Send message to Author

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.