Denmin Tao
Kansai University

Although Japan has a long tradition in the study of the canonical scriptures of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism since the 5th century, Tominaga Nakamoto was perhaps the first one who made critical textual study of them. In his trace for the historical process of the formation and transformation of those canons and commentaries, Tominaga found that a basic human desire of "making a difference" and "adding something new" ("kajo" in Japanese) was the underlying cause for the accumulative scriptural writings by scholars of many generations. He also realized the reason that there have been so many different views on various issues was because each one was situated in a par! ticular given position in terms of time, place, and availability of information. And more importantly, he paid great attention to the complexity and ambiguity of languages and ways of expressions, and coined a linguistic guiding principle of "Sanbutsu gorui" to help scholars to get the possible true meanings from the texts according to their contexts. A lonely scholar of his time, however, Tominaga did not get much attention from his contemporaries. He was discovered and highly appraised in Meiji Japan by Nato Konan, the leading scholar of the Kyoto Sinological school, and had a considerable impact on the works of Naito and his disciples including Takeuchi Yoshio.