A name is born in a place

LIVING QUESTIONS

For many years I have studied the Japanese in my own way, through ancient history, myth, faith, fudo (風土) and folklore, and I have gone to the places themselves all over the country. Now, interestingly, all of that has become the soil that grew inside me, and new life has begun to sprout from it: the spiritual culture of Japan.

Perhaps what I was searching for all along was something that seems to have form and has none. Contrary by nature, I consult academic scholarship but never swallow it whole. I put my own primary information first, and above all I treasure the feeling I gain on the land itself. That was a way of speaking with the gods. You visit a place, feel the wind blowing there, listen to the sound of the waves, put yourself inside the forest. Doing this across the Japanese archipelago, I have come to understand fairly well, and quite naturally, what the Japanese of the past found and called divine.

Everything I have researched over these years is no more than a prologue. It is the ground for what comes next, the search into spiritual culture and into prayer itself. Lately, though, what I feel is the way a forest comes into being. Life sprouts from the earth, and in time trees make a forest. For that there must be rich soil. If the years behind me are that soil, what begins now is the very process of trees being born one after another and a forest forming.

Thought has no destination. There is nothing in it to be achieved. Thought is a forest. Go deep into a forest and you lose your sense of direction; the compass stops working; in time you feel you have come back to the same spot, and you no longer know where to go. You move forward step by step, and it seems as if nothing is happening. When the trees shut out the sun, you lose your sense of time as well. By the time darkness wraps around you, you can hardly move. And yet, once you have entered the forest, you cannot leave it.

Why did I enter the forest? That is the one question I keep asking. However far I walk, no answer comes. I cannot rage at anything outside, and I cannot seek an answer outside. In the world where people live, you can look outward for answers, but in the forest you learn that this was only ever a fiction. In the end, there is no answer anywhere but in yourself, and in fact there is no answer at all.

Still, you must keep walking. In a world where it no longer means anything which direction is right, there is no way but to sharpen your own intuition and follow it. Being lost reflects a heart that is lost; it is not the forest that is lost. Go deeper and deeper into that state and you see something strange. There are footprints.

Footprints, in a deep forest where no one should be. Follow them, and someone is sitting there quietly. In that instant I know who it is: one who came before me, who was given the same mission, resolved to enter the forest and kept walking. He says nothing; he only keeps his silence. But because he was there, I know that I must take up that mission and go further still. A mission is always passed on.

This, for me, is what thought is.

Shinto and the many Buddhist schools, Daoism and Confucianism, kokugaku (国学): countless currents of thought have arisen in Japan and taken root in their own way in Japanese soil. What they are, in the end, no one yet knows. I will never know, for instance, what fervor drove the young people of the anti-establishment movements of the late 1960s. But one thing at least can be said. It was kangeki (感激), being deeply moved.

Were you moved by it?

Being moved gives birth to thought, and in time, after a lag, to culture. Without that primal experience of being moved at its root, thought is only consumed as surface ideology and in the end changes nothing.

Our world has reached a complete dead end, with nowhere left to go. Is that not because the world that has taken shape was driven not by the primal experience of being moved but by intensely selfish private desire?

A world without kangeki will, after its own lag, produce a culture with nothing inside it. Unless people call it culture, they cannot disguise it, so far has it decayed.

The primal experience of being moved. What we must think about seriously now, and set at the foundation of how we design the world, is not the academic jargon intellectuals speak. It comes down, I think, to a single word, kangeki. That is where I find myself this week.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

How were the names of the gods born in Japan? The gods known as yaoyorozu (八百萬), a word that means countless, have quite literally countless names, and they still sit enshrined across the Japanese archipelago. Yet their origins are unclear, and from the mid-Edo period on, the names of the gods were pieced together, mainly by kokugaku scholars, by working backward from the reading of characters and sounds.

How, to begin with, did the compilers of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki in the early eighth century transplant the gods of Japan into writing? The opening of the Nihon Shoki records that the process brought immense difficulty and anguish. When gods who had been spoken as sound were turned into letters, in other words, something at the source produced a deep unease in the heart.

Who gives a name? Or is a name something that arose by itself, in a state where the very relation of "giving" and "being given" does not hold? Thinking about this question should not be pointless for us, living as we do in an age that has handed out so many names that everything has become excessive. So this time I will take one Japanese god as my axis and uncover the primal form in which names are born.

That god is Okuninushi. Izumo Taisha in Izumo, Shimane, stands as one of the two great pillars of Japanese faith alongside the Inner Shrine of Ise Jingu in Ise, Mie, which enshrines Amaterasu, placed in modern Japan as the ancestral deity of the imperial house. Remote as it is, Izumo Taisha is still crowded with worshippers. Okuninushi, though, is a deeply intriguing god, because in the myths he has countless names. There is, in other words, no true name, no single name at all. Understanding that sense is where I want to begin.

The Kojiki lists Onamuchi, Ashiharashikoo, Yachihoko, Utsushikunitama and Okuninushi, and it even adds the note that this god "has five names." This tells us that by the early eighth century, when it was compiled, Okuninushi was already thought of as a mysterious being in the Asuka region of Nara, where the court stood. He was already a god whose true nature was unknown, and the one thing known was that he had several names.

The Nihon Shoki records him also as Omononushi and as Okunitama. But here we run into something strange.

The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki are myths compiled at court. At the same time, by order of Empress Genmei, a project was under way in which each province gathered its old traditions, compiled them independently and presented them to the court. These are the Fudoki. Among them, the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki, which compiled the traditions of Izumo, has come down to us almost complete. Yet for some reason the name Okuninushi, the god of Izumo, never appears in it once.

In the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki, he appears as Amenoshitatsukurashishi no Okami and as Onamochi; no god named Okuninushi appears. Nor do any of the famous Izumo legends told in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. Rather, it reads as though it were written about a different god altogether.

Since this gets confusing, let me set out the main line. If you take the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki as your axis, they tell how a god called Onamuchi later came to sit as the god of Izumo under the name Okuninushi. Several names appear along the way, but this transfer from Onamuchi to Okuninushi is the basic structure. The difficulty is that everything was expressed in sound at the time, and naturally the sound changes from place to place. So the sound Onamuchi is rendered variously as Oanamochi, Onamochi and Onamuji, and the characters used to write it change too. Basically, though, they speak of closely related gods.

So the Onamochi of the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki can be seen as close to this Onamuchi. Amenoshitatsukurashishi no Okami, on the other hand, appears only in the Fudoki, which suggests it was the original form, worshipped as the god of that land.

Another difficulty is that this god of Izumo is enshrined all over the country. So no one knows which is the true name, and if you take the court's records as your premise, contradictions with Izumo's own records pile up. This misalignment that never lines up has troubled scholars since the modern era. They asked: which is the real name?

But I believe that question is wrong to begin with.

Since 1868 and the Meiji era that is called Japan's modernization, everyone who tried to answer it has explained the names as traces of one god acquiring other names in different places. Every one of them, without exception, said the same thing. But in my view this happens only inside the scholar's head and never touches faith as it is lived. Linking history directly to myth is something people do when they understand neither.

Myth is not history. It can enfold history, but myth does not in itself narrate history. Unlike China, which had writing and the craft of documents early and established official histories, Japan lived most of its history without such things. One can easily imagine that they were imported many times, but they never took root.

Modern scholars ignored all this and simply assumed that Okuninushi had many names because, in ancient Japan, as forces of Izumo origin spread, other names piled up on a single personality. In short, they took Okuninushi to be a subject and began their argument from there. The trace of this shows plainly in their talk of aliases, alternate names and the same god. Such ideas can only arise once you have set up one god as a particular subject. Something alien happened, then, with the arrival of the modern. I call it the inversion, and this inversion bent the rich world of myth out of shape, and with it ancient Japan.

What, then, was really happening? I believe the names did not multiply. They were countless from the start, and the divine figure of Okuninushi was generated in the very process of their being bound into one, which is itself a footprint of a transformation of the spirit. Rather than a process of binding into one, it would be truer to call it a process of alienation: in the state where countless names were alienated, the position of a new, single god called Okuninushi was born. This is not a question of history.

And the myths tell of two gods who were decisive in this generation: the god who stays in a place, and the god who leaves it.

Because Okuninushi is now the chief deity of Izumo Taisha, few people know it, but the original god of Izumo was Susanoo. In the myths Susanoo is placed as the younger brother of Amaterasu and is drawn as an early god of violent temper. Along the Japan Sea coast of western Japan especially, countless traditions remain that Susanoo was a god who came over from the Korean peninsula, and he is thought to have been a god of migrants who crossed the sea. But this is where it gets difficult.

I myself have traveled all over the country following Susanoo, and the conclusion that came into view was a plural figure: Susanoo is a god of the land, a god of migrants, and at the same time neither. In the myths, the gods of the land are called the kunitsukami (国つ神), and the gods of migrants who come across the sea are the amatsukami (天つ神). Since Amaterasu belongs to the amatsukami, Susanoo would naturally be taken as one of them too. Yet the texts record that for his raging nature he was banished from the amatsukami. What on earth does that mean?

Banished from the amatsukami, Susanoo becomes a wanderer and in time arrives in Izumo. In Japan such a wandering god is called a matsurowanu (まつろわぬ) god, a god who will not submit, meaning a god who is neither kunitsukami nor amatsukami. And because the matsurowanu gods have no country, they move. Why did the banished Susanoo come to Izumo? In fact, not only the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki but many other texts agree in describing Izumo as a dangerous land that did not yet hold together as a country.

Drifting into that land, Susanoo hears from an old couple of a daughter about to be devoured by a great serpent, and he agrees to slay it in exchange for her hand. The serpent is called Yamata no Orochi and is drawn in the myths as a terrible creature with eight heads. After slaying it, Susanoo is said to have built a palace in the land of Izumo. And indeed, even today, deep in the hills beyond Izumo, it is not Okuninushi, the god of Izumo, but Susanoo and his wife Kushinadahime who are enshrined again and again.

The arrangement looks almost as if the mountains were guarding Okuninushi, enshrined on a cape facing the sea. I think the relation between Susanoo and Okuninushi tells us where names are born. And here history comes in.

For a long time Japan was divided into administrative regions called kuni, provinces, under the ritsuryo legal system. The book that gathered these together is the Engishiki Jinmyocho, the register of shrines. Among the 2,861 shrines listed there, the one in each province said to draw the deepest reverence and hold the highest standing was placed as the ichinomiya (一之宮), the first shrine. Once the system of shrine rites under the ritsuryo order was established, the ichinomiya was set as the shrine each provincial governor visited first, and traces of this survive across the whole country today. Put simply, the ichinomiya of each province was honored as the guardian of the entire province.

But something strange is recorded here. Izumo Province in fact has two ichinomiya. One is Izumo Taisha, enshrining Okuninushi, in what is now Izumo, Shimane. The other stands next door on the Matsue side, in the hills: Kumano Taisha. Its chief deity is a mysterious god with a long name, Izanagi no Manago Kumano ni Masu Kamuro no Mikoto, and at some point an interpretation took hold that this was another name for Susanoo. Medieval politics is tangled up in this, so I will not go deep into it here. I will only note that Izumo had two first shrines, and that the pattern took hold of one enshrining Okuninushi and the other Susanoo. Indeed, a text thought to date from around the ninth century already reads the chief deity of Kumano Taisha as Susanoo, suggesting the view was widespread by the early Heian period.

Why Susanoo, then? Here too something curious happens. Susanoo is placed as Amaterasu's younger brother and drawn as a kind of hero, yet where he appears in the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki, not one line is written of the famous myth of Yamata no Orochi. He appears only very briefly, in the entry for a settlement called Susa-go (須佐郷). There Susanoo says: "This is a small country, but a good one. So I will not put my name on trees or stones." He settles his own spirit in that land and opens two fields there. To me this passage looks like the prototype of Japanese faith.

The god does not put his name on nature, on trees or stones. What the god names, it says, is a place. The god himself is declaring that a name is generated in a place. No such passage exists anywhere else. And right after this, it is written that he set down his spirit and marked out his fields, and this act is tied directly to the founding of the land. In Japan, then, all gods, Susanoo among them, have no substance. That is the shape of antiquity.

A name, a spirit, and land under the plough.

What holds these together, I believe, is the acts of the people who live in that place. Seen simply, it looks as though the god's name becomes the land's name and the land's name becomes the god's. But neither comes first, because what generates them is the living acts of people in the place. To put it another way, it is a world without a subject.

A name, then, is not something given but something that arises of itself. And that is exactly why Susanoo was also a god who gives names. In the Kojiki, Onamuchi comes to Ne no Katasukuni, the land Susanoo rules, and overcomes a series of trials, and as he sets out from that land, it is Susanoo who gives him the name Okuninushi. Mediating this is Onamuchi's marriage to Susanoo's daughter Suseribime. In a foreign place, an alien visiting god, helped by a princess goddess of that land, passes through his trials, and as he departs he receives a name from the god who rules the country.

Okuninushi means "master who rules the country." That this name came from the mouth of a native god of Izumo, and the weight of that fact, casts light on the origin of the myth. From a country at the level of the god Susanoo, it is alienated and sublimated to the level of the god Okuninushi. What a country actually was changed greatly. Okuninushi is spoken of as the master who rules many countries. This does not mean a mightiest king called Okuninushi existed. It records the origin of many place-based countries coming together, in a state of alienation, as a communal illusion. That was achieved through sound, not through writing.

The other is the god who leaves; in other words, the visiting god.

After Onamuchi receives his name and departs, there is a tale of a small god who appears from beyond the sea, riding a boat to a cape in Izumo. Yet no one knows his name. What is interesting is that here it is clearly said that he came visiting from the sea.

At this point a toad named Taniguku says that Kuebiko would know. Kuebiko is a scarecrow standing in a rice field in a place called Yamada no Sohodo; a god of place, in other words. He has no great country, yet he certainly exists. The Kojiki writes of this god that he cannot go anywhere, yet he knows everything in the world. The one who can go nowhere knows everything in the world.

Kuebiko at once gives the name: this is Sukunahikona, child of Kamumusuhi. Kamumusuhi is one of the first gods to appear in the myths, and he is said to hold a special status even among the amatsukami. He is, so to speak, the matrix that gave birth to the amatsukami, a god worshipped at the source. No trace of this remains today, but I suspect that after crossing to Japan, faith in this god was passed down as ancestral memory. Someone who drifted to Japan carrying a myth, at some point during a movement that took an immense span of years, acquired a new myth that was not this one.

A god did not know a god's name. And the one who knew it was one who kept standing in the field of a particular land and never went anywhere. The one who knew the name was the place itself. This tells of Sukunahikona coming again and again to Kuebiko, the god of place. He visits a particular place. And he always leaves.

Sukunahikona belongs to no place. Because he belongs nowhere, no one can call his name. Here is the prototype of the god the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi later called the marebito (まれびと). The marebito is a visiting god who comes at a fixed season, takes part in the rites and leaves. Across Japan, the footprints of visiting gods were once the everyday world itself. They have been lost only within the last half-century.

So Onamuchi and Sukunahikona build the country together, but in time Sukunahikona leaves. A visiting god must not remain in a place. What is more, he leaves before the building of the country is finished. He is not allowed to stay long. That is the fate of the one who visits: a being not permitted to remain.

For if he stayed, he would become an unmoving god of place. He would become like Kuebiko. Because he leaves, he can come again. If he can bring wisdom, he can also bring calamity. The working of coming and going was itself the body of this god. There are gods who dwell in places, gods who come and go, and wandering gods. That plural world was the very world our ancestors lived in.

The question, then, is the one left behind. The Nihon Shoki describes what follows. Left alone, Onamuchi laments, asking who will govern this country, and then something comes toward him, lighting up the sea, and declares itself.

I am your two spirits, it says. Onamuchi, in other words, did not know his own spirits until they named themselves to him. Those spirits asked for a place, to be settled on Mount Mimoro, and the moment they received a place they became a god with another name, Omononushi. He is the chief deity of Omiwa Shrine in what is now Sakurai, Nara, sometimes called the oldest god in Japan.

This is important. He received his name from the god who put his name on the land, joined with a god who came from the sea, was left by that god, and in the end split off his own spirit and set a god on Mount Mimoro. At the end of this process rises a divine figure who seeks to rule a country beyond any one place. Okuninushi, then, is not a god from birth. He lies in the very movement by which a plural form, generated between the god who stays and the god who leaves, is generated and gathered into one. Myth is not tracing history.

I have always seen no meaning in comparative mythology. I have also thought that linking myth directly to history is the same as saying nothing. Myth is not history, and history is not myth. The two are born from entirely different principles.

Let me come, then, to the heart of it: why the names had to be plural. It is because the act of prayer has no subject. More than that, it has no subjectivity, no ego. I have written this several times, and it looks trivial, but it is the most important thing of all. Prayer originally had no "subject who prays." That is why people could pray. Where there is no subject, there is no object either. So the question that became a problem after the modern era, "who is praying, and to whom?", had no meaning in the faith that came before.

Ask who is praying and no answer comes; ask what is being prayed to and no answer comes. On the continent, of course, there is a long history of worshipping a single god, and it is true that this produced vast religious organizations. But that is the very process of inversion into the subject, and was it not something human beings never really needed? That is the strong doubt I carry.

Those who came before us did not live in a world where subject and object had split apart. They simply lived in a place. Their lives were a chain of everyday acts passed down, and there was no subject in it. If there was a subject, it was the place, the land, the village, the family. That is why Susanoo declared that he would put his name on a place. The memory of a time when the place itself was generated as a god dwells here.

Prayer is the relation itself that rises between people and nature in a place, and it belongs to neither. Since it is a relation, it always belongs to a place. The prayer on the shore of Izumo, the prayer on Mount Mimoro and the prayer in some rice field can never be the same, because the water, the wind and the food differ, and so does the quality of awe. When the quality differs, the form that appears differs; when the form differs, the sound uttered differs. When the sound differs, the god differs. A god is sound.

That is how the names of the gods were generated. The environment of a place, in other words, is what remains of the names of the gods of old. So there are as many names as there are places. Japan's yaoyorozu no kami, its eight million gods, is not animism; it is a word for exactly this. And every one of those names is true, because where the place differs, the relation differs.

Later, Kukai tried to make the Buddha manifest by uttering sound. The Shingon esoteric Buddhism he brought in was precisely the faith that the Buddha lives in the sound of words.

Today the world has fallen into an unprecedented loss of faith, and many people have reached a dead end. But does the cause of that dead end really lie in the areas being debated around the world? To my eyes, the root cause is the loss of prayer. And that may be the end point of human beings who inverted themselves into the subject.