Hermeneutics of Acrostics: From Kūkai to Tsurayuki

Abstract

This study is an attempt to show how the poetic figure of the acrostic was constructed in ninth-century Japan as a tantric semiological implement in a poetic discourse, in which poets working in Sino-Japanese or kanabun constructed kami cultic ritual in various forms and contexts within the broad framework of Kūkai’s tantric Buddhist semiology. Three poetic texts, a Sino-Japanese poem by Kūkai and two prose-poem texts from Kokin wakashū and/or Ise monogatari, all of which contain an acrostic, are analysed and interpreted, and evidence from several of Kūkai’s expositions on semiology (philosophy of language) and hermeneutics, is adduced in support. The suggestion is that the acrostic was construed as an articulation of Kūkai’s metaphor for the limitlessness of meanings of the mantra syllables, the intersection of vertical and horizontal meanings, which was associated with the experience of nyūga ganyū 入我我入 (Skt. ahaṃkāra).