Paulus Kaufmann - Panel 13 ENOJP Paris
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 08/03/2018

“Kūkai as Philosopher” — Paulus Kaufmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The US-American metaphysician David Lewis characterised a philosopher as someone who doubts something that everybody else accepts as an evident truth. In this sense we can confidently assume that the Japanese monk Kūkai (774–835) was a philosopher. He not only doubted what most people believed about the world, but he also promoted the new positions of esoteric Buddhism in Japan that were highly controversial among the country’s intellectuals of the time. His treatise Sokushinjobutsugi, for example, starts with the question how Kūkai can teach that we can become Buddhas in this very body while all other schools agree that it takes eons until one finally reaches awakening. Kūkai thus was a thinker who called into doubt apparently self-evident positions and his courage in challenging common opinions seems to be a good reason to call him a philosopher. And this is actually what many people—such as Takagi Shingen, Thomas Kasulis, John Krummel, Gregor Paul, Peter Pörtner and others—do. There might be reasons, however, to doubt this common assumption. It could be argued—and actually has been argued—that Kūkai was not really a philosopher for the following reasons: 
1. Kūkai was a promoter of the magical rituals of esoteric Buddhism.
 2. Kūkai did not write philosophical treatises but primarily commentarial works. 
3. Kūkai was very much engaged in political activities, trying to secure political and financial support for his school. 
4. Kūkai did not create new ideas, but only transmitted esoteric Buddhism to Japan. 
5. In calling Kūkai a philosopher we might unconsciously follow the politicallymotivated project of Meiji-Buddhist apologetics to establish Buddhism as philosophy and not as religion. 
In my talk I will try to answer the questions if and in how far these considerations should prevent us from calling Kūkai a philosopher. My attempt to answer this question makes it necessary to ask further and more general questions that are crucial for any study of (premodern) Japanese philosophy, namely the questions “What is philosophy?” “What is our interest in distinguishing philosophy from other intellectual activities?” “What is a stake when we attribute or refrain from attributing the adjective “philosophical” to a text, to a person or a discourse? 

This talk took place at the 3rd Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy in Paris, Université Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris 1) and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) from November 2-4, 2017.

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