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Accepted Paper:
Votive literature and relationality, or how did Heian prayer texts build relationships?
Heather Blair
(Indiana University)
Arguing that both literature and devotion are fundamentally social, this paper analyzes relationships of clientage and worship in Buddhist prayer texts (ganmon) commissioned by lower-ranking noblemen from the noted Heian man of letters Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111).
Paper long abstract:
Far from resting in a zone of representation, both literature and devotion in fact create and sustain social relationships. To argue that point, this paper explores how Buddhist prayer texts (ganmon) composed during the Heian period enacted relationships among humans, buddhas, and gods. More specifically, it examines several ganmon commissioned by lower-ranking noblemen from the well-known man of letters Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111) in the years around 1100. In each case, the sponsor put his prayer to ritual use in consecrating a buddha hall he had just built. But as this paper shows, these men’s devotional projects, which were already at once ritual, literary, and institutional, also served complex relational purposes. On the one hand, through transfer of merit and symbolic action, they aimed to establish or affirm relations of clientage between a particular sponsor and Retired Emperor Shirakawa (1053–1129). On the other, through gestures of prayer and offering, they sought to sustain protective, sanctifying relationships with local gods and more or less universal Buddhist figures. By analyzing patterns of clientage and devotion as they intersected on the stage of the “votive occasion,” this paper expands the reach of the social to embrace the divine and shows prayer to be both literary and relational.