In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Ritual Implements for Funerals and Memorials The implements that accompanied Japanese funeral rituals and death memorials are still plentiful; they were produced by workshops to be durable and to perform particular functions. Bronze candleholders and many other intriguing appurtenances of religious practices are housed today in major museums. The usual label identifies an implement by type but says little or nothing about its religious function. Extracted from their original contexts, religious paraphernalia in a museum cannot reveal where or how they were once used, let alone the meanings they had held for participants in religious rituals. Until recently, modern scholarship has added little to the information on the labels because—save for sculpture, painting, and architecture—the implements of ritual were consigned to the “minor arts” and therefore mostly ignored. Unlike traditional grave goods in early China, implements had not been owned by the deceased when alive or been made especially for a given deceased individual after death. Beyond revealing generally that the deceased was sufficiently wealthy and high-ranking, most objects used at funerals and death memorials in medieval Japan demonstrate very little about the particular social or political status of the deceased. In his discussion of early Chinese ritual paraphernalia (liqi), Wu Hung claimed that ritual objects can be distinguished from similar-appearing ordinary tools and mundane wares by their costly manufacture: they are made of precious materials and/or exhibit specialized craftsmanship requiring an unusual amount of human labor.1 This theory applies also, to some degree, to medieval Japan where Buddhist ritual implements, many of which derived from the forms of ancient Chinese bronze vessels, were also made of bronze, an expensive material used almost exclusively for ceremonial objects. Lac- 114 The Material Culture of Death quered wooden implements, which are also tremendously labor-intensive, were also popular for religious ceremonies and rituals. As we have seen, death rituals in medieval Japan required the use of special objects, the meaning of which lay in their roles in funerary and memorial ceremonies . Clearly, one of the best ways to understand how they were used in the past is by examining the illustrations that remain from the period in question. That particular ritual implements are so carefully depicted in these illustrations suggests that they were indeed recognized as important to the performance of the rituals. Because the funerals and memorial services of the secular elite in the medieval period were not generally illustrated, however, this chapter will look at the types of ritual objects depicted in funeral scenes in illustrated biographies of importantpriests (kôsôden-e)datingfromthefourteenththroughtheearlysixteenth centuries. In particular, I shall concentrate on the types of ritual implements that attended Priest Nichiren’s (1222–1282) funeral procession in the Nichiren shônin chûgasan handscroll (early 16th c.), and those that accompanied Priest Hônen’s (1133–1212) seven seventh-day death memorials in Hônen shônin e-den (early 14th c.), with examples from other medieval scrolls introduced where useful. By employing this methodology, I am not suggesting that the scrolls provide historically accurate illustrations of how implements were used for the funerals and memorials of Nichiren or Hônen, as neither scroll is contemporary with the time of death of its subject. Rather, the pictures show the types of objects commonly employed for mortuary rites associated with high-ranking priests and elite members of society in late medieval Japan, a fact borne out by the fifteenth-century records of the funerals of the Ashikaga shoguns discussed in Chapter 2. Illustrated handscrolls allow us to “see” which ritual implements were used when and how they were positioned (information only rarely provided in written records), and may help to foster new thinking about their original function in funerary rituals. Ritual Implements in Funeral Processions About the funeral of Nichiren, who died in 1282, we have only a few details. More than two centuries later an extensive visualization of that important event appeared in the form of an illustrated biography called the Nichiren shônin chûgasan (Annotated paintings of Nichiren shônin).2 Priest Enmyôin Nitchô (1441–1510), about whom little is known,3 began work on this project late in his life, probably after 1506. The illustrations for the scrolls (five in all) were commissioned by the Provisional Senior Assistant High Priest Nissei,4 a priest of Kyoto’s head Nichiren sect temple, Honkokuji, who selected the littleknown Kyoto artist Kubota Muneyasu to paint them; the images were completed in 1536. From...

Share