Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to clarify and compare the narrative mechanisms informing Western and Japanese depictions of the other’s practices of dying for the faith. Here I focus on fudaraku and martyrdom, in order to shed new light on the encounters between Christianity and Buddhism in early modern Japan.

Paper long abstract:

The Jesuits introduced to Japan the concept of martyrdom during the last decades of the 16th century. However, dying for the faith was not unfamiliar to Japanese thought. Early missionaries recognized something similar to Christian martyrdom in fudaraku sailing, an ancient Buddhist practice of believers sailing out to sea before throwing themselves into the sea to reach Buddha’s promised land. Missionaries nonetheless depicted this practice in their correspondence as “demonic,” eliminating any possible ontological assimilation to the Catholic creed. On the other hand, the Nagasaki Kōfukuji hikki, a record of sermons given by the monk Sōsai at Nagasaki (1647), finds similarities between the Christian practice of martyrdom and the Pure Land Buddhist monks who died in the name of Amida. And yet, anti-Christian texts of the first half of the 17th century, including Sōsai‘s later work, often depicted martyrdom as pernicious, irrational, and removed from Buddhist teachings.

My analytical focus falls on the depiction of practices such as fudaraku and martyrdom found in the Jesuit correspondence and the work of Sōsai respectively. Even though scholars have before now analyzed Jesuit descriptions of hodaraku, they did not address the theological foundations of these Western accounts, and their political implications. Nor is there any substantial comparative work on the differences and similarities between these European descriptions and the accounts of Sōsai on Christian martyrdom.

This paper aims to clarify, deconstruct, and then compare the narrative mechanisms informing European and Japanese accounts of the taking of one’s own life and dying for the faith by addressing the following questions: What kind of rhetoric is behind these accounts? What is the relation between the rhetoric chosen by the authors of these texts and the historical, political, and social background they were living in? Why did both Jesuit priests and Buddhist monks dismiss any ontological similarity between practices such as fudaraku and martyrdom? By exploring these issues, I hope to shed new light on the narratives that helped construct the Western and Japanese images of the other during the early encounter between Christianity and Buddhism in Japan.