Paper short abstract:

I explore conceptions of space and time in the mythical narrations of the Yōtenki, a text on the deities of the Hie shrines. Picturing a Buddhist "world atlas", the text finds within it a place for Japan. I explore the destabilising effect of this emplacement on conceptions of time.

Paper long abstract:

The Yōtenki (13-15th century) is a collection of traditions related to the Hie shrines and their deities (Sannō, mountain sovereigns). Its longest section, most likely produced at the Enryakuji, is entitled "Sannō no koto". While half of the Yōtenki is mostly historical with mythological asides, "Sannō no koto" is an entirely mythological narrative, covering the millennia leading to the development of honji suijaku, the salvific project which has Buddhas and bodhisattvas appearing as "local" deities to save a populace still unprepared for the mental and emotional labour of Buddhist salvation.

Different from most medieval sources, which theorise honji suijaku as a technology of salvation tailored exclusively for Japan, the Yōtenki recounts it as having been first planned in India by Śakyamuni himself, and then tested in China. In doing so, it creates a Buddhist "world atlas," finding within it a place for Japan. My talk explores the consequences of this emplacement on the concept of time.

The map of "Sannō no koto" is a patchwork of real and imaginary spaces, whose timelines do not quite work in the same way; woven together in the same narrative, they are bound to collapse onto each other. China and Japan are subject to historical time, narrated in the style of dynastic histories. However, the whole history of China is re-imagined as a conspiracy to diffuse Buddhism which draws heavily from Chinese sources, and biographies of Japanese historical figures echo the life of the Buddha. India is the India of sūtras, dominated by the cyclical time of Buddhism, whose continuity is nonetheless interrupted by the salvific intervention of deities in China and Japan. This renders flexible the deadlines imposed by the decline of the dharma.

Treating the narrative as a deleuzian "assemblage", I explode its components to highlight interactions among dynastic, cyclical and soteriological timelines. I argue that the creation of a Buddhist map redefining Japan as a sacred space does not produce a well-ordered narrative of space and time, but instead generates multiple contrasting timelines simultaneously present in the same narration.

Paper short abstract:

I analyze the secret transmission of a Zen ritual based on the legend of Kataoka depicting the encounter between Prince Shōtoku and Bodhidharma. The readaptation of this parable in Zen secret manuals reflects the heterotopic structure of secrecy, in which heterogeneous forms of knowledge coexist.

Paper long abstract:

During the middle ages, Mt. Kataoka and its temple, Darumaji (Nara Pref.), became a literary and religious topos used to explain the rebirth of Bodhidharma in Japan, his bond with Prince Shōtoku, and, most importantly, the meaning of death. The legend recounts how Prince Shōtoku saw a starving wayfarer, on a road near Mt. Kataoka, offered his mantle and exchanged poems with him. The man died a few days later and no traces of him remained, leading Prince Shōtoku to believe that he was a saint. For this reason, he decided that a temple should be erected to commemorate the event. Scholars have directed their attention toward the poetical meaning of this episode, arguing that the verses composed on this occasion unveil the compassionate behavior of Prince Shōtoku and his deep ties with Buddhism. Consequentially, they largely ignore the medieval identification of the pauper with Bodhidharma.

In my presentation, I will explore how Zen secret manuals illustrate the linkage between Mt. Kataoka, death, and the Japanese manifestations of Bodhidharma, establishing this legend as the ontological ground to perform a ritual for the anticipation of the moment of death. The genealogy of this ritual significantly helps us to inquire into the rewritings of the legend by Zen scholar-monks, showing the networks of knowledge, notions, and individuals underlying the creation of a ritual and its secret transmission. I argue that the connection with similar ceremonies contained in Tendai secret oral instructions, the echoes of Daoist notions on the alchemical body, and the medieval écriture of this parable are central to the orthopraxy of the ceremony, which epitomizes the hybridity of Zen secrecy in premodern Japan.

By adapting the development of Foucault's concept of heterotopia suggested by Mary Franklin-Brown, I contend that Zen secret corpus was organized as a space in which different and contrasting forms of knowledge coexisted regardless of their nature. Likewise, the secretization and ritualization of Mt. Kataoka reflects this same logic, revealing the capacity of secrecy to reshape and, in turn, be reshaped by real and imagined places.

Paper short abstract:

I examine the translocal identities of local gods through an analysis of the Itsukushima Shrine origin narrative incorporated into the Shōbōrinzō Prince Shōtoku hagiography. The recontextualized legend reveals how Itsukushima's identity was defined through interconnections with other sacred spaces.

Paper long abstract:

The Itsukushima Deity is named as such because it is enshrined at Itsukushima Shrine. But what does that tell us about the divinity or its sacred place? Defining a divinity by its locality provides a seemingly self-explanatory identity, but it also hides the influences of ideas, narratives, and people located outside of the cultic site. This talk will examine how the translocal circulation and reproduction of an Itsukushima Shrine origin narrative (engi) remapped the spatial characterization of the Itsukushima Deity. Expanding the contexts of origin narratives beyond their territorial grounds, I will argue that origin narratives provided opportunities and exigencies for identifying sacred spaces and deities as simultaneously individual (local) and unified (translocal).

My presentation will focus on the retelling of an Itsukushima Shrine origin narrative within the early fourteenth century Shōbōrinzō (Treasury of the Wheel of the True Law) biography of Prince Shōtoku. The text introduces Prince Shōtoku into the origin narrative as advising the sovereign, Suiko Tennō, to support the newly founded Itsukushima Shrine. Changes to the narrative, explanatory details about Itsukushima, and discursive context all incorporated Itsukushima within a framework of networked space, wherein the sacred spaces of the myriad local deities are unified as the realm of Japan, while maintaining their individual identities. Similarly, the Shōbōrinzō employs honji-suijaku (original form and local traces) combinative logic to argue that Shōtoku appropriated the local deities into Buddhism, but closer analysis shows that the honji-suijaku associations complicated, but never effaced, the narrative's local characterization of the Itsukushima Deity.

Working from the relational models of space and locality proposed by Doreen Massey and Arjun Appadurai, I argue that the translocal contexts of origin narratives mediated the spatial particularity and universality of the deities. The multiple spatial frameworks within origin narratives raised questions that could not be answered by Buddhist discourses alone. It is precisely when origin narratives were not confined to writers, audiences, and content within the walls of the religious institution, that they were able to contribute to bodies of knowledge on the gods, sacred spaces, and the relations between them.