Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Program, Dean of the College, and Asian Studies Program Present
"Closing the Gap between the Sacred Past and Defiled Present: The Case of the Twelfth-century Monk Jōkei and his Identification of Mt. Kasagi as the home of Śākyamuni"
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Luke Noel Thompson
Columbia University
Columbia University
In a number of liturgical works that he wrote near the end of the twelfth-century, the Japanese monk Jōkei identified Mt. Kasagi in central Japan as Vulture Peak, the Indian summit where the Buddha is supposed to have revealed many of his most important teachings and which in East Asia was regarded as the eternal abode of the Buddha. Previous scholarship has treated this sort of mapping of Indian sacred topography onto the Japanese landscape as an attempt to bridge the geographical distance between Japan, at the periphery of the Buddhist world, and India, which represented the genesis and geographical heart of Buddhism. In this talk I argue that in the case of Jōkei we have an entirely different model, for Jōkei was trying to close the historical, temporal gap between himself and Śākyamuni (the historical Buddha) rather than a geographical, spatial distance between India and Japan.
Jōkei came of age in the midst of a thirty-year civil war that ravaged Japan, a period that also saw the widespread acceptance of the belief that Buddhism had entered its final, darkest age. Faced with this crisis, some clerics turned to the belief that they could escape to an otherworldly utopia called the pure land; others sought to depart Japan for India; and still others found solace in complex doctrines that taught that this world was not so rotten after all. Like his contemporaries, Jōkei inherited this narrative of decline, but unlike them he sought to overcome it by re-establishing a connection with the historical Buddha and by making the radical claim that Śākyamuni was in fact present in Japan, residing atop Mt. Kasagi.
While the talk focuses on the way in which one Japanese monk managed to create a meaningful relationship with an increasingly inaccessible Buddhism, more broadly the talk raises questions about the way in which members of a tradition relate to the origins of that tradition when those origins are historically, geographically, and culturally distant.
Jōkei came of age in the midst of a thirty-year civil war that ravaged Japan, a period that also saw the widespread acceptance of the belief that Buddhism had entered its final, darkest age. Faced with this crisis, some clerics turned to the belief that they could escape to an otherworldly utopia called the pure land; others sought to depart Japan for India; and still others found solace in complex doctrines that taught that this world was not so rotten after all. Like his contemporaries, Jōkei inherited this narrative of decline, but unlike them he sought to overcome it by re-establishing a connection with the historical Buddha and by making the radical claim that Śākyamuni was in fact present in Japan, residing atop Mt. Kasagi.
While the talk focuses on the way in which one Japanese monk managed to create a meaningful relationship with an increasingly inaccessible Buddhism, more broadly the talk raises questions about the way in which members of a tradition relate to the origins of that tradition when those origins are historically, geographically, and culturally distant.
For more information, call 845-758-7364, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium