Michael COMO is the Tōshū Fukami Associate Professor of Shinto Studies at Columbia University.
關鍵詞
Huisi; Shitennōji; Prince Shōtoku; Sutra burial; Iconic texts
摘要
This paper engages a set of issues related to recent discussions concerning interactions between texts, narratives, and materiality in the formation and development of religious movements. In contrast to the general tendency of such studies to presume a high level of background literacy, this paper asks how the transmission of the Buddhist tradition to the Japanese islands at a time when Japan was still essentially a preliterate society helped shape early Japanese understandings of Buddhist scriptures and their uses. The paper engages these issues by focusing on two important moments in the development of the Japanese Buddhist tradition. The first of these centers on the construction of the founding legend of Japanese Buddhism. This legend helped define the relationship between the Buddhist tradition and the early Japanese state and, more broadly, established a reference point for later Buddhist movements seeking to plot new doctrinal or social trajectories. The second phenomenon addressed by the paper concerns the origins for the practice of sutra burials that became widespread beginning in the first decade of the 11th century. This practice, in which religious devotees buried sutras in the earth in the hopes that they could be accessed in the Final Age of the Dharma, both reflected and helped shape early Japanese Pure Land belief.
目次
Abstract Introduction 13 Prince Shōtoku 13 Silla Immigrants and the Founding Legend of Japanese Buddhism 15 Buddhist Textuality and Sutra Burials 20 Michinaga 22 Huisi’s Vow and Buried Scripture 22 Shōtoku as the Reincarnation of Huisi 24 Shitennōji goshuin engi 四天王寺御手印縁起 25 Conclusion 28 References 31
