Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how Muromachi elites pacified vengeful ghosts. Earlier pacification activities are shown to have been replaced with ghost-feeding rites adopted from the continent, because they offered an alternative vision of the relationship between the governing and the governed.

Paper long abstract:

In the fourteenth century, Ashikaga Takauji (1305-58), the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate helped establish a temple to pacify his dead enemy, Emperor Go-Daigo. In doing so, he was engaging in a long tradition of enshrining vengeful spirits so as to neutralise them, and hence protect regime and polity from catastrophe. However, even as he drew on tradition to pacify the casualties of the violence that that brought him to power, the methods and objects of pacification were undergoing significant change. Where the august spirits of aristocrats had loomed large in the elite imagination regarding the vengeful dead, hungry ghosts now took centre stage. 

My presentation explores the factors underlying the Muromachi-period shift in the landscape of elite spirit pacification, and its implications for how regime legitimacy was conceived. Through an analysis of rituals as accounted for in elite diaries, I demonstrate that continental ghost-feeding rites, introduced and practiced primarily by Zen clerics, helped to construct for the Ashikaga regime an alternative framework by which to conceptualise the relationship between the ruler and his dead subjects, and more broadly, between the governing and the governed. Nonetheless, this framework did not completely replace, but existed alongside older spirit pacification practices, providing an arena in which elites, traditional or new, could contest their positions within the dual polity.