Insight from a Recumbent Position

Das Dämonische in Oshida Sigeto

Abstract

Oshida Shigeto was a peculiar Dominican monk who founded a unique community Takamori-sōan as an immanent self-criticism to cure the ossified Catholicism. His religious philosophy worked positively as a devil’s advocate as a result. Oshida listened intensively to what he called koto-kotoba, proto-word derived from the primordial dimension of an existence that can be found in the midst of nature instead of through an accumulation of dogma and theology. His language and behavior are not intellectual but are fundamentally spiritual with such a strange self-image of lying on the grass that appears on the first page of one of his books. The recumbent position offers the dimension of das Dämonische that is often passed over in the sharp contrast between a self-constructing standing position and a self-renouncing sitting position. This type of demonic vision does not intend to launch some opposing reaction but rather to express sympathy for the weak in the thoroughly passive posture of decumbence.