Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Motoori Norinaga

472 Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長 (1730–1801) Motoori Norinaga, the preeminent scholar of the early modern nativist movement known as Kokugaku, was born to a cotton wholesaler in the town of Matsusaka . In 1852, he went to Kyoto to study medicine, where he also enrolled in the school of the Confucian scholar Hori Keizan (1689–1757). Through the course of his studies, which included native poetic and prose traditions, Norinaga was informed by two hermeneutical approaches. The first was that of Ogyū Sorai*, who advocated a return to the study of the original, primary texts of Chinese Confucianism in order to ascertain the “true facts” of the “Way of the sages” through the analysis of word meaning in context. The second was the philology of the Japanese language by Keichū (1640–1701), a Buddhist priest who wrote a ground-breaking commentary on the Man’yōshū. On completion of medical studies in 1757, Norinaga returned to Matsusaka where he established a medical practice. Norinaga’s long and prolific scholarly career was devoted to elucidation of the spiritual heritage of the Japanese people. He also made lasting contributions to poetics (“Personal Views on Poetry,” 1763), the interpretation of literature (“Essentials of the Tale of Genji,” 1763), and the analysis of the history and structure of the Japanese language. His major achievement, however, was his Commentary on the źKojikiŻ, a forty-four-volume work composed between 1764 and 1798. The earliest extant texts of Japan were two mytho-historical chronicles, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), and the źNihon shokiŻ (Chronicles of Japan, 720). The Nihon shoki, written entirely in classical Chinese, was the first of six official court-sponsored chronologies modeled on the official histories of China. The Kojiki, on the other hand, held no official status and with the exception of deity names and poems written in sinographs used phonetically, was composed largely in hybrid classical Chinese. Norinaga argued that the Kojiki, while cloaked in the veneer of Chinese, was in fact the Ur-text of an ancient oral transmission of the true origins of Japan, communicated from the deities to their descendants, the ruling emperors of Japan. In his commentary, Norinaga reconstructed a native reading for the entire text in Yamato kotoba, an older form of Japanese unadulterated by Chinese borrowing , and probed the meaning of the text. Under the dominant neo-Confucian ideology of the seventeenth century, scholarly attention to the “age of the kami” chapters in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki was devoted to elucidating the ways in which the facts recorded therein conformed to the neo-Confucian universalist claims of principlesž common to all peoples. Norinaga maintained that this so-called universalism was simply a concept rooted m o t o o r i n o r i nag a | 473 in Chinese epistemology. In his view, the concept of the “Way of heaven,” under which principle, the moral force inherent in all things, rewarded those of virtue by allowing them to rise to power as rulers to serve as models of principled behavior for the ruled, was simply an artificial construct created to legitimate particular forms of governance. Norinaga claimed that in ancient Japan, order was naturally maintained through unquestioned faith in the deities of creation, and in their descendants, the imperial rulers of Japan. The selections that follow open with a passage from Norinaga’s The Spirit of Rectification , which contained the essence of his thought on the “ancient Way of Japan.” The next excerpt shows Norinaga engaged in debate with Ichikawa Tazumaro (1740–1795), a Confucian of the Sorai School who was the first to offer a Confucian critique of Norinaga’s work in an 1870 work entitled Exorcising Evil. Norinaga countered that same year with the essay “Arrowroot,” in which he takes up the criticisms one by one and offers counter-arguments. È See also pages 1174–5. [aw] The way of japan Motoori Norinaga 1771, 50–2, 54, 57, 62; 28–32, 35, 40 In ancient times there was no discussion of a Wayž.… The word meant merely a route that led to some place. Apart from this, there was no other “way” in antiquity. Speaking of “the Way of so-and-so” to refer to an ideal state or particular teaching is the custom of a foreign country. …… The Way referred to created and established laws. Thus, in China, the Way is nothing but a device to seize another country and a strategy to protect one’s own country from being...