Anyway, after a bit more effort, I found the better search term, hara, and lots of associated results that do seem to back up Johnstone’s claim (if I’m understanding them right—the descriptions I’ve found feel a bit cryptic). Note, however, that Johnstone was writing 45 years ago, and I have a vague impression that Japanese people below age ≈70 probably conceptualize themselves as being in the head—another victim of the ravages of global cultural homogenization, I suppose. If anyone knows more about this topic, please share in the comments!
I’m not Japanese, but I practice Zen, so I’m very familiar with the hara. I can’t speak to what it would be like to have had the belief that my self was located in the hara, but I can talk about its role in Zen.
Zen famously, like all of Buddhism, says that there’s no separate self, i.e. the homunculus isn’t how our minds works. A common strating practice instruction in Zen is the meditate on the breath at the hara, which is often described as located about 2 inches inside the body from the bellybutton.
This 2 inch number assumes you’re fairly thin, and it may not be that helpful a way to find the spot, anyway. I instead tell people to find it by feeling for where the very bottom of their diaphragm is. It feels like the lowest point in the body that activates to contract at the start of the breath, and is the lowest point in the body that relaxes when a breath finishes.
Some Zen teachers say that hara is where attention starts, as part of a broader theory that attention/awareness cycles with the breath. I wrote about this a bit previously in a book review. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but as a practice instruction it’s effective to have people put their attention on the hara and observe their breathing. This attention on the breath at a fixed point can induce a pleasant trance state that often creates jhana, and longer term helps with the nervous system regulation training meditation performs.
It takes most people several hundred to a few thousand hours to be able to really stabilize their attention on the hara during meditation, although the basics of it can be grasped within a few dozen hours.
I’m not Japanese, but I practice Zen, so I’m very familiar with the hara. I can’t speak to what it would be like to have had the belief that my self was located in the hara, but I can talk about its role in Zen.
Zen famously, like all of Buddhism, says that there’s no separate self, i.e. the homunculus isn’t how our minds works. A common strating practice instruction in Zen is the meditate on the breath at the hara, which is often described as located about 2 inches inside the body from the bellybutton.
This 2 inch number assumes you’re fairly thin, and it may not be that helpful a way to find the spot, anyway. I instead tell people to find it by feeling for where the very bottom of their diaphragm is. It feels like the lowest point in the body that activates to contract at the start of the breath, and is the lowest point in the body that relaxes when a breath finishes.
Some Zen teachers say that hara is where attention starts, as part of a broader theory that attention/awareness cycles with the breath. I wrote about this a bit previously in a book review. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but as a practice instruction it’s effective to have people put their attention on the hara and observe their breathing. This attention on the breath at a fixed point can induce a pleasant trance state that often creates jhana, and longer term helps with the nervous system regulation training meditation performs.
It takes most people several hundred to a few thousand hours to be able to really stabilize their attention on the hara during meditation, although the basics of it can be grasped within a few dozen hours.