Tominaga our Contemporary

Abstract

Just supposing that the British Council were able to offer lecture tours by the world's great minds of the past, I am sure that names like Aquinas, Chu Hsi or Dōgen would be able to pack an auditorium even now. But in the pub afterwards we would probably find them less easy company, not quite at home in our own times. Reading Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–46), however, one gets the extraordinary but quite palpable feeling of encountering an intelligence every bit as alert and critical as any product of a modern university education – no doubt precisely because by the standards of his own day he was largely selfeducated. To find the entire surviving slim corpus of the writings of this remarkable genius rendered into English by the head of one of our most respected departments of Religious Studies is gratifying indeed, and one hesitates to qualify praise of such a welcome achievement with a note of criticism, especially when the translation is prefaced by a lengthy introduction giving within a limited compass a more than adequate account of Tominaga's all too brief life.