Kūkai and Bhartṛhari: when a word is part of what is real rather than a label for it
Last spring I visited Kōyasan, the mountain monastery Kūkai founded, and sat in on the morning chanting. I don't understand Sanskrit and barely understand the Sino-Japanese readings, but it was obvious the monks didn't treat the syllables as labels for something else. The sounds themselves were the practice.
When I got home I tried to read about Kūkai's view of language. He wrote a short treatise on the meanings of sound, letters and reality, and as far as I can follow, he holds that these three are not separate: the whole cosmos is the Dharma Body expressing itself, and sound and written signs are part of that expression rather than names stuck onto it.
On this site I saw Bhartṛhari described in a similar way, as someone for whom the word is close to the root of reality. Is that a real kinship, or a surface resemblance?
I also think of my grandmother, a devout Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, who said the nembutsu every day. For her the name of Amida was not a description of Amida.