「他」の受容とは何だったのか？：スピリチュアリティを祀る伝統What Does It Mean to Receive the “Other”?: A Tradition That Enshrines Spirituality

Why has the Japanese archipelago, throughout its history, appeared to receive other cultures so calmly?

Take the first religious movement in Japan. It was not Shinto but Buddhism, which came by way of China. In China, where Buddhism had arrived through India, the work of translating it into the Chinese script was a struggle to grasp its meaning in thought, and its culmination, the Buddhist scriptures, was enshrined.

But when Buddhism reached Japan, the archipelago took a different road from that struggle over translation, and did something strange: it read the scriptures, already translated into Chinese, simply as sound, just as they were, and enshrined them at once.

At that time the language of the archipelago had no writing. More than that, it suggests a deep tradition there that honored sound. Put roughly, if the sound is good, that is enough. Good here does not mean a good ear but the spirituality that dwells in the sound. Whether what arrives from elsewhere is spiritual or not becomes the criterion of acceptance.

Ancient Japan grasped complex concepts from sound itself. That is, without the trouble of writing anything down, it had cultivated a way of receiving sound that reached deep spirituality. That is exactly why writing was not needed.

When this historical background is viewed from a modern or contemporary standpoint, it tends to be told as a temperament that prizes other cultures. Indeed, that fixed idea has taken shape. But is it the right way to see it?

It is true that Buddhist monks read the scriptures every day, but they are not following the meaning. This is because the meaning and content of the written characters themselves are not the first concern there. What matters is the sound, or more precisely, the spirituality that dwells in the sound. This leads to the concept of tama/dama (霊), which comes later.

To say it plainly, what the Buddha said hardly matters; what matters is the mind of the Buddha who said it.

In a sense, having writing may bring both gain and loss. With writing, one comes to cling to the signified and may in time lose the signifier. That this struggle has been a grave philosophical problem in both the West and China makes it clear.

It is not known when writing began to be used in Japan. However, by at least the latter half of the sixth century, among Buddhist monks and people at court alone, a trend of understanding Chinese through naturalized migrants who had come from across the sea was growing.

Then in the Heian period (794–1185) a reaction against Sinicization arose, and the movement to form a script of Japan's own grew. Leading it were writers such as Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji.

Before and after that, in the Manyo era (the late seventh to the late eighth century), poets put forward a striking concept: kotodama (言霊).

Kotodama denies the primacy of the written character, the signified, and brings forth the signifier from sound itself. Seen from the West, logos would be the point of reference, but where logos is more rational and philosophical, kotodama is more spiritual.

In fact, the Kojiki (712), the oldest book in Japan, was at first made with kotodama in view. The Kojiki was carried out by recitation, setting writing aside.

At a time when characters, brought by Sinicization, were flooding in, a revival movement arose to value sound again, to return to sound. People knew that spirituality is lost when something is put into writing.

In fact, the faith in sound also appears as a god: Hitokotonushi Shrine in Katsuragi, Nara, enshrines a god of kotodama. This is not limited to antiquity. It appears too in the Shinto revival movement that arose in reaction to the Confucianization of Japan through the early modern period.

They valued kotodama and otodama (音霊) above all, and developed the thought that sound and words are themselves gods. From this source, a large spiritual movement arose in Japan around the dawn of the modern age.

From a view centered on writing, this may look careless, but it is a highly developed mental technique that grasps everything from sound itself. Even as Western concepts flowed into Japan in the modern age, those concepts were most often enshrined for their sound and form rather than their content.

This attitude is a radical form that opens a road other than philosophy and science.

On the other hand, for members of the Meiji government aiming to modernize, this approach was inconvenient for governance. They therefore built, anew and thoroughly, a structure that places only the signified.

In this way, people were made to shift into a faith in the brain. As a result, only physical objects came to be seen as important, leading to a nihilistic sense that nothing else exists. From the rulers’ perspective, this was an extremely convenient environment for governance.

Looking back at Japan's history by this measure, we see how far off the typical picture is, the picture of a place that receives other cultures. It was through sound and the spirituality that dwells in it that the archipelago took in and engaged with what came from elsewhere.