Podcasts about heian japan

Bright on Buddhism - Episode 114 - What is the role of visions and dreams in Buddhism? What are some visions and dreams that Buddhists have had? How ought we understand them? (How are they different from imagining a thing?)References: Andrews, Allan A. The Teachings Essential for Rebirth: A study of Genshin's Ōjōyōshū. Monumenta Nipponica, Sophia University, 1973.; Horton, Sarah (2004). The Influence of the Ōjōyōshū in Late Tenth- and Early Eleventh-Century Japan, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 (1), 29-54; Rhodes, Robert F. (2007). Ōjōyōshū, Nihon Ōjō Gokuraku-ki, and the Construction of Pure Land Discourse in Heian Japan, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34 (2), 249-270; Rhodes, Robert F. (2001). Some Problems concerning Genshin's Biographies, Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu) 50 (1), 514-511; Rhodes, Robert F. (2017). Genshin's Ōjōyōshū and the Construction of Pure Land Discourse in Heian Japan (Pure Land Buddhist Studies). University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0824872489.; Ishida, Mizumaro (1970). Nihon Shisō Taikei 6: Genshin (in Japanese). Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 4000700065.; Kubota, Jun (2007). Iwanami Nihon Koten Bungaku Jiten [Iwanami Dictionary of Japanese Classical Literature] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 978-4-00-080310-6. OCLC 122941872.; Muller, A. Charles (1998). "East Asian Apocryphal Scriptures: Their Origin and Role in the Development of Sinitic Buddhism". Bulletin of Toyo Gakuen University. 6: 63–76. Archived from the original on 2013-03-17.; Silk, Jonathan A. (April 1997). "The Composition of the 'Guanwuliangshoufo-jing': Some Buddhist and Jaina Parallels to its Narrative Frame". Journal of Indian Philosophy. 25 (2): 181–256. doi:10.1023/A:1004291223455. JSTOR 23448579. S2CID 169187184.; Buswell, Robert Jr; Lopez, Donald S. Jr., eds. (2013). Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691157863.; Hakeda, Yoshito S., trans. (1967), Awakening of Faith—Attributed to Aśvaghoṣa, with commentary by Yoshito S. Hakeda, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-08336-X; Jorgensen, John; Lusthaus, Dan; Makeham, John; Strange, Mark, trans. (2019), Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190297718; King, Sally B. (1991), Buddha nature, State University of New York Press, ISBN 0585068313; Muller, Charles (1998). "East Asian Apocryphal Scriptures: Their Origin and Role in the Development of Sinitic Buddhism". Bulletin of Toyo Gakuen University. 6: 63–76.; Suzuki, Daisetz T. (1900). Açvaghosha's Discourse on the awakening of faith in the Mahâyâna. Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co.; Tarocco, Franceska (2008). "Lost in Translation? The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun) and its modern readings". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 71 (2): 323–343. doi:10.1017/S0041977X08000566. hdl:10278/3684313.Do you have a question about Buddhism that you'd like us to discuss? Let us know by emailing us at Bright.On.Buddhism@gmail.com.Credits:Nick Bright: Script, Cover Art, Music, Voice of Hearer, Co-HostProven Paradox: Editing, mixing and mastering, social media, Voice of Hermit, Co-Host

794 - 1180 - We are covering the period of Japan's history from the relocation of the capital city to Heian-kyō up to the outbreak of the Genpei War.

Kinship in Heian Japan (roughly 800–1200 CE) was matrilocal, which means it was men who moved in with their wives' families and lived largely under their control. Although already thoroughly patriarchal in most respects, these last vestiges of what Engels calls Mother Right create fascinating tensions in a society where the world-historic defeat of the female sex was not quite complete—and reveals to us that it was never set in stone. This scene from the Tale of G*nji gives us an engaging tour of a sex/gender system which seems quite exotic today (though it has many close relatives throughout history): where women were cultivated to possess every cultural accomplishment and practical skill, and it is the men who were socialized to pursue the refinement of emotional and aesthetic taste to help them choose—and they were empowered (by now) to choose—whose boudoir to visit. This leads us into meditations on the possibilities of kinship, particularly the open question of what arrangements (plural) might work best as we pursue revolutionary leveling of material relations of production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is one of the most celebrated novels in Japanese history. The story follows the life of Hikaru Genji, a child of nobility born into ancient Japan's Heian Period. It was written by a woman known only as Murasaki Shikibu, who lived during this tumultuous time and recorded the customs and details of court life. This episode is also available as a blog post: http://martinifisher.com/2022/09/06/what-happened-behind-lady-murasakis-tale-of-genji-discovering-the-secret-lives-and-times-of-11th-century-heian-japan/

We're back, baby, we're back, and just in time to release part one of this SPOOKY OCTOBER Halloween Weekend Double Feature! Let's travel back to Heian Japan with "Hoichi the Earless," the third segment from the 1964 anthology film, "Kwaidan." We're talking about the Genpei War, how vengeful ghosts could threaten the political state, and Lafcadio Hearn (best name ever?).

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Its Japanese History for Gaijins. Ever wanted to learn about the history of Japan, but history books too boring?  Well lets learn about Japan together!! This week we have every high-school student's nightmare. It's poetry! But not just Haikus and Shakespeare, what if your entire social and work life was defined by how good you were at poetry? Well that's Heian Japan,have a listen just in case you end up time travelling, so you know your plum blossom from your snow...  Also the Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, we look at how weird a book from a thousand years ago is. Turns out, VERY! Dr Denecke's wonderful article on poetry! : https://www.jstor.org/stable/25066837?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=heian&searchText=poetry&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dheian%2B%2Bpoetry&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_SYC-5152%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A9a29051cfa8a5d06fe912f2ac2bda04d&socuuid=c2554ffc-bfa5-424f-9ac4-c6e1586ed00f&socplat=twitterWould you like to hear us talk about Japan some more? Find our podcast here:Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/G-GSpot Itunes: https://tinyurl.com/Ge-Gaitune Twitter: https://twitter.com/GGaijins Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/y5kk5keyMusic for series can be found here: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/507871

This week, take a deep dive with me into the life of one of the regents of the Heian Era, Fujiwara no Tadahira, as we try and figure out just what it looked like to try and rule over Heian Japan on a day to day level.  Show notes here.

This week, we round out our look at the celebrated women of Heian Japan with two very different careers: that of the celebrated poet Akazome Emon and the recluse known either as Takasue's daughter or Lady Sarashina. Plus some final thoughts on women in the Heian era. 

This week: the start of a two-part series on women in Heian Japan. What makes the social position of women in the Heian Era so distinct from later points of Japanese history, and from the East Asian cultural sphere more generally? How do we know what we know about the lives of women? And what can we learn from the story of one particularly badass woman: the poet and "femme fatale" Izumi Shikibu?

Today we're revisiting a bit of Japanese history. Thanks to the pillow book of lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon, we have a first-person account of court life in Heian Japan. It's a diary and essay collection that's thoroughly fascinating. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site for mountain asceticism. Focusing her attention on aristocratic, male lay patrons–women were barred from climbing the mountain–she shows how the urban elite saw the mountains (and, in this case, specifically Kinpusen) as the capital’s opposite, as an untamed place to which one might go to gain something not accessible in the ordered world of the city of Kyoto. And she describes how some understood the pilgrimage to Kinpusen to correspond to the path to awakening, thereby practicing what Blair calls “spatial soteriology.” A central theme in this book is the difficulty of neatly fitting Kinpusen into a single category, such as “Buddhist” or “Daoist.” An illustrative example would be the mountain’s multi-faceted tutelary deity, who is not easily categorized and who played an important role in linking buddhas and bodhisattvas to Japanese deities. In addition to looking at how Kinpusen was imagined, Blair devotes about a third of the book to records of pilgrimages to the mountain and activities undertaken on the summit. She provides us with rich descriptions of the preparatory rites and practices that pilgrims undertook for a period of some months prior to departure, of the offerings that were made during the nine-day journey to Kinpusen, and of the rituals performed atop Kinpusen’s peak. Addressing the burial of sutras, which was one of these rituals, Blair shows how on Kinpusen sutra burial was tied to meanings and symbolism specific to this mountain and its principle deity and that in the evidence available from Kinpusen there is little indication that anxiety about the decline of Buddhism, which is the the basis for this rite most often mentioned in scholarly literature on the topic, was not a central, motivating factor. With the decline of Kinpusen’s main patrons, the northern branch of the Fujiwara family based in the capital, Kinpusen ceased to be a significant pilgrimage destination. In the final section of the book Blair examines this process and the decades-long conflict between Kinpusen and a powerful temple, and demonstrates how Kinpusen, rather than falling into ruin, was transformed as it shifted away from the capital’s realm of influence and was incorporated into a network of mountains and Nara-based temples. Through the production of engi (temple-origin legends) Kinpusen was reimagined and eventually, in the fourteenth century, linked to the tradition of mountain asceticism. While many have seen the religious practices carried out on Kinpusen and the production of engi about Kinpusen and associated mountains during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as being somehow opposed to the large, established monasteries and their interests, Blair shows that many of these engi were in fact produced and circulated within networks dominated by, or at least intimately tied to, the larger, landowning temples. In so doing she demonstrates that the distinction between lowland temple and mountain ascetic was not as clear as the rhetoric found in the engi would have us believe. In addition, through her own fascinating theory of what she calls “ritual regimes,” Blair clarifies how rulers used ritual and pilgrimage as means of communication and control. Besides being of obvious importance for the study of pre-modern Japanese religion and Buddhism, this work will be of particular interest to those working on mountains in religion, sacred geography, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site for mountain asceticism. Focusing her attention on aristocratic, male lay patrons–women were barred from climbing the mountain–she shows how the urban elite saw the mountains (and, in this case, specifically Kinpusen) as the capital’s opposite, as an untamed place to which one might go to gain something not accessible in the ordered world of the city of Kyoto. And she describes how some understood the pilgrimage to Kinpusen to correspond to the path to awakening, thereby practicing what Blair calls “spatial soteriology.” A central theme in this book is the difficulty of neatly fitting Kinpusen into a single category, such as “Buddhist” or “Daoist.” An illustrative example would be the mountain’s multi-faceted tutelary deity, who is not easily categorized and who played an important role in linking buddhas and bodhisattvas to Japanese deities. In addition to looking at how Kinpusen was imagined, Blair devotes about a third of the book to records of pilgrimages to the mountain and activities undertaken on the summit. She provides us with rich descriptions of the preparatory rites and practices that pilgrims undertook for a period of some months prior to departure, of the offerings that were made during the nine-day journey to Kinpusen, and of the rituals performed atop Kinpusen’s peak. Addressing the burial of sutras, which was one of these rituals, Blair shows how on Kinpusen sutra burial was tied to meanings and symbolism specific to this mountain and its principle deity and that in the evidence available from Kinpusen there is little indication that anxiety about the decline of Buddhism, which is the the basis for this rite most often mentioned in scholarly literature on the topic, was not a central, motivating factor. With the decline of Kinpusen’s main patrons, the northern branch of the Fujiwara family based in the capital, Kinpusen ceased to be a significant pilgrimage destination. In the final section of the book Blair examines this process and the decades-long conflict between Kinpusen and a powerful temple, and demonstrates how Kinpusen, rather than falling into ruin, was transformed as it shifted away from the capital’s realm of influence and was incorporated into a network of mountains and Nara-based temples. Through the production of engi (temple-origin legends) Kinpusen was reimagined and eventually, in the fourteenth century, linked to the tradition of mountain asceticism. While many have seen the religious practices carried out on Kinpusen and the production of engi about Kinpusen and associated mountains during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as being somehow opposed to the large, established monasteries and their interests, Blair shows that many of these engi were in fact produced and circulated within networks dominated by, or at least intimately tied to, the larger, landowning temples. In so doing she demonstrates that the distinction between lowland temple and mountain ascetic was not as clear as the rhetoric found in the engi would have us believe. In addition, through her own fascinating theory of what she calls “ritual regimes,” Blair clarifies how rulers used ritual and pilgrimage as means of communication and control. Besides being of obvious importance for the study of pre-modern Japanese religion and Buddhism, this work will be of particular interest to those working on mountains in religion, sacred geography, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site for mountain asceticism. Focusing her attention on aristocratic, male lay patrons–women were barred from climbing the mountain–she shows how the urban elite saw the mountains (and, in this case, specifically Kinpusen) as the capital’s opposite, as an untamed place to which one might go to gain something not accessible in the ordered world of the city of Kyoto. And she describes how some understood the pilgrimage to Kinpusen to correspond to the path to awakening, thereby practicing what Blair calls “spatial soteriology.” A central theme in this book is the difficulty of neatly fitting Kinpusen into a single category, such as “Buddhist” or “Daoist.” An illustrative example would be the mountain’s multi-faceted tutelary deity, who is not easily categorized and who played an important role in linking buddhas and bodhisattvas to Japanese deities. In addition to looking at how Kinpusen was imagined, Blair devotes about a third of the book to records of pilgrimages to the mountain and activities undertaken on the summit. She provides us with rich descriptions of the preparatory rites and practices that pilgrims undertook for a period of some months prior to departure, of the offerings that were made during the nine-day journey to Kinpusen, and of the rituals performed atop Kinpusen’s peak. Addressing the burial of sutras, which was one of these rituals, Blair shows how on Kinpusen sutra burial was tied to meanings and symbolism specific to this mountain and its principle deity and that in the evidence available from Kinpusen there is little indication that anxiety about the decline of Buddhism, which is the the basis for this rite most often mentioned in scholarly literature on the topic, was not a central, motivating factor. With the decline of Kinpusen’s main patrons, the northern branch of the Fujiwara family based in the capital, Kinpusen ceased to be a significant pilgrimage destination. In the final section of the book Blair examines this process and the decades-long conflict between Kinpusen and a powerful temple, and demonstrates how Kinpusen, rather than falling into ruin, was transformed as it shifted away from the capital’s realm of influence and was incorporated into a network of mountains and Nara-based temples. Through the production of engi (temple-origin legends) Kinpusen was reimagined and eventually, in the fourteenth century, linked to the tradition of mountain asceticism. While many have seen the religious practices carried out on Kinpusen and the production of engi about Kinpusen and associated mountains during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as being somehow opposed to the large, established monasteries and their interests, Blair shows that many of these engi were in fact produced and circulated within networks dominated by, or at least intimately tied to, the larger, landowning temples. In so doing she demonstrates that the distinction between lowland temple and mountain ascetic was not as clear as the rhetoric found in the engi would have us believe. In addition, through her own fascinating theory of what she calls “ritual regimes,” Blair clarifies how rulers used ritual and pilgrimage as means of communication and control. Besides being of obvious importance for the study of pre-modern Japanese religion and Buddhism, this work will be of particular interest to those working on mountains in religion, sacred geography, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks to the pillow book of lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon, we have a first-person account of court life in Heian Japan. It's part diary, part commonplace book, part essay collection, and thoroughly fascinating. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers