At the end of the tenth century, a series of cultural transformations was set in motion in Japan. It is not altogether clear what triggered these changes, but contemporary records give ample evidence of epidemic disease, banditry, and general malaise. It was soon widely believed that the world was coming to an end. This conviction found its most striking expression in the Buddhist eschatological notion of mappô, or "end of the Dharma." In some ways this notion resembles the postmodernist concept of the end of history. It may also be related to contemporary anxieties about Y2K and the end of the millennium.

This panel explores one of the several cultural movements sustained by thoughts of devolution and demise, that of Pure Land Buddhist belief and practice. A great deal has already been said about the connection between mappô ideology and Pure Land doctrine. It is our goal, not to reiterate the obvious, but instead to look harder at the specifics of Pure Land theoretical and visual culture in the wider context of a millennial fixation on endings. What becomes clear is that an outburst of creativity—philosophical, social, aesthetic—accompanied such contemplation of disaster perhaps as a coping mechanism. Each paper addresses an area of such creativity, from the unprecedented appearance of mountainous landscapes in Pure Land votive imagery, to the dilemma of women in those landscapes, to the rhetoric of mappô itself. We conclude with a rumination on the work of Pure Land imagery in a postmodern setting.

William E. Deal, Case Western Reserve University

By the mid- to late-Heian period, the Buddhist eschatological notion of mappô ("end of the Dharma") was widely believed to be a concrete reality rather than a distant theoretical possibility. The contemporaneous development of Tendai Pure Land Buddhism—an amalgam of Lotus Sutra and Pure Land ritual practices—is often viewed as a religious reaction to a sense of impending decline effected by the degenerate age of mappô.

Inspired by texts like Genshin’s Ôjô yôshû (Essentials for Rebirth in the Pure Land), and perceiving themselves inhabitants of a world in crisis, mid- to late-Heian Japanese Buddhists employed Tendai Pure Land rituals in hopes of ameliorating the deletrious effects of mappô. Numerous examples, including the founding of the Kangaku-e (Society for the Encouragement of Learning) in 964 and the transformation of regent Fujiwara no Yorimichi’s detached palace into a temple in 1052, evidence the impact of mappô on Japanese culture. As a consequence, mappô has often been used as an overarching interpretive framework by twentieth-century scholars seeking to explain late-Heian Buddhism.

This paper will explore the problem of interpreting Heian Buddhism monolithically through the lens of mappô. I will argue that the diverse ideas and practices subsumed under this concept in contemporary scholarship are better understood as multivalent responses to different kinds of crises—both individual and collective—rather than as a singular religious response. While central to Heian thought, mappô generated varied reactions. This paper seeks to illuminate the complex ways in which Heian Buddhists represented their experiences of the world through the rhetorical device of mappô.

Candice F. Kanda, Yale University

The Amida raigôzu, or "picture of Amida’s welcoming arrival," is a major thematic category within Pure Land Buddhist painting. One of the most frequent and distinctive features of the Japanese raigôzu is the portrayal of mountainous landscapes. Interestingly, extant Chinese and Korean Pure Land paintings of this category seem to show no mountains at all. It is therefore worth considering the ways in which Japanese raigôzu, specifically in the representation of mountains, have evolved away from their continental counterparts.

In studying raigôzu, scholars have tended to concentrate on individual works without taking into account the sources and development of the genre. This paper will attempt to clarify how landscape formation in raigôzu stemmed from choices made by Japanese painters as they adapted Chinese Tang-dynasty forms to their own needs. It also examines how Japanese ideas about mountains encouraged a nativist landscape iconography whose maturation was catalyzed by the religious and philosophical transformations at work from the mid-Heian through the early Kamakura periods.

The paper will demonstrate that Japanese painters not only incorporated mountains into raigô imagery but also used them with extraordinary iconographic sophistication. Mountains came to serve as eloquent expressions of contemporary religious philosophy, to the remarkable extent that their presence in raigôzu substantially exceeded what the sutras describe for Amida’s pure land. The mountainous landscape in raigô imagery in fact quite literally marked the breaking of new artistic and religious ground whose impetus lay in a profound reverence for mountains emergent within Japanese sacro-artistic culture in the era of mappô.

David (Max) Moerman, Barnard College

Japan’s Pure Land movement is often said to have extended the promise of salvation to women traditionally excluded from prior forms of Buddhism. And, indeed, women played a prominent role in the textual, ritual, and visual forms of Japanese Pure Land culture. Their inclusion, however, remained deeply ambivalent. For it was the absence of women, condemned as inherently polluted, that made the Pure Land pure. Pure Land rebirth required that women undergo a change of sex and made salvation contingent on female self-hatred. Yet the very ambiguity of this liberation theology allowed for alternative interpretations of the sutras’ gendered claims.

This paper examines the ambiguous position of women at the Kumano shrines, a center of medieval pilgrimage understood as a local manifestation of Amida’s paradise. Kumano’s Pure Land was open to women who were excluded from other sacred sites because, it was claimed, the blood of menstruation and childbirth rendered them too polluted to enter such pure realms. Within a religious culture that defined the female body as an obstacle to salvation, Kumano was unusual in welcoming female devotees. However, even this local paradise presented a women’s liberation duplicitous at best. Kumano’s itinerant nuns preached to women the promise of heavenly rebirth but only as an escape from a more sordid cosmological destiny: a hell of blood to which all women, by virtue of their biology, were damned. The Kumano nuns’ promotion of an ideology responsible for women’s oppression presents a disturbing historical problem and one that reveals how Buddhist pure lands and Buddhist hells were gendered domains.

Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, Boston University