Ritual texts are essential for observing how Buddhist ideas practice religiously, and they offer many clues to identify Buddhist cultural representation for a certain period. In Japanese Buddhism, one kind of Ritual text called koshiki is mainly used for a ceremony. Koshiki is practical as a manual, and prayer texts can usually be found in it. With the prayer texts, one can fully understand the purpose of this ceremony and the anticipations of the sponsors. Ever since the middle period of Heian, the Japanese Tendai school has formed a ceremony called Daishi-ko, which was to worship masters of the Tendai school with Koshiki, and their wish to protect the country was also highlighted in this kind of ceremony. During the Edo period, along with the movement of political power, the Tendai school was also developed in the Kanto area by Tenkai (1536?-1643), and finally, a high-ranked temple Kanei was built. A sacred icon of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) as Tosho-gu Daigongen, both political and religiously worshipped in Edo, could be found in different contexts and end up with a one-of-a-kind Tosho-gu Daigongen Koshiki. This article will analyze the content and structure of Tosho-gu Daigongen Koshiki, with the background of the contexts set up by the Japanese Tendai school, to explain how the Tendai school promotes its state-protection tradition through ritual texts in the Edo period.
