L’exégèse des mythes du Nihon shoki chez Yoshikawa Koretari : entre allégorie et théologie de la présence

Abstract

In tune with the anti-allegorical stance of the Kokugakusha, most modern specialists of mythology consider the interpretation of myths advocated by the Yoshida school and its successors an artificial construct so dependent on Buddhist, Confucianist, and yin-yang concepts that it is alien to the very nature of the theo-cosmological narratives of the Nara period. The aim of the present article is to rehabilitate the hermeneutics of myth developed by esoteric Shinto in the course of its long history of commentaries on the Jindaikan. Special attention is devoted to Yoshikawa Koretari, whose exegetical texts can be read as the grand “coda” of the Yoshida tradition as a whole. The concept of “divine words” appears to be the keystone of this interpretative system, and the Yoshida school hermeneuts radically change its meaning, giving it a wide spectrum: the “divine words” stop being limited to punctual utterances (prophetic or ritual) to acquire a complex syntactic dimension, referring to extensive narratives transmitting a secret knowledge to the men. The semantic density of the divine words explains the role played in the Yoshida schools by a unique, multilayered etymology (connotations borrowed from Buddhist, neo-Confucian, and vernacular cultures coexist in the decoding process), and the importance of theurgic practices (understood, as in the neo-Platonician tradition, in their double movement, descending and ascending). We then proceed to identify the conceptual tools produced (or borrowed) by the Yoshida schools to interpret the cosmological narrative. The fusion of different gods, associations between god names and neo-Confucian notions, numerological games, and systematic parallelism between the cosmogony and the theogony are the most common hermeneutical procedures. But the conceptual operator mishō/ishō plays an even more decisive role in the Yoshidian interpretative strategies: it allows us to distinguish different moments of the creation myth while, at the same time, playing the role of an ontologico-semantic tool (ritual artifacts described in the myth possess an invisible and a visible dimension). These functions are, in turn, subordinated to an original theological thesis. Far from being erased by the emergence of the forms in the cosmogonic process, the formless (the marokare as well as the pre-named Kuni no tokotachi) continue to exist/ insist in the world as a hidden dynamic principle. This theology of presence (the divine voice is inscribed in the text in the same way as the kami are immanent to the world and man’s heart) translates into an ethical system based on a reinterpretation of the virtue of humility (tsutsushimi) in gogyō terms (tsuchikane no hiketsu). Far-fetched as it may seem, this allegorical interpretation of the Jindaikan is paradoxically faithful to the polysemy and the narrative quality of the myth, to the point that it deserves the qualification of “mytheology.”