Sub-Project Economies of the Sacred: Merging Esoteric Buddhism and Kami Worship in Medieval Japan (MC 3.1)

Project Leader: Anna Andreeva

The glorification of Shinto as Japan’s state religion in the first half of the 20th century led to the emergence of a master narrative describing Japan’s cultural and religious identity as based on homogeneous, unbroken, and monolithic native tradition of worship. However, transcultural processes, especially those facilitated by Buddhism, have played a major role in the formation of constantly shifting dynamics that made up and operated within the religious milieu of pre-1900 Japan. Seen in this light, the Buddhist concepts, institutions, practices, ritual formats, deities, and doctrines that traversed diverse cultural and historical contexts in India, China, and Korea before they reached Japan, appear as vital and dynamic. This is particularly obvious in the case of medieval period, roughly between the late 12th to 16th centuries. Some of the religious configurations that emerged during that time lasted until 1868, when the sweeping policies of the Meiji Restoration forcibly separated the syncretic worship of Buddhas and Japanese deities (kami).
This project was based on an investigation of previously overlooked Buddhist manuscripts and other historical materials. It challenged the 20th-century master narrative by studying how and why groups of non-elite religious practitioners affiliated with different cultic sites, religious facilities, or political factions created the heterogeneous economic, symbolic, and ritual systems that operated successfully according to their own needs. In particular, this project concentrated on the interaction between the transcultural forces represented by the dynamic and culturally unstable texture of esoteric (Tantric) Buddhism, the worship of Japanese deities, mountain religion, and other forms of religiosity.
Most of recent academic scholarship in this field has focused on the cultic sites and sacred areas located in central and eastern parts of Japan’s main island, Honshū. While making its own contribution to this already established trend, this project also aimed to transcend it. As one of its research foci, MC 3.1 investigated the relationships between local divinities and buddhas that developed within the Ryūkyū Islands (modern Okinawa). During the medieval and early modern periods, this island polity was conceived as a center of social, political, and cultural networks, in which the maritime links with Korea, Japan, Taiwan, coastal China, and other ocean-based polities played prominent roles. In 2013, MC 3.1 established a new research collaboration in order to analyze the previously overlooked historical sources that cast light on the maritime dimensions of the religious economies in late medieval and early modern East Asia.