Japanese Political Philosophy

Japanese philosophers have historically interacted intensively with a multitude of

philosophies outside their native boundaries—most prominently Chinese, Indian, Korean,
and Western. So, they have benefited from a rich trove of ideas and theories on which to
draw in developing their own distinctive philosophical perspectives. As a result, Japanese
philosophers have always been acutely attuned to the intimate relations among culture,
ways of thinking, and philosophical world views. An island chain twice as distant from its
continental neighbors as Britain is to its own, Japan escaped successful foreign invasion
until 1945. Accordingly, it largely negotiated its own cultural, including philosophical,
development without an alien power forcibly imposing on the archipelago its own religious
world view or philosophical theories. The early twentieth-century academic philosophers
in Japan, for example, were so well educated in the world’s texts and theories, many in
the original languages, that they were among the most internationally informed
philosophers of their time.
Without foreign ideas being coerced on them, Japanese thinkers had the luxury of
alternatives outside the binary of simple wholehearted acceptance or utter rejection. New
theories from abroad could be tried and, if need be, experimentally modified before
making a final decision about endorsement. Sometimes a foreign philosophy might be
seen as supplying raw material to be fashioned to serve ongoing native philosophical
enterprises. In other cases a new philosophy might be imported whole cloth to either
supplement or supplant a home system of thought. Because of those circumstances,
Japanese philosophers acquired skill in analyzing foreign ideas by examining the cultural
assumptions behind them to determine their potential implications if they were to be
adopted into their own culture.
Against that backdrop, this article explains Japanese philosophy in five sections. Section
1 considers how Japanese have traditionally understood philosophy to be a Way (michi)
of engaging reality rather than a detached method for studying it. The next section lists
some patterns of analysis that are hallmarks of that Way of Japanese philosophizing.
Section 3 identifies five distinguishable traditions having had a major impact on Japanese
philosophy, explaining a few central ideas from each. Section 4 surveys how those five
traditions have evolved and interacted over four major periods of Japanese history from
ancient times to the present. Section 5 concludes with a few themes given special
emphasis in Japanese philosophy that might be provocative to philosophy at large.

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 (dō or michi) such as the Way of the
buddhas, the Way of the Confucian scholarly sages, the Way of the (Shintō) 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 interrelate) 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.

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 Tetsurō (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 Tetsurō.)
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 détente 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 Shintō philosophies resolved potential conflicts
by allocating social and political issues to Confucianism, psychological and
epistemological theories to Buddhism, and naturalistic emotivism to Shintō. The
Seventeen-article Constitution of Prince Shōtoku 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. Shōtoku’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-Shintō
ideas, values, and practices by relegating its kami to being “surface manifestations” of
Buddhist reality. By that process, Shintō 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-Shintō 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 bushidō, the Way of the warrior, is such a
philosophical hybrid born of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shintō, 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 Shintō
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 Shintō. In its archaic form, especially before its contact with the
literary philosophical heritage of continental Asia, it is better termed proto-Shintō because
it only loosely resembles what we now know as Shintō. Institutional Shintō thought did
not significantly begin until the medieval period and today’s Shintō philosophy mostly
originates in the Native Studies tradition beginning in the eighteenth century. That
trajectory of Shintō doctrinal development continued with the rise of nationalism and
ethnocentrism under the rubric of Shrine Shintō, the institutional arm of State Shintō
ideology, which cast a pall on creative philosophical thinking from the early twentieth
century until 1945. Postwar Japan has witnessed a range of renewed Shintō 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-Shintō Animism and Naturalism
Proto-Shintō lacked philosophical reflection and even self-conscious articulation but is so
named because today’s Shintō has often claimed (sometimes disingenuously) a
resonance with its main values, ritual forms, and world view. Dating back to preliterate
times, proto-Shintō 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-Shintō, 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-Shintō’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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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 Shintō ideology, and the secularized version of bushidō (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-
Shintō, 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-Shintō 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-
Shintō 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-Shintō 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 Shintō 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-Shintō 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 Shintō,
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-Shintō’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 (ātman) 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-Shintō’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-Shintō 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: tathatā). That premise contrasts with a widespread
orthodox Indian view (found in the Upaniśads and later Vedas, for example) that reality
continuously hides its true nature through illusion (Sanskrit: māyā). 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 (gō). 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 Bushidō (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: bushidō, the Way of the warrior.
Although there had been edifying handbooks and martial codes in Japan for centuries
preceding the modern period, bushidō 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 bushidō gave it a
special meaning by linking it directly to the emperor and the holographic paradigm
supporting the imperial system in State Shintō. The emphasis on dying as the fullest
expression of loyalty seems to have been most foregrounded in 1701 with the famous
Akō 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 bushidō emphasized the value of makoto,
genuineness or trustworthiness, a term with originally Shintō 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.
Bushidō and National Morality
Bushidō philosophy is, therefore, a true hybrid of Confucian, Buddhist, Shintō, 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, bushidō 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 Shōtoku’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-Shintō to a subordinate place within its expanded,
all-inclusive system. Prince Regent Shōtoku’s hope, as expressed in his Constitution, was
to establish Buddhism as a state religion but to continue state rituals venerating the proto-
Shintō kami, while adhering to Confucian ideals (along with some Chinese Legalist ideas)
in organizing a centralized state government. Even after Shōtoku’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, Shintō 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 Saichō, 767–822) and Shingon (founded by Kūkai, 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” (mikkyō). In
establishing that core orientation, Kūkai was the pioneering figure and the more
sophisticated philosopher, indeed often considered Japan’s greatest premodern
systematic thinker. (See the entry on Kūkai.)
4.1.1 Kūkai’s Esoteric Foundation for Japanese Philosophizing
The linchpin in Kūkai’s philosophy was his distinction between engaged and detached
knowing, which he formulated in terms of the “difference between esoteric teachings
(mikkyō) and exoteric teachings (kengyō).” (See the entry on Kūkai, 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, Kūkai 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 (hōben; Sanskrit: upāya). 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 Kūkai to argue the inherent limitation in exoteric philosophy is what gives rise to it,
what in Buddhist terminology is called its mindset (jūshin).
Kūkai used relegation to explain his detailed “theory of the ten mindsets” (jūjūshinron).
(See the entry on Kūkai, 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. Kūkai 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 Kūkai 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).
Kūkai 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 Kūkai’s terminology, “one achieves buddha in, with, and through this very
body” (sokushinjōbutsu). (See the entry on Kūkai, section 3.9.)
Although Kūkai’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 Kōya 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 (mappō) 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 Hōnen (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, Hōnen
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 Hōnen 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 Dōgen (1200–1253), the founder of Japanese Sōtō 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, Hōnen,
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 Dōgen’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” (shōbōgen) that is the provenance (yue) of both
words and praxis. Thus, in Dōgen’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
Ōnin 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 (yūgen). These
became central categories in the new art forms of tea ceremony, poetry, nō 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
Shintō 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 Kūkai, 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 Kōya 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 Shintō. 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 Shintō) 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 Shintō
philosophy grounded in an understanding of the most ancient Japanese texts and their
language. In essence, Norinaga hoped to do for Shintō 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-Shintō 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 Shintō 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 Shintō 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 Shintō 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 Shintō, 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
Shintō 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 Shintō, 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 Itō 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 Sōhō (1573–
1645), Suzuki Shōsan (1579–1655), and Shidō 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 bushidō, 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 yōsai) 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 Shintō 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 Shintō 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 Shintō’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 Chōshū.
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 yōsai 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 Tetsujirō (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 bushidō 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 bushidō 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 yōsai allocation.
Others, perhaps in response to Inoue Tetsujirō’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 Kitarō (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 Kitarō; 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 Shūzō (1888–1941), and
Watsuji Tetsurō (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 Tetsurō; 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 Tetsujirō, who saw Western
utilitarianism and Christianity as threats to the official kokutai and bushidō 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 Shintō 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
Shintō 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. (Shintō 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 Tetsurō 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 (fūdo) 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 Tetsurō, 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, Kūkai 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 Kūkai’s view is that
the truth of words arises from their ability to confer with, rather than refer to, reality. (See
the entry on Kūkai, section 3.7.)
The medieval Zen master Dōgen distinguished the raw phenomenal presence (genjō)
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 (hōben; Sankrit: upāya) 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 Kitarō (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 Dōgen, 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.

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