Intersections of religion and literature in pre-modern Japan
Organizer/Chair: Molly Vallor, Stanford University/Rikkyo University
1) Ignacio Quiros, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/Rikkyo University
Sympathetic magic in early Japan: the different modalities of the so-called “spirit of the words”
2) Molly Vallor, Stanford University/Rikkyo University
Between Conversations: Zen and setsuwa in Musō Soseki’s Muchū Mondōshū
3) Sayoko Sakakibara, Stanford University
Localized Motif, Totalized Space: The Shōtoku Cult in Early Modern Japanese Maps
4) David Gundry, Stanford University/Waseda University
When Enlightenment Kills: Ihara Saikaku’s “Heartstrings Plucked on Lake Biwa” as Chigomonogatari
Discussant: Jason Josephson, Williams College
Intersections of religion and literature in pre-modern Japan
Organizer/Chair: Molly Vallor, Stanford University/Rikkyo University
Our panel
explores the intersection of literature and religion in texts spanning
a thousand years of Japanese cultural history, employing complementary
approaches specific to our chosen disciplines: anthropology, religious
studies, geography, history and Japanese literature. Ignacio Quiros
will attempt to reconstruct the early meaning of kotodama (the
spirit of words) by considering use of this term and related words in
the ancient period. Molly Vallor will examine how Musō Soseki fuses
traditional Zen literature with setsuwa in Muchū Mondōshū.
Sayoko Sakakibara will use Edo-period narratives of Prince Shōtoku to
map the geographical development of the Shōtoku cult. David Gundry will
analyze a samurai vendetta tale from Ihara Saikaku’s Budō denraiki as a distorted iteration of the chigomonogatari, a genre of Buddhist enlightenment tales centered on pederastic relationships that end tragically.
1) Ignacio Quiros, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/Rikkyo University
Sympathetic magic in early Japan: the different modalities of the so-called “spirit of the words”
Even a
superficial analysis of the earliest mythological and poetic texts of
Japan will testify to a strong, if rather ill-defined belief, in the
hidden power of the uttered word. This old belief was posited on a
causal relationship between the utterance and its manifestation in
reality. The Japanese term for such a relationship is the compound “kotodama,” which can be roughly translated as “spirit of the words.” Anthropologically speaking, kotodama
is just a sub-variety of Frazer’s sympathetic magic, which is
predicated on the idea that two entities can be related by means of
contiguity, and that it is possible to control the first entity by
manipulating the second. Most of Frazer’s examples suggest that
sympathetic magic is a common feature of primitive tribes and early
societies, and thus not something unique to ancient Japan. Still,
kotodama
is defined in the present day by notions of uniqueness, both religious
and political. I will try here to free the term from such later
ethnocentric-related notions as much as possible, first by limiting my
scope of research to the Nara and early Heian periods. Because the
number of appearances of the term “kotodama” is deceptively
small while the belief itself is quite broad, I will analyse and
compare some of its various modalities, namely kotoage (lifting the words),
kotomuke (words of pacification), kotoyosashi (words of command), and imina (noms tabou). This will hopefully shed some light on the use of the term in its ancient context.
2) Molly Vallor, Stanford University/Rikkyo University
Between Conversations: Zen and setsuwa in Musō Soseki’s Muchū Mondōshū
Conversations in a Dream (Muchū Mondōshū 夢中問答集, 1342) is a sermon in kana based on a series of conversations between Musō Soseki 夢窓疎石 (1275 – 1351) and General Ashikaga Tadayoshi足利直義 (1306 – 1352). This text
illuminates Musō’s role as a spiritual guide to the Ashikaga, detailing his efforts to integrate Zen with the scriptures (kyōzen icchi 教禅一致)
and his teachings on the nature of the secular, political and religious
realms. To popularize his style of Rinzai Zen during the rise of the
Five Mountains (gozan 五山) system, Musō employs a didactic style that is heavily indebted to the tradition of Japanese Buddhist tale literature, or setsuwa 説話. Conversations
draws from a variety of sources, including secular Chinese writings,
Buddhist parables, Zen stories, Japanese and Chinese poetry, and
accounts of gardening and tea-drinking. I will examine several
representative anecdotes from
Conversations as I explore how
their style and content reflect Musō’s dialectical presentation of the
scriptures and Zen. To this end, I will pay special attention to how Conversations borrows, juxtaposes and fuses stylistic elements found in setsuwa
with traditional Zen literature. Finally, I will demonstrate how, in
seeking to justify and advance Rinzai Zen practice from within the
epistemological world of the other schools, Conversations occupies a unique position that is at once inside, outside and between these two literary traditions.
3) Sayoko Sakakibara, Stanford University
Localized Motif, Totalized Space: The Shōtoku Cult in Early Modern Japanese Maps
My paper is
based on the geographical information in a popular Buddhist text of the
seventeenth century and a national map of Japan compiled in the same
period. Since its emergence in the seventh century, the cult of Prince
Shōtoku (573? – 622) evolved in response to the political, religious,
and cultural changes of each age, mirroring the changing demands of the
changing society. As is the case of earlier Shōtoku narratives, the
biography re-compiled in the seventeenth century reflects the religious
and political trends of that same period and led to further
developments of the cult in society. The most striking point is the
geographical expansion of Shōtoku’s activities in this text,
particularly when compared to the earlier narratives. The text reflects
and supports three major trends in the seventeenth century: 1)
nationwide development of the Shōtoku cult, 2) the enthusiasm for
pilgrimage and 3) the geographical understanding of the state through
the enterprise of mapmaking. In this paper, I will pay close attention
to the third trend – the political background of the geographical
development of the Shōtoku cult – by examining maps made in the early
Edo period. By mapping the geographical information in the Shōtoku
texts, I will address the following questions: How were local sites
associated with the Shōtoku cult? In what way did the cult contribute
to the religious network in early Tokugawa Japan? How did the national
project of the Shōhō (1644-1648) mapmaking influence the geographical
understanding in the early Tokugawa Shōtoku narratives?
4) David Gundry, Stanford University/Waseda University
When Enlightenment Kills: Ihara Saikaku’s “Heartstrings Plucked on Lake Biwa” as Chigomonogatari
Ihara Saikaku’s collection of samurai vendetta tales Budō denraiki
(Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior, 1687) begins with a story
in which questions of vengeance feature only in its tacked-on ending;
the main body of “Shintei o hiku Biwa no umi” (Heartstrings Plucked on Lake Biwa) is a bizarre mutation of the chigomonogatari
(“child story”), a genre of Buddhist didactic tale whose protagonists
reach enlightenment after loving a boy and then losing him to an early
death, an experience that brings home to them the ephemerality of all
phenomena and the uselessness of emotional attachment. In
“Heartstrings,” on the other hand, the protagonist enjoys the favors of
not one but two youths, who uncannily resemble each other and sleep on
either side of him, and his enlightenment precedes and ultimately leads to their deaths. In this presentation I will examine the ways in which Saikaku’s text turns the chigomonogatari
on its head, much as other Saikaku narratives appropriate and distort
materials drawn from various literary classics and from Confucian
morality tales, a strategy apparently taken from haikai
poetry, the genre in which Saikaku began his literary career, which borrows the tropes and forms of waka
poetry while systematically violating the courtly rules of decorum governing
that genre, by no means exclusively to comic effect.
Discussant: Jason Josephson, Williams College