Keichū

Who They Were

Keichū (契沖, 1640–1701) was a Buddhist priest and a scholar of Kokugaku, the movement dedicated to the study of Japan's classical texts and native traditions, during the mid-Edo period. He was born in Amagasaki in 1640, in the seventeenth year of the Kan'ei era (寛永). His grandfather had been a personal retainer of the warlord Katō Kiyomasa, but his father was a rōnin, a masterless samurai, from the Amagasaki fief. Keichū's life bridged the worlds of the priesthood and philology, and his work would reshape how the Japanese classics were read.

Life and Career

At the age of thirteen, Keichū left home to become an acolyte of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. He studied at Kaijō, a hall within Myōhōji temple in Imasato, Osaka. He later attained the rank of Ajari, a senior teacher in Shingon ritual, at Mount Kōya, the sect's mountain headquarters. He then became chief priest at Mandara-in in Ikutama, Osaka. During this period he befriended the poet-scholar Shimonokōbe Chōryū (下河辺長流, 1624–1686), a connection that would prove decisive for his later career.

Keichū disliked the worldly duties attached to his clerical posts. After wandering through the Kinki region, he returned to Mount Kōya. There he was deeply influenced by the thought of Kūkai, the founder of the Shingon sect, and he also read widely in the Japanese classics under the patronage of Fuseya Shigeta (伏屋重賢), an arts patron in Izumi Province. He later served as chief priest at Myōhōji, and spent his final years at Enju'an, a hermitage in Kōzu in the Province of Settsu. He died there on April 3, 1701.

Why They Matter

Keichū's scholarship set a new standard for the study of the Japanese classics. When Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the daimyō of Mito, decided to sponsor an edition of the Man'yōshū, the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, he commissioned Shimonokōbe Chōryū to undertake the project. Chōryū was the heir to the learning of Kinoshita Chōshōshi (木下長嘯子, 1569–1649), a poet and Man'yō expert. But Chōryū's dilatory habits, compounded by illness and finally death, left the project unfinished. The task fell to Keichū, his close friend.

The result was the Man'yō Daishōki (万葉集大匠記, 1687–1690), a monumental commentary on the Man'yōshū. The work had a profound effect on Kokugaku scholarship. Keichū applied methods borrowed from Chinese Kaozheng philology, a tradition of rigorous textual criticism, with strict empiricism. He used this hermeneutic to critique Buddhism on philological grounds and instead located Shinto as the indigenous religion of Japan. His approach treated the ancient texts as evidence to be examined, not as ornaments to be admired.

His Waji Shōranshō (1693, A Treatise on the Proper Way to Write Japanese Words) challenged the standard orthographical conventions that had been set by the poet Fujiwara no Teika in the Kamakura period. Keichū reconstructed distinctions in the old Japanese lexicon based on the earliest texts, correcting centuries of accumulated scribal habit. In addition to these major works, he wrote the Kōganshō (厚顔抄, 1691, A Brazen-faced Treatise), the Kokin Yozaishō, the Seigodan, the Genchū Shūi, and the Hyakunin Isshu Kaikanshō.

The Name in Japanese

The name 契沖 is read in Japanese as しゃく けいちゅう (Shaku Keichū). The romaji form is "Shaku Keichū." The first element, 契, is a title rather than a personal name: it is the Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit "śākya," referring to the Buddha's clan, and is used as an honorific prefix for Buddhist monks. The second element, 沖, is the given name.

Breaking the name down character by character:

• 契 (shaku): This character means "contract," "pledge," or "to engrave." In this context it functions as the monastic title, derived from the Sanskrit Śākya, the clan of the historical Buddha. It marks the bearer as a member of the Buddhist clergy.

• 沖 (keichū): This character means "open sea" or "offshore." It is the personal name proper. In this word it is read with the on'yomi, the Sino-Japanese reading, as "chū," giving the full name its sound. The character carries a sense of vastness and distance, fitting for a scholar who looked far back into the depths of the Japanese textual tradition.

The full name, Shaku Keichū, thus reads as "the monk Keichū," with the first character signalling his religious vocation and the second his individual identity.

Legacy

Keichū's influence on Kokugaku was immediate and lasting. His empirical method, applied to the Man'yōshū and to the Japanese lexicon, provided a model for later scholars such as Motoori Norinaga, who would build on Keichū's textual foundations. The Man'yō Daishōki remained a standard reference for generations of readers of the Man'yōshū. His insistence on returning to the earliest sources, and on letting the texts speak for themselves, marked a break from the medieval tradition of commentary that had often obscured rather than illuminated the classics. Keichū's work helped establish philology as a rigorous discipline in Japan, and his rehabilitation of Shinto as a distinct native tradition shaped the intellectual landscape of the Edo period and beyond. He died at Enju'an in 1701, but his methods and his texts outlived him, becoming the bedrock of modern Japanese classical studies.