The word community is often translated to the Filipino word “pamayanan.” “Pamayanan,” in turn, comes from the root word “bayan.” The word “bayan” is what came immediately to mind after reading this statement from George Williams:
For Imaoka community had four dimensions, as if legs to a table, a metaphor for personal, local, national and international. The perspective for all four was a cosmic interconnection of all beings, animate and inanimate, with the universe.
The word “bayan” is a metonymy, which is “a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated” (Merriam-Webster).
Perhaps the Japanese word kyōkai had so many possible meanings, as illustrated by your explanation, because, like the word “bayan,” it is also a metonym. In kyōkai’s case, it could mean a church, a physical structure, or a community. In the case of “bayan,” it, too, has multiple layers of meaning.
In old times, the word was used to refer to:
- The people who live in a place.
- The place where one is born.
- The space between earth and sky.
- A certain period of time.
- A name of a certain plant.
Eventually, the word was taken out of these old usage and applied to the following:
- A synonym for country or nation.
- A political unit of organization composed of smaller units (i.e., town).
What I find very interesting about this Filipino word is its historical ability to capture the personal, the local, and the national, much like the Japanese word kyōkai, as George explained.
- “Bayan” is the root word of “taong bayan,” which means “a person of the bayan.” (personal)
- A local community (i.e., a town) can be called a bayan. (local)
- The national community can also be called a bayan. (national)
The only thing I’ve never heard is the word applied in the international sphere. But since the concept is flexible and ever-changing, I don’t see how it couldn’t eventually encompass it.
One more thing noticeable with this Filipino word is that it is situated in an exact place. Its attachment to place, I think, is rooted in an ancient animistic worldview wherein the land and the animate and inanimate beings there are part of the “bayan” and have equal and sometimes even higher standing than humans. This, of course, ties well with the “universal cooperative society” idea in jiyū shūkyō, something that was unfortunately lost after the arrival of Roman Catholicism and Western Civilization.