Receiving the Other: Sound Before Meaning

Yet when Buddhism reached Japan, the people of the archipelago took a path quite different from that struggle over translation. Instead, they did something remarkable: they read the Chinese-language scriptures aloud straight from the characters as sound, and enshrined them on the spot.

At the time, the language of the Japanese archipelago had no script of its own. More than that, however, this points to a deep-seated tradition that placed the highest weight on sound.

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.

Buddhist monks chant the sutras every day, to be sure, yet they are not following the literal meaning. For the semantic content of the written characters is not the primary concern there. What carries meaning is the sound—or more precisely, the spirituality dwelling within the sound. This connects directly to the concept of tama or dama (霊), spirit, to which I will turn shortly.

To say it flatly, what Shakyamuni actually said does not matter; what matters is the heart of Shakyamuni as he spoke it.

Historically, this pattern began with the arrival of Buddhism in the mid-sixth century. Although Buddhism had never existed in ancient Japan, it would eventually become so intertwined with Japanese culture as to be indispensable. It must be remembered, however, that the doctrine which crossed the sea was not pristine Indian Buddhism, but a tradition heavily remixed within Chinese civilization. Nor did the ancient Japanese embrace it without protest: a bitter conflict erupted between the pro-Buddhist faction and the nativist anti-Buddhist faction, culminating in armed clash and a violent transfer of political power. Only when the pro-Buddhist faction seized authority did the imperial court throw its weight behind the faith, accelerating the building of temples and the importation of sutras.

Yet even as the imperial court championed Buddhism, the country was not yet a unified state, and widespread regional resistance to the foreign creed persisted at a scale the new ruling elites could not ignore. To entrench Buddhism on native soil, rulers were forced into a delicate compromise: setting the foreign faith against indigenous Shinto beliefs while orchestrating an uneasy harmony. While history offers few instances where clashing religions smoothly fuse, ancient Japan responded with shinbutsu shugo (神仏習合), the syncretic doctrine that identified native kami with the buddhas. Bridging a foreign creed with indigenous deities might appear to reflect extraordinary flexibility, yet we should not be seduced by this superficial assimilation. One of the fundamental mechanisms of Japanese cultural reception is a layered duality: the surface graciously accepts foreign forms, while the inner core fiercely defends what is native. This concealed architecture is nearly impossible for outside observers to decipher, which is why international assessments of Japan consistently miss the mark.

For an insular people shaped by millennia of village life, direct confrontation with foreign powers was a suicidal gamble. From the perspective of sheer survival, the Japanese learned to simulate compliance on the surface while quietly nurturing a fierce, unyielding self-consciousness within. This duality is the fundamental mechanism of Japanese culture, and I will continue to explore its mysterious operations in future essays.

Yesterday's article suggested that two factors lay beneath the rooting of Buddhism in Japan, Soga no Umako and the curse, and that together they bore deeply on the ground that promoted Buddhism and shaped the history that followed.

Seen this way, I think the background to Buddhism's acceptance on the Japanese side was not that native Japanese sensed a future in a new religious spirit. In the beginning it came from the political skill of the Soga, who, in a power struggle, drew in the naturalized immigrants whose voice was starting to grow. The point to be careful about is whether a religion called "Shinto" existed on the Japanese side before the arrival of Buddhism, or in the upheaval of its arrival. I believe that Shinto as a religion did not exist then. Faith in daily life was forced out of its earlier state by the arrival of a continental religion with strong doctrine and discipline, and only then, I suspect, did the need arise to make Shinto a religion in order to stand against Buddhism.

That is, the religious concept called "Shinto" itself did not yet exist. Countless studies still ask whether Shinto is a religion at all, which shows as much. My own view is that with the rise of the Soga at the time Buddhism arrived, pressure to acquire a religious character was bound to fall on Shinto, and over the next several centuries, reshaped by its intricate relation with Buddhism, it achieved religiousness. From this view, the first real success of Shinto in becoming a religion was State Shinto (shrine Shinto) of the Meiji era, which means it is in fact quite recent.