Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the "humble materialities" that proved essential to the popularization of the Mantra of Light (kōmyō shingon) in Japan, with a focus on the ritual, material, and soteriological uses of contributor rosters for the mass annual assemblies that Eison (1201-90) initiated at Saidaiji.

Paper long abstract:

Our earliest evidence for uses of the Mantra of Light (kōmyō shingon) in Japan dates to the ninth century, but the mantra's popularity accelerated in the thirteenth century through the efforts of Myōe (1173-1232) and Eison (1201-90), founder of the Saidaiji order of "Shingon Ritsu" monks and nuns. Each promoted recitation of the mantra and distribution of sand empowered by it to the living and the dead to erase transgressions, provide protection and other practical benefits, and ensure rebirth in a pure land. I suggest that while both monks were pivotal in popularizing the practice, they did so in different ways that were inseparable from the mantra's "humble materialities."

As Paul Copp has argued, the power of spells in East Asia derived from much more than the reproduction of Sanskrit sounds that is commonly emphasized; rather, their written forms were themselves seen as dhāraṇī and "not merely the incidental details of their encoding for future speech" (The Body Incantatory [2014], 5). And moving beyond the written forms of the syllables, we find many other examples of physical embodiments of spells and their links to material culture. For the Mantra of Light in Japan, the materiality that has drawn the most scholarly attention is the sand it empowers, which received a strong boost from Myōe's texts and lectures. I suggest, however, that focusing on the sand as the impetus for the mantra's popularization casts into shadow another key to its spread: the annual assemblies implemented by Eison at Saidaiji in 1264 and the networks of exchange in which they were embedded. Those networks are exemplified in the order's wide-ranging use of contributor rosters, including liturgical, soteriological, and iconographic practices that continue to the present. This paper will thus spotlight the "lives and afterlives" of the rosters of donors and other contributors to the assemblies, which were held as mass ceremonies involving a spectrum of monastics and laypeople. In examining the assemblies and rosters through both textual and ethnographic evidence, this paper will help illuminate the ongoing evolution of the mantra in Japan and its intimately linked material and ritual contexts.