Organizer and Chair: Fabio Rambelli, Williams College
Discussant: Bernard Faure, Stanford University
The Dragon Palace (ryugu)—the seat of the Dragon King (ryuo), the protector of Buddhism—is one of the main symbols of the Japanese imperial mythology. Located under the sea, it can be reached only sporadically by ascetics, saints, and accidentally also by commoners. The traditional inaccessibility of the Dragon Palace, with its particular composition of inhabitants, visitors, and sacred objects, often reflected important changes on a symbolic level in the religious and political establishment and in the cultural self-identity of medieval Japan.
The Dragon Palace is a complex transnational symbol, in which Indian (Buddhist and non-Buddhist), Chinese, and Japanese elements concur in the formation of a veritable multisemic entity. It represents ideas of salvation, power/authority, and gender, but also images and conceptions of exotic foreign lands and cultures. As a representational Other, the Dragon Palace and its inhabitants thus participated in fixing normative notions and visions of Japan.
Our panel investigates the Dragon Palace topos from the perspectives of four different academic disciplines: philology, religion, art history, and literature. Each talk examines the theme as it appears in a separate discursive area (ancient myths, religious texts, visual images, and popular narratives) with the aim of fostering a wide-ranging discussion. The goal of our panel is to focus on one popular theme in premodern Japanese culture as a means of understanding the larger role of symbolic images and spatial topoi in the configuration of power/authority, gender, and self-identity in medieval Japan.
Where Shinto and Sea Deities Meet: The Palace of the Dragon King in Ancient Myths
X. Jie Yang, University of Calgary
The Dragon Palace figures prominently in one of the most intriguing tales told in the ancient chronicles: In the age of the gods, there lived two brothers. The younger one borrowed a fishhook from the older brother, but lost it in the sea. Through a miraculous visit to the Dragon Palace, the young man succeeded in finding the missing fishhook, as well as quelling his older brother’s greedy desires. Going to the Palace again, the hero married the daughter of the Dragon-King Deity. The two then returned to land to prepare for the delivery of their first child. In various accounts either the younger brother, or his progeny, becomes emperor of Japan.
This dramatic tale about the young hero Hikohohodemi-no-mikoto, himself a Shinto kami descended from the goddess Amaterasu, appears in many Shinto texts in varying lengths. These include Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and numerous commentaries on the myths. The tale was also illustrated in the handscroll format during the Heian period, which survives today through a number of faithful Edo-period copies. These multiple textual and visual resources, when examined together, reveal the changing conception of one of the earliest manifestations of the Dragon Palace theme.
This paper attempts to reconstruct both the textual and visual images associated with the Dragon Palace in premodern Japan by tracing the manifold transformations of this myth. Through a careful reading of both textual and visual documents, we may see a new vision of the other world in Japanese mythology and within the Shinto tradition.
The Dragon Palace, Institutional Buddhism and Imperial Mythology in Medieval Japan
Fabio Rambelli, Williams College
In the realm of darkness at the bottom of the sea lives the species of Naga (dragon-serpents). Their world, centered on the Dragon Palace, is described in a variety of Japanese sources, from folk tales to Buddhist initiatory documents. As such, it played an important role in defining the boundaries and content of the imaginary of premodern Japanese culture. This paper attempts to reconstruct the Buddhist intellectual geography of the Dragon Palace symbol.
First, the Dragon Palace was part of Buddhist cosmogony, as the place where all sutras were to be preserved at the end of the Dharma until the appearance of the next Buddha.
Second, the Dragon Palace was a soteriological symbol (representing both ignorance and enlightenment), as in the vast exegetical discourse connected to the parable of the Naaga princess who became a buddha (ryunyo jobutsu). Particularly interesting in such a discourse was the theme of embodiment: complex correlative strategies enabled Buddhist scholar-monks to find the Dragon Palace inside the human body.
Third, the Dragon Palace was connected to the political mythology of medieval Japanese kingship, especially through the symbol of the sacred jewel (hoju) owned by the Dragon King. Often connected to Buddhist relics, this jewel, as a symbol of both political legitimacy and soteriological power, was at the center of numerous medieval discourses and rituals.
By describing these three different but related discursive fields, this paper aims at defining Buddhist intervention in the medieval Japanese imaginary of salvation, femininity, and power.
Enter the Dragon Palace: Representations of the Ryugu in Medieval Narrative Painting
Melissa McCormick, Princeton University
Pictorial representations of the Dragon Palace reified the mythical realm under the sea, significantly shaping its conception within the Japanese imagination. Using bright colors and exotic motifs, most medieval illustrated narratives position the voyage to the Dragon Palace between more familiar and less spectacular images on either end. Rather than simply providing fantastic interludes, however, these scenes portray the Dragon Palace as a regenerative space: those who enter acquire certain knowledge that can then be parlayed into worldly recognition, imperial power, or even rebirth in the Pure Land. The Dragon Palace also functions as a privileged site for sexual behavior; male protagonists often benefit from sexual activity there, both as a purely sensorial experience and in the resulting production of heirs.
This paper examines the narratological and representational methods employed in several medieval handscrolls that articulate this protean character of the Dragon Palace topos. The analysis will center upon representations of the Dragon King’s daughter. Unlike the Lotus Sutra, which relates her enlightenment, medieval narrative representations construct her identity solely as sexual or procreative, often describing her as unsaveable. I will argue that this female role enabled the construction of a topos that could simultaneously embody Buddhist awareness, imperial authority, and sexual indulgence. The talk also addresses the structure of the voyage scenes and specific pictorial motifs that signify the Dragon Palace—including imagery overlapping with that of T’ang and Silla—in considering how visualizations of this underwater abode contributed to the self-imaging of Japan in the medieval period.
Realms of Invention: Foreign Countries and Imaginary Lands in Medieval Japanese Short Stories
Roberta Strippoli, Stanford University
The Dragon Palace is one of several ikoku (strange/foreign lands) found in short stories commonly known as otogizoshi, which were written mainly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and later circulated across a wider range of social strata during the Tokugawa period.
Some stories, like the Hamaguri no soshi, are set entirely within these foreign lands. Others, such as Onzoshi shimawatari and Bonden koku, feature a protagonist who travels to distant islands, under the sea, or through hells, always with a mission to accomplish. The tasks of these characters range from acquiring knowledge to meeting or rescuing someone in danger.
Much attention is lavished upon the literary depiction of the inhabitants of ikoku: their physical appearance, and especially their character as well as the values that form their social organization. Such attention to detail reveals a curiosity and widespread taste for the exotic; at the same time, however, it can be read as the process of shaping a Japanese identity: the codification of similarities with and differences to an Other.
After providing a brief overview of various types of ikoku, I will situate the Dragon Palace within this imaginary geography, while analyzing its contribution towards the construction of a Japanese identity.