The esotericism of language : Kûkai's (774-835) ideas on language

This year's lecture is, appropriately enough, a continuation of the inquiry into the " Philology of Japanese Civilization ". It will be recalled that the first lecture focused on the Buddhist-themed Japanese poems composed by an unjustly neglected^{13th-14th-century} monk as a poet, Son.en. The second lecture was devoted to " poems about the gods " (jingi-ka/uta 神祇歌) as a rubric in official poetry anthologies; we have tried above all to highlight the way in which these poems, a priori dedicated to the native Japanese gods, quite rapidly came into harmony with Buddhist-themed poems (shakkyô-ka 釋教歌), which constituted a parallel rubric in these same anthologies, to establish a dialogue or complementary relationship between the two categories, in which the poems on the gods highlighted the presence of deities in the world of men and their nature as "vestigial" emanations (suijaku 垂迹) of buddhas and bodhisattvas, while the rubric known as "Buddhist doctrine" (shakkyô) provided the doctrinal, extra-mundane basis for this descent from the transcendental into the immanent. These first two lectures were therefore concrete case studies demonstrating how the Japanese language established itself as the vehicle for the passage of Buddhist doctrines into Japanese culture, not only through the religious message it poetically conveyed, but also through the internal, semantic transformations that took place within it. In particular, we have demonstrated how Chinese Buddhist scriptural sources and the very terms used in these sources were represented by traditional Japanese poetic vocabulary.