Paper short abstract:

This paper will build upon the panel’s conception of “the votive occasion” with specific examples from the Classical Japanese waka corpus. Poems offered to Buddhas, kami, spirits of the living and the dead and more will be interpreted as votive productions with long, if unwitnessed, afterlives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will build upon the panel’s general conception and theorization of “the votive occasion” as a trans-cultural, trans-literary and trans-medial phenomenon with specific examples from the Classical Japanese waka corpus. In some ways, it would be tempting to argue that all waka arise from and record votive occasions. In doing so, I would avoid the problematic term and notion of kotodama (given its limited use in the classical corpus itself), but would recognize that the foundations of uta, and waka, are in spoken and sung charms and spells, cajoling seen and unseen occult energies. Then, given the manner in which, across the ages, waka poets approached their creative opportunities and tasks, we see and hear how every waka makes a reverent gesture to its predecessors and successors—or, now and then, an irreverent one that nevertheless acknowledges its inheritance and its place in a continuum of the wringing of changes within familiar contours. However, in this paper I will confine the discussion to examples of waka composed as votive offerings in specifically religious contexts: as Buddhist devotional verses, contemplations and transformed appropriations of scripture, prayerful intercessions for the deceased, verse articulations in praise of deities whether kami, Buddhas, or both, and the like. I will suggest that the chanted songs and inscribed screen poems presented in the Daijōe since very early times and continuing into the present qualify as “votive” in that their figural schemes and modes of address are calibrated so as to please the natural/divine forces that order the realm and ensure its prosperity. Other examples will be drawn from Daisaiin Senshi’s Hosshin wakashū (early 11th century); Saigyō’s Mimosusogawa utaawase and Miyagawa utaawase (late 12th century) and various works by Fujiwara no Teika, Jien and other late-Heian/early Kamakura-period poets. An important question in each case will be: what becomes of the materiality as well as the metaphysical energy produced in such occasions? Where do the poems go? Who hears, sees, or reads, or possesses them in their afterlives, in what forms, by what means, and do their intended positive effects persist?