Abstract
Terms like spiritual and spirituality are receiving unprecedented attention in Japan today. There is no doubt that the popularity of these words is connected with some unique (probably cross-cultural) social phenomenon. In English these terms have gone through some transformation and expansion in their range of usage: (1) the monastic spirituality of Christianity, (2) the inner spirituality of Christians in general, (3) the spirituality of other religions, and (4) extrareligious spirituality or the new spirituality. The Japanese, the term reisei _??_??__ was first used by such Shinto thinkers as URABE Kanetomo in the Kamakura period and HIRATA Atsutane in the Edo period to describe the human essence. SUZUKI Daisetsu applied this usage to Buddhism in discussing the transcending of the dualism of the mental and physical. In modern Japan, terms like spiritual and spirituality rendered in katakana are used with characteristic nuances in a wide variety of areas. For example, in the fields of medicine and welfare they are related to ideas of the meaning and purpose of life, and in psychiatry and psychotherapy they are often used in the senses of self-transcending or self-actualization.
A decisive turning point in this study will be achieved by examining the root term spirit, and the Japanese terms that correspond to it, including rei _??_ or tama. The linguistic root of the word spirit (ruah, pneuma, spiritus) is connected with wind or the breath, from which it acquires the sense of an intrinsic principle of life. The Chinese character rei _??_ originally refers to the descent of a deity into a priestess when praying for rain, and the meaning of the native Japanese word tama is a kind of free-floating spirit that is accompanied by a perfectly round mental image. Both of these concern inner realities of a different order than the physical or corporeal. From the point of view of a trichotomy of spirit, mind, and body that recognizes the innateness of spirit, three separate uses of the term spiritual can be discerned: the innermost dimension of man, activities that return to that point, and conversely activities that emerge from that point. The possibility of establishing a philosophical anthropology of spirituality is deeply intertwined with a fundamental transition to a view that treats the spirit as the innermost structural dimension of man.
