IMPERIAL POLITICS AND SYMBOLICS IN ANCIENT JAPAN: THE TENMU DYNASTY, 650-800 . By Herman Ooms . Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press , 2009 . Pp. 376 . $50.00 .
摘要
Ooms, an authority on Japan's early Tokugawa period (1570‐1680), seeks to disabuse modern minds of the notion that “Shintō, upheld by many as Japan's indigenous religion, presumably reaches seamlessly from the ancient past to Japan's present.” He argues correctly that many features of “Shintō” were actually constructed by the seventh‐century emperor Temmu. Ooms is on less solid ground, however, in contending that Temmu reconfigured the court's legitimation system by adapting Taoist elements from China. During the mid‐sixth century, Buddhism had been championed at the Yamato court by the parvenu Soga clan, who sought to usurp the power of clans associated with the indigenous traditions. By 592, the Soga managed to place their own ruler on the throne—the empress Suiko—firmly establishing Buddhism at the court. But after 673, Temmu strove diligently, and successfully, to reverse his predecessors' China‐oriented reforms and to redefine court authority by reviving pre‐Buddhist court religious traditions (such as the daijō‐sai enthronement rite) and by strengthening links with the Ise shrine. It was under Temmu that the name of Amaterasu first appears in a contemporary historical record. Temmu's modifications were an attempt to restore the political realities of pre‐Buddhist Japan. But little in Temmu's modifications were identifiably Taoist. The data that Ooms adduces as “Taoist” are often just elements of medieval Chinese culture that non‐Taoists (of that period and later) misconstrued as Taoist. Future studies of this material should be more fully grounded in the facts of Six‐Dynasties/Tang Taoism.
