The Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan by Asuka Sango (review)

In the past decade Japanese scholarship has seen a rise in studies that focus on the doctrinal, historical, and social importance of ritual during the classical and medieval periods. While the field of Buddhist studies previously was largely disconnected from historical studies, Japanese historians and Buddhologists now engage in more interdisciplinary work, and this is a welcome change. In addition, with the rise of digitization of important archives such as the Tōji Hyakugō Monjo (a collection of documents originally preserved at the Tōji temple in Kyoto and now belonging to Kyoto prefecture), many primary sources related to the study of ritual and temple histories have become readily available to researchers. This increasing interest in Japan has sparked new directions in Western scholarship as well, resulting in studies that focus on ritual debate, court ritual, and the connection between ritual practice and healing and medicine.

In The Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan, Asuka Sango has undertaken a study that focuses on rituals as the site where Buddhism and State meet. More specifically, by focusing on the Buddhist assembly called “Misai-e,” she addresses two themes—the status of imperial authority and the relation between the changing ritsuryō state and the monastic community. As correctly pointed out by the author, it is important to problematize the concept “State Buddhism,” and the Misai-e (or any other major ritual for that matter) serves as a good vehicle for doing so. However, this topic requires an approach that takes into account doctrinal, institutional, and ritual developments. In addition, rituals change over time within their larger historical context, meaning, in this case, that the Misaie needs to be discussed as it developed over the course of the Nara and Heian periods. This, in turn, entails critical engagement with the concepts “ritsuryō state,” “regents’ period” (sekkan ki), “retired emperors’ period” (insei ki), and so on. Even before plunging into the book, I wondered, frankly, whether its length—120 pages of main text (not including the appendix, notes, glossary, and so forth)—could provide sufficient space within which to undertake the necessary conversation with the large body of Japanese scholarship on these topics.

The book consists of six chapters, of which chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6 revolve around the position of the emperor, while chapters 2 and 3 focus on the relation between the ritsuryō state (a bureaucratic state system based on legal codes introduced from China in the seventh and eighth centuries) and the Buddhist community. Sango’s argumentation starts with an introduction to the Misai-e and the text that forms its basis, the Golden Light Sutra. In chapter 1, we see how this scripture was received by the Japanese court, what its immediate importance was, and how the actual ritual was modeled after some of its passages. Sango emphasizes that the ritual, doctrinal, and political spheres should not be treated separately. She provides a good summary of the sutra, but it seems to me that a discussion in this chapter of the Golden Light Sutra as an exoteric text possessing several esoteric features—a characteristic of the sutra mentioned only later in the book—would have given more depth and nuance to Sango’s treatment of exoteric Buddhism. Since Kuroda Toshio, mentioned several times throughout, based his view of Heian society on his well-known kenmitsu taisei model, a discussion of exo-esoteric (kenmitsu) Buddhism in relation to this particular sutra would also have been welcome. Choices have to be made, and it is understandable that exo-esoteric Buddhism itself could not be addressed in detail at this point in the book, but given Sango’s later statement in connection with monastic promotion that “[the evidence] challenges the argument of Kuroda Toshio that, by the latter half of this period, esoteric Buddhism had become the predominant principle in the Japanese religious milieu,” an exploration...