Speech, Text, and Reality: Kokugaku and the Buddhist Roots of Japanese Philology

This article aims to overcome the longstanding dichotomy between religion and philology in scholarly discourse on kokugaku. Specifically, it argues that philology as it was practiced by the paradigmatic figure of the kokugaku movement, Motoori Norinaga, not only borrowed certain philological methods of analysis from the Shingon Buddhist cleric Keichū but also took for granted the esoteric Buddhist understanding of language that formed the context for the practice of those methods. Keichū, in turn, borrowed these from his fellow Shingon cleric Jōgon, a groundbreaking scholar of Sanskrit and leading figure in the early modern Japanese precepts reform movement. Already in his studies of Sanskrit, Jōgon formulated the basic principles and methods of Japanese philology as it came to be practiced first by Keichū and subsequently by scholars of kokugaku: a concern for recovering the sound of written graphs and a belief that the recovery of those sounds would restore a salvific use of language that had been lost to humanity. The motivation shared by Jōgon and Keichū to retrieve and revive a lost salvific language practice took shape in the context of their involvement in the early modern Buddhist precepts reform movement.