Nakamura Hajime

Abstract

Nakamura Hajime was perhaps one of the most gifted scholars in the twentieth century, able to move from one area of specialty to another with equal ease and authority. He is widely acknowledged as a scholar of great accomplishment, even to the extent that the output of his work is said to easily equal that of a hundred scholars. Ronald Burr, in his editorial preface, remarks: “He stands in a tradition of scholars who have held the chair of philosophy at Tokyo University, and who are of astonishingly high caliber in the amount and quality of the scholarship they have produced” (Burr 1992: ix). It was his early works such as A History of the Early Vedānta Philosophy (1950–1956) and Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (1948–1949) that brought about a breakthrough in his early career and made him an internationally acclaimed thinker. He expanded the horizon of his research into Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and European thought, cutting across the Eurasian continent. His interest in human thought culminated in the comparative analysis of human thought, both East and West. In the field of comparative philosophy, Nakamura talks about its methodology by giving an example of the central philosophy of Buddhism. In Buddhism there is the theory of “12 links of causality.” This has 12 items beginning with “ignorance,” “karmic formation,” “consciousness,” etc. Although this theory is specific to Buddhism alone, items such as “decay and death,” “birth,” “ignorance,” or “delusion” are the problems of any culture. In other words, they are the universal problems of mankind. Comparative philosophy or thought has, as its target, such universal problems, or the problems that became common to both East and West. Nakamura had a clear vision as to why such a process of comparison in philosophy or thought was needed. He was firmly convinced that if the studies concerning philosophy were to become meaningful as something that would truly come alive, one should abandon the attitude that one’s theory was true and others were false; and it is imperative that people must have self-introspection and speak out mutually.