while lecturing on their various theories... They deceive the people with their many theories in order to eat gluttonously... Note well what they are doing...! We should behead them."