92 This Book Takes Mount Miwa (In Present-Day Nara Prefecture)

92 book reviews

Anna Andreeva, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. xxi + 397 pp. isbn 9780674970571 (hbk.)

This book takes Mount Miwa (in present-day Nara Prefecture), one of Japan’s most important religious sites, as its spatial focus and explores the activities of local Buddhist practitioners (lineages, priests, holy men, mountain ascetics) during the medieval period, roughly from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. It aims to retrieve the “complex mix of religious and cultural ingredients and the uneven historical processes involved in assembling the ritual and doctrinal knowledge of medieval temple lineages at Miwa, especially concerning kami” (p. 12), and to show how local Buddhist practitioners played the most important role in shaping the worship of kami in the medieval period (p. 15). The book commences with a historical survey of the deities, early forms of worship, and sacred sites at Miwa by consulting a series of Buddhist texts as well as Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Fudoki. The author points to the continental origin of the main Miwa deity, Ōnamuchi, and refers to Mount Miwa, which was considered as the deity itself, as a “peace-token in the discourse of Izumo’s surrender to the Yamato rulers” (p. 46). The linkage of the origin of Mount Miwa with the subjugation of the Izumo kami Ōnamuchi is a fascinating and important topic in the history of kami worship and Shinto and can help the author connect the kami of Mount Miwa to the topic of “assembling Shinto,” in which the imperial ancestor Amaterasu played a central role. However, the author refers to this episode only in passing. In fact, neither Ōnamuchi nor kami as a generic category seems a major concern for Andreeva, whose discussion focuses on esoteric Buddhist practices and doctrines. Chapter 2 retraces the emergence of temple networks and pilgrimage in southern Yamato, where Mount Miwa is located. The expansion of Kōfukuji, Hasedera, the Murō Shrine Temple, and the Kasuga Shrine into the southern Yamato region, enabled by the emerging theory of “original ground vs. mani- fested trace” (honji suijaku), gave rise to “criss-crossing geographies of pilgrimage” (p. 101), where semi-itinerant Buddhist practitioners, holy men, and mountain ascetic practitioners studied scriptures and commentaries and prac- ticed rituals and training. These people “were instrumental in creating a basis for the emergence of a loose assemblage of rituals, doctrines, and images that later would be called ‘Miwa-ryū Shinto’” (p. 106). This is an enticing claim, but as it turns out, kami does not yet figure importantly in this story of “assemblage.” Chapter 3 introduces the holy man Kyōen, who established the main training facility, the Miwa bessho. Reputed to have attained “enlightenment in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu), Kyōen was responsible for popularizing this

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15685276-12341523 book reviews 93 esoteric doctrine among practitioners in the region. Chapter 4 explores the fascinating history of charitable activities, including taking care of the outcasts called hinin, in the Miwa region, led by the Buddhist monk Eizon of Saidaiji in Nara. Eizon is also known for compiling a history of the Miwa temple titled “Karmic Origins of the Great Bright Miwa Deity” or Miwa daimyōjin engi, a late thirteenth century text. In Chapter 5, the author conducts a fascinating analysis of this text, referring to it as making “a powerful political statement” (p. 191), because it, among other discursive moves, creatively defined the Miwa deity, together with the Sun Goddess Amaterasu enshrined at Ise, as one of the three forms of the cosmic Mahavairocana Buddha, and further raised it above Amaterasu. This chapter convincingly demonstrates how, by way of the text, Mount Miwa “was transformed into a new kind of transcendent space, and emerged as a religious authority in its own right” (p. 197). Chapter 6 develops an interesting discussion of representations of kami as serpents in the teachings of esoteric Buddhism. Here, kami, the imperial ancestor Amaterasu included, were understood to have “an intrinsic value for advancing new salvatory techniques that could open gates to achieving per- fect enlightenment” (p. 218). Serving as “representations of true reality, and embodiments of the enlightened mind” (p. 232), the serpent, together with the motifs of pollution and poison, was part of extensive iconographic representations accessible to all, thereby facilitating the spread of esoteric Buddhist teachings across different social strata. Besides iconographies, holy men and other practitioners developed Ise kanjo and jingi kanjo rituals that represented “symbolic unification of the practitioner with the kami … through the chan- neling agency of an esoteric deity” (p. 251). In Chapter 7, the author recounts how the above-mentioned rituals came to be marked as “Miwa-ryū” during the early modern period (1600–1867). Here, this reviewer finds the author’s identification of a continuity between medieval Mount Miwa and early modern Miwa-ryū Shinto and Ryōbu Shinto problematic, because it reads like Andreeva is writing backwards from the per- spective of early modern “Shinto.” The terms “Ryōbu Shinto” and “Miwa-ryū Shinto” originated from the Yoshida house, more specifically, Yoshida Kanekuni and Yoshida Kanetomo, in the 1480s. For Kanetomo, the use of Ryōbu Shinto served to distinguish and distance his own “pure” Shinto-under-construction from what he claimed to be earlier, amalgamated, and thus impure forms of Shinto. Kanetomo was creatively classifying and formulating knowledge and the history of the kami by mobilizing the term Shinto, and he did so for very clear reasons. Andreeva seems to have followed the Yoshidas’ classifica- tion and assumed a prehistory for Miwa-ryū and Ryōbu Shinto. The history of esoteric Buddhist approaches to kami worship at Mount Miwa, covered in

Numen 66 (2019) 89–106