Great Construction
Health and Longevity
In the second part of this book I analyze and critique medical science in all of its aspects, but first I must preface this topic with a few words about health and longevity. If today’s medical science were a true healing art, the number of sick persons should decrease by the year, and proportionately, the length of the human life span should gradually increase. A few hundred years should have been enough time for such an ideal to have come about, and the most difficult maladies such as tuberculosis and contagious diseases should have been completely eliminated. The sufferings caused by disease should have become tales from long ago. But the reality is quite the opposite, and human beings are not healthy, so it should be abundantly clear that today’s medical science is not a true healing art.
The Creator clearly fixed the term for human longevity when human beings were created. God has revealed to me that it should be possible for human beings to live at least one hundred and twenty years and at the most, six hundred years. If human beings had not committed any wrongs, a human life span of one hundred and twenty years should be commonplace. If human development had done so, how truly full of hope human life would have been! Lives would not only have been longer but would have been full of energy, the unease from which illness arises would have disappeared, so this world would truly have been a paradise. What was the mistake that human beings made to which I refer above? That mistake was what has become medical science. Some people may be astonished to read this, but I will explain my proposition of a human life span of one hundred and twenty years with an easily understandable example.
First, let’s divide the life of a human being into the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. If we say that spring is January, February, and March, then that makes New Years Day the day of a person’s birth. January would be infancy, and February would be childhood, the period when the plum trees blossom. Adolescence would be the time when the cherry trees are about to bloom, when the person becomes an adult, and their entrance into society is the blooming of the cherry trees. Next comes April, when the cherries reach their maturity and the person is most full of life. The fortieth year of life is probably the peak of most people’s activities. The Japanese people figuratively compare the forty-second year of a male’s life to a storm, when the tree blossoms fall. May, June, and July are the summer months when abundant foliage appears from the fresh buds. Fruits and nuts appear on the branches, but after these have appeared, the temperatures drop and autumn starts with the beginning of harvest. In the same way as nature, the many years of struggle of the human being results in fruition, work reaches a plateau, the person earns the trust of those around, and, at the same time, children and grandchildren increase, which should be the period of an individual’s greatest contentment. The person has had many experiences and has gained the trust of others, and this is the time that these qualities can be best put to use helping others and accumulating personal virtue. If such a period were to last ten years, a person would be about ninety years old, so the remaining period would be winter in which individuals spend the years left to them in retirement, when they may follow pursuits such as quietly enjoying the beauties of nature. Depending on the person, though, individuals could also participate in various activities and be active until death.
As the preceding shows, the four seasons and the human life span make for a good comparison and is the best illustration of the appropriateness of a life span of one hundred and twenty years. If medical science were to disappear, living until the age of one hundred and twenty years would not be unusual at all. But to even speak of medical science in such broad terms, it has passed through various stages. Before the twentieth century, medicines were the mainstay of treatment, and over this long period, the use in human bodies of pharmaceuticals and drugs created many diseases. Because pharmaceuticals cause disease and human beings try to heal disease through medicines, naturally the number of diseases increases and the life span decreases. The best proof of this assertion is that if medical science had been progressing, the number of diseases should have decreased, but since, on the contrary, the number of diseases has increased, the number of medicines has also increased in direct proportion.
There is another important point that people have not yet perceived which is, if medical science could heal disease, the health of the ordinary people, not to speak of the health of doctors and their families, should be excellent. In fact, however, the health of doctors and their families is worse than that of the most other people. Among the many individuals with advanced university degrees, medical doctors have the shortest life span. It is also common knowledge that the health of doctors’ families is very poor and that they have the highest incidence of tuberculosis. Aside from accidents due to crashes, at present the greatest cause of death is that due to illness. Death through illness entails a great amount of agony, and we hear of stories where the suffering was so intense, the afflicted have cried out to be killed. This kind of suffering results from the fact that people die before their natural life span is over, as if the branches on a tree had been forcefully cut and so the leaves on the branch die and fall, and the greenery browns and dies. It is natural for the rice plant to mature and produce cereal, but for people to die from disease is as unnatural as the rice plant that does not produce rice because its flowers have been plucked and leaves cut off. People should die a natural death. But contemporary people are so weak that even those who do die a natural death, do so at only ninety or a hundred years of age.
God gave human beings a natural life span of anywhere over one hundred and twenty years with lives absent suffering from disease nor sickness or incident. Human beings have foolishly followed a mistaken path, and created for themselves disease, suffering, and a short life span. I can only call such ignorant and pitiful.
Creation of Civilization, unpublished, 1952
translated by cynndd* * *
“Kenkō to Jumyō,” now known as the fifth chapter of “Joron” (“Introduction”), the first of the three parts that presently remain of the manuscript for the volume Bunmei no Sōzō (Creation of Civilization), a book that Meishu-sama never published but which is customarily dated 1952 even though Meishu-sama had started writing it earlier, has appeared in translation. Citation is given below for reference.
“Health and One’s Natural Term of Life,” Creation of Civilization, 1978, page 20.