## 1. Philosophy as Engaged Knowing



Most Japanese philosophers have assumed the relation between knower
and known is an interactive conjunction between the two rather than a
bridge spanning the disjunction between what is in the knower's
mind and the known which stands outside it. The Japanese philosopher
is thus more likely to be viewed as a person who tries to fathom
reality by working within it rather than one who tries to understand
it by standing apart from it. In other words, the Japanese
philosopher's project more often involves personal engagement
than impersonal detachment. The difference in emphasis between
traditional Japanese philosophy and modern Western philosophy became
clear to the Japanese when the latter was first introduced into their
country in full force in the mid-nineteenth century. A crucial issue
for the intellectual leadership of the time was how to identify in
Japanese what the Westerners called *philosophy*. Wanting to
assimilate Western philosophy along with other aspects of Western
culture, the architects of Japanese modernization wanted to give the
field its own Japanese name, rather than treating it as a foreign term
pronounced phonetically.



To capture the philosophical sense of *wisdom*
(-*sophy*), they picked a likely candidate from the classical
East Asian tradition, namely, *tetsu*. More provocative,
though, was their choice for the other part of the neologism, namely,
*gaku*. That word also had a classical pedigree: it signified
*learning*, especially in the sense of modeling oneself after a
textual or human model (that is, a master text or a personal master).
Probably more significantly, though, the term *gaku* at the
time was prominent in neologisms for disciplines in the newly
established Western-style universities, functioning as an equivalent
for the German *Wissenschaft*. Hence, it rendered the
-*ology* suffix of fields like biology or geology as well as
the humanistic "sciences" (*Wissenschaften*) like
history or literary studies. By this protocol of nomenclature, the
Western discipline of *philosophy* came to be called in Japan
by the compound word *tetsugaku* and academic philosophers were
(and still are) called *tetsugakusha*, that is, "ones who
partake in the *Wissenschaft* of wisdom."



The salient point is that the label chosen was not a more traditional
term like *tetsujin*, "wise people." A word like
*tetsujin* might have more closely approximated the original
Greek meaning of the philosopher as a "lover of wisdom"
than does *tetsugakusha*, which suggests something more like a
"scholar of wisdomology." As a result, we might say
*tetsujin* better refers to the premodern Japanese sense of the
philosopher, that is, a sage who has mastery in one of the traditional
*Ways* (*do* or *michi*) such as the Way of
the buddhas, the Way of the Confucian scholarly sages, the Way of the
(Shinto) *kami*, or even one of the Ways of the
traditional arts such as calligraphy, tea ceremony, pottery, painting,
flower arranging, or any of the various martial arts. (Traditional
Japan used a variety of terms for the sagely master; for convenience
in this article *tetsujin* will appear throughout.)



In effect, by creating the new term *tetsugakusha* instead of
drawing on an already existing term from their own tradition, the
Japanese were drawing a distinction between two species of
understanding and two forms of philosophizing. One species of knowers
aspires to a scholarly ("scientific") detachment that
mutes personal affect with the aim of reflecting external affairs as
they exist independently of human ideation. That kind of understanding
is the goal of the *Wissenschaften*--the empirical
sciences, literary criticism, studies of history, and social
sciences--that define most departments in the academy alongside
philosophy.



The other species of understanding characterizes those who personally
engage reality, transforming themselves and reality together into a
coherent and harmonious whole. That more traditional Japanese sense of
understanding transcends mere skill or know-how, it should be noted.
To be a Confucian sage or a master calligrapher is not simply to be
proficient in technique (any more than being a logician in the West is
simply knowing how to construct a syllogism). Although rigorously
disciplined in their early training, the members of the engaged
knowing family of philosophers eventually go beyond fixed templates
and regimens to respond creatively to what-is. When engaged
understanding prevails, the knower and known collaborate in an act of
innovation rather than simple discovery. From the Japanese standpoint,
in their praxis as philosophers, the *tetsugakusha* are akin to
how geologists understand clay whereas the *tetsujin* are akin
to how master potters understand clay. The geologist acquires
scientific knowledge (geology) to forge an external relation between
the knower and the clay, each of which preexists the knowledge and
basically remains unchanged by the knowledge (a *Wissenschaft*
is typically grounded in the descriptive). By contrast, the knowledge
of the potter is expressed in, by, and with the clay as an interactive
project (the masterwork of pottery). Both the clay and the
"bodymind" of the potter are transformed in the act of
engaged wisdom. For the *tetsugakusha*, philosophy bridges the
philosopher's connection with reality; for the
*tetsujin*, on the other hand, philosophy is the Way the
philosopher and reality are purposively engaged with each other and
transform each other. For the *tetsugakusha* philosophy is a
link the self creates to connect with the world; for the
*tetsujin* philosophy is a product created out of the mutual
engagement between self and world. The distinction parallels what
Henri Bergson characterized in the opening pages of *Introduction
to Metaphysics* as two ways of knowing: "moving
around" an object as contrasted with "entering it"
(Bergson 1955, 21).


## 2. Hallmarks of Japanese Philosophical Analysis


### 2.1 Internal Relations



When Japanese thinkers assume two items are related (whether the items
be physical entities, ideas, persons, social structures, etc.), they
commonly begin by examining how the items internally overlap (how they
*inter*relate) rather than by looking for something additional
(a third item whether it be another thing, idea, force, or whatever)
that externally *connects* or *bonds* them. The simple
diagrams below indicate the chief difference.





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| two disjoint circles labeled 'a' and 'b' connected by a relation 'R' external to both | two intersecting circles labelel 'a' and 'b' with the intersection labeled 'R' |
| 
Figure 1: External Relation | 
Figure 2: Internal Relation |




Figure 1 shows *a* and *b* as discrete entities in an
external relation represented by the extrinsic linking agency of
*R*. Figure 2, by contrast, shows *a* and *b* as
internally related entities such that *R* denotes what they
share, what intrinsically conjoins them. In the case of the external
relation, if the relation dissolves (or is omitted from the analysis),
*a* and *b* each retains its own integrity without loss.
Only the context of their connection disappears. In the case of an
internal relation, on the other hand, if the relation dissolves (or is
omitted from the analysis), *a* loses part of itself, as does
*b*. For instance, as a legal arrangement, marriage is an
external, contractual relation into which two individuals enter.
Should that arrangement end, each of the pair returns to his or her
originally discrete individuality and attendant rights. As a loving
arrangement, however, marriage is an internal relation in which two
people share part of themselves and should the love connection
dissolve, each person loses part of what one had formerly been, the
part that had been invested in the other. As Emily Dickinson (1884)
wrote after losing a beloved friend, she became a
"crescent" of her former self. (See the entry on
 relations
 for further discussion of the external/internal distinction.)



When Japanese philosophers emphasize engaged over detached knowing,
their treatment of standard philosophical themes assumes distinctive
nuances. One example will illustrate. Because of its roots in praxis,
Japanese philosophy approaches mind-body issues differently from how
they have typically been addressed in the West, especially the modern
West. As the postwar philosopher, Yuasa Yasuo (1925-2005)
analyzes in detail (Yuasa 1987), the preference in modern Western
philosophy has been to think about the mind and body as discrete (that
is, as external to each other) and the issue then becomes
*what* connects the two. If no third external connection can be
found, the only obvious alternative is to eliminate the dualism by
reducing one of the polarities to the other, for example, by making
the mind an epiphenomenon of the body. Yuasa found such formulations
of the mind-body problem alien to the Japanese philosophical
tradition, both ancient and modern.



Japanese philosophers have customarily taken the view that the body
and mind may be distinguished, but they have assumed from the outset
that their relation is internal rather than external. That is, the
mind and body cannot be completely separated without violating their
essential character or function. If we envision body and mind as a
single complex of two intersecting circles (call it *bodymind*
to capture the sense of the Japanese compound term *shinjin*),
then without the somatic conjunction, the mind is not fully the mind
and without the mental conjunction, the body is not fully the body.
Accordingly, Yuasa argues, Japanese philosophers have throughout
history typically searched not for *what* constant connects the
discrete mind and discrete body, but instead, *how* the
bodymind functions such that the interrelationship between the somatic
and mental aspects may increase. That is, the focus has been
*how* disciplined study and praxis enables the two circles to
overlap increasingly in the direction of unity.



That approach implies that the bodymind relationship is a changing
internal relationship rather than a fixed external one. In learning to
play the piano, for example, Yuasa says the novice has "the mind
lead the body" to memorize the keys, but as the pianist becomes
proficient, "the body leads the mind" so that it seems the
"fingers know where the keys are" without the intrusion of
conscious thinking, leaving the mind to concentrate more fully on the
music itself. As the two circles more fully merge, the bodymind
becomes capable of holistic function. That unification enables further
creativity and insight--the point when the music, the mind, and
the fingers touching the keyboard become a single act. That pathway to
increasing bodymind unity explains how praxis and discipline are
prerequisite to free expression. Yuasa explains how this integrative
bodymind phenomenon is treated in various Western as well as Eastern
theories including neurology, the psychology of conditioned response,
psychosomatic medicine, depth psychology, phenomenologies of the body,
Indian Ayurvedic medicine, kundalini yogic praxis, Japanese theories
of artistry, and East Asian models of *ki* (*qi* in
Chinese) within medicine and the martial arts.



Yuasa concludes that philosophy would be well served by leaving the
rarefied pure and distinct abstractions of Cartesian metaphysics and
its theory of the substantially discrete body and mind. By focusing
instead on the dynamics of bodymind as a single fluid system, the
dualism inherent in the classic Western mind-body problem would
dissolve into an engaged study of the Way of bodymind: its
cultivation, transformation, and its links to praxis, performance,
holistic health, and creative expression. Yuasa's philosophy
exemplifies how contemporary Japanese thinkers may constructively
engage Western thought while drawing on strands of their own premodern
traditions. As we have seen, his analysis shows how a relation (in
this case that between mind and body) that is commonly assumed to be
external in modern Western philosophy is understood quite differently
when it is assumed to be internal. This difference is typical not only
of Yuasa, but also more generally of Japanese philosophizing at
large.



Consider also how highlighting internal relations would affect ethical
problems involving self and other (whether the "other" is
another person, a group, a thing, the natural world, etc.). Most
Japanese philosophers tend to pose the fundamental question not in
terms of what principles or calculus of consequential considerations
define the ideal relation spanning the two. Instead their analyses
more commonly begin from a consideration of what the self and other
intrinsically share such that there is an original relationship at
all: What is the common ground giving rise to the relationship? That
is, ethics is not about making relations but about discovering
interrelations.



Similarly, in aesthetics the general modus operandi for the Japanese
philosopher is not to explain art as establishing extrinsic contexts
or criteria that connect artist, medium, creative intention, audience,
and the work of art (whether the work be poetry, painting, or a
dramatic or musical performance). Instead the Japanese philosopher
delves immediately into the *in medias res* of the work of art
as the presentation of a single interresponsive field (often called
*kokoro*) out of which that whole cluster of aesthetic
components takes form. (See the entry on
 Japanese Aesthetics.)



To take one final example, in his ethico-political philosophy, Watsuji
Tetsuro (1889-1960) explicitly rejected as a starting point
the social contract theory of the modern West (Watsuji 1996). As a way
of theorizing the meaning and purpose of the state, a social contract
is conceived as an external relation made by discrete, independent
individuals. Watsuji's critique was that even a thought
experiment should begin with an understanding of human existence based
in fact. Human being originates not as an individual, but as a fetus
interdependent with its mother and once born, the baby is fully
dependent on its mother. Only subsequently does it develop
individuality and independence, but even then it is in transition to
becoming a socialized human being. To understand ethics and politics,
Watsuji argues, even a thought experiment must recognize the inherent
relations intrinsic to, and constitutive of, human being in that
ongoing process, what he called a dialectic of interpersonal
betweenness or being in the "midst of the interpersonal"
(*hito to hito no aidagara*) that precedes the polarization
into either individual or collective. (See the entry on
 Watsuji Tetsuro.)


### 2.2 Holographic Relation between Whole and Part



Models of reality built on external relations often resemble a mosaic
in which individual entities are like tiles whose meaning in relation
to the whole can only be determined by applying an extrinsic blueprint
or template representing the external relations linking them. Each
individual tile in itself gives little or no information about how it
relates to other tiles. By contrast, models of reality built on
internal relations are typically more like jigsaw puzzles in which we
discover the relation of one piece to another by looking more closely
at the information already within each individual piece: its
protuberances, indentations, and coloration. Each piece has within it
the information about how it links with its adjacent pieces. In some
instances the configuration within the internal relation is even more
revealing such that each piece has information not only about adjacent
pieces, but also about *all* the other pieces in the whole.
That paradigm can be called *holographic* in the etymological
sense that the whole (*holo*-) is considered to be inscribed
(*-graph*) in each of its parts. That is, the whole is not
simply made of its parts, but also, each part contains the pattern or
configuration of the whole of which it is a part. Such holographic
relations between whole and part are common in Japanese philosophical
systems.



In the West the holographic paradigm permeated animistic cultures
tracing back to prehistoric times and persisted in the later magical
arts wherein a fingernail or hair could give a wizard or witch power
over the whole person from which the part was pilfered. It continued
in the cult of relics throughout the Middle Ages. But the
Enlightenment's rationalism stripped the holographic paradigm of
its ontological connections, restricting it to being no more than a
figure of speech (such as a metonym) or other form of conventionalized
symbol. In general the Western intellectual tradition limited
holographic thinking to the literary (e.g., William Blake's
universe in a grain of sand) and the psychological (e.g.,
Freud's symbolic dream analysis), rather than the
philosophical.



More recently, however, in a scientific world increasingly attracted
to frames of recursiveness, fractals, the multiple expressions of stem
cells, and so forth, the holographic paradigm has once again begun to
have ontological and not just figurative relevance in the West. To a
forensic scientist, for example, a drop of blood or a single hair from
a crime scene, is not only part of a person's anatomy, but is
also an item inscribed with the dna pattern of
the person's entire anatomy. The relevant contrast is that in
the history of Japanese thought the holographical paradigm of the
whole-inscribed-in-each-of-its-parts never went out of philosophical
fashion as having potentially ontological significance. It was never
demoted to the status of being only a primitive, magical, or
metaphorical way of engaging the world. Indeed, holographic relations
often figure prominently in many Japanese philosophical theories.



Two Western misinterpretations of the political theory behind
Japan's imperial polity illustrate the point. In the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when Westerners first encountered the
Japanese ideology of the emperor, they noted the emperor was referred
to as *kami*, a term translated as "god" when it
refers to a celestial deity. The (mistaken) inference was that the
Japanese believed the emperor, like Yahweh or Zeus, was deemed to be a
transcendent being in an external relation to the state and the people
in it. That interpretation missed the internal relation between the
emperor and the Japanese people that establishes their logical
inseparability such that neither could maintain its full identity
without the other. Thus, in the logic of the *kamikaze* pilot,
dying for the emperor was not a simple act of sacrificing one's
self to a higher being or even a higher value. Instead, to die for the
emperor could not be completely separated from dying for oneself and
dying for all other Japanese. To deny that connection would reduce the
pilot to a crescent of his full identity, that is, for him to die for
the emperor was an act of self-fulfillment rather than
self-sacrifice.



The second misunderstanding of the political theory behind the
imperial system arose later in the twentieth century with Western
intellectual historians influenced by Hayden White's theory of
historical discourse and its analysis of tropes (White 1973). One
claim was that in the nineteenth century Japanese Native Studies
(Kokugaku) had developed a new form of historical narrative centering
on the trope of *kokutai*. The emperor is the *body*,
*essence*, or *formation* (*tai*) of the
*country*, *nation*, and its *people*
(*koku*). Thus the term *kokutai* applies to both the
emperor and to Japan. The new ideological narrative, the critics
claimed, deceptively used a metonym (the emperor as a part of the
state used to symbolize the state) to claim the emperor *is*
the state (Harootunian 1978). Despite its virtues on other counts
(see the entry on 
 philosophy of history, section 3.4),
metahistorical criticism ill fits the Japanese situation inasmuch as
it overlooks the long-standing Japanese emphasis on internal and
holographic relations. That is, the internal relation between emperor
and Japan establishes a holographic relation such that each person
contains the configuration of the whole Japanese nation. From the
standpoint of the traditional Japanese *kokutai* theory, to
claim the emperor is really only a symbol or metonym for Japan is a
category mistake comparable to saying the dna
found in the blood at the crime scene is only a symbol or metonym for
the perpetrator. The philosophical claim (leaving aside here the truth
value of that claim) is that the relations among the emperor, the
Japanese people, and the state are comparable to the relations among
the dna, the blood, and the person from the
crime scene. It is simply a false premise (and certainly not one
assumed in the history of Japanese thought) that there is no possible
sense in which the whole can be contained in one of its parts and that
any such claim must be no more than a trope.



Another area where ignorance of Japanese holographic thinking has led
to Western misinterpretation is in the so-called aesthetic of
minimalism. Once we are attuned to the holographic paradigm it becomes
clear that Japanese minimalism is not about eliminating the extraneous
or omitting the unnecessary, but rather (as in the case of the
forensic scientist) about focusing on the particular as revealing the
whole from which it was taken. If we recall that the Japanese work of
art is the creative presentation of the *kokoro* (the total
interactive field that generates the artist, medium, and audience as a
single event) then what is normally considered in the West to be the
work of art is that precise point in the *kokoro* through which
we can experience the configuration of the whole of the
*kokoro.* Japanese minimalism does not exclude or eliminate; by
focusing on the particular it enables us to attend to the whole
aesthetic event that produces it and of which it is a part. To the
discerning reader, the *haiku* with its meager seventeen
syllables omits nothing; rather, it is holographic of the whole.


### 2.3 Forms of Assimilation



One response to encountering an opposing philosophical position or
theory, a response common in the Western tradition from the time of
the ancient Sophists, is to reaffirm one's own position by
refuting the other, revealing its inconsistencies or weaknesses. (This
adversarial form of argumentation, including its rarefied form known
as the *reductio ad absurdum*, is common in Indian philosophy
as well and was introduced to Japan via Buddhism more than a
millennium prior to any Western influence.) In Japan, however, a more
common response to philosophical opposition has been to reaffirm
one's original view by assimilating into it what is central in
the opposing viewpoint through a process of allocation, relegation, or
hybridization. Very often in Japanese philosophical debates, the
contenders compete in trying to absorb rather than refute the
opposition. Cultural comparatists have noted that the Western game of
chess is won by attacking the opponent's pieces and capturing
the king whereas the Japanese game of *go* is won by encircling
the opponent's stones until all are captured and none remain. To
the surprise of the uninitiated Western philosophical reader,
therefore, the skilled use of agreement and concession, rather than
direct attack, may sometimes be the sharpest tools in the Japanese
philosopher's argumentative arsenal. It is important, therefore,
to notice how allocation, relegation, and hybridization can help a
philosophical theory gain dominance in the Japanese milieu.


#### 2.3.1 Allocation



Allocation is the most compromising form of philosophical
assimilation. Two opposing views are accepted without major alteration
but conflict is avoided by restricting each to its own clearly defined
disjunctive domain. A detente is negotiated such that each
philosophy can function without opposition within its own discrete set
of philosophical problems as long as it refrains from universal claims
that its methods, assumptions, and conclusions apply to every possible
kind of philosophical enterprise. For example, at times Japanese
Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto philosophies resolved potential
conflicts by allocating social and political issues to Confucianism,
psychological and epistemological theories to Buddhism, and
naturalistic emotivism to Shinto. The Seventeen-article
Constitution of Prince Shotoku in the early seventh century is
such an instance, using Confucian principles to define the political
virtues and responsibilities of courtly retainers, the emperor, and
the people, but following Buddhist models in discussing human nature
and the cultivation of the introspective discipline necessary to
control egoistic desires and unbridled emotions. Shotoku's
document used allocation, in effect, to envision a harmonious world of
Confucian social and ethical decorum inhabited by people trained in
Buddhist psychospiritual introspection and discipline.


#### 2.3.2 Relegation



Relegation assimilates an opposing view by conceding its truth even
while subordinating that truth to being only a partial component of
the original, now more inclusive, position. Usually the rhetoric is
that the apparently opposing view is not really something new at all,
but has always been part of the original theory, albeit perhaps not
previously emphasized as such. As in allocation, the position of the
other is fully accepted but in this case only as an incomplete part of
the whole picture which, it is demonstrated, the original theory has
contained all along (or at least could *ex post facto* be
interpreted so). Of course, the rhetoric aside, a close analysis often
reveals that the original theory actually expands its
comprehensiveness to incorporate the competing one, but the end result
is the same: the rival ideas are assimilated by being relegated to a
subordinated place within the whole, thereby losing their force as an
independent theory that can oppose the winning position. For example,
Japanese esoteric Buddhism assimilated proto-Shinto ideas,
values, and practices by relegating its *kami* to being
"surface manifestations" of Buddhist reality. By that
process, Shinto cosmology and rituals could be assimilated
without change within the esoteric Buddhist system but only insofar as
they were subordinated by means of a "deep" Buddhist
metaphysical interpretation relegating their former proto-Shinto
meanings to the superficial level of understanding.


#### 2.3.3 Hybridization



Hybridization is a third form of assimilation that leaves neither the
original theory nor its opposing rival theory intact. Instead, through
their cross-pollination something completely new is born. A hybrid
presents us with a new species of philosophy and although we can do a
genealogy of its parentage, it cannot (unlike the cases of allocation
or relegation) ever return to its earlier opposing forms. If we
consider a biological hybrid like a boysenberry, which has a genetic
parentage traceable to a loganberry and a raspberry, we cannot find
the loganberry or the raspberry intact in the boysenberry. Once the
hybrid is created, we cannot undo the crossbreeding; there are now
three distinct species of berries. Analogously, in the process of
philosophical assimilation, when true philosophical hybrids emerge,
historians of philosophy may be able to uncover their genealogies, but
the theories themselves can no longer be deconstructed back into their
parental origins. As will be explained below, in Japan
*bushido*, the Way of the warrior, is such a philosophical
hybrid born of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto, but which
became an independent philosophy of its own that in many ways served
as a rival to its antecedents.



Next let us examine how Japanese philosophers use those forms of
analysis in developing five originally distinct sources of
philosophical ideas.


## 3. Five Fountainheads of Japanese Philosophy


### 3.1 Shinto



Three major philosophical sources have fed into Japanese thought since
ancient times up through the present, two additional ones being added
in modern times (that is, post-1868). First has been Shinto. In
its archaic form, especially before its contact with the literary
philosophical heritage of continental Asia, it is better termed
*proto-Shinto* because it only loosely resembles what we
now know as Shinto. Institutional Shinto thought did not
significantly begin until the medieval period and today's
Shinto philosophy mostly originates in the Native Studies
tradition beginning in the eighteenth century. That trajectory of
Shinto doctrinal development continued with the rise of
nationalism and ethnocentrism under the rubric of Shrine Shinto,
the institutional arm of State Shinto ideology, which cast a pall
on creative philosophical thinking from the early twentieth century
until 1945. Postwar Japan has witnessed a range of renewed Shinto
philosophies, some in the direction of a return to right-wing
ideology, others toward a more liberalized version inspired by Western
models of liberal Christian theology and comparative religious
scholarship.



*Proto-Shinto Animism and Naturalism*



 *Proto-Shinto* lacked philosophical reflection and even
self-conscious articulation but is so named because today's
Shinto has often claimed (sometimes disingenuously) a resonance
with its main values, ritual forms, and world view. Dating back to
preliterate times, proto-Shinto was more an amalgam of beliefs
and practices lending cohesion to early Japanese communities. As such
it largely resembled religions in ancient animistic and shamanistic
cultures found elsewhere in the world. Specifically, the material and
spiritual were internally related so as to form a continuous field
wherein the human and the natural, both animate and inanimate, were in
an interactional, even communicative relation. *Kami* (often
too restrictively translated into English as "gods")
manifested the power (*tama*) to inspire awe and could refer to
anything ranging from a celestial deity to a ghost to a possessed
human being to a spirit within a natural object to a wondrous natural
object itself (such as Mt Fuji) to even a special manufactured object
such as a sword. Although human interactions with *kami* might
be either beneficial or harmful, there was no duality or conflict
between good and evil forces. Even within human affairs wrongdoing was
generally a violation or transgression of a taboo, regardless of
whether the acts were accidental or intentional. Since criminality or
sin was not a major consideration, the proper response was not so much
guilt, repentance, or rehabilitation, but instead ritual purification.
Spiritual and political leadership shared a common charisma allowing
the political leader to serve sacerdotal roles in rituals that brought
the community benefits and warded off danger. The rituals, often
shamanistic in character, mediated the fluid boundaries between the
heavens, this world, and the underworld as well as the realms of the
animate, inanimate, human, and natural.



Although, as far as we know, there was no self-reflective
philosophizing per se in the preliterate world of proto-Shinto,
philosophical ideas introduced from abroad often took root most deeply
when they drew support from some of its basic ideas and values. For
example, proto-Shinto animism generally assumed we live in a
world of internal relations where various forces and things can be
distinguished, but in the end, they are never discrete but inherently
interrelated in some way. Indeed because of that reciprocity, one
might say the world is not simply what we engage, but also something
that engages us. As we define it, it also defines us. Nothing is ever
simply material without somehow also having some spirituality; nothing
is ever simply spiritual without somehow also having some materiality.
The ancient proto-Shinto creation myths recount how many parts of
the physical world came into being through involuntary divine
parthenogenesis. For example, the sun and the moon--both the
physical objects and the celestial *kami* associated with
each--came into being as the effluent of Izanagi
*kami*'s eyes when he purified himself in a river after
being polluted by a journey to the realm of the dead. This type of
genesis narrative also supports an understanding that every part of
the physical world holographically reflects the pattern of spiritual
creativity on a cosmic level.



For proto-Shinto the intersection of the
dualities--humanity/nature, spirit/matter, good/bad, alive/dead,
above/below, natural/cosmic--is almost always a preexistent
intrinsic relation that is not made but discovered, not fixed but
evolving, not given but nurtured. In the final analysis, reality is
not a world of discrete things connected to each other, but more a
field of which we are part (a field often expressed by the indigenous
word *kokoro*). This form of relation applies to the
word-reality relation as well. From what we know of proto-Shinto
ritual forms, it seems incantations played a central role in
purification rites. In those incantations the sounds of the words
were, as in magical cultures elsewhere in the world, thought to have
special efficacy beyond the simple semantic meaning. *Koto* was
a term for both *word* and *thing* suggesting that words
had the spiritual power (*tama*) to evoke, and not simply refer
to, a preexisting reality. Thus, the term *kotodama* (*koto
+ tama*) suggested an onto-phonetic resonance reflecting internal
relations among language, sound, and reality.



Although many such characteristics of proto-Shinto are found in
other archaic animistic cultures throughout the world, unlike many of
those other locations, in Japan those ancient sensitivities were not
suppressed by the imposition of rationalistic philosophies from
outside. For example, the expansion of Christianity with its
Greco-Roman philosophical analyses drove underground many older
animistic cultures (such as the Druids in the British Isles). When the
major philosophical traditions from continental Asia entered Japan, by
contrast, they did not take an oppositional stance toward the world
view already in place within the archipelago. Therefore, much of
proto-Shinto's organicism, vitalism, and the sensitivity to
the field of inter-responsive, internal, and holographic relations
could survive within the mainstream of Japanese thinking.


### 3.2 Confucianism



The impulse to philosophize in an organized fashion came to Japan in
waves from continental Asia: China, Korea, and indirectly India.
Previously illiterate, in the fifth century or so the Japanese started
developing a writing system, using at first the Chinese language for
its base. Because Japanese and Chinese are linguistically unrelated
and differ both syntactically and phonetically, it took centuries for
a Japanese writing system to evolve out of the Chinese sinographs, in
the meantime making Chinese the *de facto* written language. As
such, Chinese philosophical works served as textbooks for
Japan's study centers, eventually transforming the culture
beyond the parameters envisioned by the proto-Shinto world view
and forms of life.



Of the three classical "Ways" of traditional Chinese
philosophy, namely, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, only the
latter two achieved independent prominence in Japan. Daoism
contributed to the proto-Shinto base a more sophisticated
understanding of the processes of natural change and a conceptual
vocabulary for creative, responsive engagement with reality through
agenda-less activity (what the Chinese Daoists called *wuwei*).
For the most part, however, its influence was most obvious in the
alchemical arts, prognostication, and as a resource for occasional
literary references. Admittedly, in the medieval period some Daoist
philosophical references appear in the language of the arts,
especially in theories of creativity, but they occur mainly within a
Zen Buddhist context. That is likely because before coming to Japan,
Chinese Zen (Chan) had already assimilated many Daoist ideas. In
contrast with Daoism, however, Confucianism and Buddhism maintained a
presence throughout Japanese history as independent philosophical
currents of philosophy. Of the two, we consider Confucianism first.
(See also the entry on 
 Japanese Confucian Philosophy.)




As the second fountainhead of Japanese philosophy, Confucianism
entered the country as a literary tradition from China and Korea
beginning around the sixth and seventh centuries. By then it already
enjoyed a sophisticated continental philosophical heritage well over a
millennium old. Confucian philosophy in Japan underwent only minor
changes until its second wave in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
after which it experienced major transformations as it became
Japan's dominant philosophical movement until the radical
changes brought by the modern period. With the Meiji Restoration of
1868, that is, with the overthrow of the shogunate and the return of
imperial rule, Confucianism receded somewhat in its philosophical
dominance, yielding to the rise of Western academic philosophy, State
Shinto ideology, and the secularized version of
*bushido* (Way of the warrior) as promulgated in the
educational program of National Morality. That is not to say, however,
that Confucianism did not continue to remain influential in its
emphasis on scholarship, the definition of hierarchical social roles,
and general models of virtue.



*The Confucian Social and Moral Order*



From the time of their introduction into Japan, Confucian political,
social, and ethical ideals quickly transformed the structure of
Japanese society. From the seventh century, texts traditionally
associated with Confucianism served as the core curriculum in the
imperial academy for the education of courtiers and bureaucratic
officials. Politically, Confucian ideology gave a sophisticated
justification for an imperial state. Like proto-Shinto, it
recognized the charisma of the political ruler as both a chief ritual
priest and mediator with the celestial realm as well as the pinnacle
of political authority. But Confucianism added to the Japanese context
a rich description of political and social roles that organized the
society into a harmonious network of interdependent offices and
groups. Confucianism defined a place for each person and a set of
shifting roles and contexts to be performed with ritual decorum.



So the proto-Shinto taboo structure was enhanced with a Confucian
set of socially appropriate behaviors. Once again, it was not a matter
of moral mandates about good vs. evil, however, but a description of
role-based behaviors describing rightness as contrasted with
inappropriateness or impropriety. Those dimensions of Confucianism
could be assimilated into the proto-Shinto world view as useful
elaborations and improvements, especially ones that would enable the
growth of a Japanese state that expanded beyond family and regional
clan regimes to become a central imperial state spanning the
archipelago. Furthermore, as it became aware of the high cultural
achievements of its Korean and Chinese neighbors, Japan could use
Confucianism to participate in the East Asian cultural sphere defined
by China and the prestige accompanying that membership.



One striking exception to the adoption of the standard Confucian
political philosophy was that the Japanese ignored the principle of
the mandate of heaven (*tianming* in Chinese) that was central
to the Chinese Confucian ideology of the state. In China the authority
of the emperor flowed from a celestial entitlement or command, a
mandate that could be withdrawn if the emperor no longer acted in
accord with the Way (*dao*) or cosmic pattern
(*tianli*). By contrast, following their proto-Shinto
sensitivities, the Japanese understood imperial authority to derive
primarily from the field that included the internal relations among
heaven and earth or the deities and the people, with the
emperor's being considered a direct descendant of the celestial
sun *kami,* Amaterasu. Indeed, proto-Shinto considered the
relation between the celestial *kami,* the emperor, and the
people to be familial and in no way either contractual or
transcendent. Like a blood connection, all Japanese and the
*kami* were, through the emperor, internally related with each
other such that the connections among them could not be nullified.



Not having a philosophical tradition of its own, proto-Shinto did
not so much argue against or refute the Chinese idea of the mandate of
heaven; it simply ignored it, however fundamental it was to Confucian
political theory. It is significant that no major Confucian thinker,
not even in the most ascendant period of Confucian philosophy under
the Tokugawa shogunate, vigorously argued that the mandate of heaven
should supersede the Shinto justification for imperial rule based
in the function of the emperor as holographically reflecting the
ontological, inherent connection among the *kami,* the Japanese
people, and the physical land of Japan.



For the most part, Confucianism brought to proto-Shinto a new set
of detailed ideas about how to organize a harmonious hierarchical
society in which roles of respect directed to those above were
reciprocated by roles of caring directed to those below. The analysis
was that society can be construed as constructed out of five binary
relations: ruler-subject, parent-child, husband-wife, senior-junior,
and friend-friend. If those five relations are lived with ritualized
propriety and an attention to being appropriate to the roles they name
(a praxis called in Japanese *seimei* "trueing up the
terms" or "the rectification of names"), harmony
will prevail not only in those relations but in the whole society
constructed out of those relations. An implication of the Confucian
view of role-based ideals is that the sharp separation between the
descriptive and the prescriptive collapses. There is theoretically no
gap between knowing what a parent (or a ruler, or a husband ...)
*is* and the role that person *should* perform. Thus,
Confucianism can be understood as a type of ethico-political
utopianism, but it is emphatically insistent that it is based neither
in speculation nor rationalistic theory, but in historical paradigm.
The prototype is found in the harmonious society depicted in the
ancient Chinese classics: the histories, the odes, and the rites that
inspired Confucius's insights. It follows that the Way to become
ethically and politically accomplished is to study the classics and to
model oneself after the ancient paradigms of the roles exemplified by
the sages of the past.


### 3.3 Buddhism



The third major fountainhead feeding into Japanese philosophy from
ancient to contemporary times has been Buddhism. With origins in India
going back to the fifth century bce, Buddhist
philosophy like Confucianism entered Japan via Korea and China in the
sixth and seventh centuries. In contrast with Confucianism, however,
by the end of the eighth century Buddhism emerged as the major focus
of Japanese creative philosophical development as imported Chinese
Buddhist schools of thought were modified and new Japanese schools
developed. Buddhism continued its intellectual dominance until the
seventeenth century, then making way for the second wave of Confucian
ideas that better suited the newly risen urbanized, secular society
under the control of the Tokugawa shoguns. With notable exceptions, in
the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries Buddhist intellectuals
retreated from philosophical innovation to focus on institutional
development, textual studies, and sectarian histories. When Western
philosophy surged into modern Japan and its newly established secular
universities, some influential Japanese philosophers saw Buddhist
ideas as the best premodern resource for synthesis with Western
thought. In some cases that entailed reformulating traditional
Buddhist ideas in light of Western philosophical categories. In other
cases, philosophers used allocation, relegation, or hybridization to
create new systems that tried to assimilate Western ideas while
maintaining aspects of traditional Japanese values. That said, in the
modern era under the ideology of State Shinto, Buddhism as both a
religion and a philosophy often suffered persecution and it was not
until 1945 that it was once again completely free to develop its
theories openly without government surveillance and censorship.



*Buddhism and the Self-World Interrelation*



Buddhism, with a millennium of philosophical roots going back to India
and further cultivated in China and Korea, brought to
Proto-Shinto's vague intuitions and inchoate belief systems
sophisticated analyses, multiple theoretical formulations and
counterarguments represented by a multitude of different schools of
thought, and a rich new vocabulary redolent with allusions to ideas
and terms from Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese. There were, however, a few
nearly universally accepted Buddhist themes that resonated well with
the Japanese preliterate context and have continued to influence major
lines of Japanese thinking throughout its history



First is the Buddhist claim that reality consists of a flow of
interdependent, conditioned events rather than independent,
substantially existent things. Nothing exists in and of itself and
there is no unchanging reality behind the world of flux. The
Buddha's view was formulated originally in opposition to an
increasingly orthodox emphasis in Indian philosophy at the time
(roughly the 5th *c.* bce)
that favored the idea of a permanent reality (Sanskrit:
*brahman*) or Self (*atman*) behind a world of
apparent change. Thus, more than a millennium later Buddhism came to
Japan with fully developed, sophisticated analyses supporting a world
view that was essentially consistent with proto-Shinto's
unreflective emphasis on internal relations, fluid boundaries, and a
field of shifting events rather than fixed things. Moreover, within
the variety of Buddhist schools introduced into Japan by the eighth
century, there were further resources that could philosophically
justify and elaborate what had been rather inchoate assumptions of
pre-Buddhist Japan. For example, the Japanese Kegon (Chinese: Huayan)
school had a rich philosophy of interdependence based in holographic
relations, which had probably been more a magical modality than
philosophical idea in the proto-Shinto consciousness. Kegon gave
it a philosophical articulation and justification.



A second Buddhist premise is that reality presents itself without
illusion in its so-called as-ness or thusness (*nyoze;*
Sanskrit: *tathata*). That premise contrasts with a
widespread orthodox Indian view (found in the *Upanisads*
and later *Vedas*, for example) that reality continuously hides
its true nature through illusion (Sanskrit: *maya*).
Still, according to Buddhism, despite the lack of ontological
illusions, we ordinarily almost never access reality as it is because
we project on it psychological delusions fueled by habituated
stimulus-response systems based in ignorance, repulsion, and desire.
As a result, a major theme in Buddhist philosophy is to understand the
bodymind mechanisms of the inner self or consciousness, to recognize
how our emotions, ideas, mental states, and even philosophical
assumptions color our perceptions of reality. The problem is not
illusions within reality, but the self-delusions we mistake for
reality. Buddhism brought to Japan not only an awareness of the inner
dynamics of experience, but also a collection of epistemological,
psychological, ethical, hermeneutic, and metaphysical bodymind
theories and practices aimed at understanding and eradicating those
delusions. Without those delusions our bodymind would be in accord
with the way things are and we could live without the anguish created
by trying to live in a concocted reality we desire instead of reality
as it is.



A third general Buddhist contribution to Japanese thought since
ancient times is its theory of volitional action or karma
(*go*). Every volitional thought, word, or deed has an
impact on the bodymind system such that present actions lead to
propensities for future actions within that system. Furthermore, karma
is Janus-headed in its causality such that those present actions are
also in part conditioned by previous volitional actions as well. The
result is that I affect my surrounding conditions even as those
surrounding conditions are affecting me. Thus, the Buddhist theory of
karmic action implies a field of interresponsive agency that is
paradoxically both individuated and systemic, both volitional and
conditioned. That paradigm has raised a number of issues and generated
multiple theories by Japanese Buddhist ethical and social philosophers
through the centuries.


### 3.4 Western Academic Philosophy



The fourth major source of Japanese philosophy, the first of the two
additional ones to enter modern Japan, has been the aforementioned
influx of Western philosophy into the universities. As
*tetsugaku,* Western philosophy became a standard discipline in
the newly established Japanese universities designed on Western
models. The philosophy courses, like most other subjects of Western
origin, were initially taught by Westerners, mainly professors from
Germany and the United States who came to Japan to teach the
discipline in their native languages. To prepare students to benefit
from that instruction, the government established a comprehensive
system of preparatory academies ("higher schools")
scattered throughout the land in which the highly qualified were
trained not only in the basic academic disciplines of arts and
sciences (both Western and East Asian) but also in the Western
languages required for university instruction. Then after completing
training in philosophy at the Imperial University (Tokyo Imperial
University was the first, then several others were added in other
major cities around Japan), the most promising students were sometimes
sent abroad to the West for further study, after which time they could
assume professorships back home. Thus, as in other academic fields,
philosophers in Japan were groomed in Western studies from their early
teenage years until their mid- or late twenties. As a result, their
philosophical education was truly global in scope.



*Western Academic Philosophy and Modernization*




Although Roman Catholic Christian thought was introduced by
missionaries in the fifteenth century, it had a short-lived influence
of about a century before it was banned as part of the closure of
Japan to almost all foreign contact. Hence, the first strong and
lasting impact of Western philosophy came in the late nineteenth
century. Although its impact has been broad and difficult to
summarize, a few key points are especially noteworthy.



First, in the two or three centuries preceding the modern period,
Confucianism and its secular academies dominated the philosophical
scene. Since Confucian philosophy placed a premium on the mastery of
classic historical texts and given the etymology of the neologism
*tetsugaku,* it is probably not surprising that the study of
the history of Western thought was one pillar of the Japanese
philosophy curriculum. Many young philosophers could read the original
texts in English, German, or French and sometimes also in Greek or
Latin. For a wider audience, there was a major publication effort to
translate major Western philosophical works into Japanese. With
Japan's new openness to Western ideas, modernization, and the
democracy promised in the Meiji Constitution of 1889, there was
initially an attraction to the liberal political ideas of Rousseau and
J. S. Mill, for example.



Second, the stress on urgent technological and scientific development
as well as the chance to break free from the canonicity of
Confucianism (and to a lesser extent Buddhism) led to an almost
immediate interest in Comte's positivism and Mill's
utilitarianism. With the new emphasis on mathematics and science,
there was also an interest in the new (still
"philosophical") field of experimental psychology
represented by Wilhelm Wundt and William James.



In the long run, however, German philosophy, especially German
idealism had the most lasting and deep influence. This was partly a
fortuitous connection brought about by the close association formed in
the late nineteenth century between Tokyo Imperial University and
Germany. Not only were some key early foreign professors at Tokyo from
Germany, but also Germany became the favored location for sending
Japanese philosophy students for foreign study. Another factor was the
modernization strategy of Japanese government and intellectual
leadership. To modernize as quickly as possible, a Western country was
identified as the model to emulate for each academic field. For
example, for medicine and physics, Germany was the target; for
government bureaucracy, France; for agricultural science and public
education for school children, the United States. Once the decision
was made, urgency made it difficult to change direction. And Germany
was chosen for philosophy. In that context even more than Plato or
Descartes, Kant was considered the key figure for the founding of
*tetsugaku.* He had settled the challenge of Hume's
skeptical stance toward science, saved us from scholastic theological
metaphysics by establishing critical philosophy and the antinomies, as
well as given direction--either positive or
negative--to the development of Fichte's philosophical
anthropology, Hegel's dialectical thinking, Schopenhauer's
and Nietzsche's Will, Kierkegaard's subjectivism, and the
later school of neo-Kantianism. At least that became the mainstream
view among the majority of Japan's early twentieth-century
philosophers.


### 3.5 Bushido (The Way of the Warrior)



The fifth fountainhead of Japanese philosophy did not originate from
abroad but bubbled up from within Japan itself in the modern period:
*bushido,* the Way of the warrior. Although there had been
edifying handbooks and martial codes in Japan for centuries preceding
the modern period, *bushido* was formalized only in the
modern period as a school of thought with a political, ethical, and
ethnic ideology in service of the state. Loyalty was originally a
generalized lower-order Confucian virtue but *bushido*
gave it a special meaning by linking it directly to the emperor and
the holographic paradigm supporting the imperial system in State
Shinto. The emphasis on dying as the fullest expression of
loyalty seems to have been most foregrounded in 1701 with the famous
Ako Incident of the Forty-seven Masterless Samurai, later
valorized in popular literature and dramatic performances. A
contributing factor in that cult of death may have been the emphasis
on the death of the ego-self in Zen Buddhism, a locution used by
Rinzai Zen masters in training unemployed samurai who joined the
monastery during the centuries of the Tokugawa peace. In addition
*bushido* emphasized the value of *makoto*,
genuineness or trustworthiness, a term with originally Shinto
connotations. Added to those native influences was the imported
nineteenth-century European ideologies of ethnic virtue, the purity of
a given race of people as constituting the basis for a nation
state.



**Bushido* and National Morality*



*Bushido* philosophy is, therefore, a true hybrid of
Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and European parentage.
Ideologically it claimed to have been a philosophy of the Japanese
people harking back to ancient times but its parentage is clearly
nineteenth century. Because of its hybridity, however, its history was
occluded and its tenets were couched in terms deemed traditional but
often given nuances they had not had previously. Hence,
*bushido* was almost impervious to philosophical critique,
especially when it was protected by government censorship and
institutionalized in the mandatory national educational curriculum for
school children called National Morality. In an important sense it is
not at all a philosophical stream comparable to the others, but its
impact should not be overlooked because it did affect the flow (and
the stagnation) of the other streams for the first half of the
twentieth century. That brings us to an overview of the eddies and
cross-currents of the five streams in Japanese history.


## 4. Historical Periods of Philosophical Development and Interaction


### 4.1 Ancient and Classical Philosophy (up to 12th century)



The ancient and classical periods of Japanese philosophy span the
years 604 (the traditional date of Shotoku's
*Seventeen-article Constitution*) to 1185 (the fall of
aristocratic rule and the installation of the first military
shogunate). In the usual Japanese reckoning, it covers the Late Kofun
(or Asuka), Nara, and Heian periods. During that time Buddhism came to
dominate the philosophical landscape by allocating the social and
legal systems to Confucianism and relegating proto-Shinto to a
subordinate place within its expanded, all-inclusive system. Prince
Regent Shotoku's hope, as expressed in his
*Constitution*, was to establish Buddhism as a state religion
but to continue state rituals venerating the proto-Shinto
*kami*, while adhering to Confucian ideals (along with some
Chinese Legalist ideas) in organizing a centralized state government.
Even after Shotoku's pro-Buddhist Soga family fell from
power, the basic model endured. Chinese laws served as models and
Buddhist texts and teachers continued to flow into Japan.



When the first permanent capital was established in Nara in the eighth
century, the city plan included a number of Buddhist temples,
Shinto shrines, and Buddhist institutes or study centers,
including those of the so-called Six Nara Schools (all based on
Chinese Buddhist schools with roots traceable to India). Buddhist
practice, especially for intensive periods, was often performed in
mountain temple retreats in natural settings rather than in the city.
Creative and innovative thinking was limited at this point, but that
would change with the establishment of two new schools at the
beginning of the ninth century, Tendai (founded by Saicho,
767-822) and Shingon (founded by Kukai, 774-835).
Although both traditions originated in China, they assumed
distinctively comprehensive Japanese forms that would set the
trajectory of Buddhist philosophy in Japan for centuries to come. The
major factor behind their success was their focus on "esoteric
teachings" (*mikkyo*). In establishing that core
orientation, Kukai was the pioneering figure and the more
sophisticated philosopher, indeed often considered Japan's
greatest premodern systematic thinker. (See the entry on 
 Kukai.)


#### 4.1.1 Kukai's Esoteric Foundation for Japanese Philosophizing



The linchpin in Kukai's philosophy was his distinction
between engaged and detached knowing, which he formulated in terms of
the "difference between esoteric teachings
(*mikkyo*) and exoteric teachings
(*kengyo*)." (See the entry on 
 Kukai, section 3.2.)
The esoteric involves an interpersonal engagement between the cosmos
(the activity of patterned, self-structuring resonances called
Dainichi Buddha) and the Shingon practitioner (who is a bodymind
holographically inscribed with the same pattern as the cosmos). Wisdom
occurs when the theory-praxis of the Shingon Buddhist enables the
cosmic functions and the person's functions to be in accord,
that is, to resonate harmoniously.



By contrast, Kukai claims that detached or exoteric understanding
occurs when there is a separation between knower and known, a gap that
can only be bridged with the external application of linguistic
categories or heuristic expressions (*hoben;* Sanskrit:
*upaya*). So an exoteric philosophy, even if it knows
*about* engagement, cannot ground its own theory in an engaged
way because it depends on external relations even to express itself.
It is, in effect, a theory about bodymind unity that is based only in
the mind. That realization led Kukai to argue the inherent
limitation in exoteric philosophy is what gives rise to it, what in
Buddhist terminology is called its *mindset*
(*jushin*).



Kukai used relegation to explain his detailed "theory of
the ten mindsets" (*jujushinron*). (See the entry
on 
 Kukai, section 3.12.) 
He analyzed all the philosophical
standpoints known to him into a hierarchy of the ten mindsets
producing them, starting from the base level of narcissistic
philosophy driven by animal impulses, up through the mindsets of
Confucianism, Daoism, and continuing in the hierarchy through all the
Buddhist schools existing in Japan at the time. Kukai ranked
Kegon Buddhist philosophy at level nine, the highest level of exoteric
thinking because it highlighted internal and holographic relations.
Only Shingon's esoteric philosophy of embodied theory-praxis
ranked above it.



In determining his rankings, for each level Kukai asked whether
that mindset could establish its own ground within its own terms. For
example, to put one's own interest above others, the
narcissistic mindset (level one) must account for the existence of
those others in one's own awareness. That, in turn, leads to an
understanding that the self must be relational, a fundamental
assumption of the Confucian mindset found in level two. That is, even
the egoism of narcissism, upon examination, assumes a relational self
of the sort that is the point of departure for a Confucian analysis.
Thus a lack of foundation in mindset one opens to the prospect of
mindset two. At the other end of the scale, Kegon Buddhism's
level-nine mindset generates a theory of the interpenetration of all
things and the holographic relation of whole-in-every-part, but to do
so the mind must stand outside reality to characterize it as such.
Yet, its own theory implies the knower cannot be independent of the
known, nor the mind from the body. That opens the door to a praxis of
engagement that is the basis for the esoteric mindset (level ten).



Kukai argues the "mind" of the Shingon mindset is
more like "bodymind" because it is a knowing inseparable
from praxis. Whereas a philosophy based in metaphysical theory can
never establish its own ground, a philosophy based in an engaged
bodymind praxis can *produce* its ground as surely as, we might
say, the understanding of the master potter is produced in a masterful
work of pottery. Whereas the exoteric philosopher, using detachment
and assuming external relations between self and reality, presents
truth as ideas linking those two relatents, the esoteric philosopher
engages self and reality in an internal relation, presenting truth as
a unified bodymind *performance* of thought, word, and deed. In
Kukai's terminology, "one achieves buddha in, with,
and through this very body" (*sokushinjobutsu*).
(See the entry on 
 Kukai, section 3.9.)



Although Kukai's philosophy itself did not become dominant
in the Japanese tradition, he set a pattern for philosophizing that
(often without acknowledgment) continued to influence many later
philosophers even into modern times. First, he firmly entrenched a
preference for internal and holographic relations. Second, he
demonstrated that a strong philosophical position should not only be
able to show weaknesses in other positions but also, if it is truly
comprehensive, it should be able to explain how such an error or
misunderstanding could occur. In other words assimilation through
relegation is a stronger position than simple refutation because it
takes opposing theories as real theories deserving a place within any
all-inclusive account of reality. Third, a way to evaluate a new
philosophical position is to try to understand the mindset that
produced it. That methodological strategy would be especially helpful
as Japanese philosophers encountered new theories from other
cultures.



As the classical period continued, Buddhist philosophizing was
concentrated in the monastic communities, especially the huge mountain
complexes of Mt Hiei in Kyoto representing Tendai Buddhism and Mt
Koya representing Shingon Buddhism. At first borrowing from
Shingon, Tendai soon evolved its own form of esotericism with
additional input from emissaries sent to China for further training.
Since Tendai was already the most comprehensive form of exoteric
teaching in Japan, when mated with esotericism, it became the most
inclusive and comprehensive system of philosophy and praxis in the
country. As a result, by the end of the classical period the monastic
center on Mt Hiei emerged as the premier site of monastic education
and philosophical training.


#### 4.1.2 Aesthetics in the Heian Court



For the lay aristocrats, the Heian court of Kyoto was the hub for the
classical study of both Chinese and Japanese arts and letters,
becoming a fertile ground for aesthetic theories, some of which were
borrowed from China, but others emerging from more native
sensitivities. The notion of reality as a self-expressive
field--whether formulated in terms of the native idea of
*kokoro* or of the activity of the cosmos-as-buddha, whether
seen as permeated with the spiritual power of *kami* or
buddhas, whether relished for the poignancy of its impermanent beauty
however fleeting (as in the aesthetic of *aware* in Lady
Murasaki's *Tale of Genji*) or seen as a detached object
for amusement (as in the aesthetic of *okashi* in Sei no
Shonagon's *Pillow Book*)--became a focal point for
the cloistered world of the Heian court, generating an artistic
sensitivity and vocabulary that became a cornerstone of Japanese
aesthetics. As the classical period drew to a close, however, the
cloistered worlds of the monastery and the Heian court would come
under attack and philosophical innovation would need to find new
contexts.


### 4.2 Medieval Philosophy (late 12th through 16th centuries)



The medieval period witnessed the destabilization of the social,
political, and religious order. The luxuries and amusements of court
life had become so attractive that many aristocrats abandoned their
far-flung estates to spend more time in the capital, entrusting their
wealth-generating domains to the hands of their stewards, the
*samurai* ("those who serve"). Eventually, the
samurai took over the domains for themselves, then fought each other
for national dominance until the Minamoto were victorious in 1185,
establishing Japan's first military government or shogunate in
1192. To protect its vulnerable position, it centered its operations
in Kamakura, leaving the court and the emperor in Kyoto. The political
instability and the attendant economic upheaval were exacerbated by an
unusually devastating period of natural disasters, pestilence, and
famine. When personal survival was at stake, the complex theories and
practices of Shingon and Tendai Buddhism were of little solace to most
people. Furthermore, the financial success of the monastic centers had
led to institutional corruption and a popular theory was that Buddhism
had entered its final Degenerate Age (*mappo*) in which
teachings were lost, could no longer be understood, and enlightenment
no longer attained. Tendai's Mt Hiei, which had been a magnet
for many of Japan's brightest and most gifted thinkers, started
to lose some of its most talented monks as they left the mountain and
eventually advanced new Buddhist philosophies resulting in the rise of
new religious sects, most notably Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren.


#### 4.2.1 The Strategy of Selection



Among the founders of the so-called Kamakura New Religions, the Pure
Land philosopher Honen (1133-1212) expressed a seminal idea
that keynoted the greater movement. (See the entry on 
 Japanese Pure Land Philosophy, section 3.) 
A noted Tendai master of Mt Hiei's texts
and practices, both esoteric and exoteric, he was frustrated with his
personal failure to find any liberating insight. As a Tendai
philosopher, however, he recognized one teaching that could lead to a
new philosophical approach, namely, the holographic paradigm of the
whole-in-every-part. Tendai had used it to go from simplicity to
reveal ever greater levels of complexity, but might it now also be
reversed? Could it not be used to pare complexity down to a minimal
particularity that would still be all-inclusive? The key would not be
to set out to embrace the whole, but instead to select *one*
thing--one practice, one teaching, one text--and to
focus on that, realizing that by the holographic paradigm ultimately
nothing would be lost. By that line of thought, Honen came to his
idea of *selection* (*senjaku* or *senchaku*) as
the guiding strategy for his engaged philosophy. By engaging a
properly selected single teaching or practice, one does not abandon
the holistic view but instead discovers it as inscribed in that
particular. That philosophical modus operandi became the guiding
principle for all three of the major branches of Kamakura-period
philosophies: Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren.



Selection involves a decision about what to select and a methodology
for engaging the selection as a single bodymind focus. Pure Land
thinkers like Honen and Shinran (1173-1263) concentrated on
the mythos of the Vow of Amida Buddha to aid those who could not
attain liberating insight by their own devices or efforts and so
needed assistance from outside. Since the theory of the Degenerate Age
suggested all people were in that state of personal helplessness,
Amida's Vow was intended to serve everyone. For Nichiren
(1222-1282), the creator of the Nichiren School, the despair of
the Degenerate Age was again a consideration, but in his
interpretation, the second half of the *Lotus Sutra* was
written specifically for those times and should be the sole focus of
selection. For philosophers like Dogen (1200-1253), the
founder of Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism, the theory of the
Degenerate Age was irrelevant. As a result, he selected a single
practice he considered central to all Buddhist traditions from the
outset: the state of bodymind achieved in seated meditation
(*zazen*) under the guidance of a master. (See the entry on 
 Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy.)



The biographies of the Kamakura philosophers suggest that most often
their selection process arose from a sudden intuition, or a statement
from an inspiring text or teacher, after a frustrating period of trial
and error. Since most of them had originally trained at Mt Hiei and
because they were deviating from the Tendai Buddhist
establishment's doctrines and practices, they were accused of
heresy, which could lead to a penalty of exile or even execution. So
they devised *ex post facto* philosophical justifications for
their choices, often explaining how their new selective teachings and
methods were consistent with tradition and demonstrating, by using a
holographic argument, that nothing significant was really being
omitted from the orthodox tradition. The situation resulted in some of
the most creative medieval theories of metaphysics, philosophical
anthropology, and philosophies about the structures of experience.



As for engaging the selection wholeheartedly in a focused bodymind
activity, Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren all emphasized
"entrusting faith" (*shinjin*) as the Way that
dissolves the ego-self into a focal object. For the Pure Land
philosophers, the object is the fulfillment of Amida Buddha's
Vow as expressed in the phrase of the *nenbutsu* (*namu
amida butsu* "I take refuge in Amida Buddha"), for
Nichiren the power of the *Lotus Sutra* (especially as further
holographically particularized in the recitation of its title). In
such cases the model of faith is one of internal relations and
immersion in immanence rather than one of external relations and faith
in a transcendent reality. In the case of Dogen's Zen, the
engagement in *zazen* is characterized by a state of
without-thinking (*hishiryo*) in which "bodymind drops
away." In that state of full engagement with as-ness
(*inmo* or *nyoze*, how phenomena are before they are
structured by concepts), one is at the prereflective point that is in
itself without meaning, but is the basis from which meaning is
generated in any context. That is the "eye for the truth"
(*shobogen*) that is the provenance (*yue*) of
both words and praxis. Thus, in Dogen's decision to make
seated meditation his item of selection, he focused on how to find the
experiential point from which full engagement can originate. (Kasulis
2018, 218-34)



One benefit of the Kamakura innovations was that their singular
practices were readily accessible to anyone, even the uneducated. Over
the centuries, the Kamakura New Religions gradually became the most
popular forms of Buddhism in Japan. At the same time, the
philosophical *justifications* for those minimalized practices,
the metapraxes, were often highly sophisticated and have continued to
attract the further reflection of some of the best philosophical minds
in Japan over the centuries. For example, some twentieth-century
Japanese philosophers found points of contact between Western
existential philosophers' responses to *Angst* and the
medieval Buddhist philosophers' responses to the anguish of the
Degenerate Age.


#### 4.2.2 Muromachi Aesthetics



With the decline of the cloistered Heian court, the nature of Japanese
aesthetics underwent a change as dramatic as that of religious
philosophies. After the fall of the Minamoto's shogunate in
Kamakura and the takeover by the Ashikaga, the new shogunate moved its
headquarters to Muromachi in Kyoto in 1338. The reestablishment of
relations with China precipitated an economic boom and revival of the
Chinese-influenced arts in the capital, but the prosperity was
short-lived. Triggered by a dispute over shogunal succession, open
warfare broke out in Kyoto, ultimately involving most of the major
regional military lords from around the country. The capital was
leveled and the Onin War (1467-1477) ended in stalemate but
not before the coffers of the shogunate and the court were almost
completely depleted. Upon returning to their home regions, local wars
continued and the entire country entered the Period of Warring
Domains, lasting for over a century. Without the isolation of a
cloistered community of aristocratic courtiers, the former aesthetic
categories were superseded by new ones suggestive of retreat or
withdrawal: withdrawal from the cultured and elegant to the plainness
of the rustic (*wabi*), withdrawal from the outward glitter to
the lonely, neglected, and isolated (*sabi*), and withdrawal
from the surface to the quiet, mysterious depths
(*yugen*). These became central categories in the new art
forms of tea ceremony, poetry, no drama, and landscaped gardens.
(See the entry on 
 Japanese Aesthetics, sections 3-5.)


### 4.3 Edo-period Philosophy (1600-1868)



The Edo period marked a time of relative peace and stability under the
Tokugawa shogunate following the unification of the country by a
sequence of three hegemons: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (1537-1598), and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu
(1543-1616). Most of the unification occurred at the hands of
Nobunaga with Hideyoshi as his chief general. A major factor in
Nobunaga's success was his cunning use of the new technologies
of warfare (canons and muskets) introduced by Portuguese traders in
1543.



With the Portuguese and Spanish ships came Roman Catholic
missionaries. The hegemons at times welcomed the Christians as
informants about the West and as foils against Buddhism, but at other
times, viciously persecuted them as potential threats in turning the
people against the new political order in favor a foreign God. In the
end, Christianity was banned from the country entirely (with most
finality after the closure of Japan to almost all Western contact
after 1637). Therefore, although Christianity enjoyed some initial
success in its number of conversions, its overall impact was limited.
Formal polemical debates with Buddhists did introduce some new lines
of argument to Japan especially concerning creation, afterlife, and
teleology. Snippets reappeared in later Shinto arguments, most
notably those by Hirata Atsutane (1777-1843), but in general, as
a philosophical tradition, Christianity's impact would be
minimal until its reintroduction to Japan in the modern period. The
major philosophical innovation of the Edo period would not be
Christianity but rather a new form of Confucianism.


#### 4.3.1 Edo-period Confucianism



Confucianism had been part of Japan's intellectual tradition
since ancient times, but a series of events in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries breathed into it new life. With their skills in
Chinese language, their general knowledge of Chinese culture, and
their intermittent personal contacts in China, Rinzai Zen Buddhist
monks often served as advisers about China to the medieval shoguns.
Yet, for the most part, the Rinzai monks had lost touch with Confucian
movements in China through much of the medieval era and were surprised
to discover in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that since
the eleventh century totally new forms of Chinese Confucianism had
developed, what is called in the West *neo-Confucianism*.



That neo-Confucianism included comprehensive philosophical systems
that had incorporated ideas and practices from Buddhism and Daoism,
relegating them into subordinate places within its own philosophy. The
Confucianism in Japan that was a legacy from the ancient period barely
touched on metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological issues and
had hardly mentioned themes related to nature, art, and creativity.
Hence, up to the Edo period, Japanese philosophers had turned to
Buddhism to address those themes. Indeed, from the time of Kukai,
Buddhism had relegated Japanese Confucian thought to being not much
more than a social philosophy. The newly imported neo-Confucianism,
however, had assimilated enough Buddhist and Daoist ideas that it
could address a full complement of philosophical problems in a single
comprehensive system. When the second hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi,
brought prisoners of war to Japan from his failed attempt to conquer
Korea in the late sixteenth century, included in the group were some
Korean officials who were also scholars of Chinese neo-Confucianism.
Rinzai Zen monks became disciples and soon Japan had its own emergent
schools of neo-Confucianism, a phenomenon the Tokugawa shogunate would
welcome.



The Tokugawa regime largely distrusted Buddhism with its armies of
monks on Mt Hiei and Mt Koya and with its popularity among
peasants who rebelled (for good reason) over high taxes and the
mismanagement of agricultural resources. Hoping to centralize the
government by building up large urban centers, the shogunate believed
Confucianism could support its aims. First, compared with Buddhism and
Christianity, Confucianism in Japan was basically secular and unlike
Buddhism had no preexisting institutional networks to conciliate. As a
philosophy, Confucianism stresses communal harmony grounded in
hierarchical social relations, an ideal that had served the state well
in building Japan's first permanent capital in eighth-century
Nara. Perhaps it could work again. Lastly, Confucian academies could
serve the new urban, literate, and mercantile culture the shogunate
was envisioning.



By the end of the seventeenth century, the home of the Tokugawa
shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo) had grown from a fishing village
to a metropolis larger than any city in Europe, while Kyoto and Osaka
were each close to the size of Paris. A nationwide economy flourished
by means of a a network of roads and waterways accompanied by a system
of mercantile laws with a unified monetary system. Literacy soared as
the publication industry boomed. The effect on philosophy was profound
as its center of activity shifted from the Buddhist temples to secular
urban academies supported by student tuition. This commodification of
knowledge led to sharp competition among schools of thought, fueling
an array of new philosophies, each purporting to be an improvement on
what was available elsewhere. See the entry on 
 Japanese Confucian Philosophy, section 3.)



Besides schools directly imported from China, Japanese Confucians
developed their own variations, occasionally assimilating aspects of
Shinto. Even more syncretic were teachers of practical philosophy
who directed their teachings to ordinary townspeople, mixing various
levels of teaching and praxis (including Buddhism and Shinto)
according to the needs and talents of the audience, even to the extent
of having different wings in their academies dedicated to different
levels and kinds of teaching for different audiences.



A major theme across many varieties of Edo-period Confucianism was a
focus on language. As mentioned above in the discussion of the
fundamental ideas of Confucian philosophy, a basic assumption is that
an understanding of a term for a human relation entails a recognition
of how that relation should be enacted. To know fully what the term
*friend* means, for example, is to know how a friend ought to
act. That is the principle of the trueing up of terms, or the
rectification of names. Previous to the Edo period in Japan that was
about as far as the analysis went. With the expanded range of issues
addressed in the new forms of Confucianism, however, the question was
whether that same principle could be applied beyond the five binary
human relations. For example, do the essential meanings of terms like
*human nature, mind, harmony, principle,* or *learning*
also entail normative behaviors? Can a philosophy of education, for
example, be generated out of a close analysis of the meaning of the
ancient word for "learning" (*gaku*) in the classic
Chinese texts? To what extent do words have individual meanings and to
what extent is there a core of terms that are in internal relation to
each other that can be understood only together? And so forth. Such
themes became the center of attention in the Confucian academies and
they raised questions about the nature of language and how to study
it.



The concern for language motivated not only the careful reading of
traditional texts, but also increasingly sophisticated philological
studies into the meaning of ancient Chinese words. Inspired by
detailed Chinese glossaries of key terms, Japanese Confucian scholars
argued among themselves about the correct understanding of central
ideas by doing their own exegeses of texts and etymological or
philological discussions. Some (who came to be associated with a
classicist movement sometimes called *Kogaku)* took their
historical philology so strictly that they refused to read any Chinese
Confucian texts written after Confucius's own time, considering
the assimilative techniques of neo-Confucianism to be dilutions of
original insights, even to the extent of introducing Buddhist or
Daoist "distortions" to the original meaning of terms. As
for philological methodology, again we find a range of opinion. Should
we take a detached, scientific approach that analyzes the occurrences
of words simply in their own contexts as objectively as possible? Or
should we try to engage them so that they become *our* language
and we can write or even speak in the style of the most ancient
Chinese prose and poetry? How can we best understand language: with
the detachment of a philologist or with the engagement of a poet? The
philosophers of language in Edo-period Confucianism debated such
issues.


#### 4.3.2 Kokugaku (Native Studies)



The emphasis on ancient texts, language, and meanings inspired another
group of scholars to pursue an entirely different direction. The
blatant sinophilia of some of the Japanese Confucians vexed those
Japanese who wanted to deepen the appreciation of their own ancient
language and texts. The oldest Japanese texts such as *Kojiki*
had been written in the eighth century, before an effective
orthography for Japanese had been fully developed. As a result, many
parts of those most ancient texts were nearly unintelligible to later
readers. Philologists and literary critics in a movement called Native
Studies (*kokugaku*) took up the task of breaking the code by
discovering, for example, that ancient Japanese had vowel sounds that
soon dropped out of use by the time the orthography had been
standardized. That helped account for many apparent discrepancies and
allowed for insights into ancient expressions. (See the entry on 
 The Kokugaku School.)



For example, the terms for "awe-inspiring being" and
"above" have both been pronounced *kami* since the
eight century*,* but in ancient Japanese they were separate
words pronounced differently, disproving a common theory that there
was a semantic link between the two. Such discoveries led some
thinkers, most notably Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), to take
Native Studies in a new direction: the quest for developing a
Shinto philosophy grounded in an understanding of the most
ancient Japanese texts and their language. In essence, Norinaga hoped
to do for Shinto what Edo-period Confucians were doing for their
tradition in going back to ancient texts and analyzing their original
language.



As already explained, in ancient Japan proto-Shinto had the
sketch of a basic world view and set of values, but it had lacked
philosophical explanation or argumentative justification. In the early
ninth century esoteric Buddhism supplied the philosophical
underpinnings for what was, in effect, a quite similar view of reality
as a field of interdependent, internally related events that are
always in flux. Esoteric Buddhist philosophy had relegated Shinto
to being a surface manifestation of what, on a deeper level, could be
explained as a Buddhist reality. That is roughly how the situation
stood for much of the medieval period with one notable exception.



In the fourteenth and fifteenth century Shinto philosophers in
the Watarai lineage had started to pose repeatedly a new argument:
historical priority entails ontological priority or importance. For a
creation or cosmogonic theory formulated in diachronic time, the point
is clear enough. What comes first creates what comes next and hence
the latter is ontologically dependent on the former. The remarkable
point is that this claim, so common in Abrahamic theories of genesis
as well as most classical Greco-Roman cosmogonies, seems to have been
mostly unargued in Japan before the medieval period, primarily because
Buddhism and Confucianism place little importance in their
philosophies on creation myths. Buddhism in particular favors a
cyclical rather than linear theory of cosmic time and, therefore, in
claiming the ontological superiority of buddhas over their
manifestations as *kami,* the argument was based on a
metaphysical or logical argument, not an appeal to a chronology of
creation.



In Shinto philosophy, however, in the centuries following the
Watarai formulations, the search for the primordial--the
primal energy of creation, the primal source of language, the primal
origin of the Japanese land and its people--became a deepening
interest. Certainly, we find that emphasis in Native Studies, in both
its early philological and literary project as well as in its focus on
*Kojiki*. Because of Norinaga's influence,
*Kojiki* became not only the central canon for Shinto, but
also revered as the oldest text with substantial portions written in
the "original" language of the Japanese people (*yamato
no kotoba*). That language was understood to consist of
word-things (*koto*) imbued with the creation of the spirit of
ancient Japan (*yamato no damashii*). (See the entry on 
 The Kokugaku School, section 3.2.) 
That claim continued into the
nineteenth-century ideology of State Shinto that argued for the
restoration of the original purity of the Japanese people and their
appropriate role in the "new moment of world history," a
keynote of the Japanese ethnocentrism and imperial militarism of the
modern period.


#### 4.3.3 Edo-period Buddhism



Although Edo-period Buddhism was active in its scholarly productivity,
its philosophical creativity did not match the activity of either
Confucianism or Shinto, but there were exceptions. For example,
Jiun Sonja (1718-1804) was a Shingon monk whose career ran
counter to the typical pattern in Edo Japan in that he was first a
Confucian and then became a Buddhist. Early in his career he enrolled
in the Confucian academy of Ito Jinsai (1627-1705), where
there was a strong emphasis on philology, on trueing up the key terms
by scrutinizing the early Chinese texts. That inspired Jiun to
investigate the roots of Buddhism, but in that case the relevant texts
were in Sanskrit, a language barely studied in Japan at the time.
Undaunted, he took up the study mainly on his own, becoming
Japan's premier authority on Sanskrit in the premodern period.
Based on his research, Jiun argued for a new form of monasticism based
on what he understood to be the original principles of Buddhism that
preceded and transcended the various sectarian forms of Buddhism known
in Japan. Thus, Jiun represents yet another example of an Edo-period
thinker who used philology as a means of unearthing the origins and
philosophical principles of a tradition--in his case
Buddhism--in much the same way as his contemporaries did in
Native and Confucian Studies.



As a philosopher, Jiun's acumen was best displayed in his
arguments in favor of Buddhist over Confucian ethics. Against the
Confucian charge that Buddhism was antinomian, Jiun pointed to the ten
Buddhist precepts, the prohibitions against "killing, stealing,
adultery, lying, frivolous language, slander, equivocation, greed,
anger, and wrong views." In comparison with the Confucian
virtues, Jiun argued, they were not only more specific (and therefore
more practical), but also could be shown to have a metaphysical
justification based in the nature of reality as confirmed by the
Buddhist experiences of as-ness and universal buddha-nature. By
contrast, Jiun pointed out, the Confucian virtues derived from a blind
acceptance of texts claiming that the ancient Chinese sages had lived
in a utopian society of harmony. In other words, Buddhist ethics
emerge from an analysis based in the engagement with immanent reality,
whereas Confucian ethics are based in the detached study of texts
considered authoritative.



As sinophilia increased among Rinzai Zen monks in the later medieval
and Edo periods, many Rinzai monasteries became centers for practicing
the arts and letters, much in the tradition of the Chinese literati
and often to the neglect of traditional Zen disciplines. Occasionally,
Rinzai masters like Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768) reacted against
this development and urged a revival of intense and rigorous forms of
praxis. One teaching that would have important ramifications for later
events was an increasing emphasis on death as a theme. When the
Tokugawa peace brought newly unemployed samurai warriors to the gates
of Rinzai Zen monasteries, some masters like Takuan Soho
(1573-1645), Suzuki Shosan (1579-1655), and
Shido Bunan (or Munan 1603-1676) tried to find points of
contact between Zen and their martial experience. One strategy was to
compare the warrior's fearlessness in the face of death with the
Zen monk's fearlessness in the face of losing the ego-self. Of
course, the former occurs only at the moment of battle and the latter
should be a mentality of egoless engagement within all the events of
everyday life. Yet, the comparison would establish a link between
Buddhist discipline and what would evolve into *bushido,*
the Way of the warrior in the modern period.


### 4.4 Modern (post-1868) Philosophy



By convention the *modern period* in Japan is considered to
have begun with the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate and the formal
restoration of the emperor to power in 1868 and continues until today.
Although the Tokugawa were gradually losing control for some decades,
the precipitating cause for their downfall was the shogunate's
inability to effectively address the incursion of U.S. gunships into
Tokyo harbor in 1854 forcing Japan to open its doors to trade with the
West. Although a smattering of information about the West had trickled
into Japan during its period of closure starting in 1637, the
intelligentsia were shocked at how far Japan had fallen behind
technologically. Forced to accept severely unfavorable trade
agreements first with the United States and then Britain and Russia,
Japan realized that it had to modernize quickly or fall victim to
Western imperialism. Its hope was that somehow it could achieve that
modernization through allocating a balance between "Japanese
spirit and Western ingenuity" (*wakon yosai*) that
is, by finding a way to maintain its fundamental cultural values while
adopting Western education, science, and technology. That challenge
inspired much of the philosophical thinking in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.



Edo-period Confucianism's reliance on ancient texts seemed out
of synch with the demands for modernization. In response, increasing
emphasis was placed on the acceptance of Western philosophical
theories along with Western technologies and social institutions. The
Japanese were particularly impressed with positivism's rejection
of religious metaphysics in favor of empiricism. As for
utilitarianism, they admired its consequentialist ethics that used an
empirically derived cost-benefit analysis to determine what would
bring maximum happiness or pleasure for society as a whole. The
popularity of Rousseau and Mill's *On Liberty* enthused a
generation about the prospect for a Japanese democracy in the form of
a constitutional monarchy. The intellectuals proudly referred to their
time as the "Meiji Enlightenment." There were powerful
forces contravening against this movement toward liberal democracy,
however, and they were based in the ideologies behind the events that
had led to the Imperial Restoration of 1868 itself.


#### 4.4.1 Ideologies of Imperial Restoration



Beyond the practical considerations--the increasing military
weakness of the Tokugawa control within Japan, persistent economic
instability, recurrent peasant uprisings, the imminent threat of
foreign invasion, and so forth--three philosophical ideologies
had coalesced to support the overthrow of the shogunate and
restoration of the emperor. First, the Mito School, a think tank of
intellectual historians who for centuries were writing a comprehensive
history of Japan, had developed a political interpretation of the
imperial system as *kokutai,* basically a theory claiming that
from time immemorial the emperor has embodied the state in such a way
that the two are inseparable. Specifically, because of that
embodiment, the celestial *kami* who created Japan, the
Japanese land, and the Japanese people are in a holographical relation
reflecting, containing, and depending on each other.



The second philosophical ideology to support the Restoration was
Native Studies, which went beyond its original philological and
textual interests to construct a Shinto theory of racial purity
based in a world view purported to be implicit in the ancient Japanese
language, mythic narratives, and a primordial view of the land and
country. According to those mythic narratives, the celestial
*kami* had appointed the imperial family to rule over the land.
That so-called Restoration Shinto was said to predate influences
from the Asian continent including Buddhism and Confucianism. Hence,
it served as a major resource for the ideology of State
Shinto's vision of a pure Japanese ethnicity and
spirituality that served as the nucleus of the first half of the
"Japanese spirituality and Western ingenuity" formula of
allocation.



The Imperial Restoration also required a third, militant ideology.
That came from the warrior ideal that had been developing in the Edo
period, including the willingness to die for one's lord as the
definitive self-expression of loyalty. Of course, the loyalty had to
be directed now to the emperor instead of toward the shogun and the
hotbed of the samurai revolt behind the Restoration was in the far
western provinces of Satsuma and Choshu. The lords of those
domains not only held a long-standing grudge against the Tokugawa but
also enjoyed geographical proximity to secret trade routes with access
to weapons from the continent that were beyond the scope of the
weakened shogunate's surveillance network.



The practical exigencies had become so dire that the shogunate might
have crumbled without the support of the three philosophical
ideologies, but once the revolution was complete the ideologies formed
the political theory behind the new imperial state. Following models
developed by Germany and Italy, for example, the new Japanese state
honed its own identity as a nation state by basing itself in ancient
myths of racial uniformity, warrior heroism, ethnic purity, and a
claim to a primordial linguistic homogeneity.


#### 4.4.2 Modern Academic Philosophies



As *tetsugaku,* the philosophy done within the university
departments of philosophy fit more the "Western ingenuity"
side of the *wakon yosai* allocation formula and was
initially allowed to flourish freely along with the other
*Wissenschaften* serving the modernization project, especially
as it restricted itself to the subfields of epistemology, logic,
philosophy of science, and metaphysics. The more the academic
philosophers ventured into ethics, political philosophy, the
philosophy of religion, and even philosophical anthropology, however,
the more likely they were to encounter government censorship or even
imprisonment. Some philosophers like Inoue Tetsujiro
(1855-1944), Japan's first native born professor of
philosophy and head of the department at Tokyo Imperial University
used his considerable prestige to lend philosophical support to the
*kokutai* theory against liberal democracy and to develop
*bushido* from a code of samurai warriors into a National
Morality for everyone to be taught throughout the land in the public
school system. He based his full-bodied theory of
*bushido* in Japanese ethnicity, loyalty to the
*kokutai,* moral discipline, and the study of virtue. For
Inoue, it seems, ethics was mainly morality and, as such, belonged on
the spirituality side of the *wakon yosai* allocation.



Others, perhaps in response to Inoue Tetsujiro's
collaboration with the state ideology, stayed more squarely within the
mode of Western philosophy but tried to develop a more expansive
version of *tetsugaku* that would allow for Japanese ethical,
spiritual, and aesthetic sensitivities. Nishida Kitaro
(1870-1945), the founder of what became known as the Kyoto
School, tried to assimilate Western empiricism and Western idealism by
relegating them into a subordinate position within his more
comprehensive system of experience and judgments, a system that
grounded itself in the Buddhist notion of nothingness. (See entries on
Nishida Kitaro; The Kyoto School.) In general, although still
under the sway of German idealism, many important philosophers of the
first half of the twentieth century including Tanabe Hajime
(1865-1962), Kuki Shuzo (1888-1941), and Watsuji
Tetsuro (1889-1960) developed philosophies that stressed
culture as a crucial dimension of thought, being critical of what
seemed to them the overly simplistic dualities of either the
individual vs. the universal or individualism vs. collectivism that
seemed to dominate most Western logical and social theories. Yet, in
stressing the importance of the cultural and ethnic dimension of human
existence, they sometimes found themselves either wittingly or
unwittingly considered allies of the imperial state ideology. (See
entry on 
 Watsuji Tetsuro; 
for Tanabe, see the entry on 
 The Kyoto School, section 3.4.)



For the most part, Confucianism in the Edo period functioned more as a
secular philosophy than a religious tradition and so it was no threat
to the "Japanese spirituality" being cultivated in modern
Japan. Edifying narratives of Edo-period virtuous (often samurai)
Confucians made their way into the National Morality curriculum and
the Confucian emphasis on academic study was esteemed as a model for
the modern student. Yet, because a prevailing view was that
Confucianism was a foreign tradition based in archaic texts instead of
empirical data or utilitarianism, it seemed to many Westernized
intellectuals embarrassingly unmodern. Inoue Tetsujiro, who saw
Western utilitarianism and Christianity as threats to the official
*kokutai* and *bushido* theories, did make the case
in three books that Edo-period Confucianism was indeed a Japanese
premodern *tetsugaku*, implying Japan had no need to seek
ethical theories from the West. Yet, he did little to contribute to
the Japanese Confucian traditions of Japan since philosophically,
after eight years of study in Germany, his own academic philosophical
sympathies remained very strongly planted in the German idealism which
he promoted vigorously in his home department at Tokyo University.



Buddhism was in a different situation from Confucianism, however,
because it was both a religion and a philosophy in premodern Japan. As
a "foreign" religion it was deemed a pollutant to the pure
Japanese spirituality of State Shinto and underwent various forms
of persecution, even to the extent of mobs desecrating Buddhist
cemeteries and altars within private homes. The major Buddhist
reaction was institutional, trying to be less visibly an exception to
the new order, at times even encouraging monks to marry and have
families in service to the national program supporting population
growth, for example. There was also a philosophical response, however.
With Buddhism's wide variety of schools of thought and its
traditions of experiential verification, theories of consciousness,
forms of dialectical logic, alternative forms of knowing, and so
forth, some intellectuals felt there could be fertile interaction
between premodern Buddhist thought and the newly introduced Western
philosophies. As a result, some of the brightest young Buddhist
seminarians were enrolled in philosophy programs at the Imperial
Universities, creating a synergy between Western and Buddhist
philosophy in Japan that continues in many quarters until the present.
In addition, intrigued by the manner in which Christian theology was
drawing on nineteeth- and twentieth-century European philosophies,
pockets of so-called Buddhist-Christian dialogue began to emerge and
fully blossomed in the post-censorship era after 1945.


#### 4.4.3 Postwar Philosophies



The postwar period has brought three general developments. First, with
the end of censorship of liberal and leftist thought, there was often
a purge of the very idea of "Japanese" philosophy as
smacking of nativism, ethnocentrism, jingoism, and State Shinto
ideology. This was often directed, fairly or unfairly, toward
assimilative traditions like the Kyoto School. In response, the
immediate postwar generation or two in most Japanese academic
philosophy departments escaped into Western philosophy, often carried
out with a sense of purity that rivaled the earlier ethnocentric
movement. Consequently, the large majority of Japanese academic
philosophers trained in the latter half of the twentieth century have
pursued philosophy according to methods and themes hardly
distinguishable from those of the West.



The second postwar response has been for traditions like the Kyoto
School, born in 1910-1945, to continue to evolve, now without
the distraction of the old state ideology's casting a shadow on
the enterprise. This movement has generated increasing interest among
philosophers in Europe and the United States, especially those from
the more Continental influenced traditions. In some quarters, for
example, the Kyoto School is beginning to be recognized in
philosophical forums, taking a place alongside other schools of global
significance such as the Marburg or Frankfurt Schools.



Lastly, with the greater availability of translations into European
languages and the sprouting of learned societies for Japanese
philosophy in Asia, the United States, and Europe, there are
increasingly signs of cross-influence and hybridization. Western
philosophers, even those who do not consider themselves Japanese
specialists, are participating in the cross-pollination of ideas. As a
philosopher does not need to know Danish to be influenced by
Kierkegaard, a philosopher no longer needs to know Japanese to be
influenced by, or even contribute to, Japanese philosophy. The last
section of this article outlines some themes in Japanese philosophy
that may in the future stimulate philosophers of various backgrounds
and national origins.


## 5. Possible Contributions to Philosophy at Large


### 5.1 Philosophy: *Wissenschaft* or Way?



Japanese philosophy presents alternative models to today's
common paradigm of philosophy as a *Wissenschaft,* a form of
detached knowing that functions as a "scientific"
discipline within the modern academy. When Japanese philosophy
considers itself a Way rather than a *Wissenschaft*, it
stresses engagement over detachment. As an enterprise that may
transform both knower and known through a bodymind theory-praxis, that
Japanese version of philosophy seems to parallel some aspects of
Western philosophy in its original, ancient Greek form which also
emphasized loving wisdom rather than detached knowledge as well as
knowing oneself rather than impersonal analysis. Thus, the study of
Japanese philosophy raises not only philosophical questions, but also
opens into metaphilosophical questions about what philosophy is,
whether there are different kinds of philosophy, and how different
models of philosophy may interrelate.


### 5.2 Reality as Field



Philosophers often think of reality as consisting of elements that are
discovered, engineered, combined, and adapted to meet the needs of
their particular systems. In thinking about those elements of reality,
Western philosophy has often depended on primary concepts like
*things*, *facts*, *stuff*, *sensations*,
*subject*, *object*, *being*, *substance*,
*essence*, *attribute*, *quality*, and so forth.
As that list of elemental concepts has become standardized, it has
served as a glossary for future thinking and further philosophical
initiatives. Philosophers may discover or even craft new elements, but
they do so against that preexisting background, like filling gaps
within the periodic table. Commonly, those elements are thought to be
fixed entities that are connected or acted upon by relational forces
such as causes or agents. Change may also be understood as occurring
through the interaction of forces in dynamic opposition, including
dialectical opposition.



By contrast, Japanese philosophers typically view reality in terms of
a complex, organic system of interdependent processes, a system that
includes themselves as the knowers. Thus, the point of departure for
the analysis is not a separation between knower and known. Instead, to
know reality is to work with it, not as a discrete agent, but as part
of a common field, designated by such terms as *kokoro* or the
"midst" (*aidagara*). The field consists not of
things as much as events or processes such as *event-words*
(koto), *interpenetration*, *generative force* (ki),
*performative intuition*, *pure experience*,
*naturalness* (jinen), and so forth. In most Japanese
philosophies, oppositional polarities do not create dynamism, but
rather, dynamism is the primary event out of which the polarities can
be abstracted after the fact. The polarities have no independent
existence of their own and so cannot cause anything, but only have
explanatory value for *how* the dynamism flows, showing its
vectors of activity.



How might a field model of reality--especially one that
explicitly places the thinker within the field being
analyzed--challenge the way classical Western philosophical
problems have been posed and addressed? For one, philosophizing would
seem to emanate not from the thinking thing (*res cogitans*)
but from the field of bodymind praxis.



*The Field of Bodymind Praxis*



If, as the Japanese model suggests, reality is a field and includes
the philosopher within that field, then the Way of philosophy is a
theory-praxis event within that field. The implication, then, is that
philosophizing involves the bodymind as a whole and not just the mind.
In other words philosophy is an *embodied* cognitive activity.
Again, this would not be alien to the ancient Greek philosophers.
Plato's dialogues were not between ideas, but between people
with ideas; Aristotle's ethics were empty until embodied through
the praxis of habit. Philosophy is as much a product of philosophers
as pottery is the product of potters. Therefore, to what extent, if
any, can a philosophy transcend time, place, and culture? There would
be no philosophy without a flesh-and-blood philosopher and as a human
being that philosopher is encultured in a particular social milieu.
Like karma, that milieu conditions the philosopher even as the
philosopher conditions that milieu. In provoking such questions,
Japanese philosophy's field of bodymind praxis coincides with
concerns in both ancient and postmodern streams of philosophy within
the West.


### 5.3 The Agency of No-I vs. Autonomous Self



Most Western philosophies, as well as Abrahamic religious theologies,
think of personal identity as a discrete, independently existing,
autonomous agency. That view in turn generates certain assumptions
about creative authorship, ethical responsibility, and religious faith
in a transcendent reality. Such a view of personal identity is seldom
found in Japanese philosophy, however. Instead, the self is defined by
a field of interdependent relationships. Confucianism sees the
defining relations as a set of interpersonal roles, Buddhism as a
broader set of interdependent events or conditions. (Shinto has
multiple theories, including sometimes an idea of an individual soul,
but even that is often considered holographically inscribed with a
collective soul.) If there is generally no independent "I"
in Japanese philosophy, then how might we understand agency in such
areas as artistic creativity, ethics, and religious faith?


#### 5.3.1 Artistic Agency



Although there is an abundance of aesthetic theories in the Japanese
tradition, artistic creativity is generally thought to originate not
in the artist but in the artist's engagement within a field that
includes the medium, the auto-expressive character of reality, and the
audience. All that together--artist, medium, reality, and
audience--comprises *kokoro* in its fullest sense. The
creativity within art originates not in the individual's
self-expression but in *kokoro's* auto-expression.
(Kasulis 2008)



Hence, in creating the work of art, the rock gardener may speak of
"listening to the rocks," the *ikebana* master of
"working *with* the flowers." In his theory of
poetics, Motoori Norinaga stressed the importance of the audience as
part of the field of *kokoro,* claiming that an unread poem is
not yet a poem. In the classical Western tradition, creativity was
sometimes construed as the artist's being inspired by a muse, in
effect a double agency. Yet, both agencies--artist and
muse--were discrete individuals. How would a philosophy of
artistic creativity be different if it is one with no discrete
individuals, but instead a complex process of an auto-generative
field? That would seem to be a provocative question for comparative
aesthetics. (See entry on 
 Japanese Aesthetics.)


#### 5.3.2 Ethics without Discrete Agents



As many Japanese theories of creativity recognize the agency arising
within a field of engagement without the need for a discrete,
independently existing "I," the same can be said for many
ethical theories. With their tenet of no-I, Japanese Buddhist
philosophers typically stress egoless responsiveness within a
situation rather than the individual's responsibility to follow
rules, principles, or divine mandates. As mentioned in section 3.2.1
above, even the Chinese Confucian mandate of heaven (C.
*tianming*; J. *tenmei*) never found a comfortable home
in Japanese Confucianism. Yet, from a Western philosophical
standpoint, it may seem paradoxical to speak of an ethics without
either principles or a sense of responsibility.



One way to open a dialogue with the West on this issue is to consider
the critique posed by the aforementioned medieval Pure Land
philosopher, Shinran, who argued against making rationality the basis
for ethics. Basically, he insisted that to try to rationally determine
what is right is to distance oneself from the field of events, to make
the self an ego detached from the flow of reality by the very act of
trying to "figure it out" (*hakarai*). Engagement
with the events as they occur, by contrast, enables a form of knowing
that allows a compassionate response, the true basis of ethics.
Detachment from events not only feeds the ego (*I* know what is
right) but also thwarts the internal relationships that make
compassion possible. So. Shinran argues, the attempt to know what is
right and to apply rational principles undermines rather than enables
true moral behavior. (See the entry on 
 Japanese Pure Land Philosophy, section 4.4.)



In light of that analysis, on what grounds can we prefer an ethics of
responsibility over one of responsiveness or vice versa? The modern
philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro claimed that ethics is the
manifestation of a philosophical anthropology (Watsuji 1996). That is,
our ethical theories reflect our understanding of what it means to be
human. Presumably, the same philosophical anthropology informing our
ethics would also underlie, for example, our theories of knowledge,
aesthetics, and politics. If that is correct, ethics cannot be a
subfield of philosophical inquiry separate from other subfields. For
Watsuji, ethics is inseparable from the cultural milieu
(*fudo*) from which we derive meaning as human beings in
all aspects of our lives. As Watsuji put it, "the study of
ethics is the study of human being." (See the entry on 
 Watsuji Tetsuro, sections 2-3.) 
Again Japanese philosophies often
challenge the sharp bifurcation between the prescriptive and
descriptive that has been assumed by much Western philosophy since
David Hume.


#### 5.3.3 Faith without Self-Other



The Japanese notion of agency without an independent agent has
ramifications within religious philosophy as well, especially in
relation to faith. If there is no discrete self and no discrete
transcendent being, how can Shin Buddhism explain its central idea of
"entrusting faith" (*shinjin*)? Again, Shinran has
the most philosophically sophisticated explanation.



First, it is crucial to underscore that entrusting faith is directed
not to Amida Buddha (as we might expect in a theistic religion) but
rather to Amida's Vow to help bring to enlightenment those who
cannot make it on their own. In fact, Amida Buddha as a person is only
a heuristic device allowing me a focal point for my entrusting faith
so that I can surrender all senses of ego and self-agency to it. Once
I do so, I as a discrete entity disappear into the field of as-ness,
which is Amida in its true, impersonal form as infinite light. In
other words as long as there is a subject having the entrusting faith,
that faith directs itself to depend on the power of the object (the
Vow of the personal Amida). But as the dependence on that objectified
other-power becomes complete, the subject (the "I" who has
the entrusting faith) dissolves. Yet, if there is no subject, the
object must simultaneously disappear as well. The result is just the
spontaneous naturalness of the agentless field, what Shinran calls the
"working of nonworking" (*mugi no gi*).



Shinran's account is certainly a powerful description for
understanding "faith" in a nontheistic religion. Yet, even
some theistic religions on the mystical end of the spectrum may speak
of a God that disappears when engaged fully in a faith that overcomes
dualism. The aforementioned Kyoto School includes thinkers like Ueda
Shizuteru and Nishitani Keiji who have pursued comparisons with
Meister Eckhart on precisely those grounds (Ueda 2004).


### 5.4 Language and Meaning



At least since Aristotle (see his *Metaphysics* 1011), Western
philosophers have commonly assumed that the primary meaning (or truth)
of words lies in their ability to refer to already existing realities.
Often implicit in that assumption is that (1) reality is fixed, or at
least stable enough to be pinned down by linguistic expression; (2)
context is not necessarily determinative in meaning; (3) the audience
is irrelevant or at least externally, not internally, related to the
meaning of the expression; (4) the semantic and syntactic, but not
phonetic, aspects of the language carry the meaning; and (5) language
defines and restricts the possible meanings of things or events. Every
one of those assumptions has been challenged by major Japanese
philosophers, both classical and modern. In fact, some important
thinkers have in one way or another denied or at least qualified
*all* of them.



From the Buddhist standpoint of reality as a field of interdependent
events in continuous flux, if words stand in external relation to that
reality, they are perpetually trying to hit a moving target. If
instead language arises from engagement with the field itself, then
the words, reality, and speaker will express the moment together as
part of the flux. As the contexts change, so also will the forms of
expression. Thus, starting with the sound of words as his foundation,
Kukai spoke of the internal relations among sound-word-reality.
Because the cosmos of things and the utterance of words are both
vibrations, truth-words (*shingon*) arise from the resonance
among the three. We could say Kukai's view is that the
truth of words arises from their ability to confer with, rather than
refer to, reality. (See the entry on 
 Kukai, section 3.7.)



The medieval Zen master Dogen distinguished the raw phenomenal
presence (*genjo*) that precedes meaning from how it
acquires meanings through its dependence within a contextual field.
Thus, the same presence may shift its meaning as the field shifts.
"If we inquire into the manner and style of the totality of
phenomena..., we should bear in mind there are many worlds
everywhere." (JPS 146) That is, language and phenomena are parts
of single field that is in flux and can auto-generate multiple
contexts and meanings. My book may become a paperweight as soon as a
puff of wind begins to blow away the papers on my desk, for
example.



The audience as well is part of the field shared by words, speakers,
and things. Different expressions are used in addressing different
people. For most Japanese Buddhist philosophies, ordinary language is
always heuristic expression (*hoben*; Sankrit:
*upaya*) in that words are directed to someone to lead
them to some insight. So words are always being adjusted. Mori Arimasa
(1911-1976) noted that Japanese syntax demands multiple levels
of formality and politeness indicating the social space shared by
speaker and listener. That characteristic, he claims, gives the
language an inherently second-person, rather than impersonal,
third-person feel (JPS 1047-52).



Another way Japanese philosophers of language analyze how words can
address the fluidity of the field of impermanent, interdependent
events is to develop theories that focus on the predicate rather than
subject of the sentence as the nucleus of meaning. The sentential
subject is usually a noun that refers to a substance and the predicate
its attribute. To capture a world of events rather than things, on the
other hand, one can focus on the meaning as emerging from predicate,
the subject becoming in effect a modifier rather than a cause or agent
of the event. Such predicate-based analyses of language were developed
by Sakabe Megumi (1936-2009), Nishida Kitaro
(1870-1945), and the linguist Tokieda Motoki (1900-1967).
(JPS 979-92)



A final strategy for approaching the word-thing relation is to turn
the usual Western assumption upside down and claim that there are no
things (*mono*) at all until language fixates events
(*koto*) by imposing names on them. That is, words do not refer
to pre-existing things, but rather, words create things. The
psychiatrist-philosopher Kimura Bin (1931- ) has analyzed the
human compulsion to stabilize and reify the flow of events as an
effort to reinforce our sense of a discrete ego (JPS
958-72).



Ueda Shizuteru (1926- ), a member of the Kyoto School, has
developed a detailed theory of language along similar lines (JPS
766-84). Like Zen Master Dogen, Ueda argues language
translates the empty, not-yet-meaningful "pre-thing"
(*Vor-sache*) into a *thing* with meaning. Having evoked
that meaning, the word recedes back into the hollow void and the thing
takes its place in the totality we call "world." If we
need to subsequently point to those things, we can again call up the
word that originally conjured up the thing since the word-thing link
has already been established and the word can simply refer back to
that link without creating anything new. That is not the whole story,
however. There are other words (fictional, metaphorical, poetic
expressions) that do not point to such things in the world at all but
are "hollow words." Such words are not about things as
much as they are about words themselves or, better stated, about
*how* words work. Ueda claims, therefore, that through poetic
and religious language, we do not learn about things, but about the
origin of things, about how the "world" came into being
and how meaning is generated. 



These themes and approaches suggest just a few of the riches in
Japanese philosophy that might intrigue a philosopher from any
culture. As Japanese philosophy becomes better known and increasingly
accessible through translation and Western commentaries, it seems
likely it may engage an ever wider circle of philosophers worldwide,
becoming a resource for Western philosophy as Western philosophy has
historically been a resource for it.