Studies on Indian Philosophy in Japan, 1963-1987

Abstract

The history of the study of Indian philosophy in Japan may be considered to have started on December 25, 1879, when Hara Tanzan (18191892), a lecturer at the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature at the University of Tokyo, initiated a course of Lectures on Buddhist Texts. But it was to be more than twenty years later that the study of Indian philosophy in the truly modern sense of the term may be said to have begun. In 1884, Nanjo Bunyu (1849-1927) returned to Japan after having studied Sanskrit for eight years under F. Max Muller (1823-1900) at the University of Oxford, and the following year, having been appointed lecturer at the University of Tokyo, he started a course in Sanskrit. Already in the early Heian period the siddham studies of China had been introduced to Japan from the T'ang and had been continued in an unbroken tradition up until that time. But Nanjo was the first to introduce European Sanskrit studies to Japan, and he laid the firm foundations for the modern study of Sanskrit and Buddhism in Japan. This current was further consolidated by Takakusu Junjiro (1886-1945). He, too, pursued the study of Sanskrit language and literature under Max Muller, as Nanjo had done, and also studied Pali, Indian philosophy, Tibetan, and Mongolian at German universities in Kiel, Berlin, and Leipzig, after which he returned to Japan in 1897 and began lecturing in Sanskrit as a lecturer at the University of Tokyo the following year. In 1901 a chair of Sanskrit was established at the University of Tokyo, the first in Japan, with Takakusu being appointed its first professor. Then, in 1906, he initiated a course in the of Indian Philosophy and Religion, which was to become the starting point for the study of Indian philosophy in Japan. This course was taken over by Kimura Taiken (1881-1930) in 1912, and the draft notes for the course were published in 1914 as a joint work entitled Indo tetsugaku shukyo shi (The History of Indian Philosophy and Religion). This was the first work in Japanese to provide a conspectus of the history of Indian philosophy and religion from the time of the Rgveda to the age of the sutras that not only was based on secondary sources in Western languages, but also referred directly to the original texts. Subsequently, this tradition of scholarship was carried over and further developed by Ui Hakuju (1882-1963) and Nakamura Hajime (1912-), and today the study of Indian philosophy is being pursued primarily at, apart from the University of Tokyo, institutions such as Kyoto, Hokkaido, Tohoku, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyushu Universities. The study of Indian Sengaku Mayeda