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India. Monks such as Myōe (
明恵
, 1173-1232), who was an advocate for “Old Buddhism” and
supporter of the Buddhist precepts revival movement, wished to travel to India.
267
He twice
attempted to do so, but was instructed by the Kasuga deity to remain in Japan.
268
This story
remained popular in various formats. For example, in the Noh play
Kasuga Ryūjin, of uncertain
authorship from around the fifteenth century, the reason stated for the Kasuga deity’s instructions
to Myōe stem from the fact that those sacred spaces (in China and India) can be found in Japan at
Kasuga.
269
With the medieval interest in drawing links between India and Japan and reviving
“Old Buddhism,” it is unsurprising that the handscrolls illustrating Xuanzang’s travels noted
previously also date to the Kamakura period. This set of scrolls emphasized Kōfuku-ji’s link to
the great master who studied in the holy land of the historical Buddha (Jp.: Shaka,
釈迦
) and
glorified the Chinese founder of the Hossō school.
270
In
other words, the
Genjō sanzō e
handscroll provides subtle evidence of medieval Nara’s interest in harkening back to India.
271
These scrolls situated Xuanzang in a lineage of direct transmission of the Buddhist teachings
from India. The scrolls, held by Kōfuku-ji, served to legitimize the temple as an inheritor of
Xuanzang’s Hossō Buddhism that originated in India, thus establishing Kōfuku-ji’s link to the
foreign land.
In light of these various movements aimed at establishing Indian roots and rediscovering
an earlier, uncorrupt Buddhism (whether such a version of “Old Buddhism” ever existed or not),
the choice to depict the
honji of the Nezu
Kasuga mandara in
shūji form takes on a new
dimension. Besides illustrating the period’s belief in the
honji-suijaku concept, the painting
267
Tyler,
Miracles, p. 67.
268
Scrolls 17 and 18 of the
Genki handscroll set depict such scenes of Myōe.
269
Grapard, “Flying Mountains,” p. 219.
270
Due to similarities in style and execution, this scroll set was likely painted by the same artist who painted the
Genki, Takashina no Takakane (
高階隆兼, fl. 1309-1330
). Wong, Dorothy C. "The Making of a Saint: Images of
Xuanzang in East Asia".
Early Medieval China. 2002 (1), p. 54.
271
Incidentally, the rising pilgrimage culture is also reflected in this set of scrolls, as Dorothy Wong states: “Once in
India, he [Xuanzang] is portrayed making pilgrimages to all the sacred sites of Buddhism.” Ibid.
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establishes a visual link to India. Rather than using the anthropomorphic figures of the Buddhas
and Bodhisattvas—which had been Sinicized and fully adopted and adapted
into Japanese visual
culture much earlier—the original “face” of the deities is depicted in a form that, while
recognizable by this time, inherently evoked some sense of Other (Other language, Other country
as origin, etc.). Sanskrit characters in Japan were only widely legible as a visual language. In
Buddhist visual culture, they were powerful forms of the deity, recalling the efficacious nature of
the deity (through mantra and previous uses of Sanskrit characters such as that mentioned in the
Hōjō-ki).
To conclude, in the Japanese medieval period the use of Sanskrit characters non-textually
gained different meanings. My goal in this chapter has been to give sustained
attention to one
individual occurrence (the Nezu
Kasuga mandara) in order to provide a basis for understanding
broader trends in the dissemination of Sanskrit. It is clear that concepts of polysemy were still
very much a part of the
shūji form of the deity
as seen in the
miya mandara. Yet, the goal in
illustrating this polysemic nature of the deity differed from the overall message of the works
discussed in the previous chapter. The localized circumstances of the Nezu
miya mandara reveal
that the use of Sanskrit characters to depict deities within the painting were prompted by
intentions that differed from those prior visual and iconic uses of Sanskrit. Unlike the
a-ji kan
imagery and the
hō mandara, the emphasis here is not quite on nonduality (though it is in
essence one possible result), but rather on establishing localized manifestations of Buddhism’s
original Indian deities. This is done by pairing two
forms of what, in the
honji-suijaku concept,
were the same deity.
In the Nezu
Kasuga mandara, the pairing of the enthroned
shūji forms and the structure
of the
honden visually link the Buddhist divinities and the
kami, presenting two “faces” for each
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deity. Other
miya mandara that incorporate
shūji sometimes show three forms of the deity: the
shūji form, the anthropomorphic Buddhist form, and the anthropomorphic
kami form (often
depicted as a noble court individual). The fourteenth-century
Sanno miya mandara is one such
example. In works like this, the polysemy of the sign envelops three forms for a single deity (a
single signified). In the
Sanno miya mandara the
shūji are on the top row and below are,
respectively, the rows of the anthropomorphic Buddhist deities and
kami. In an interpretation of
hierarchy, the
shūji are in the position of prominence. Alternately, the middle row of Buddhist
deities in human-like forms act as an intermediary between the
kami forms and what can be seen
as the essence (the seed) of the Buddhist divinities, the
shūji.
Regardless of
the layout of shūji
within the
miya mandara, the Sanskrit characters function no less as deities and reminders of the
concept of polysemy and the link to Buddhism’s origin country. Essentially, for the medieval
Japanese such
miya mandara created an invisible (or rather painted) link between
there and
here
(between the land of the Historical Buddha and Japan)—an appropriate goal for a work produced
and housed in a city where contemporaneous movements to return to the roots of Buddhism in
India were prevalent.