Alive or not alive?

Views on what it means to be alive from Buddhism, Shinto, and Japanese grammar

Japanese Zen Buddhist monks have very regimented lives. For example, their diet is very strict vegan. As such, they are not allowed to eat any live things. Their definition of a live thing is anything that can run (or crawl or swim) away from you when you try to catch it. Hence chicken and clams are off limits, while seaweed and carrots are fair game.

Coincidentally, that is also the distinction between animate and inanimate objects (有生性) you need to make to use some basic Japanese verbs correctly. For example, there is/there are in Japanese is iru for live creatures and aru for lifeless objects. While in English you never have to think about such a difference to speak grammatically, in Japanese iru and aru are absolutely not interchangeable. The same applies to some other common verbs. For example, if you want to bring a live person to a party the verb 'to bring' is tsurete kuru, but for an inanimate object it is motte kuru. If your friend is stone-cold drunk or dead then, perhaps, you can motte kuru them over your shoulder. In all other cases, you would need to tsurete kuru them.

This definition of life is not without problems. Trees are definitely alive. They germinate and grow, wither away and die. Their intelligence is different from ours but they are sentient, as they do appear to know when to blossom and when to shed leaves, how to turn towards the sun and how to heal their wounds with resin, and even how to stifle competition from other plants by fighting off the spread of their roots. Yet, grammatically in Japanese they are considered inanimate. The same applies to bacteria and fungi. They are doubtless alive as they propagate and can be killed. Yet both Japanese grammar and Buddhism treat them as inanimate. A Zen monk can thus eat his miso soup, made with help of kōji fungus (Japan's national fungus or 国菌) with clear conscience.

Japan's native religion Shinto, however, takes a different, less restrictive and probably fairer view on what life and being alive means. In Shinto, everything has a soul/spirit (anima in Latin). Everything has animated, hence this kind of religion is known as animism. The original Japanese word for either someone or something, mono, can be used for all creation, animate and inanimate alike. That very much reflects the Shinto view on life. Only much later (around the time Buddhism took root in Japan) did it acquire two different kanji, 者 and 物, to make that distinction.

Human creation, that is, man-made things, is thought to have a spirit too. Until the 1960s, Japan's professional associations would stage funerals for used tools. For example, seamstresses would give a proper ceremonial goodbye to old needles, thimbles, and sewing machines. Nowadays, Shinto shrines still carry out elaborate funeral rites for children's dolls (ningyo kuyo ・人形供養). As with all rituals, they have multi-layered social meanings. Different observers and participants can interpret a doll funeral as either an important rite of passage, or a mere homage to tradition, or a money-making scheme for priests, or a psychological cut-off point for childhood proper, or pointless timewastery, or an actual spiritual celebration.

What's your take on all of this? Which definition of life/sentience makes more sense? Do doll funerals even make sense? Do you think influencers will ever take to giving final rites to discontinued Instagram and TikTok accounts? Please share what you think in the comments!