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1 CHAPTER 1 Immigrant Gods on the Road to Jindò ALTHOUGH FEW SCHOLARS of Japanese religion today would accept Meijiperiod claims about the centrality of the royal cult for the spiritual life of the Japanese people, one of the most enduring legacies of prewar Japanese ideology has been the association of the Japanese royal house with Japanese nationalism. In this ideological configuration tennò and kami were represented as cornerstones of a purportedly continuous native Japanese cultural and religious identity with roots in pre-Buddhist antiquity. Perhaps because the Japanese university system and the academic study of religion began to take shape at just this time, to a large degree these ideological parameters have been absorbed into academic discourse and are found even within the self-representation of Japanese Buddhist institutions. One of the most important presuppositions of this discourse has been the tacit assumption that while the relationship between the royal cult and the Buddhist tradition is a phenomenon that must be explained, the alliance between the tennò and the kami is something natural and in need of virtually no explanation. As a result, the bivalent Buddhist-Shintò framework for discussing Japanese religion still exerts a powerful influence in academic textbooks as well as in the broader academic discourse in Japan and the west. Central to this model are a series of historical claims rooted in a conception of Japanese Buddhism as an initially “foreign” tradition that was slowly absorbed by the Japanese as it reached an accommodation with the purportedly native kami. Because this model posits a horizon of reception for the Buddhist tradition that was dominated by native kami, it has also long been implicated in nativist discourses centering on the Nara (710–784) and early Heian (794–1185) periods, when many of the building blocks for the Japanese royal system were constructed. Perhaps the greatest testament to the influence of prewar ideology can be seen in the emergence of two powerful countercurrents in the 2 Weaving and Binding scholarship of early Japanese religion that have more or less explicitly been presented in opposition to the bivalent model and its often distorting presuppositions. One of these movements, championed by such scholars as Fukunaga Mitsuji, Shinkawa Tokio, Herman Ooms, and David Bialock, has emphasized the prominence of continental cultic elements with little apparent connection to the Buddhist tradition in the ritual and cultural life of the early court. These scholars have tended to assert that much of what has long been labeled “Shintò” within the royal cult in fact represents early appropriations of rites and motifs found in Chinese Taoism.1 A second, equally powerful movement, led by scholars such as Kuroda Toshio and Mark Teeuwen, has directly challenged nativist understandings by arguing that Shintò is best understood as an important historical phenomenon with roots in mid-Heian period Buddhist discourses concerning the relationship between the buddhas and kami of the Japanese islands. Kuroda famously argued that the term “Shintò” itself was used only rarely in the ancient period and never in reference to a discreet religious system. Similarly, Teeuwen has argued that the term “Shintò,” or jindò, as it would have been read at the time, was most likely taken from Chinese Buddhist discourses concerning deities in need of “taming” and Buddhist salvation. He notes that whereas court-sponsored rites at shrines were most commonly referred to by the term “jingi,” the term jindò appears almost exclusively in contexts related to such activities as the worship of kami at Buddhist temples or temple-shrine multiplexes (jingûji). Teeuwen therefore suggests that the origins of Shintò may lie not in court-sponsored jingi worship, but rather within jindò-style rites that were performed at temple-shrine multiplexes that had supplanted much of the jingi cult by the mid-Heian period.2 In this chapter I propose to build on the work of these and other scholars in order to delineate a few important turning points on the road that led from the establishment of the tennò-centered polity in the late seventh century towards the establishment of Jindò as an organizing principle of the royal cult in the mid-Heian period. This will require an examination of a complicated set of interactions between tennò, monk, and kami in which the often hostile relations between tennò and kami influenced the growth and direction of Buddhist movements on the one hand and the tennò’s still evolving political and cultic identity on the other. Along the way we shall also repeatedly...

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