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.