Abstract
Have you ever heard the expression“ a drop in the ocean”? This proverb refers to the presence of something very small in a place as vast as an ocean. Naoya Shiga, one of the leading writers of the Shirakaba School of modern Japanese literature, left behind a short work similar to this,“ One Drop of Water on the Nile”. In this work, Shiga did not focus on a tiny drop of water, but rather on the great river, the Nile, which is some kind of everlasting existence that transcends time and space.
Similar worldviews can be found in the writings of Kumagusu Minakata, a naturalist, Kitarou Nishida, a philosopher in modern Japan, and H. P. Blavatsky, a Russian-born founder of theosophy. On the contrary, the modern Japanese thinker Chōmin Nakae, the English mathematician and philosopher B. Russell and W. K. Clifford were all devoted to materialism and denied the existence of the“ Nile” as Shiga said. They boldly chose a life of confronting the severe real world as an existence of only “a drop”. Whether each human being is just an isolated speck of consciousness, or whether it is possible to envision a larger consciousness that encompasses us all - this question that has been pondered by many religious and philosophical scholars, but for which no one can find a satisfactory answer. Nevertheless, living with the flow of the“ Nile” close to us at all times will
be a guideline for finding hope, gratitude, and compassion in our life.
