Abstract:

This dissertation examines a group of large hanging scroll sets that depict the life of the Japanese Prince Sh?toku (574-622). The study analyzes visual narratives as sites for negotiating conflicts of lineage, legitimacy, and national and sectarian identity.

The first chapter examines the early history of Sh?toku belief, focusing on the 1069 wall painting program from H?ry?-ji Temple. It demonstrates how, throughout much of the Heian Period, Sh?toku art was primarily the purview of aristocratic devotees and was limited to sites historically and geographically linked to the prince. In such locations, it functioned as a type of performative relic and sacred map of Sh?toku's life.

The second chapter analyzes the explosion of Sh?toku art around the seven hundredth anniversary of the prince's death in 1322. The first half examines the historical and institutional factors that formed a basis for popular medieval cults of the prince. Careful consideration of the three main stylistic lineages of images depicting Sh?toku's life lead to the hypotheses that the large hanging scrolls sets were produced and distributed under the auspices of Shitenn?-ji and the Takada faction of the Shin Sect.

Chapter Three posits the Sh?toku narrative scrolls as ritual objects. After a brief examination of the history and historiography of pictorial exegesis in Japan, this section shows how a thorough understanding of the physical qualities of the scrolls, coupled with a textured analysis of existing textual evidence, challenges received understandings of what it meant to experience hagiographic art in medieval Japan.

In order understand the presence that animates the visual culture of the Sh?toku cult, the fourth and final chapter considers the many aspects of the prince as a deity. Through detailed analysis of various visual and textual hagiographies from medieval Japan, it shows how the story of Sh?toku came to be closely associated with a panoply of religious figures, ultimately even usurping the status of the Buddha Sakyamuni in many circles.

The conclusion ties the previous chapters together, demonstrating how the image of Sh?toku was central to Japanese senses of national history and identity, from medieval times to the present.