3 - Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

nature itself of shittangaku is problematic for modern scholarship. Briefly put, most of
shittangaku was essentially “wrong.” Not just its mythological assumptions, but also
and especially its knowledge of Sanskrit, too vague or simply mistaken, make
shittangaku a sort of “imaginary science,” [check book by Mandel, invented script]
rather than a discipline to be undertaken scientifically.
However, in spite of these problems and objective limitations, it would be wrong
to ignore or dismiss a discipline that played such an important role in esoteric
Buddhism and Japanese culture in general. In particular, Japanese esoteric Buddhism
has developed numerous and highly systematic doctrines and practices concerning the
shittan characters. In fact, most sources existing today on shittan characters and
shittangaku come from Japan, where this writing system obviously played a role much
more important than it did in China or Korea. It is the intellectual world of shittangaku
that will be the main subject of this section of the present lecture.
2.2. An Esoteric Grammatology
Originally, the study of shittan was meant to give indications on the pronunciation
of the Indian characters in which mantras were written and on the grammar of Sanskrit
as a tool to understand their meaning. Esoteric Buddhism turned Shittan studies into a
mystical linguistics, estranged from the living language of India and with increasingly
important ritual and initiatory features. Scholars stress that shittangaku is useful to
learn ancient and medieval Indian and Chinese glottology (see for example Bodman
1978); however, few have emphasized the fact that the Shittan script was used to write,
to give a visual, “physical” shape to the absolute language which is the subject of
esoteric Buddhist semiotics. Here precisely lies our interest in Shittan studies.
The limits of ordinary language and the essentially non-linguistic nature of
Dharma make it impossible to explain the contents of the esoteric enlightenment in
everyday words. Esoteric thinkers, however, thought that it was possible to give shape
to the reality of the esoteric universe by employing particular signs and images, in
particular the mandala and the representations of the deities it contains. Shittan, when
treated as esoteric “ideographs,” that is, iconic signs of an absolute nature which are
characterized by the identity of their shapes, sounds, meanings, and referents, can fill
the gap separating language (which explains superficially but does not “represent”)
from visual signs (which represent but do not explain). The Shittan esoteric script thus
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