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Kniha uvažuje o japonských horách jako o místech náboženských úkonů. Autorka čtenáři nabízí pohled na historický i současný stav náboženských praktik, pričemž nezanedbává ekonomický aspekt jejich vývoje. První tři kapitoly, věnované historickému vývoji náboženských praktik v horské oblasti Tatejama, odhalují souvislost mezi horami a představami o posmrtném životě v Japonsku. Příklad poutnického místa Tatejama, populárního v období Edo, pomáhá představit si jakým způsobem fungovalo v tomto období poutnické místo a náboženský kult. Autorka přitom poukazuje na ekonomickou stránku provozu poutnického místa. Terénní výzkum a účast na náboženských praktikách v horských oblastech Tatejama a Dewa Sanzan umožnil autorce sledovat jejich současný stav. Získaný výzkumný materiál poodhaluje například úlohu konceptu kulturního dědictví v úsilí o udržování náboženských praktik v současnosti. Tato část poskytuje zajímavý pohled na to, jak se poskytovatelé náboženských praktik a jejich účastníci přizpůsobují novodobým podmínkám. Novodobým asketickým úkonům probíhajícím ve vodopádech je věnovaná poslední kapitola. Přesto, že jsou považované za marginální praktiky, komplexnost kvalit, se kterými jsou spojované, je příkladem kreativity v úsilí o jejich udržení.
Shugendō has been an object of fascination among scholars and the general public, yet its historical development remains an enigma. This book offers a provocative reexamination of the social, economic, and spiritual terrain from which this mountain religious system arose. Caleb Carter traces Shugendō through the mountains of Togakushi (Nagano Prefecture), while situating it within the religious landscape of medieval and early modern Japan. His is the first major study to view Shugendō as a self-conscious religious system—something that was historically emergent but conceptually distinct from the prevailing Buddhist orders of medieval Japan. Beyond Shugendō, his work rethinks a range of issues in the history of Japanese religions, including exclusionary policies toward women, the formation of Shintō, and religion at the social and geographical margins of the Japanese archipelago. Carter takes a new tack in the study of religions by tracking three recurrent and intersecting elements—institution, ritual, and narrative. Examination of origin accounts, temple records, gazetteers, and iconography from Togakushi demonstrates how practitioners implemented storytelling, new rituals and festivals, and institutional measures to merge Shugendō with their mountain’s culture while establishing social legitimacy and economic security. Indicative of early modern trends, the case of Mount Togakushi reveals how Shugendō moved from a patchwork of regional communities into a translocal system of national scope, eventually becoming Japan’s signature mountain religion.
This anthology reflects a range of Japanese religions in their complex, sometimes conflicting, diversity. In the tradition of the Princeton Readings in Religions series, the collection presents documents (legends and miracle tales, hagiographies, ritual prayers and ceremonies, sermons, reform treatises, doctrinal tracts, historical and ethnographic writings), most of which have been translated for the first time here, that serve to illuminate the mosaic of Japanese religions in practice. George Tanabe provides a lucid introduction to the "patterned confusion" of Japan's religious practices. He has ordered the anthology's forty-five readings under the categories of "Ethical Practices," "Ritual Practices," and "Institutional Practices," moving beyond the traditional classifications of chronology, religious traditions (Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.), and sects, and illuminating the actual orientation of people who engage in religious practices. Within the anthology's three broad categories, subdivisions address the topics of social values, clerical and lay precepts, gods, spirits, rituals of realization, faith, court and emperor, sectarian founders, wizards, and heroes, orthopraxis and orthodoxy, and special places. Dating from the eighth through the twentieth centuries, the documents are revealed to be open to various and evolving interpretations, their meanings dependent not only on how they are placed in context but also on how individual researchers read them. Each text is preceded by an introductory explanation of the text's essence, written by its translator. Instructors and students will find these explications useful starting points for their encounters with the varied worlds of practice within which the texts interact with readers and changing contexts. Religions of Japan in Practice is a compendium of relationships between great minds and ordinary people, abstruse theories and mundane acts, natural and supernatural powers, altruism and self-interest, disappointment and hope, quiescence and war. It is an indispensable sourcebook for scholars, students, and general readers seeking engagement with the fertile "ordered disorder" of religious practice in Japan.
Even a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak emerging from the clouds in the distance evokes the reverence it has commanded in Japan from ancient times. Long considered sacred, during the medieval era the mountain evolved from a venue for solitary ascetics into a well-regulated pilgrimage site. With the onset of the Tokugawa period, the nature of devotion to Mount Fuji underwent a dramatic change. Working people from nearby Edo (now Tokyo) began climbing the mountain in increasing numbers and worshipping its deity on their own terms, leading to a widespread network of devotional associations known as Fujikō. In Faith in Mount Fuji Janine Sawada asserts that the rise of the Fuji movement epitomizes a broad transformation in popular religion that took place in early modern Japan. Drawing on existing practices and values, artisans and merchants generated new forms of religious life outside the confines of the sectarian establishment. Sawada highlights the importance of independent thinking in these grassroots phenomena, making a compelling case that the new Fuji devotees carved out enclaves for subtle opposition to the status quo within the restrictive parameters of the Tokugawa order. The founding members effectively reinterpreted materials such as pilgrimage maps, talismans, and prayer formulae, laying the groundwork for the articulation of a set of remarkable teachings by Jikigyō Miroku (1671–1733), an oil peddler who became one of the group’s leading ascetic practitioners. His writings fostered a vision of Mount Fuji as a compassionate parental deity who mandated a new world of economic justice and fairness in social and gender relations. The book concludes with a thought-provoking assessment of Jikigyō’s suicide on the mountain as an act of commitment to world salvation that drew on established ascetic practice even as it conveyed political dissent. Faith in Mount Fuji is a pioneering work that contains a wealth of in-depth analysis and original interpretation. It will open up new avenues of discussion among students of Japanese religions and intellectual history, and supply rich food for thought to readers interested in global perspectives on issues of religion and society, ritual culture, new religions, and asceticism.
Ichiro Hori's is the first book in Western literature to portray how Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist elements, as well as all manner of archaic magical beliefs and practices, are fused on the folk level. Folk religion, transmitted by the common people from generation to generation, has greatly conditioned the political, economic, and cultural development of Japan and continues to satisfy the emotional and religious needs of the people. Hori examines the organic relationship between the Japanese social structure—the family kinship system, village and community organizations—and folk religion. A glossary with Japanese characters is included in the index.
Winner of the 2022 Association for the Study of Japanese Mountain Religion Book Prize Defining Shugendo brings together leading international experts on Japanese mountain asceticism to discuss what has been an essential component of Japanese religions for more than a thousand years. Contributors explore how mountains have been abodes of deities, a resting place for the dead, sources of natural bounty and calamities, places of religious activities, and a vast repository of symbols. The book shows that many peoples have chosen them as sites for ascetic practices, claiming the potential to attain supernatural powers there. This book discusses the history of scholarship on Shugendo, the development process of mountain worship, and the religious and philosophical features of devotion at specific sacred mountains. Moreover, it reveals the rich material and visual culture associated with Shugendo, from statues and steles, to talismans and written oaths.
Seventeen distinguished experts on Japanese religion provide a fascinating overview of its history and development. Beginning with the origins of religion in primitive Japanese society, they chart the growth of each of Japan's major religious organizations and doctrinal systems. They follow Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and popular religious belief through major periods of change to show how history and religion affected each-and discuss the interactions between the different religious traditions.
Illustrated with color and black-and-white images of the mountain and its associated religious practices, H. Byron Earhart's study utilizes his decades of fieldwork—including climbing Fuji with three pilgrimage groups—and his research into Japanese and Western sources to offer a comprehensive overview of the evolving imagery of Mount Fuji from ancient times to the present day. Included in the book is a link to his twenty-eight minute streaming video documentary of Fuji pilgrimage and practice, Fuji: Sacred Mountain of Japan. Beginning with early reflections on the beauty and power associated with the mountain in medieval Japanese literature, Earhart examines how these qualities fostered spiritual practices such as Shugendo, which established rituals and a temple complex at the mountain as a portal to an ascetic otherworld. As a focus of worship, the mountain became a source of spiritual insight, rebirth, and prophecy through the practitioners Kakugyo and Jikigyo, whose teachings led to social movements such as Fujido (the way of Fuji) and to a variety of pilgrimage confraternities making images and replicas of the mountain for use in local rituals. Earhart shows how the seventeenth-century commodification of Mount Fuji inspired powerful interpretive renderings of the "peerless" mountain of Japan, such as those of the nineteenth-century print masters Hiroshige and Hokusai, which were largely responsible for creating the international reputation of Mount Fuji. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, images of Fuji served as an expression of a unique and superior Japanese culture. With its distinctive shape firmly embedded in Japanese culture but its ethical, ritual, and spiritual associations made malleable over time, Mount Fuji came to symbolize ultranationalistic ambitions in the 1930s and early 1940s, peacetime democracy as early as 1946, and a host of artistic, naturalistic, and commercial causes, even the exotic and erotic, in the decades since.
The Sea and the Sacred in Japan is the first book to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. While many leading Shinto deities tend to be understood today as unrelated to the sea, and mountains are considered the privileged sites of sacredness, this book provides new ways to understand Japanese religious culture and history. Scholars from North America, Japan and Europe explore the sea and the sacred in relation to history, culture, politics, geography, worldviews and cosmology, space and borders, and ritual practices and doctrines. Examples include Japanese indigenous conceptualizations of the sea from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; ancient sea myths and rituals; sea deities and sea cults; the role of the sea in Buddhist cosmology; and the international dimension of Japanese Buddhism and its maritime imaginary.