Special issue: Vernacular Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Literature. Hank Glassman is associate professor of East Asian Studies at Haverford College (Pennsylvania), and Keller Kimbrough is associate professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
摘要
In March of 2008, the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder, hosted a small interdisciplinary conference titled “Illustrating the Dharma: Popular Buddhism in Medieval Japanese Fiction.” The conference featured ten presentations and one keynote speech devoted to exploring aspects of “popular” (as opposed to monastic, elite, or orthodox doctrinal) Buddhism in the illustrated fiction of the Kamakura, Muromachi, and early Edo periods—roughly the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. Participants considered a variety of hand-illustrated and woodblock-printed texts from an array of methodological perspectives—literary, historical, Buddhological, and art historical—concentrating in particular on issues of religious doctrine, practice, and representation in the literary genres of setsuwa 説話 (tales), otogizōshi お伽草子 (Muromachi-period fiction), ko-jōruri 古浄瑠璃 (early puppet theater), jisha engi 寺社縁起 (temple and shrine histories), and kōwakamai 幸若舞 (ballad-dramas). The present thematic issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies is an indirect result of that 2008 conference. Five of the seven essays included here were first presented at the Boulder event, which also inspired our underlying (and, it was intended, unifying) approach: to consider premodern Japanese religious culture through the lens of literature, rather than more traditional Buddhist scriptural, historical, biographical, and exegetical sources. Our two corollary desiderata have been, from the start, to explore the roles of Buddhist sectarian and/or didactic concerns in the production of late-Heian and medieval literature, and to consider the place and significance of “visuality” in the illustrated textual media of medieval and early-Edo Japan (including illuminated sutras, emaki 絵巻 picture scrolls, nara ehon 奈良絵本 picture books, and woodblock-printed books and maps).1 The seven contributors to this volume have approached these issues in different ways, but each engages the three topics of Buddhism, literature, and visual representation.
