Abstract:

Ritual was never a matter of mere formality in the court society of Heian Japan (794-1185), in which one's sponsorship of ritual directly and effectively mediated his acquisition of bureaucratic positions and ranks, of friends and enemies, and of cultural knowledge and economic wealth. In the eighth century, the emperor inaugurated the Buddhist rite of the Misaie Assembly held at the palace, in order to adopt the image of the ideal Buddhist king depicted in the Golden Light Sutra and to establish his position as head of the centripetal government called the Ritsuryo state. As the structure of governance shifted over the course of the Heian period from the Ritsuryo state to a system of shared rule, influential contenders for political power, such as the Fujiwara regent and the retired emperor, appropriated the imperial symbolism enacted in the Misaie Assembly by sponsoring structurally similar Buddhist rites to legitimate their claims to authority. Thus, even as the structure of rule was transformed, the Misaie Assembly (and rites imitating it) in effect reinvented and perpetuated imperial authority, all the while presenting it as an unchanging tradition. The Misaie Assembly was also integrated into the court-sponsored clerical training program comprising Buddhist debate rituals. Thus the Misaie Assembly and similar rites both stimulated doctrinal learning and offered a major venue for clerical promotion.

By demonstrating the ritual enactment of imperial authority as essential to the legitimating of political power throughout the Heian period, this study challenges dominant scholarly models that have characterized Heian Buddhism in terms of a process of "privatization" or shift from "state Buddhism" to a discourse of personal devotion. In addition, its attention to Buddhist debate as a vehicle for monastic advancement suggests that doctrinal learning grew in importance during the Heian period, and calls into question the prevailing view that Buddhist doctrinal scholarship declined in the Heian period. Finally, by attending to cases of "ritual failure"--in Heian terms, the inability to muster sufficient participants--this study casts new light on the indispensable roles that Buddhist rituals played in constructing and contesting political authority in premodern Japan.

Drawing on understudied genres of texts, such as ecclesiastic appointment records and diaries written by monks and aristocrats, the dissertation situates ritual performance in its specific social and historical contexts. This approach enables a better account of the dynamic and powerful working of Buddhist rites by which social actors with different ambitions--including monks, the imperial family, and aristocrats--redrew social boundaries and reinvented religious traditions.