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Writing a History of Japanese philosophy
What I Have Learned
Thomas P. KASULIS
The Ohio State University

For the past several years, I have been writing a book-length history
of Japanese philosophy and, in doing so, I have come to understand
features of the tradition in a way differently from how I had previous-
ly. I do not know whether these are insights valuable to others or
merely corrections to my own initial naïve assumptions. For this
paper, I will merely share those ideas and readers can decide for them-
selves whether there is anything important or innovative in them.
I will broadly address three issues. (1) How can one explain to a
Westerner the basic patterns of Japanese philosophizing, especially
when those patterns are rare in the present-day Western philosophi-
cal scene? (2) What themes or motifs emerged in Japanese philosophy
in response to the Zeitgeist of each historical period? (3) Is there
something Japanese philosophy can contribute to world philosophy
today?

Explaining Japanese Philosophy to Westerners

In teaching and writing about Japanese philosophy for over three

decades, I have sometimes been discouraged by readers or students
who just could not seem to “get it.” They might know which philoso-
pher said what on which occasion or they might be able to define
individual Japanese philosophical terms, but too often the enterprise
as a whole did not make sense to them. This only reinforced preju-
26 Thomas P. KASULIS

dices that Japanese thought is, as D. T. Suzuki liked to claim, not

rational, but aesthetic or mystical. This left many Western philoso-
phers convinced there was nothing of interest for them in studying
Japanese thought. That response was disappointing and I wanted to
find a better approach in my explanations.
Experimenting in public lectures and in the classroom, I discoverd
that a good technique was to put my audience into a different frame
of mind, a different way of asking questions, before I told them any-
thing about Japanese philosophy itself. If my audiences would stop
asking their Western-biased questions of Japanese philosophers, they
might learn what kinds of questions the Japanese thinkers themselves
asked. Then they could appreciate Japanese answers as being as
provocative, rational, and systematic as philosophical answers in the
West. As I liked to say, it is not that Japanese typically think different-
ly from most Westerners, but that Japanese commonly think about
different things. Depending on differences in what you are asking
about, it is hardly surprising that different rhetorics, forms of analysis,
forms of persuasion, and types of argument would develop over the
centuries. In response, I developed a way of reorienting the philosoph-
ical assumptions and paradigms of the audience. I argued for the
rationale behind my approach in my book, Intimacy or Integrity:
Philosophy and Cultural Difference (2002). Originally delivered as the
Gilbert Ryle Lectures to an audience of Western philosophers, the
book distinguished two kinds of philosophizing, what I call philoso-
phizing in the “intimacy” and the “integrity” orientations.
My claim is that the integrity orientation of philosophy has been
especially prominent in the West since the early modern period
(Descartes) and it became dominant by the time of the
Enlightenment. I do not claim, of course, that the integrity orienta-
tion has been supreme throughout the Western tradition. Indeed, the
other orientation—that of “intimacy”—can be found in some early
Greek thought, in much of the medieval period, in process philosophy
and pragmatism of various sorts, and in some contemporary Western
feminist and postmodernist theories. Only toward the end of the
book did I emphasize that the intimacy orientation has been domi-
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 27

nant through most of the history of Japanese philosophy. The evi-

dence for that claim, I promised, would be in my forthcoming history
of Japanese philosophy.
In Intimacy or Integrity, I gave five characteristics that distinguish
philosophizing in an integrity and an intimacy orientation. For our
purposes here, I will mention just two. The first is that an integrity
orientation favors explanation and analysis as based in external rela-
tions. That is, if I say “a and b are related,” integrity assumes that a
and b can exist independently (each with its own integrity), but since
there is a relation between them, some third factor R bridges or con-
nects the two. By contrast, an intimacy orientation favors an explana-
tion in terms of internal or inherent relations. That is, if I say “a and b
are related,” intimacy assumes that a and b are interlinked or overlap,
and that the R is the shared part of a and b. This subtle difference pro-
foundly influences how philosophy in each orientation proceeds. For
example, in integrity, to understand the relation between knower and
known, one looks for something else to connect them (such as the
words or concepts of “knowledge”). In intimacy, however, to under-
stand the relation between knower and known, one looks for some-
thing they share. Knowledge is in the intersection between knower
and known. Using diagrams, we can represent the difference like this,
showing the relevance to various philosophical fields:

Knower Knowledge Known

I Ethics You/It
“Self” Artist Creativity Medium “Other”
Word Expression Thing
Artwork Aesthetics Audience

Figure 1: Philosophy in the Orientation of Integrity

28 Thomas P. KASULIS

Knower Known
I You/It
“Self” Artist Medium “Other”
Word Thing
Artwork Audience

Knowledge
Ethics
Creativity
Expression
Aesthetics

Figure 2: Philosophy in the Orientation of Intimacy

The contrast is clear when, for instance, a modern Western analyt-

ic philosopher and a typical Japanese philosopher try to develop an
epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic theory to address some philo-
sophical issue. When they do so, they tend to look for their answer in
a different way, indeed in a different “place” or “field” (basho , as
Nishida Kitarō called it). Because of that difference, what counts as a
suitable answer in each tradition is different.
The second difference between the intimacy and integrity orienta-
tions that I will make here involves the role of the somatic. In the
integrity orientation, the body and mind are externally related to each
other and distinct, each having its own integrity. Among other things,
this leads to the view that knowledge is mental and emotions are
somatic. For intimacy, by contrast, the mind and body intersect and
overlap rather than exist separately. Consequently, in Japan the koko-
ro is necessarily both cognitive and affective and even the common
word omou involves feeling as well as thinking. A corollary of this
intimate relation between mind and body is that in the Japanese tra-
dition, to learn or achieve insight requires psychosomatic discipline.
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 29

One can never know deeply without a bodymind praxis. To explain

this difference to my students, I ask them who better knows the
nature of clay, the geologist or the potter. The answer, of course,
depends on what “knowing” means and how it is attained. The geolo-
gist uses detached, scientific observation; the potter learns by imitat-
ing the praxis of the teacher in a “hands-on” form of knowing. So,
when a geologist and a potter each say they “know the nature of clay,”
despite the similarity in their comment, they actually mean something
quite different.
In writing a history of Japanese philosophy for Westerners, there-
fore, I think it best to orient the reader to intimacy at the outset.
When Japanese philosophers—whether it be Kūkai in the ninth cen-
tury or Nishida in the twentieth—investigate the meaning of knowl-
edge or wisdom, they are looking for knowledge in the intimacy orien-
tation’s sense of the word. Unless the reader of Japanese philosophy
understands that basic point, the study of Japanese philosophy will
always be exotic and not philosophically provocative.

Philosophical Themes in Different Japanese Eras

As a human and social construction, philosophy always reflects not

only its cultural home, but also the Zeitgeist of its particular time and
place. Therefore, a challenge in writing a history of Japanese philoso-
phy is finding the specific character of philosophizing in any given era.
To give a sampling of how I have done this, I will make a few com-
ments about different periods of Japanese philosophy as I see them.
The first question for any history of philosophy, of course, is where
to begin. The Institute for Religion and Culture at Nanzan
University is assembling a sourcebook of readings in Japanese philoso-
phy, a project in which I am a co-editor. When we began to outline
that book, we invited about a dozen prominent European and
American scholars of Japanese philosophy to a small workshop to
share ideas about what the book might include. Right away, there
arose the question of where to begin. Who was Japan’s “first philoso-
30 Thomas P. KASULIS

pher?” At one point, Kūkai’s name came up as a possible candidate for

the honor. A French scholar responded that Kūkai’s writings were not
“philosophy” but only something like pensée. About ten minutes later,
a German scholar argued the opposite side of the case, noting that
Kūkai was certainly a philosopher because his works clearly qualify as
Denken. We Americans were a bit amused since in English we often
translate the French and German words the same: thought or think-
ing. This led us to the conclusion that we would never settle the issue
if we had to start with some essentialist definition of philosophy and
then decide how it applies to various Japanese thinkers
For my history, I decided that philosophy in Japan started with
Shōtoku Taishi in the 7th century (or at least whoever wrote the texts
attributed to him, especially the Seventeen-article Constitution). My
justification is simple. Almost all histories of Western philosophy
start with Thales. Yet, about all we know of Thales as a philosopher
are his two statements: “all things are water” and “everything is full of
spirits.” Why, then, do almost all the Western histories designate him
as the West’s first philosopher? The reason is that Aristotle appointed
him so when he wrote his own little survey of the history of philoso-
phy up to his time (Metaphysics I:3) . Aristotle’s justification was that
Thales was the first thinker to ask “what everything is” and to give an
answer based not in myth or religious tradition, but in observation
and reason. Aristotle claims that “we philosophers” have been doing
the same ever since. In a parallel fashion, I argue, the writer of the
Seventeen-article Constitution inquired into which imported philoso-
phy Japan should follow, Confucianism or Buddhism. Shōtoku’s
answer was that there should be harmony among differing philoso-
phies, a way of giving each its due. Japanese philosophers have since
then been doing the same—taking disparate ideas from different
philosophical sources and finding a way to bring them into some har-
mony.
For the Japanese thinkers of the Heian period, there were two
pressing problems. The first was how to integrate all the different
points of view—Confucianism, Daoism, the various forms of
Buddhism, as well as sundry indigenous ideas and values—into a
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 31

coherent system. Both Tendai and Shingon developed ways of han-

dling this problem: the Tendai classification of teachings and writings
(later departing from the Chinese scheme by including the esoteric as
well as the exoteric) and the Shingon classification of the “ten mind-
sets” (jujūshin ). In classifying the mindsets, Kūkai made a fun-
damental distinction between the exoteric and esoteric ways of know-
ing, arguing for the superiority of the latter. (Within a century after
Kūkai, Tendai came to the same conclusion.) Importantly, that dis-
tinction closely parallels the difference between integrity’s and inti-
macy’s modes of knowing. Esoteric knowing assumes an internal rela-
tion between knower and known. It cannot be achieved by the mind
alone, but must be embodied in praxis (sokushinjōbutsu ).
Further, if we examine the nine lower exoteric mindsets, we find that
the more a tradition emphasized internal over external relations, the
more highly Kūkai ranked it.
The second problem facing the Heian thinkers was how to under-
stand the relation between part and whole. In response Kūkai
expounded a holographic relation. Kūkai’s system, consonant with
the structure found in mandala practice as well as certain assumptions
within animism and fetishism, insists that the whole is not merely
made up of its parts, but also contained in every part. It is as if the
DNA of the universe is found in each and every thing in the universe.
This holographic view of relation—the whole (holo-) as inscribed
(-graph) in each of its parts—became a major paradigm for later
Japanese thought.
The political, religious, and social upheaval of the Kamakura peri-
od lent a feeling of despair to the Zeitgeist. The unusual series of natu-
ral disasters—earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, droughts, epidemics,
and catastrophic urban conflagrations— only made the situation
worse. Many people interpreted the times in terms of the Buddhist
idea of mappō. Philosophically, we could say the late Heian and
Kamakura periods were a time of fragmentation and de-centering.
The comprehensive systems of Tendai and Shingon philosophy, the
claim to religious authority by their centralized institutions, the con-
cern for fathoming the workings of the cosmos, and the devotion to
32 Thomas P. KASULIS

the academic study of the Buddhist canon all fell into disrepute.
Religious people focused not on complexity but simplicity, and not
on universal truth but pragmatic or contextual truth. There are paral-
lel’s with today’s postmodern mood. For example, postmodernism has
called into question whether texts can have meaning in themselves
independent of the perspective and assumptions of its readers. In a
similar vein, Shinran and Dōgen (and to a lesser extent, Nichiren as
well) developed radical re-readings of classical Chinese texts based on
their own idiosyncratic insight, using their yomikae ( ) tech-
nique to deconstruct the orthodox meanings of the sacred writings.
Of praxis, postmodern thinkers today often reject the systematized,
elitist, and authoritarian disciplines of traditional institutions in favor
of more ad hoc responses to concrete situations that include formerly
marginalized people. In the Kamakura context, each innovative reli-
gious philosopher simplified praxis down to a single activity (nenbu-
tsu, zazen, daimoku), rejecting the very attempt at a hegemonic, com-
prehensive system of praxis like that found in Tendai. The simplified
Kamakura religions spread readily among the general populace. The
philosophers took pains to justify that simplification, however.
Despite their rejection of Shingon and Tendai esotericism, they often
still made use of the holographic model to defend their praxes. If one
did any one practice the right way, they argued, that one part of the
whole panoply of Buddhist practices would give insight into the
whole truth. This holographic thinking allowed fragmentation to be a
positive development, since every fragment contains the whole.
Fragmentation can then be simplification without loss. This was the
core idea behind the Kamakura period’s emphasis on the “selection”
(senjaku or senchaku) of a single text or single practice.
For the Edo period, my study of the era’s rich variety of philoso-
phies led me to an unexpected conclusion. It is common for scholars,
in Japan as well as the West, to find in the Edo period an explosion of
creative philosophizing leading to a profusion of schools of thought.
It seems almost every philosopher had developed his own unique phi-
losophy. Indeed, even our common grouping of the Confucians into
“schools” like kogaku, shushigaku, and yōmeigaku may more derive
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 33

from Inoue Tetsujirō’s Meiji reconstruction of Edo intellectual histo-

ry than the way the philosophers understood themselves at the time.
Yet, when I examined closely the Edo philosophers’ standpoints, I
found most differences among them to be slight. The smallest dis-
agreements presented themselves as starkly opposed worldviews. This
contrasted with the tendency in the medieval philosophers to assert
repeatedly that they were not deviating from the tradition. Shinran’s
deviations from Hōnen were at least as great as Sorai’s from Jinsai, yet
Shinran insisted he was following what his master had meant, whereas
Sorai stressed his own uniqueness whenever possible.
I theorized why there should be such a contrast between the
Kamakura and Edo rhetoric on the issue of uniqueness and innova-
tion. In the Kamakura period, the center of power, including the con-
trol of financial assets, was the Tendai-Shingon-shogunate-court com-
plex. It was not only ill-advised, but outright dangerous, to be labeled
a “heretic” by that establishment. Without its support, one could not
build temples or accumulate the cultural capital to support a new reli-
gious institution. In the Tokugawa period, by contrast, philosophy
had freed itself from that Buddhist institutional hierarchy and found
its new home in the secularized life of the townspeople. To survive in
that context, with few exceptions, meant that philosophers had to
support themselves with tuition funds from students who attended
their own academies. Another source of money was income from pub-
lication. This arose naturally from the opportunity presented by the
skyrocketing literacy rate among the townspeople and new techniques
in printing. The way for a philosopher to succeed in the Edo period
was to define a distinctive niche in the marketplace of ideas. A
philosopher had to advertise why students should come to his acade-
my rather than the one across the street. The situation is like academ-
ic institutions today that compete for the same pool of students. Each
school has to present itself as unique. The evidence from the Edo peri-
od supports this interpretation of commercial competition among
philosophers. For example, bookstores sometimes posted “gakusha
banzuke” in the format of sumo programs with ranks like sekiwake
and ōzeki assigned to the philosophers from the East (Edo) and West
34 Thomas P. KASULIS

(Kyōto-ōsaka).
Finally, the modern period again encountered the familiar issue of
how to harmonize newly introduced philosophies, only this time
from the West instead of from China. The Zeitgeist of the Meiji,
Taishō, and early Shōwa periods was a time of experimenting with
new identities based on new ideas, including individualism and
democracy. People wondered what it meant to be Japanese and what
it meant to be Western. A common response, although posed in often
radically different philosophical contexts, was that the Japanese intel-
lectual and spiritual traditions avoided basic polarities within
Western thought. Let us consider how four philosophers responded
along such lines.
First, Nishida Kitarō’s “logic of absolute nothingness” said the
Western dichotomy between empiricism (the “basho of being”) and
idealism (“the basho of relative nothingness”) was based in something
more fundamental and primordial, the “basho of absolute nothing-
ness.” This was the inherently inexpressible domain of the “acting
intuition” (kōiteki chokkan), a bodymind engagement with reality that
can be abstracted in the direction of the physical world (body) of
empiricism or in the direction of the intellectual world (mind) of ide-
alism. In itself, however, the acting intuition is neither pole, but the
inexpressible acting-feeling-thinking at their ground. This is not
unlike Kūkai’s bodymind esoteric praxis as the basis for all exoteric
distinctions. Second, Watsuji’s “betweenness” (aidagara) had a simi-
lar function for ethics instead of epistemology. He maintained there
was an emptiness (kū) between the individual and the collective.
Truly ethical actions occur by preserving the dialectical tension (the
“double negation”) between the polarities, an oscillation between the
existential freedom of the individual and the traditional values of the
collective. Third, as a philosopher of science and logic, Tanabe
Hajime developed his “logic of the specific” to explain the logical need
for there to be a middle ground between the universal and individual.
This had implications for his philosophical anthropology. To analyze
accurately the nature of human existence, Tanabe maintained, we
must recognize what lies between and mediates our individuality and
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 35

our universal humanity, namely, our belonging to a specific society,

culture, and nation. Without that middle logical category, we cannot
understand how to live out our lives as fully human beings. Lastly,
Kuki Shūzō was an aesthetician who argued along similar lines.
Critiquing Heidegger’s polarity between being itself (Sein) and the
individual existence of human being (Dasein), Kuki emphasized
something between, what he called the “being of a people” or “ethnic
existence” (minzoku sonzai). Kuki thought this realm of being was the
proper domain of aesthetic value because it resided not in some uni-
versal, eternal Beauty, nor in the relativistism of the individualistic
artist. Instead, like the aesthetic of iki for the Edoites of the
Tokugawa period, aesthetic value is most real as the expression of a
specific culture at a specific moment in history.
The common thread in all four philosophers is their insistence that
the way to harmonize opposites is not to subordinate one to the
other, nor to transcend or sublate the tension between the two.
Rather, it is to recognize that the polarities are not primary at all, but
instead two poles abstracted out of a bodymind experience underlying
them both. This kind of philosophy lives in the in medias res, instead
of the interplay of discrete opposites.

The Possible Relevance of Japanese Philosophy to World Philosophy

Is there value for Westerners in studying Japanese philosophy

beyond the goal of achieving a better understanding of Japanese cul-
ture and its intellectual development? Does Japanese philosophy have
something to contribute today to philosophy in general beyond
Japan’s national borders? Two points stand out: the model of holo-
graphic thinking and the emphasis on cultural existence. As suggested
earlier, the holographic model has an intriguing relevance to our post-
modern fragmentation and de-centeredness. The contemporary West
has not yet fully engaged and explored the holographic model of the
relation of the whole-in-every-part. In postmodern theory, the holo-
graphic relation is usually no more than a “trope” or “figure of speech”
36 Thomas P. KASULIS

like synecdoche or metonymy. For today’s critical theory, the part can,
at most, be a symbol for the whole. The holographic relation in
Japanese philosophy is not merely symbolic or a figure of speech, how-
ever. It is an ontological relation. Just as the genetic blueprint for my
entire body is physically in every cell of my body, just as whole pattern
is explicitly in every part of the pattern of a fractal or recursive set, the
holographic theory implies the part is not just a symbol of the whole,
but really contains the whole in some sense.
In deconstructing the hegemony of the “systematic” and “univer-
sal,” postmodernism has made room for the formerly marginalized
and subaltern voices to be heard. Difference can no longer be sub-
sumed under the homogenizing, imperialist, and patriarchal struc-
tures of authority that use dominance to impose harmony. Yet, in its
success, postmodernism leaves us with a fractured, splintered world
devoid of real communication and cooperation. Our intellectual con-
versation is one in which each position takes its turn in expressing its
voice. We listen to each view, but do not engage the view of the other
because that would deny the integrity of its alterity. It is as if our con-
versations were no more than a set of self-introductions at the begin-
ning of roundtable discussion that never gets to the discussion itself.
We have become fractions without a whole to be a fraction of. The
holographic model suggests, though, the fraction is not just a fraction;
it is also a fractal. By examining carefully the individual, unique, and
distinctive piece, we can find the whole. That relation is not one in
which the whole swallows up the part as in the hegemonic modernism
we have discarded. Instead, the holographic is visible when the whole
and part resonate together. We discover our commonality even while
delving into our distinctiveness.
This leads to the issue of cultural existence. We live in medias res
and that must be where philosophy must begin. No philosophy can
transcend its culture, but out of that cultural embeddedness, abstrac-
tion reveals the poles of individuality and universality. This individu-
ality and universality must, therefore, recognize that they do not exist
of themselves, but only as rarefied aspects of the primordial “between-
ness” that is our cultural existence, our bodymind experience. As a
 Writing a History of Japanese philosophy 37

strictly logical category, individuality is everywhere the same—

uniqueness. As a strictly logical category, universality is everywhere
the same—oneness. What really makes us human is not our unique-
ness or our oneness. It is the particular social, cultural, historical, eth-
nic, national way we live our lives in the midst of it all, as the in
medias res. Humanity is not what we are; it is how we are.