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.