Shaka no Honji : Preaching, Intertextuality, and Popular Hagiography

The tradition of telling the life story of the Buddha, Śamacr;kyamuni, is as old as Buddhism itself. Such accounts served as a prototype for religious biographies as a category, but at the same time, the original tale also was transformed as it was retold in different contexts. Shaka no honji, the work of hagiography I will describe here, exemplifies this process. First appearing in the early Muromachi and much transcribed throughout the late medieval period, the tale spread widely during the early Edo period when printed editions proliferated. Many manuscript and printed copies survive.¹ It was owned by a great number of temples and households and indeed was likely the most popular hagiography of the Buddha during those centuries. That is to say, for many people of the time, the story told in Shaka no honji was the story of Śākyamuni Buddha, known to them as Shaka nyorai or Shakuson . There can be little doubt that the text was widely read and that it was adopted for the performance of "picture-explaining," or etoki.²

Shaka no honji is a fascinating combination of traditional hagiographical elements with innovative departures. While many events are copied faithfully from earlier renditions, other scenes, including some of the most central ones, are quite novel. As the tale evolved in the Japanese context, it was shaped by themes figuring in stories about noted Japanese monks that in turn engaged concerns East Asian Buddhism developed many centuries after the death of the founder. Prime among these was the salvation of parents. Popular hagiographies of saints often emphasized the role played by their mothers in their lives and depicted the salvation of one's parents as a key reason for entering the path of religion. Reflecting these influences, a distinctive feature of Shaka no honji is that the primary motivation for the religious quest of the young prince Siddh&amacrrtha (Jp. Shitta taishi ), who would become the Buddha, is the salvation of his mother. In the pages that follow, I will trace some of the factors that led to the great renunciant being recast as a filial son in this Japanese version of his life story.

Shaka no honji also came to be deeply colored by the conventions of classical Japanese literature. A prose narrative, written almost exclusively in the hiragana syllabary, the text can be placed within the modern scholarly rubric of the Muromachi tale, Muromachi jidai monogatari, or otogizōshi, a broad category consisting of a great number of disparate and overlapping subtypes.³Otogizōshi are known for their hybridity, their propensity for jumping generic categories, recycling old plots, and borrowing narrative details. The themes and narrative tropes of many such works took shape out of the practice of oral explication in Japanese of collections of legends written in Sino-Japanese kanbun. As such they were part of an economy of texts and preaching that, picking up and reworking religious themes, played a central role in shaping the beliefs and aspirations of people in medieval and early modern Japan. Created from the voices of marketplace preachers and sprinkled with strains of Buddhist liturgy and snippets of philosophical discourse, such stories came to be written down in Japanese and then circulated among religious communities to be performed in the streets, in the marketplace, in temples, and in private homes.⁴ In this process of circulation, texts floated free of their anonymous authors, mutually shaping and influencing each other. The preachers who were the curators of these texts often borrowed details from one story to embellish another.⁵ Intersecting with the world of masters of linked verse, the rengashi, they also borrowed liberally from the rich body of poetry and prose writings in the Japanese classical tradition. Before examining the features of Shaka no honji, we thus should take a somewhat closer look at the parameters of the genre of medieval otogizōshi of which it was part.

The Parameters of Otogizōshi

As noted above, groups of traveling preachers played a key part in the development of otogizōshi like Shaka no honji. As preachers spread...