Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan by Bryan D. Lowe (review)

In this fascinating and masterful book, Bryan Lowe combines an interest in doctrine with an emphasis on practice to explore "the ways key Buddhist concepts such as merit, ethics, friendship, and cosmology interact with social structures and cultural patterns" (p. 7). In the process, he makes a convincing argument that the ritualized reproduction of Buddhist texts played a central role in the creation of the world of ancient Japan in its varied cosmological, social, bureaucratic, ethical, and political aspects.

Lowe defines "ritualized writing" as an activity that is set apart from everyday scribal tasks by means of ritual practices such as purifications and other ceremonies. He uses the term to refer both to the act of transcription and to the texts themselves—ritual prayers, sutras, and other forms of scripture. The concept is closely related to the Buddhist ideal of the book as a sacred object that asks to be venerated and promises rewards to those who do so. Lowe approaches ritual not simply as a form of symbolic action that functioned to maintain the social order but also as a dynamic activity that served to reconfigure local communities, reshape bureaucratic institutions, and reimagine concepts of the afterlife and of the state. One key contribution of the book is a powerful and sweeping critique of the state-Buddhism approach to the Nara period and of the contrasting reductive notion of popular Buddhism. As Lowe argues, the agency of religious and historical actors is not to be found in a binary tension between state control and popular resistance but rather within a framework of ritual practices, which served to create both commonalities and distinctions among individuals and to transform social and geographic communities.

The book is painstakingly researched. Lowe is the only scholar working in English on the Shōsōin 正倉院 documents, an extraordinary collection of over ten thousand manuscripts dating from the Nara period. In addition to copies of sutras, the documents also include records related to tax collection, censuses, temple construction, and even poetry. Lowe demonstrates considerable expertise and familiarity with this archive. He is also able to move comfortably and expertly back and forth among many other kinds of materials, including historical records and literary texts. At a theoretical level, Lowe's study makes a valuable contribution to rethinking the concepts of ritual and agency in ways that could be helpful far beyond the confines of the field of early Japan.

Part 1 of the book, "Ritual Practices," explores the "cosmological and ethical underpinnings of transcribing scripture" (p. 19). In chapter 1, "Merit, Purity, and Ceremony," Lowe examines literary tales from Japan and the continent together with colophons appended to sutra manuscripts in order to discuss "three ways that East Asian Buddhists understood and practiced ritualized writing" (p. 30) as acts that created merit, required purification, and featured concluding ceremonies. This understanding of sutra copying as ethically fulfilling ritualized writing spread throughout East Asia and came to Japan in the form of narrative accounts and scriptural practices. Chapter 2, "Ritual Compositions," focuses on ganmon 願文 (prayer texts), a ritual and literary genre that functioned to dedicate merit. Ganmon were ritual texts insofar as they were performed in a ritual setting and employed formal ritualistic language and sacral symbolism. But ganmon were also literary creations in that they were governed by rules from classical Chinese poetics. In Lowe's account, ganmon are a wonderful illustration of the close relationship between literature and ritual: just as literary composition requires conceptions of ritual order to create its formal structures, so does ritual prayer require literary language in order to elevate it and thus set it apart from ordinary utterances.

In part 2, "Organizations," Lowe examines the social groups and institutions that made ritualized writing possible. Chapter 3, "Writing Societies," focuses on the earliest datable sutra manuscript in Japan (686) "to explore the communities connected to ritualized writing in ancient Japan" (p. 83). In this...