Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to consider the various sets of beliefs appearing in the Heian-period source material as being intimately related, by means of an approach that posits an episteme generating various modes of thought as the unifying centre of their worldview.

Paper long abstract:

As part of my PhD project, I aim to demonstrate that beliefs in the "supernatural", such as evil spirits, were embedded in a broader domain of beliefs in pestilence-causing and other harmful deities, and more abstract notions of external influences, which can be collectively subsumed under the term "meta-physical", and were far more integrated into the complex of beliefs and knowledge in the Heian period than is currently recognised. They formed an integral constituent of the relations and modes of interaction between humans and deities and their ritual context. In order to describe the various meta-physical beliefs and ritual responses, the objective is to find an alternative approach that unifies the different spheres of belief, which were almost certainly not distinguished as such at the time, and avoids conventional categories such as "religion" and "superstition" that are not consistent with the Heian-period cosmology.

The proposition is to develop an approach to the Heian-period episteme, as a set of underlying principles deeply rooted in the nobility's mind-set and thought on an unconscious level, which governed certain interpretive structures, and as the unifying centre of their worldview, expressing their ontology. Such an approach seems feasible when considering that the different strands of belief and fields of knowledge were all intimately related and seem to have relied on the same fundamental principles. Some of these reflect their origins in Chinese modes of thought that had been introduced as part of the imported Chinese culture and the adoption of state-building mechanisms. As a consequence, such a model could elucidate the methods of ascribing meaning in specific contexts and explain inherent connections between certain modes of thought that may not be apparent on the surface level. This applies, for instance, to the subset of meta-physical beliefs that represent a disparate set of elements superficially, but appear to be engrained in a particular way in the interpretive models concerning the deities and supernatural forces, and their cosmology as a whole. It will also be interesting to consider the role of Buddhism in this particular understanding, since it was introduced as a fully-fledged system with its own cosmology.