Buddhas and Kami in Japan

Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm

Fabio Rambelli, Mark Teeuwen, Fabio Rambelli, Mark Teeuwen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134431236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia giapponese

This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the combinatory tradition that dominated premodern and early modern Japanese religion, known as honji suijaku ( originals and their traces ). It questions received, simplified accounts of the interactions between Shinto and Japanese Buddhism, and presents a more dynamic and variegated religious world, one in which the deities' Buddhist originals and local traces did not constitute one-to-one associations, but complex combinations of multiple deities based on semiotic operations, doctrines, myths, and legends. The book's essays, all based on specific case studies, discuss the honji suijaku paradigm from a number of different perspectives, always integrating historical and doctrinal analysis with interpretive insights.

1

INTRODUCTION
Combinatory religion and the honji suijaku paradigm in pre-modern Japan

Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli

This book discusses a central issue in the history of pre-modern Japanese religion, namely the idea that local, native deities (kami) are emanations of universal, Buddhist divinities — a notion known in Japanese as honji suijaku (“original forms of deities and their local traces”). It was this idea that lay at the basis of Buddhist cults of kami, of the incorporation of kami shrines in Buddhist temples, and of the development of Buddhist-inspired kami cults which at a later stage developed into an independent religion, namely Shinto. “Originals” refers to the Buddhist divinities that show their compassion for the Japanese by appearing in their distant land, in the periphery of the Buddhist world, as “temporary emanations” – in the guise of kami who are now understood to be “traces” of Buddhist “originals.”

This topic is of great interest for a number of reasons. First of all, Japanese religion is often categorised under the twin headings Buddhism and Shinto, in spite of the fact that the worship of “Shinto” deities played a central role in Japanese Buddhism, and that Shinto hardly existed as an autonomous cultic system – for the very reason that its deities were worshipped first and foremost as emanations of Buddhist divinities. Although the view that Shinto and Buddhism formed two distinct traditions in pre-modern Japan has by now been largely abandoned, little work has been done to clarify what the combin-atory traditions of pre-modern Japan actually looked like, and how they functioned. It is on this question that this book tries to shed new light.

In particular, the book will draw attention to the fact that the paradigm of “originals and traces” was much more than merely a way of turning native deities into Buddhist figures. This paradigm had important consequences, ranging from epistemology to economics, politics, social ideology, and ideas about subjectivity. Epistemologically, it is interesting to note that originals and traces were not one-to-one associations, but complex combinations of several deities based on sophisticated semiotic operations, myths, legends, and so on – all procedures that we will investigate. This is directly related to subjectivity, since each deity was a combination of a plurality of divine entities. In this respect, one of the most interesting features of this paradigm is the fact that its deities were Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, in a consciously and coherently transnational fashion.

Furthermore, the idea that local phenomena are “one with” some absolute sacred source was used widely to sanctify and legitimate many different kinds of practices throughout the medieval and early modern periods. We find, for example, that temple lands were defined as local emanations in Japan of Buddhist paradises; that the practice of writing Japanese poetry was “one with” the chanting of sacred Buddhist spells; or that the work of a carpenter was “the same as” the sacred acts of Indian buddhas. These few examples already show how profound the cultural, political, and economic impact of this paradigm has been over an extended period of time. In this book we shall draw attention to these various functions of the paradigm, and illustrate them by analysing concrete historical examples of its use.

The honji suijaku paradigm is an example of a combinatory religious system that could fruitfully be compared with similar systems in other cultures. Curiously, it would seem that the closest parallels to the Japanese situation are to be found not in neighbouring Korea or China, but in Indian and Indianised cultures further south. Here we think, for example, of the coexistence of the brahman and the Buddhist monk in Thailand, as described by Stanley J. Tambiah (1970); or of the situation in Nepal, as analysed and compared with Japan by David N. Gellner (1997). Many parallels can also be drawn with the Buddhist and Bönpo monks of Tibet and their engagement with local spirits as discussed by Geoffrey Samuel (1993). Further afield, we only have to think of the classical religions of the Roman Empire, or the many local forms of Christianity in South America, Africa and other places to recognise that combinatory processes are ubiquitous throughout the world.

Such a comparative perspective, however, is beyond the scope of this book. Here, we will limit ourselves to exploring the historical development and the theological, social and political functioning of the honji suijaku paradigm in Japan. This introductory chapter will first sketch our general approach to pre-modern Japanese religion and the place of the honji suijaku paradigm in it. Then, we shall outline some strands in the history of honji suijaku thought and practice, and explore its internal logic and its functionality within Japanese society.

Pre-modern Japanese religion: a two-room flat?

The Japanese religious scene of the classical and medieval periods was by no means a simple affair. Elements from different traditions, some autochthonous and others of continental origin, combined to form a mêlée of practices, ideas and beliefs that at first sight appears to us as an inextricable tangle.

This characteristic of pre-modern Japanese religion has important repercussions for its study. Even if one succeeds in isolating a single thread from the tangle, one is left with the difficult question of what relevance it may have had in its knotty context. At an even more fundamental level, the question imposes itself of why seemingly contradictory elements were combined in ritual and doctrinal contexts in what to us often seems to be a bewilderingly arbitrary fashion. What was the significance of all this crisscrossing of traditions, and why was the phenomenon so ubiquitous? In short, we end up asking ourselves: are we to take all this “syncretism” seriously?

Two scholars who have addressed these questions, and have come to widely diverging conclusions, are Ivan Morris in the 1960s and Allan Grapard more recently. Both stand out for trying to make sense of religiosity in the Heian period (794–1185) by addressing the “tangle” as a whole, rather than taking the more usual but also more sectarian method of singling out one of its many threads. If we are to characterise their approaches in a word, we might say that while Morris could not bring himself to deal with Heian religion on its own terms, Grapard does just that.

Discussing the world of The Tale of Genji (early eleventh century), Morris marvels over the “facile blending of beliefs” that he regards as characteristic of the court aristocracy of this period. He notes: “For Murasaki [Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji] and her countrymen there was no idea that the acceptance of one set of beliefs (Buddhism) might preclude adherence to another (Shintoism), or that either was incompatible with a mass of complex superstitions deriving both from native tradition and from Chinese folklore.”¹ To Morris, Heian religiosity remains a form of “eclecticism” in which “various religions and superstitions have become . . . inextricably entwined,”² rather than an integrated system that made sense to its practitioners. Here, Morris’ narrow definition of religion, as “the quest for moral or ethical righteousness, or for purity, salvation, or enlightenment,”³ prevents him from accepting a form of religiosity completely alien to his own.

Grapard’s take on the subject is radically different.⁴ He describes the genesis, in the course of the Nara period (710–94), of a complex cultic system that integrated both (Shinto) shrines and (Buddhist) temples under the aegis of the imperial court. The main function of these shrines and temples was to “protect the state” (chingo kokka) – that is, the imperial lineage and the aristocratic houses that supported it. Grapard points out that the basic metaphor behind the ritual protection of the state was that of the human body. The state was embodied in the emperor, and state rituals often focused on the person of the emperor. The problems of the state were envisaged as physical diseases that could be cured in a ritual manner through “magic, manipulation of symbols, and medicine.”⁵ The main paradigms of ritual curing were esoteric rites of penitence and autochthonous rites of purification, both of which aimed at “the removal of baleful omens concerning whatever might threaten the human representatives of [the] state.”⁶ These rituals combined Buddhist, Daoist (or, more accurately, Yin-Yang), and indigenous elements as mutually reinforcing components of an ideologically coherent system.

From the mid-Heian period onwards, Grapard notes a trend towards the privatisation and individualisation of such rituals.⁷ Not only the state, but also the individual was subject to higher influences, be they the will of local deities, buddhas and bodhisattvas, as revealed through oracles and divination, or of planets and stars or the forces of Yin and Yang, as made apparent through complicated calendrical and directional computations. The result was an “impressive networ...