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.