記紀の天地創造 : 「天地初発之時」の解釈をめぐって

Kojiki begins with the phrase '天地初発之時'. There has been controversy about how to read it since the Edo period, but it remains unsolved. The aim of this paper is to focus on this problem and explain its significance as compared with the Bible. As is well known, the Bible begins with the following sentence: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It is obvious that God in the Bible existed earlier than the heaven and the earth because He is an absolute creator of all things in the universe. However, gods in Japanese mythology must have come into existence after heaven at least, if we interpret the phrase '天地初発之時' to mean "when in the beginning the heaven is separated from the earth". Norinaga Motoori excluded the influence of Chinese culture and interpreted this phrase as "when the heaven and the earth begin". Masao Maruyama discovered the spirit of ancient Japanese by giving the reading of 'hatsu' to the word '発', which expresses movement in a given direction. As a result, it became possible for gods to be generated one after another. Therefore Japanese mythology belongs to the 'Generate-Grow' type rather than the 'Create-Generate' type of mythology. The former is to be acknowledged not only in the mythological world, but also in the historical consciousness of the Japanese from ancient times to modem times.