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- Convenors:
-
Cynthea J. Bogel
(Kyushu University (Japan))
Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan University)
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- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel contends that human and material actors in Heian-early Kamakura Japan had strategies for negotiating the effects of vengeful spirits. Speakers highlight texts and images that forged agency and restored individual or collective capacity to act in the face of threatening occurrences.
Long Abstract:
Activists today raise concerns that learned helplessness in the face of environmental challenges could prevent meaningful action to mitigate further damage from anthropogenic climate change. Can we profitably reference ways of acting-being from the past that reestablish our connections to our own well-being (in this world) and beings in this world, as the title claims?
This panel contends that human and material actors in eleventh-thirteenth century (Heian-early Kamakura period) Japan deployed strategies for negotiating such relationships and their outcomes. We identify in these diverse materials an ontological framework that allows for the agency of the living as in control of their "being" here and also the effects of "beings" here. As the papers demonstrate, spirit-induced phenomena emerged as a central framework for producing ontological knowledge about life, death, and the volatile universe, creating an avenue for human agency.
Speaker1 analyzes dreams as precarious sites of interactions between humans and spirits. Examining dreams by and about the emperor, recorded and interpreted in courtier diaries of the late-Heian era, the paper presents dream interpretation (yumetoki) as a means for individual courtiers to address crises of imperial authority.
Speaker2 asserts that the Eiga monogatari (Tale of Flowering Fortunes, ca. 1092), previously framed as lesser tale literature, in fact acts as a prophylactic against the emergence of malevolent spirits, overwriting the anger of the resentful dead in the collective memory.
Speaker3 bridges the individual and collective using a memoir from 1107. The case of Emperor Horikawa's illness and possession—the result of his unintentional slighting of a lower-ranked individual—opens a window into a worldview wherein social upheaval is reflected in disaster and illness, and can be treated by gestures of social rapprochement.
Speaker4 argues that the battling divinities and demons depicted in the twelfth-century Hekijae negotiate the horrifying, yet necessary, power of violence for the work's elite patrons.
Focusing on precarious moments in history, speakers from literature, religion, intellectual history, and art history each highlight strategies that forged agency and restored individual or collective capacity to act in the face of threatening personal and societal occurrences, and natural disasters.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Satomi Yamamoto (Waseda University)
Paper short abstract:
Representations of the Buddhas in medieval Japanese painting embodied hopes. Far less studied is religious imagery of demons and malevolent spirits that rendered negative agencies like resentments. By making the invisible visible, such representations allowed for their grasping and their taming.
Paper long abstract:
The dynamics of the gaze in painting has now been robustly theorized. Today, visual analysis of art from anywhere and any period requires considerations of who illustrates, who is illustrated, who controls, and who is controlled. For example, retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127-1192), who was a famous collector of illustrated handscrolls, pursued an innovative view of the world undergoing seismic political shifts that threatened his traditional, imperial hold on power. Of particular interest is the portrayal of demons and malevolent spirits in scrolls of his era, which served a particular function in these works as conveyors of undesirable energies or human traits.
This paper analyzes images from Go-Shirakawa's era , focusing on the painting set Hekijae (Extermination of Evil). This work has been understood as scenes of good vanquishing evil. But put in the context of didactic tales and Chinese legends, its divinities originally had demonic qualities. Thus, the work's subject consists of conflicts between entities that have powers of both good and evil. The outcome can then be understood to be the restoration of a world order with the defeat of one over the other. This battle imagery overlaps with ideas about the Ashura of the Rokudō (Six Realms of Rebirth), and warrior literature. For Go-Shirakawa, who is thought to have commissioned the work, the divinities and demons that fought day and night were none other than the emerging-class of warriors, who were at times necessary, but also troublesome for his attempts to rule.
Human agency and object agency combine here in the process of reception and patron/artist intention. Although we understand well the ideals of compassion and grace conveyed by depictions of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, what is the affective agency of these renderings of unfortunate creatures restrained and punished, or suffering and threatening demonic beings? For these works' commissioners and viewers—members of the ruling class who could not escape their times of warfare and disasters—such enchained figuration of supernatural creatures, trapped in their cages that was the artistic work, were arguably ideal partners in mediating the volatile gaps between ideals and realities.
Takeshi Watanabe (Wesleyan University)
Paper short abstract:
Eiga monogatari (c. 1092) tells of a turbulent society punctuated by calamities, some attributed to malevolent spirits. But if stories energized the violence, they also placated. This paper contends that Eiga uses affective tale discourse to exorcise history's hauntings.
Paper long abstract:
Possession by malevolent spirits posed one of the greatest threats to the well-being of the aristocracy in Heian-period Japan. As fearsome as they were, articulated as such, these conditions seized control of otherwise volatile, inexplicable phenomena as the workings of relatable, embittered spirits. And such very human explanations opened the way to a cure: exorcism. Since possession was diagnosed mostly through public acknowledgement of the resentments harbored by that spirit, exorcism and its shamanic storytelling acted as a therapeutic forum through which the court society could exorcize its own regrets and psychic projections. Especially in the language of the monogatari, the roles of victim and perpetrator were blurred as intertwined twists of fate showed how some people's fortunes could turn to death overnight. Although tales could not change what happened in the past, they could rewrite to open possibilities in memory. Such interconnected stories helped to make sense of the world and alleviated anxieties about the future by offering sympathy for all, defusing the negative energy propelling these collective manifestations. To illustrate such effects of tale discourse, this paper analyzes a series of examples from Eiga monogatari (Tale of Flowering Fortunes, c. 1092), a vernacular history that acts as a virtual exorcism, a potent cure and prophylactic for possessions. Because the work has been perceived as an inaccurate history or as an uninspired fictional tale, Eiga has been underappreciated for what it achieved: a new type of history that employed the affective language of tales to move and hence to heal. This paper illustrates such effects through a reading of one such narrative strand, the malevolent spirits of Fujiwara no Akimitsu and his daughter. Links between Akimitsu and other fathers who had ambitions for their daughters reintegrate an alienated, oft denigrated Akimitsu as an integral part of Heian society and restore his dignity. Akimitsu, the minister of the right during much of Fujiwara no Michinaga's tenure as the minister of the left, thus acts as a foil and deflects the much more frightening prospect that Michinaga himself might, despite his immense successes, emerge as a fearsome specter.
Asuka Sango (Carleton College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines dreams by and about the emperor as recorded and interpreted in courtiers' diaries of late Heian Japan. Dreams were a precarious site of interactions between humans and spirits, and their interpretation was a means for courtiers to respond to crises of the imperial authority.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines dreams by and about the emperor as recorded and interpreted in courtier diaries of late Heian Japan. Dream interpretation (yumetoki) was widespread in the court; and it became especially active in the face of ontological or social precarity as a means for courtiers to respond to crises of the imperial authority.
A case in point is a strange dream that Japanese courtier Fujiwara Sanesuke (957-1046) recorded and attributed to Emperor Goichijō (1008-1036) in 1025. Possessed by evil spirits, several thousand women invaded his palace. A mysterious man then warned that the only solution to the emperor's situation was to hold the lecture on the Golden Light Sūtra. Upon awakening, the emperor expressed his intention to do so, but Sanesuke disagreed, claiming that, as stated in the Sūtra, righteous imperial rule would ensure that such calamities do not unfold, and therefore, there would be no need to hold the lectures.
This entry reveals two competing interpretations of Goichijō's dream. On the one hand, the "mysterious man" interpreted his nightmare as a psycho-somatic symptom of the emperor's body, symbolized as his palace, requiring a proper ritual prescription. Although the emperor himself agreed with this interpretation, Sanesuke read it as a sign of failing imperial rule that implicitly criticizes the emperor for not upholding the ideal of the righteous rule, as prescribed by the Sūtra. Thus Goichijō's dream and its interpretations point to a classic dilemma of "king's two bodies," the "body natural" and the "body politic," as formulated by Kantorowicz.
I will argue that the members of the Heian court-the emperor, aristocrats, and monks-collectively engaged in the practice of dream interpretation forming what one scholar calls "the dream discourse community" (yumegatari kyōdōtai). This community mediated interactions between humans and spirits. It helped to express and treat fears arising from any cosmological, ontological, or social rapprochement in the imperial court, whether caused by political contention, natural disasters, or the emperor's illness. Dream interpretation was a means to reassert one's sense of being in the world, and of the shared worlds of being(s) here and beings there.
Kristina Buhrman (Florida State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses an account of the 1107 possession of Emperor Horikawa to analyze the ways in which illness was viewed as a crisis of social relationships wherein the relative positions of high and low were reinforced and strengthened.
Paper long abstract:
The idea of a divide between human civilization and the natural has been questioned by ecologists and de-essentialized by environmental historians. Material from medieval Japan, however, further shows how the pre-modern and the non-Western does not predicate any prelapsarian unity with nature. Although members of the Heian court wrote and reacted as if their social and natural worlds were one and the same, the dominant lens through which they viewed disorder in these realms was the human one. Thus, epidemics, famine or war (outer cosmos), or personal illness (inner cosmos) could be caused by justice-seeking displaced spirits of living or deceased humans. This paper performs a close historical reading of the case of one of the more persistent spirits afflicting Emperor Horikawa during his final illness of 1107 to examine the ways in which all things in the world were viewed as part of the social world. According to the Sanuki no suke nikki, a memoiristic account of Horikawa's court, his death, and its aftermath, this particular spirit was finally forced to identify himself: a monk who had been honored by a visit to his temple of residence and who, longing for a return of the royal personage, had come to afflict the ruler whose absence afflicted him. This account fits with numerous accounts in tale literature that similarly narrate how those of lower rank can seek a justice that is otherwise hard to reach in the structure of the Heian court. This style of possession is similar to but contrasts with the dominant type of unruly spirit in classical Japan, the "political victim" appeased in ninth-century goryō-e ceremonies and revived in twelfth-century onryō cults. When these afflicting spirits are compared, we find that those that were powerful in life harmed many, those who were of lower status only tormented individuals, albeit of high rank. The slights, retributions, and appeasement were all activated by links to the moral reciprocity of proper human relations in late Heian thought, which meant that ultimately the power of the dispossessed did not destabilize, but reinforced an economically and ecologically precarious social hierarchy.