Writing about an anime may seem a little surprising to readers of this site, but anime (despite its “lowbrow” image in some quarters) is in fact a powerful and artistic medium that can explore the deepest of human experiences and sentiments.
The anime we are going to consider here is, in my opinion a true work of art. That is merely a personal opinion, of course. Others will form their own opinions.
But whether it is or is not classed as a work of art, it undoubtedly explores the depths of the human psyche and of worldly existence.
The anime series Air is one of the “Holy Trinity” of anime produced by Kyoto Studios, a high-quality anime studio and sometimes light novel publisher.
Kyoto Studios was brought to everyone’s attention in 2019 by a horrific arson incident which killed 36 staff members.
The Air anime series, however, was published long before this in 2006 and was one of the first anime series ever to be released on Blu-Ray.
As the first of the Kyoto Studios “Holy Trinity”, Air explores many of the themes that were explored further in the second two series, Kanon and Clannad.
The “Endless Golden Summer” (my phrase) refers to the hugely sentimental (懐かしい) concept – deeply rooted in modern Japanese culture and sentiment – of a golden summer of infinite promise.
In more mundane terms, it is based on the long summer vacation enjoyed by Japanese schoolchildren during their “uniformed years” from first entering public school at the age of five or six to leaving it for University and/or the world of work.
This later – post public school – stage of life may hold promise and excitement of various kinds, but endless golden magic for only a few.
In purely sound terms the name of the series’ protagonist, Yukito Kunisaki, can be read as “snow-rabbit” + “country’s end” – indicating the onset of winter and the end of the Golden Summer dream.
This refers in practice to the fact that for many fans of the series, their chance at fulfilling the Golden Summer dream is already over for this lifetime.
And on a lighter but still psycho/culturally significant note (particularly inb Japan, where the image of Alice has a huge presence in the mass psyche), her name also refers to the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland.
Yukito is at an age where this will be his last, or last-but-one, chance to make the Dream any kind of lived reality this time around.
This sense of the fleeting evanescence of the Perfect Dream fills the series in many different ways.
Yukito is seeking the Lady in the Sky for reasons connected with his this-world past – a story in which he gains from his mother the power to animate dolls and use them as makeshift theatre.
This is how he manages to finance his travels through this fateful attempt at the Golden Summer.
He becomes involved with one of the main female protagonists, a sick and very emotional child who is also seeking the Lady in the Sky.
Many of her characteristics are deeply significant of this psycho/cultural search. For example, she is obsessed with dinosaurs – constantly using the exclamation “Gao!” which she explains as representing a dinosaur’s roar.
When asked why, she explains that it is because they were the Rulers of this World and now are passed away.
This sense of a lost world – not only a present loss, but one stretching back over millennia- indicates that the loss is not merely “accidental” but woven into the very fabric of being.
With our grounding in Traditional philosophy we can step back from this sense of fundamental loss and see how it is a universal phenomenon rooted in the very nature of our human experience.
In the Abrahamic religions this is the loss of Paradise or of the Beatific Vision – unity with the Divine.
In the Dharmic religions this is the illusory loss of our fundamental nature.
In Vedanta Atma (the soul) and Brahman are non-dual. In other words we are not really separate from the Ultimate Reality.
We experience a “hallucination” of separateness but in fact we cannot be separate from the One that we really are.
However, from our present illusory point of view, the One is unknowable. To any definite statement we make about the One, Vedanta replies “Neti, neti” – “not that, not that”.
The One is inconceivable to us in our current state.
Similarly in Mahayana Buddhism, what we truly are is the Buddha Nature. However, the Buddha Nature is not graspable to us in our everyday state of experienced “reality”.
Any statement made about the Buddha Nature is the finger pointing at the moon. It cannot express the moon itself because the One is literally ineffable – inexpressible. Those moments in which some individuals can “see” the Moon of Absolute Reality are called the opening of Satori in Japanese.
In truth, Satori is not a “special” state of mind, but its original and true state. It is simply the state of being awake rather than in the dream of worldly illusion. The term Buddha simply means “awakened” or “aware”, coming from the Proto-Indo-European root *bheudh– “be aware, make aware.”
This word and concept is also etymologically connected to the concept of absolute Wisdom in various European traditions (for example, Woden, the God of Wisdom in the Teutonic Traditions).
Even more remarkable is that, according to René Guénon, this etymology transcends the European locality and has branches in the ancient languages of Central and South America. This would indicate the word’s ultimate derivation from the universal proto-language that underlies all human languages – the pre-Babel language in Abrahamic terminology – that speech that existed in Ages closer to “paradise” – before human language became broken and scattered into different “languages”.
Guénon gives the example of Votan, an ancient name of Quetzal cohuatl, the “bird-serpent,” and the union of these two symbolic animals is also figured by the wings and the serpents of the Caduceus (carried by the Greek Votan, Hermes).**
Guénon comments that “One must indeed be blind not to see, in such facts, a sign of the fundamental unity of all traditional doctrines.”
Focusing back on the two Dharmic Traditions we are considering – Vedanta and Buddhism – all this is important from the point of view of the “Transcendent Unity of Religions”.
Much is made of the “opposite” nature of Vedanta and Buddhism – in Vedanta the Atman (soul) is one with Brahman (the Absolute) while Buddhism preaches no-soul (Anattā) doctrine.
Doesn’t this mean that the two are opposites, absolutely contradicting each other?
Only on a very superficial level.
In the foundational Mahayana Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, Sunya is shown to be ultimately identical with the One.
Despite their “opposite” means of expression (of that which is ultimately inexpressible) they are saying, at the deepest level, the same thing, as Frithjof Schuon has also pointed out in a video interview.
They are also, at the fundamental level of their supra-Traditional roots, saying the same thing as the Abrahamic traditions and of all true Tradition worldwide.
So, returning from the sublime to the local, our anime Air, while clearly not expounding these doctrines, is rooted in the reality that they express.
Our fundamental sense of loss is the deepest thing in us. It is that which calls us back to the One.
In Air, one manifestation of the Lady of the Sky turns out to be one of the more minor characters.
When her real identity (that of a wandering sky-spirit who has attached herself to an earthly “sister”) becomes apparent she has to abandon her physical form and disappear from this world.
Her loss is felt deeply by everyone.
But it is inevitable because the dream of Reality is not the Reality itself.
The drama of love and loss – of deep human relations on every level, whose destruction is always horribly painful but always has to happen – turns out to span a millennium in Japanese history.
All the characters have lived together before hundreds of years ago in ancient Japan and part of the anime explores this period.
In reality, the experience of love, deep connection and deep loss – our root-experience – spans far more than a mere millennium.
Our return to the Endless Golden Summer still awaits us.
But if we are attached to a true Tradition, it does await us.
Some people may be able to reach it through own-power (自力 Jiriki).
Some people reach it through the saving Grace of Jesus or of Sri Krishna.
We shall reach it through the vast and mysterious power of Amida-sama and the Nenbutsu.
The very root of our existence.
_________
* If we take her name as written in Japanese without any sound-play, it would be better translated as Bunny Moonfield
** See Guénon’s article “Hermes” from Studies in Comparative Religion
Originally published in le Voile d’Isis, April 1932. Original version here.