Kotodama: Receiving the World by Its Sound

Instead, they did something remarkable: they read the Chinese-language scriptures aloud straight from the characters as sound, and enshrined them on the spot.

To put it bluntly, so long as the sound was right, that was enough. And whether a sound was right or not was a matter not of musicality, but of the spirituality dwelling within it. Whether that which arrived from elsewhere carried spirituality or not was the criterion by which it was received.

Ancient Japan grasped complex concepts directly from sound itself. Without needing to set words down in script, people had cultivated the art of receiving sound in a way that reached straight to its deepest spiritual core. That is precisely why writing was not needed.

The Manyoshu records Yamanoue no Okura's lines, "That this is a land where the spirit of words brings blessings, so it has been told and handed down," and Kakinomoto no Hitomaro's "This land of Yamato, of Shikishima, is a land the spirit of words sustains. May all be well," as well as "At the crossroads of eighty ways, where the spirit of words dwells, I ask the evening oracle." Hitomaro's poems in particular became the source of the later belief in Kotodama.

For some people, Kotodama remains a spiritual foundation even now, but apart from the Manyoshu, which preserves the earliest traces of the word being used in a poetic, intuitive way, it cannot be traced any further back. … The ancestors of the Japanese, who originally had no need of a written culture, conveyed the world to one another through sound, or rather through vibration, and so they shared the idea that the gods were reflected in sound itself.

For them, using writing was an act that confined the gods of a boundless world of sound that could never be fully grasped, and there was a time when it was shunned as an evil thing.

What Norinaga stressed above all was that koto (言) and koto (事) had once shared a single root. … Both are pronounced koto, yet 言 is the word and 事 is reality. In ancient Japan, a word was not a mere sign. It was the power that formed reality itself.

To speak a word was to move the world.

This unity of the two koto, made explicit here, became the philosophical ground of kotodama (言霊), the belief that the divine dwells in words.

Yet in those days, a plural world lived within the single sound "koto." The sense that koto is both "word" [言] and "deed" [事] gave rise in myth to Hitokotonushi, the god of the word, and Kotoshironushi [事代主神], the god of the deed. What is intriguing is that the two gods are rooted side by side.

In the mountain range that rises along the border between Osaka and Nara, Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine stands at the foot of Mount Katsuragi, and Kamotsuba Shrine stands on the plain below it. … Hitokotonushi is enshrined at Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine, and Kotoshironushi at Kamotsuba Shrine. The two gods of "koto" live together side by side, and in that very arrangement I seem to see the sensibility that the ancient Japanese had grasped.

The starting point was Keichu (1640–1701). He is remembered as the founder of kokugaku, but he began as a monk of the Shingon school, in the lineage of Kukai (774–835). This fact matters a great deal. At the base of the Shingon school lay the thought of shingon (真言), the Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit mantra. Kokugaku, in other words, is a philosophy of words.

Behind this was Kukai's conviction that words do not explain; they have the power to transform existence itself. Keichu inherited that shingon thought deeply, and his greatness lay in turning his gaze from "the words of the buddha" to "the old words of Japan."

Norinaga's Kojiki-den set off a structural turning point, after which the Kojiki came to be valued above the Nihon Shoki. His successor Atsutane Hirata then reinterpreted his master's work from a spiritual standpoint and opened a door that connected it to religious movements. Coinciding with the unsettled times of the late Edo period, this set off an explosion of religious movements, in region after region, that took the Kojiki as their foundation.

Their founders were people possessed by the gods or gifted with spiritual powers, but the spiritual foundation they shared was the Kojiki as it had passed through Atsutane Hirata. … To put that mystery into words, Atsutane Hirata's disciples spread the idea of Kotodama [言霊], the spirit that dwells in words.

The following year, guided by the gods, he visited Nao, married her daughter Sumi Deguchi, changed his name to Onisaburo Deguchi, and moved toward founding Omoto. When Nao, the spiritual presence of the age, and Onisaburo crossed paths, a movement quite unlike the State Shinto of the center began to stir in the mountains of Tamba.

With the arrival of Onisaburo, who had religious charisma like Hirata's, the Shinto of the Meiji era was shaken at once. Let me offer a hint as to how Onisaburo could found his own Shinto from a position outside the line of State Shinto. It is in fact the presence of kotodama, the spirit of words. Understanding of kotodama, the greatest concern of National Learning scholars, had been honed from around Hirata's time, and it deeply influenced the Shinto figures after him. Until then kotodama was a sacred thing handed down within particular clans or persons, one child to one child, and it never leaked to others.

Fortunately, the movements from the late Edo period to the early Meiji were gathered through Kisaburo Ueda's spiritual journey, and flowed toward systematization under him. The modern history in which Ueda, Onisaburo Deguchi, appeared, won great fame, and shook the age also played the important role of leaving to later generations, directly, the interesting history of the lost kotodama.

Deguchi was an outstanding religious figure and a mystical thinker who carried out his own research. The central idea was kotodama. From then on Ueshiba moved with his family to Ayabe, lived under Deguchi, and devoted himself to religious discipline while farming.

Ueshiba left Omoto, half by force, but in his lifetime he recalled that he had "learned kotodama studies from Deguchi." … Put simply, it comes from the ancient Japanese belief that "a soul (spirit) dwells in words, and the resonance of a spoken word has a mysterious power to move reality." Deguchi was skilled in using kotodama and could call up storms and cure people's illnesses. He also gathered the history of kotodama in himself and established the "Omoto kotodama studies," contributing greatly to systematizing the mystery of kotodama.

Ueshiba took in this thought through his discipline in Omoto. Later he stressed again and again that "the root of aikido lies in the kotodama of ancient times." As the universe was made with kotodama and expands and unfolds day by day, aikido too, he held, is a martial art based on a universal truth in step with the creation of heaven and earth. He also held that the martial arts and the Shinto view of the universe are two sides of one thing, and taught that "aikido is the way of grasping the spiritual principle of all things, and the pinnacle of kotodama practice."