Organizer and Chair: Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
Discussants: Neil Francis McMullin, University of Toronto; Samuel C. Morse, Amherst College; Edward B. Kamens, Yale University
In the realm of the senses the path to enlightenment is covered in blood and bodies. From Mara to the killing fields of hell, and in each rout of ignorance, a rhetoric of violence subtends the beauty and wisdom of the Buddhist teachings. Commentators have tended to see the sublime in Buddhism and not its scary monsters. But the ugly and the transgressive, those very monsters, are like the muddy root of the lotus. They prepare the ground for the blossom that will open.
Our panel has been conceived as an exploration of the violent in medieval Japanese Buddhist narrative and pictorial practice. We adopt a countermajoritarian position and examine Buddhism from the underside, where the public transcript meets the dialectical force of the lurid and the hideous. Much of the imagery discussed in our papers is frankly sadomasochistic in aspect. By addressing such imagery we seek to raise questions about the strategic importance of violence to the Buddhist episteme in medieval Japan. If our material shocks, as it should, it is because we are committed to generating debate about what Buddhism means as a practice that acts on the world.
David Moerman, Stanford University
This paper investigates the practice of Fudaraku tokai ("crossing the sea to Kannon’s paradise"), one of the more extreme forms of self-immolation in premodern Japanese Buddhism. During this rite priests were sealed inside the cabins of small rudderless boats outfitted as floating tombs and sent off to the island pure land of the bodhisattva Kannon believed to lie in the distant southern seas. Although the ascetics never returned from these final journeys (holes drilled in the boat’s hull assured a swift dispatch to paradise), their financial sponsors benefited from the surplus value generated by such pious exertions. The karmic burden of the devotee was assumed and extinguished by the religious suicide’s self-sacrifice. This most individual of acts was thus a collective and public event: a social institution entailing a ritual and even an economic exchange.
Over forty instances of this rite, dating from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, are recorded in premodern sources. Using temple records, courtier diaries, warrior tales, hagiographies, and popular paintings, this paper explores the cultural meanings of this unexamined side of Japanese Buddhism. These religious suicides provide a dark window onto the ritualization of death in medieval Japan and suggest the over-determined and often ambivalent nature of medieval religious practice. The suicide’s otherworldly goal was a syncretic one, an imagined paradise composed of Buddhist, Taoist, and local traditions. And as his self-mortification brought benefit for his survivors, it is not always clear whether his death was that of a martyr or a scapegoat.
Hank Glassman, Stanford University
Medieval Japanese narrative is famous for its graphic depiction, in words and art, of the heroic and bloodthirsty acts of warriors. Less well known than these fictionalized accounts of historical military conflict are the tales of violence visited upon women, specifically pregnant women, that pepper the corpus of Muromachi period religious fiction.
These Buddhist tales, often illustrated, are no less bloody than the stories of cruelty and bravery on the battlefield. In one, an infant is suckled by his mother’s headless corpse for three years after she is brutally killed due to the machinations of barren and jealous co-wives. In another legend, a pregnant woman dies but is miraculously able to bear and to care for her baby despite the decomposition of her body. The climactic scene of another story has a husband exhuming his wife’s body and slitting her belly open with his sword to reveal a beautiful and healthy baby boy. Often stories focus on the "evil" or "sinful" nature of going to the grave with a child in one’s womb.
This paper explores the meaning of violence against women in these tales of exhumation and dismemberment which were aimed at a largely female audience whose greatest threat was from death in childbirth. These lurid images reveal various aspects of the religious construction of gender during the Muromachi period. I use these rich narratives to examine medieval Japanese Buddhist views on childbirth, motherhood, the female body, and the salvation of women.
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
A familiar sight in many Buddhist halls of worship is the painted or sculpted figure of Buddha surrounded by bodhisattvas and guardian figures. The standard iconographical and gestural protocols of this arrangement are well known: Buddha and bodhisattva images at center in quiet repose or muted movement; guardian images around them in poses of ferociously muscular action. One of the most interesting aspects of this body language of hierarchy is found at the feet of the figures. Where Buddha and bodhisattva images tend to occupy lotus blossoms, most guardian figures stand atop, in fact kick and grind beneath their feet, a writhing zooanthropomorphic monster that grimaces in pain. It is a display of violence as common to the visual ideology of Buddhist worship as the beatific visage of the Buddha at its center.
This paper examines one group of guardian figures, the Shitenno, for the creatures that they trample as Buddha bears witness. The scriptural and iconographical foundations of such aggression are investigated with emphasis on the Konkomyo saisho okyo, the principal text on the Shitenno, and its platform of violence toward enemies of Buddhism and its kings. Commentary is also addressed to the visual impact of scenes of torture, as when a guardian figure bullies and squashes another being. On the premise that appearances have real consequences, it is argued that such imagery in its very brutality marks a fraught and conflicted site on the conceptual and physical landscape of Buddhist practice.