Vajrayāna and Pure Land practices and traditions are often studied as if they are necessarily exclusive and autonomous spheres of Buddhist activity.1 Arguing against this still common point of view, I will examine a nenbutsu mandala visualization ritual presented in the Compendium on the Secret Nenbutsu (Himitsu nenbutsu shō, 秘密念仏抄),2 an important early twelfth century Pure Land text by the Mt. Kōya monk Dōhan (道 範, 1179–1252).3 Dōhan was not the first, nor the last, Buddhist thinker to employ “Vajrayāna Pure Land” ritual technologies, cosmology, or soteriological goals in his ritual program. For Buddhist monks in medieval Japan, “tantric” or Vajrayāna4 ritual theory served as the dominant paradigm for negotiating Buddhist conceptions of ritual power, while Pure Land rebirth, an assumed component of Mahāyāna cosmology and soteriology, was a nearly universal aspiration and concern.5 In other words, these “two” served a variety of often overlapping functions in a complex intellectual, religious, social, and political environment that the study of Japanese religions based on a sectarian taxonomy has largely ignored. As will be demonstrated below, the example of Dōhan provides a new perspective on how medieval Japanese Buddhists conceived of the relationships between ritual, power, and salvation. While Dōhan is primarily known as an influential scholar of the works of Kūkai (空海, 774–835), the early Heian period (794–1185) monk who is regarded as the founder of the Japanese Vajrayāna tradition, he was also an important early-Kamakura Pure Land thinker.6 The study of Kūkai and Vajrayāna in Japan has largely been conducted through the lens of contemporary Shingon sectarian orthodoxy, and the study of Pure Land thought has been significantly influenced in particular contemporary Jōdo Shinshū historiography. When taken at face value, orthodox sectarian history might suggest that mantra- and mandala-based practices in some sense “belong” to Shingon (and to a lesser extent, Tendai7 ), and the chanting of the nenbutsu and aspiration for rebirth in a Buddha’s Pure Land belong to the Pure Land schools. This type of sectarian consciousness is a rather recent development in the history of East Asian Buddhism, and pre-modern monks would not have recognized such clearly defined demarcations.8 In other words, that Dōhan wrote about Pure Land and Kūkai’s thought seems surprising only to the contemporary observer who has been influenced by the taxonomic approach to Japanese religion. This still common approach tends to over-determine the boundaries between groups and define “schools” by their founders and doctrines.9 The main problem with this approach, which may at first appear to provide a useful hermeneutic for the study of Japanese religion, is the application of anachronistic and/or polemical criteria uncritically derived from the source material.10 Moreover, perspectives and concerns that do not fit into narrowly defined idealized contemporary orthodoxy and praxis (such as Vajrayāna ritual conducted for rebirth in a Buddha’s Pure Land) have been ignored. Therefore, in order to understand Dōhan’s contribution to Japanese Pure Land thought, we must first look beyond sectarian assumptions about the development of Japanese Buddhism.
目次
Kūkai and the Early Systematization of Japanese Vajrayāna Conclusion: The “Secret” Nenbutsu Endnotes
