3 - Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

On a different context, Stanley Tambiah (1985) has convincingly criticized the
presuppositions behind Frazer’s idea of sympathetic magic, and has shown that a magic
language, or a language used for magic purposes, is not “mumbo-jumbo shot through
with mystical ideas resistant to rational examination” (Tambiah 1985: 35). On the
contrary, the magic use of language reveals the working of metaphoric thought and a
complex association between the semantic properties of the objects evoked in magic and
the participants to those rituals. Tambiah’s interpretation can be heuristically useful to
interpret ancient Japanese uses of language in ritual and magical contexts, including the
issue of kotodama.
As we have seen at the beginning of this lecture, the first gomitsu practice described
by Kakuban, the simplest one, consists in chanting and memorizing shingon. Let us
investigate the theoretical presuppositions of this kind of “easy practices” through the
instruments given us by modern philosophy of language.
Mantras serve to create a sacred communicational situation; in addition, they are
also used in ritual interaction to address the deities by asking, making statements,
praising, ordering, promising—in other words, they essentially an illocutionary
purpose. The use of shingon generates (or is believed to generate which, for our
purposes here, amounts to the same thing) effects that are well-defined and known in
advance, such as entering samådhi, receiving worldly benefits, to be reborn in a Pure
Land, or to become a buddha. These effects can be attributed to mantras’ perlocutionary
force. In this sense, the chanting (voiced or mental) of shingon and darani is not just an
utterance or an act of thought, but a full-fledged activity that produces effects on reality.
This particular power of mantras is based on Indian traditional linguistic doctrines.
As Frits Staal writes, “in India language is not something with which you name
something. It is something with which you do something” (Staal 1979b: 9); also for this
reason, in India “language was generally approached within a ritual perspective” (10).
We cannot understand the attribution of this kind of illocutionary power to
shingon without reference to the Buddhist concept of karma and the esoteric doctrine of
the Three Secrets (sanmitsu) we have discussed before. The presence of language among
the factors of rebirth/suffering and liberation indicates an underlying theory of
language as activity. As an activity, language is not independent from karma and is
new linguistic practices such as the Nenbutsu recitation (in Toyoda 1980: 180). The Shingon scholar Højø
Kenzø, after an initial skepticism, has recognized the possibility that K¥kai’s linguistic thought might
have been influenced by kotodama conceptions: Højø 1984a: 69-70.
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