Stranger in the Distance: Pilgrims, Marvels, and the Mapping of the Medieval (Japanese) World

Medieval studies is an inherently comparative enterprise. The middle, after all, is a relational category: any discussion of a Middle Ages begs the historical question of what came before and after, and of the transformations by which the former became the latter. This truism, however, becomes more interesting when we consider the ways in which these categories, developed in the context of European historiography, have influenced the study of cultures outside the geographic confines of Europe. Indeed, historians of virtually every region have made use at one time or another of the heuristic (and ideological) benefits of viewing their own history in terms of the tripartite division between ancient, medieval and modern. For example, it was in 1906 – just as Japan was emerging as the first Asian power to engage in successful military action against a Western nation – that the historian Hara Katsurō first applied the designation "Middle Ages" (chūsei) to the analysis of Japanese history, a category that continues to be employed (and disputed) by scholars today.¹ More recently, historians of medieval Christendom such as Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jaques LeGoff and Peter Brown have permitted scholars of pre-modern Buddhism to recognize numerous features of religious experience that had hitherto been obscured by an emphasis on canonical scriptures and sectarian doctrine.²

For the most part, this influence has been limited to the appropriation of these medievalists' insights, employing paradigms developed for the study of European history to highlight unexplored facets of the Asian religious world. While this has provided invaluable new perspectives from which to consider medieval Asian religion, there nevertheless remains a great deal of work to be done.³ I would suggest, for example, that comparative study is, at its best, a reciprocal endeavor, providing new perspectives from which to understand both sides of the comparison. It is to suggest something of this potential that I venture – with some trepidation – to present in this forum the following reflections of a specialist in medieval Japanese religion.

Any comparative project in medieval Buddhism and Christianity should perhaps begin with a recognition of the anthropological theories that have informed both fields. In his now-classic critique of functionalist theories of religious ritual, for example, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested that we devote our attention, not only to examples of rituals that function as expected, but to those that fail to do so. It is precisely in such moments, he argued, that we may detect the changing tensions and contradictions all traditions must navigate over time.⁴ It is with that advice in mind that I offer up two Japanese stories of pilgrimage gone marvelously wrong, tales that have been repeated in literature, drama and the visual arts throughout the medieval period and into the present.⁵ These narratives, I will argue, provide more than a vantage from which to view some of the central dynamics in the development of the medieval Japanese religious world; their use of the marvelous in the negotiation of sacred space may also shed light on the nature of medieval pilgrimage more generally, in the West as well as in Japan.

The Stories

The first of these two stories (which makes its initial appearance in an eleventh century collection of Buddhist didactic literature) describes a series of events associated with a temple known as Dōjōji, in modern-day Wakayama prefecture.⁶ The name Dōjōji (literally, "Path Becoming Temple") likely derives from the fact that it marks the first stage of one of the routes in the Kumano pilgrimage, a journey through the mountains of the Kii peninsula to venerate three shrines linked with the indigenous gods of the Shinto pantheon. And it was on just such a journey, we are told, that a handsome young religious named Anchin set out in the year 928.

On the way, he rented lodgings in the home of Kiyohime, a young widow. She proved herself to be an unusually attentive hostess, and that night, the man learned why, when she snuck into his quarters and tried to join him under the covers. In spite...