Tominaga Nakamoto

Who They Were

Tominaga Nakamoto (富永仲基) was a Japanese philosopher of the Edo period (1603 – 1868), born in Osaka in 1715 and dead by 1746, at around thirty years of age. He was the son of a merchant family and worked as a merchant himself, but his lasting contribution was intellectual: a hard, sceptical critique of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto that treated their sacred histories as human documents rather than revealed truth.

He belonged to a rationalist current of Japanese thought and argued for a position he called mukishinron (無鬼神論, mukishinron — "no gods or demons"), a Japanese form of atheism. He was educated at the Kaitokudō (懐徳堂, Kaitokudō), an academy founded by members of Osaka's mercantile class, and was pushed out of it not long after the age of fifteen.

Life and Career

Tominaga was born in Osaka in 1715, in the fifth year of the Shōtoku era (正徳, Shōtoku). His family were merchants, and he remained one, running his business in the same city where he had studied.

The Kaitokudō gave him an unusual education for a townsman of his day. Founded by merchants rather than by warriors or clerics, it stressed objectivity and the careful weighing of evidence — habits Tominaga pushed far beyond what the academy's teachers intended. His heterodoxy, and the fact that he turned his critical method against the dominant philosophies of the institution itself, made him an awkward presence. He was ostracised shortly after the age of fifteen.

Only a few of his works survive. Three are known by content: Okina no Fumi (翁の文, "The Writings of an Old Man"), Shutsujō Gogo (出定後語, "Words after Enlightenment"), a textual criticism of the Buddhist sutras, and a third group of writings on ancient musical scales, ancient measurements, and poetry. Roughly nine other titles are known. One of them, Setsuhei (説弊, "Discussions on Error"), has been lost; it may have been the reason he was separated from the Kaitokudō.

His critical stance rested on a simple and corrosive observation. Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto all appealed to history to justify themselves, but the history they appealed to was, in his reading, a pseudo-justification for innovations — each sect dressing up new doctrine as ancient inheritance in order to outdo its rivals. He pointed to the Confucian Masters, who disagreed among themselves over whether human nature is partially good, neither good nor bad, wholly good, or inherently bad, and to the later interpreters who tried to reconcile all of them into one system. Of Shinto he was especially harsh, attacking its habit of secret instruction: "hiding is the beginning of lying and stealing", as he put it.

In his study of the Buddhist scriptures he argued that the Hinayana texts preceded the Mahayana texts, and — more radically — that the vast majority of the Hinayana scriptures were themselves composed long after the life of Gautama Buddha. He also showed awareness of Manichaeism and of its possible relationship with Buddhism.

Why They Matter

Tominaga's dating of the Buddhist scriptures anticipated conclusions that modern scriptural scholarship would reach centuries later. That alone makes Shutsujō Gogo an early and indigenous example of Buddhist studies, produced in Osaka by a merchant in his twenties, without access to the European philological tradition that would later be credited with the method.

His wider importance lies in the way he applied historical criticism across traditions rather than within one. He did not defend Buddhism against Confucianism, or Shinto against both; he asked why each claimed antiquity, and found the claim to be a move in a competition for power and prestige. Michael Pye has argued that Tominaga represents a non-European example of religious studies. Jason Josephson has challenged that reading, arguing that Tominaga does not treat non-Buddhist traditions as systematic religions in the first place. The disagreement is itself a measure of how unusual his position was.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 富永仲基. It is read in kana as とみなが なかもと, and in romaji as Tominaga Nakamoto. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

富 (とみ, tomi) — wealth, riches, abundance. It is the first element of the surname.

永 (なが, naga) — long, eternal, everlasting. Together with 富 it forms the surname 富永, Tominaga.

仲 (なか, naka) — middle, intermediary, relationship between people. It is the first element of the given name.

基 (もと, moto) — foundation, basis, base. Together with 仲 it forms the given name 仲基, Nakamoto.

Note that the surname element 永 is read naga here rather than the more familiar ei or e, and that the given-name element 基 is read moto rather than ki. Japanese names frequently use readings that differ from a kanji's most common pronunciation, which is why the kana reading is worth learning alongside the characters.

Legacy

Tominaga died in 1746, in his early thirties. The loss of Setsuhei means that the work most closely tied to his break with the Kaitokudō cannot be read, and the surviving corpus is small: Okina no Fumi, Shutsujō Gogo, and the three technical writings on musical scales, measurements and poetry.

What survived was enough to secure him a place as one of the Edo period's sharpest critics of inherited authority. His insistence that a tradition's claim to antiquity be tested rather than accepted, and his willingness to apply the same test to Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto alike, mark him as an outlier in a period usually described through its schools and lineages. The debate over whether to call his work religious studies, and over how far his critique of the three traditions really extended, continues among scholars of Japanese intellectual history.