The book stated that “without language, we cannot think.” As a Japanese student, this sentence puzzled me deeply.
In Japanese, the English verb think is divided into two distinct verbs:
-
考える（to reason, to think logically）
-
思う（to feel, to have an intuition or impression）
English does not have a dedicated verb for the second meaning. Because of this, the textbook’s claim felt misleading to me. Even without words, we can still “feel” or “sense” something—so how could language be a prerequisite for all forms of thinking? This early confusion planted the first seed of my later theory.
A second seed came from a familiar childhood game: janken (rock–paper–scissors). Its three‑way circular structure—A beats B, B beats C, C beats A—resembles a self‑contained world of relations. I later learned that similar three‑way games exist in Southeast Asia and China. This suggested to me that triadic, circulating structures are not uniquely Japanese but part of a broader human pattern, even if Western thought tends to imagine the world in more linear or binary terms.
The final inspiration came from Yogācāra Buddhism (唯識), which teaches that the world we perceive is nothing more than what appears within consciousness. This idea helped me articulate a structure in which:
-
the world exists within language,
-
the person exists within the world,
-
and language exists within the person.
These three layers form a continuous loop rather than a hierarchy. From these early experiences—an English textbook, a children’s game, and Buddhist philosophy—my theory of Circulatory Existence gradually emerged.