In the aftermath of the suppression of the Tachibana Naramaro conspiracy of 757, the Empress Koken (“Kōken/Shōtoku Tennō”) issued two edicts articulating the royal political theology of the time. The first edict was a senmyo, inscribed in the Shoku Nihongi in Old Japanese; the second was a choku in Chinese. A miraculous omen, the apparition of a silkworn cocoon with a message woven into its surface, was interpreted as the occasion for a change in the calendrical era name, or nengo. This article argues that the imperial edicts express a coherent ideology combining ideas from a cultic martrix in which may be discerned proto-Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian elements.
