Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Andrea Castiglioni
(Nagoya City University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
D. Max Moerman
(Barnard College, Columbia University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Religion and Religious Thought
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.1
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel shows how visual techniques involving cartographic, pictorial, and narrative representations of pre-modern Shugendō ascetic sites served to blur the taxonomical boundaries between human ascetic practices, kami-buddhas combinatory paradigms, natural landscapes, and devotional objects.
Long Abstract:
In pre-modern Shugendō the human body was conceived as the site par excellence where the marks of ascetic practices were ultimately concentrated. Nevertheless, such an enfleshing process could not take place without being deeply interwoven with complex networks of human and non-human agencies, which relied on continuous engagements with natural environments, objects, and aesthetic perceptions. This panel focuses on the cartographic, pictorial, and narrative representations of emblematic Shugendō ascetic sites to demonstrate the always symbiotic and rhizomatic relationships between human practitioners, natural settings, religious materiality, and doctrinal discourses.
The first paper focuses on representations of En no Gyōja, who, long before being named the founder of Shugendō, was idealized as an ascetic cumulating Buddhist, Daoist and autochthonous powers. Centering on lesser known variants of En no Gyōja's hagiography in premodern documents and on his place in a variety of mandalas, the paper will examine how this figure came to embody the essence of asceticism both visually and textually.
The second paper outlines the geographical distribution of cold-water austerities performed by an independent ascetic called Kakugyō Tōbutsu in the vicinity of Mount Fuji in the late medieval and early Edo periods. The correlation of this ritual itinerary, called the "Eight Inner Lakes and Eight Outer Lakes," with images revealed to Kakugyō upon completion of his regimens illuminates the dynamic relationality of practitioner, terrain, and visuality in Japanese mountain religion.
The third paper explores the aural and geo-devotional landscape associated with the Valley of the Immortals (Senninzawa) on Mount Yudono as it appears in painted hanging scrolls of the Bakumatsu and Meiji period. These devotional objects provide a glimpse at the early-modern Yudono "practicescape," which merged together human ascetic practices, kami-buddhas combinatory paradigms, natural elements, and synesthetic transpositions of the religious space.
All together these three papers shed light on different strategies of aesthetic mediation, which enabled a sensorial interlacing between Shugendō ascetic practices on one side, and human, divine, natural, and material embodiments on the other.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Andrea Castiglioni (Nagoya City University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the painted hanging scrolls, which display the combinatory pantheon of kami and buddhas of the Immortal Valley (Senninzawa) on Mount Yudono in the late Edo and early Meiji periods. The study shows the aesthetic interlacing of humans and non-humans in Yudono religious context.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the conflations between natural landscape, ascetic practices, and devotional chants (hōraku) in the painted hanging scrolls, which portray the kami and buddhas combinatory pantheon of the Immortal Valley (Senninzawa) on Mount Yudono (Yamagata prefecture) in the late Edo (1603-1868) and early Meiji (1868-1911) periods. The analysis of Yudono asceticism and its correlated material culture such as the hanging scrolls dedicated to the so-called "buddhas of the venerable valley" (ozawabutsu) allows a fruitful insight into the rhizome-like networks between human and non-human actants, which are reminiscent of those described in the works of Philippe Descola about the necessity of overcoming the structuralist divisions between nature and culture.
In the ozawabutsu hanging scrolls the natural elements, which characterize the ascetic spots (gyōba) of Senninzawa, are displayed in the guise of kami and buddhas that are, in turn, arrayed according the hōraku sections chanted by lay pilgrims, ascetics (issei gyōnin), and Shugendō practitioners (shugenja) during the ritual ascent toward Gohōzen, i.e. the sacred boulder of Mount Yudono. Through the contemplation of the ozawabutsu hanging scrolls Yudono devotees visually engaged the soteriological morphology of Senninzawa and, at the same time, aurally activated the protective powers of kami and buddhas, which were interwoven with the natural elements of this mountainous area. The religious relevance of the ozawabutsu hanging scrolls clearly emerges if we take into account the fact that their diffusion reached the climax after the promulgation of the kami-buddhas clarification edicts (shinbutsu hanzenrei) in 1868. In other words, the ozawabutsu hanging scrolls worked as sonic maps or ascetic glances of the pre-modern Yudono combinatory practicescape based on the overlapping between kami and buddhas (shinbutsu shūgō), which was inexorably fading away due to the new Meiji religious politics.
The present paper argues that the ozawabutsu hanging scrolls can be considered as Latourian "quasi objects" the materiality of which synesthetically trigger an ontological confluence of human ascetic practices, sense-able procedures for evoking the kami and buddhas of Mount Yudono, and an interaction with natural elements conceived as unpredictable non-human actors.
Carina Roth (University of Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
Long before being named the founder of Shugendō, En no Gyōja was idealized as an ascetic cumulating Buddhist, Daoist and autochtonous powers. Centering on premodern hagiographies and mandalas, this paper will examine how he came to embody the essence of asceticism both visually and textually.
Paper long abstract:
Spiritual, hence ascetic, visualization can be understood from an internal and an external point of view. The internal point of view is that of the practitioner, their inner world experience. The external point of view is that of the witness to a practitioner's endeavour, be it a reader or a spectator. The body of the practitioner is the medium, the focal and transition point of both perspectives. At the same time, to be powerfully evocative, an image must convey both aspects, an inner resolve that translates to the outside. How do texts and images reflect this double viewpoint?
Before being seen as the traditional founder of Shugendō, En no Gyōja, "En the Ascetic", was considered a mountain practitioner par excellence, a prototypical and idealized ascetic cumulating Buddhist, Daoist and autochtonous powers as a result of his spiritual endeavours. Early textual descriptions of En no Gyōja yield little concrete information, yet they construct an aura of austere authority and strength from the onset, with very few elements. The first extant icons representing En no Gyōja, which are statues dating back to the 12th century, follow the same line. In all media, En no Gyōja is immediately recognizable as the epitome of an ascetic. What are the pictorial and textual characteristics that so distinguish him? Are they similar or different, and how do they interact?
Janine Tasca Sawada (Brown University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper outlines the geographical distribution of water austerities performed by the independent ascetic, Kakugyō Tōbutsu (b. 1541), in the vicinity of Mt. Fuji and seeks to correlate his itinerary, his practices, and the ritual images revealed to him on site by the mountain god.
Paper long abstract:
In Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) the number of ordinary people who undertook pilgrimages to the summit of Mount Fuji grew exponentially. However, the mountain was not only a unidirectional pilgrimage destination. Drawing on earlier religious conceptions that conflated revered mountains with native Japanese kami as well as with great Buddhas such as Dainichi and Amida, in the seventeenth century a network of lay practitioners in the Fuji catchment area began to worship the mountain itself and to engage ritually with its various topographical features. The members of these practice groups, which came to be called Fujikō later in the Tokugawa period, took their original inspiration from the activities of Kakugyō Tōbutsu (d. 1646), a wandering ascetic who is believed to have undergone multiple severe austerities in the vicinity of the mountain during the last years of the war-torn medieval period and the early decades of the new Tokugawa order. In my presentation I will outline the geographical distribution of Kakugyō’s legendary acts of self-denial, particularly his cold-water austerities, which he allegedly performed following a practice itinerary that encompassed the “Eight Inner Lakes and Eight Outer Lakes,” located on the lower reaches of Mount Fuji and beyond. I will also introduce selected examples of ritual writings that Kakugyō is said to have received from the deity of Mount Fuji, Sengen Dainichi, upon completion of each of his ascetic regimens. Kakugyō and his early followers used their practice sites to structure the topos of the mountain in accordance with how they imagined its place in the cosmos, and then inscribed that vision in their ritual products. I suggest that this pattern of action illuminates a premise of Japanese mountain religion, namely that ascetic practice, the physical features of the environment (in this case bodies of water), and the associated visual-ritual creation enjoy a three-way relationship in which they reciprocally iterate and activate each other.