Nobumi Iyanaga
EFEO
At a roundtable organized by Mathew Kapstein and Christine Mollier in Honolulu in April 2011, on the theme of “Buddhism and the Medieval Religious Traditions of China/Tibet/Japan,” I presented a paper entitled “Buddhist Ideas, Vocabulary and Quotations in Medieval Shintō Texts: The Case of the Yamato katsuragi hōzanki.” The present paper is a continuation of the study of Buddhist vocabulary and images in medieval Shintō texts as initiated in that presentation.
Traditionally, Shintō has been believed to be a “native Japanese religion” since the beginning of time, and therefore a phenomenon which would represents the “Japanese essence.” This view has changed drastically since the late 1970s, when Kuroda Toshio (1926-1993) proposed a number of revolutionary ideas, according to which the construction of Shintō was a gradual process which took place during Japanese Middle Ages under the strong influence of Buddhism. This theory is now largely accepted among specialists. Numerous innovative studies on medieval Shintō emphasize and analyze the close relationship between Buddhism and the foundation/s of Shintō.
However, it seems that so far there has been no sustained attempt to identify the Buddhist sources of Shintō ideas and images; the study that I began with my presentation in April 2011 was an essay to fill this gap. The Yamato katsuragi hōzanki was probably composed in the mid-13th century, while the text that I examine in the present paper, the Reikiki, is certainly later, written perhaps in late 13th or early 14th century. It is in fact a collection of eighteen chapters of texts and images, disparate in origins and dates, but forming a roughly homogeneous entirety. It is traditionally classified as a Ryōbu-shintō text, that is, as a Shintō text belonging to the Shingon discourse. More specifically, it discusses the religious signification of the Inner and Outer Shrines of Ise, which are associated with the two main maṇḍalas of Japanese Shingon school, the garbha maṇḍala and the vajradhātu maṇḍala. The text is an original composition on mythical and doctrinal subjects (that is to say, it is not merely a compilation of quotations like some of later Shintō works). I only examine here the last chapter of the work (except the four other chapters with only images), entitled “Buppō Shintō Reikiki,” or “Reikiki on the Buddhist Law and Shintō,” which is a kind of doctrinal recapitulation from the Buddhist point of view of the earlier chapters.
In contrast with the case of the Yamato katsuragi hōzanki, the search for Buddhist sources of this text turned out to be very difficult. While I could identify some interesting Buddhist sources quoted in the former text, in the latter work, it was only possible to find some fragments of Buddhist vocabulary besides a few evident quotations. However, this vocabulary has a very particular feature, in which it was possible to detect a specific doctrinal tendency, that of a strong “Original Enlightenment thought” in the Shingon school. In a later stage of my research, I tried to compare, using a computerized text analysis method called n-gram text comparison, the text of this chapter with those of a certain author of Shingon of roughly the same period, named Yūhan, known for his marked inclination to the same kind of discourse. The result showed that there are not only many similarities in the vocabulary used, but also some specific ways of wording which are common to the Reikiki and Yūhan, but are otherwise very rare in other Buddhist text corpora of the Taisho Canon. It is certainly impossible to propose on the basis of this simple result that the chapter in question was written by Yūhan, but I tend to think that its author was someone closely related to the Yūhan’s circle.
(Presented in the 2012 Chulalongkorn-EFEO International Conference on Buddhist Studies : Imagination, Narrative, and Localization, 6-7 January 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, organized by Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University In conjunction with The Buddhist Studies Group, EFEO)