Mountain Mandalas: Shugendō in Kyushu by Allan G. Grapard (review)

Over the last several decades, Allan Grapard has exerted a powerful influence on English-language research on Japanese religions. By insisting upon the importance of place-based institutional history, he has informed a spate of books on the interaction of Buddhism and kami worship at particular sites. Those focusing on mountains include Sarah Thal's Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods on Konpira (2005), D. Max Moerman's Localizing Paradise on Kumano (2005), Barbara Ambros's Emplacing a Mountain on Ōyama (2008), my own Real and Imagined on Kinpusen (2015), and Anna Andreeva's Assembling Medieval Shintō on Mt. Miwa (2017). Mountain Mandalas thus fits into an ongoing trend that is partly of Grapard's own making.

The book aims to illuminate the creation and maintenance of sacred sites in a regional context through a "geohistorical synthesis." It uses Shugendō, and, to a lesser extent, rites of kami worship, as examples and focuses on Mt. Hiko, Usa, and Kunisaki, three distinct but related and adjacent zones in northern Kyushu. As Grapard is at justifiable pains to remind us, Kyushu remains much understudied despite the richness of its history. In each of these domains—the methodological, the thematic, and the geographic—the book's overwhelming concern is with spatiality. Happily, its pages are graced by a number of carefully rendered maps as well as several helpful charts and illustrations. Grapard has also furnished a valuable appendix in the form of translations of key sources (an eighteenth-century list of ritual sites in Kunisaki and three engi texts: Hikosan ruki, Chinzei Hikosan engi, and Rokugō kaizan Ninmon daibosatsu hongi). It is freely available through Bloomsbury's website and is a boon to any reader interested in Mt. Hiko, Kunisaki, or the genre of engi (a term Grapard translates as "etiological records").

Mountain Mandalas is thought provoking, and Grapard's prose, ever inventive and sometimes even amazing, makes it a fun read. For me, it raised two persistent, and I think worthwhile, questions: is this book actually about Shugendō? And what is Shugendō, anyway? Early on, Grapard glosses this term, as slippery as it is seductive, as "Japan's mountain cults" (p. xii) and as "an institutional and ritual system that was elaborated over a period of several centuries on the basis of various cults in the mountains of Japan" (p. 1). Either definition has the virtues of inclusivity and flexibility; however, neither explains how location does—or does not—turn specific practices (say, esoteric Buddhist rites or the worship of Hachiman as practiced in the mountains) into "Shugendō." There are good historiographical reasons for adopting a narrower, more specific definition. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, Japanese historians like Hasegawa Kenji and Tokunaga Seiko pointed out that mountain practitioners (yamabushi, geza/genja) were active well before Shugendō coalesced as an organized religious movement. To maximize clarity and avoid anachronism, my own preference has therefore been to define Shugendō as "a religious movement (1) with its own organizational hierarchies, institutions, rites, and texts, and (2) recognized by both participants and observers as distinct from other modes of religious practice."¹ Viewed in this light, Shugendō cannot be said to have emerged prior to the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, for it was at that time that it differentiated, both organizationally and discursively, from the hybrid kenmitsu Buddhism and affiliated kami cults that dominated so much of medieval religious life.

Grapard's interest in the creation of social difference and the political effects of ritual certainly puts him into sympathy with historicist analysis. He also explicitly positions himself against approaches that essentialize Shugendō as a timeless folk religion (p. 2) and later provides some discussion of social and political organization at Mt. Hiko and Kunisaki during the Kamakura, Muromachi, and Edo periods (pp. 157–68, 216–23). Nevertheless, his approach is one in which semiotics trumps historicism, and I became a happier reader once I stopped expecting...