Marie Buda

Discovering the River Towards Inner Freedom

Disliking People Who Are Like Us: On a Japanese Four-Character Idiom That Teaches You A Lot About People

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In Japan we have a great thing called yo-ji-jyuku-go (四字熟語). These are idiomatic phrases made out of four kanji characters. For those who aren’t familiar with the Japanese language, kanji characters are logographic characters. Instead of each character having just a sound, it also has a specific meaning. Throughout the ages Japanese scholars have put together four different kanji characters to express profound life truths. A great one I came across recently was dou-zoku-ken-o（同族嫌悪). Literally translated this idiom consists of the characters, “same”, “family”, “hate”, and “bad”. It means that we dislike people who are like us.

This may sound strange, because your first instinct may be to think that conversely we are drawn to people who are like us. This is still true. When we encounter people who are like us we feel strong love and affection. On the other hand, if these people do not resemble us at all, we feel indifference. But what if these people are just like us, but resemble aspects of ourselves that we don’t like? That’s when hate rumbles from within. We really don’t like it when other people mirror aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to accept.

A frequently portrayed example of this is the school bully who beats up homosexuals, only to discover later that he is gay himself. Him beating up other poor boys is an outer manifestation of what he does internally to himself daily. We resent people for bringing up feelings that we try so hard to suppress and push down. We hate them because we are just like them. This is what this idiom succinctly teaches.

We only accept in others what we accept within ourselves. The school bully who finally embraces his sexuality will stop hurting his colleagues. This is why people who piss us off are actually our greatest teachers. The anger that wells us from inside tells us that there are parts of ourselves we haven’t accepted and integrated into our being.

Now, you may be thinking that perhaps we suppress things for good reasons. You don’t like Trump for example, because you don’t like how misogynistic he is. And sure, according to what I’ve been saying this would mean that you don’t accept misogynistic thoughts within yourself, but isn’t this a good thing? If you accepted misogyny you would think it’s ok to be horrible to women.

Well no. If you thought this then you have fallen into one of the big misunderstandings about acceptance. Acceptance of thoughts does not equate directly to any form of action (or non-action for that matter). Put it this way, if everyone who accepted their misogynistic thoughts were a misogynist, by the same logic all crime writers would be serial killers. They spend their days unapologetically exploring some of the darkest of ideas, but they are very much normal citizens of society.

To accept is to simply confront and observe various thoughts and emotions as they arise, without judgment. If a misogynistic thought arises, for example, you can simply look at it. You don’t have to act on it. All you have to do is let it bubble up inside yourself and let it go. In fact, the only way such thoughts are released is through acceptance. However, most of us are afraid to peek at the darker ideas that come out of ourselves. We push the thoughts down, build strong walls around them hoping they will never crop up again. That is, until we bump into someone who embodies the very thoughts and emotions we’ve been suppressing. Then suddenly the barriers we tried so hard to build come crashing down, and we hate it. The irony is, you never would have had your walls fall down if you hadn’t built them in the first place.

When you don’t like someone, it’s an invitation to look within to see what exactly it is that you don’t like about them, and then in turn understand what it is you don’t like about yourself. It’s a golden opportunity to shine the light of acceptance on this trait that exists within you. You hate it when people are childish? That’s because you don’t accept the child within you. But ask yourself — what is really “wrong” with being childish?

This even applies to so-called negative traits. If you don’t like someone because they are rude, that’s because you don’t accept the rude person within you. But if you can learn to accept this aspect of yourself, you can then approach this person with calm and love, rather than hate. This isn’t to say you let them get away with their rudeness. You can still say softly to this person that being rude does not help solve the situation. If anything, your calm and composed energy is likely to deflate any tension there was in the first place.

Hate yourself, hate others. Love yourself, love others.

The Art of Humility

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In Japan, we are taught that everyone lies on a hierarchy. People are above or beneath you. This is reflected in the language. You change your speech depending on how you perceive their status. To not use the correct form of language is seen as disrespectful and a massive faux pas.

When people meet each other in Japan, they quickly go through a process of  trying to suss the other person out: How old is this person? What are their credentials? This is why business cards come out very quickly during interactions — so people can read their job titles. This way people can quickly work out where they lie in the spectrum of respect.

This was my reality until I was 21. Because we live in this box of being better or worse than other people, you need to consistently strive to be on top, so to speak.

And then I met a man who changed my world.

This person was a highly accomplished martial artist, with more than enough titles under his belt. Having won pretty much every fight that he has ever fought, this would mean he saw himself as being ‘above’ all other fighters right?

Far from it.

Let me put some context first. From experience, feeling like you are ‘above’ someone is a high. The embodied feeling is that you feel like you are looking down on others from a cliff. But like all highs, it’s not an expansive and peaceful sensation. It’s a drug. It’s a wall of energy that feels pleasurable but at the same time is hard and destructive. Physically you feel a fire throughout your body, tightness in the stomach with an overwhelming heaviness in your head (hence I presume the saying, “to be big-headed”).

Conversely, feeling ‘below’ someone can manifest as all sorts of emotions, depending on how you see the person ‘above’ you. If you respect the other person, then the emotional sensation can be quite tame. However, feeling ‘beneath’ other people can also make you feel sad, even depressed. And finally, if you feel low on the hierarchy and don’t agree with it, it can lead to feelings of anger and resentment.

It’s not just that you feel these sensations within yourself. You can intuitively pick up on what other people are feeling too – whether they are feeling ‘above’ or ‘below’ you. Over the years, a skill I’ve picked up having been brought up in Japan is to quickly pick up on these cues and to act accordingly. They think they’re above you? Ok, I’ll use my subservient language to please.

Having been very familiar with these sensations all my life, I was suddenly faced with a person who radiated neither of these energies. Here was a man who on paper had accomplished so much, yet he didn’t look down on others. At the same time, it didn’t feel like he felt like he saw himself as being beneath others either. He knew exactly what his skills were, and that was that. He just was.

Until then I used to think that to show humility was to downplay your achievements. It’s what the Japanese do masterfully. If someone compliments you, you immediately deny the comment, and proceed to put yourself down in some way. This I believed was what it meant to be humble. It was to secretly know how good you were, but to hide it on the surface.

However, this was not what I was feeling from this man. He wasn’t secretly hiding anything. As I mentioned, he just was. That was when I realised what humility was. It wasn’t to downplay your skills. Instead, it meant to not see yourself on a scale, whether it be better or worse, good or bad, high or low.

You just are.

Subjectively, his energy felt like nothing I had come across so far in my life. If you could put a sensation to transcending duality, it was that. You could call it an emptiness. You could call it a liberating sensation. It was the feeling of going beyond the box of hierarchies.Old habits die hard, and I am still trying to learn the art of humility. But as I do, I know it will bring me a freedom that I have never felt before. Freedom from the highs and lows that the illusion of hierarchy brings.