990 regan murphy
the syllabary in the emerging field of Japanese linguistics until the
mid-Edo period. In fact, Jōgon’s friendship with the father of Japa-
nese linguistics (and the subject of our second case study), the esoteric
Buddhist monk Keichū, was critical to this revolutionary shift. Their
close relationship is evidenced in Keichū’s writings, which both follow
Jōgon’s explication of sound production and acknowledge his assis-
tance in finding a publisher for Keichū’s study of ancient usage of the
phonetic script, the Wajishōranshō.^23
Most scholarship on Keichū describes him as the “father” of what
has come to be understood as an anti-Buddhist nativist movement
(Kokugaku ), based on his revolutionary studies of the earliest
Japanese texts. Keichū’s writings are found in the Keichū Zenshū
,^24 and he is frequently mentioned in secondary sources on Koku-
gaku, though there are few studies that provide a strong introduction
to the role of Buddhism in his scholarship.^25
Indeed, scholarship on this topic tends to discount Keichū’s Bud-
dhist affiliations as an anomaly.^26 His writings, however, reveal a deep
commitment to esoteric Buddhism, and his studies of the Japanese
language are explained according to a logic of equivalence in which
the study of Japanese was considered particularly efficacious in teach-
ing esoteric Buddhist truths to the Japanese people. Keichū extends
esoteric Buddhist theories relating to Sanskrit to the study of Japa-
(4) A Sa Ki Yu Me Mi Shi
Ye Hi Mo Se Su
Abé 1999, 392 translates this poem as follows:
(1) Although its scent still lingers on
The form of a flower has scattered away
(2) For whom will the glory
Of this world remain unchanged?
(3) Arriving today at the yonder side
Of the deep mountains of evanescent existence
(4) We shall never allow ourselves to drift away
23 Intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.
Keichū had participated in Jōgon’s lectures on ritual manuals in 1678. He also
borrowed, read, and copied ritual manuals written by Jōgon. Ueda Reijō (1979, 10)
claims that while Motoori Norinaga praised Keichū as the father of nativism, in
fact Keichū learned his evidential scholarly method from Jōgon’s research on ritual
manuals.
(^24) Tsukishima’s Keichū Kenkyū (1984) should be consulted first, as it corrects sev-
eral mistakes in Hisamatsu’s introduction to Keichū’s work found in the Zenshū.
(^25) The best secondary sources for information on Keichū’s understanding of eso-
teric Buddhism are Inoguchi 1996; Tsukishima 1984; Murphy 2009.
(^26) See, for example, Nosco 1990; Seeley 1975.