Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (review)

A few years ago I turned a corner in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and found myself facing a remarkable work titled The Bija A, Representing Mahavairocana (Dainichi). This Muromachi-period painting depicts the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet inscribed in gold and ensconced on a lotus petal, as if the letter itself were a buddha or other suitable object of veneration or worship (in this case, as the title suggests, Dainichi nyorai). As a faithful reader of Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (1212), I was familiar with the medieval Japanese belief in the ritual power of this particular letter, but the image still struck me deeply, and it made me wonder idly about the sacred status of language, especially the written language, in medieval Japan.

Charlotte Eubanks’s very fine recent monograph, Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan, addresses this issue and many others. This book is a study of the depiction of holy texts and bodies (holy and otherwise), mainly in the setsuwa (anecdote) genre of medieval Japanese Buddhist literature, but also to a lesser but significant extent in Buddhist sutras that were composed in South Asia, translated into classical Chinese in what is now China, and transmitted to Japan. It focuses separately on bodies and on material texts and, especially, on bodies as texts and texts as bodies.

Early on, and again later for emphasis, Eubanks draws on previous research in textual studies to differentiate the terms “work” and “text.” A “work” is “a piece of literature that might be expressed in any number of forms (in folio or quarto, on vellum or paper, in various editions, etc.)” and a “linguistic text” is formed by “distinct apprehensions of the work that are expressed in words and punctuation.” Going even further, we have the material form of the text, its “container”: the “linguistic text” and “container” combine to form the “material text” (p. 36). Eubanks is concerned most of all with this material text, the intersection of what texts say and the material medium in which they are expressed or stored—including the media of the human voice and memory.

A brief introduction, subtitled “The Cult of the Book and the Culture of Text,” maps the study’s intellectual territory and defines some key terms. The first chapter, “The Ontology of Sutras,” asks and answers the questions “What do sutras want?” and “What were sutras given?” (p. 22). To rephrase, what do various sutras say about what people should and should not do with them, and to what extent were these prescriptions followed? Of course, sutras “want” to be read, believed, recited, recopied, remembered, and preserved. Drawing upon texts such as the Diamond, Flower Ornament, Nirvana, and, of course, the Lotus Sutra, Eubanks outlines the “rules” of using sutras, describing the various methods by which they (or, less coyly, their authors) attempted to secure their survival.

The second chapter, “Locating Setsuwa in Performance,” deals with the other principal genre discussed in this book, the great anecdotal collections of medieval Japan, foremost among them Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of times now past, ca. 1120). It uses them to elucidate further attitudes toward texts and books, concluding that they “reveal that an elaboration of the ‘cult of the book’ was a fundamental component in attracting and retaining believers in ninth- through thirteenth-century Japan” (p. 96).

Chapter 3, “Decomposing Bodies, Composing Texts,” focuses mainly on the practice of fujōkan, which Eubanks translates as “the spectacle of impurity” (p. 102). Fujōkan practitioners stared at decomposing corpses (especially female ones), or images thereof, or recollected corpses or images they had seen, all in order to eliminate pernicious attachments to the beauty of the human form and to the false belief in physical permanence. More broadly, the chapter is about depictions of the body...