When Adam and Eve defied God, creator and master of the universe, and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, what did they learn? To say ¡°I.¡±
They learned that they were ¡°naked¡± ¡ª they were selves, egos. As such, there was no place for them in paradise. Their expulsion was ¡°the fall of man,¡± narrated in the biblical Book of Genesis.
This seems a long way from Japan. It is. Japanese myth records no ¡°fall,¡± no defiance of the undefiable, no primeval descent into selfhood. The Japanese ego evolved very differently from the Western one.
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