The Oracles of the Three Shrines by Brian Bocking

Author:Brian Bocking [Bocking, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700713844
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 6435414
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

‘Sanja Takusen faith’ in the Edo period

Following the unification of Japan, and from the early seventeenth century onwards the expulsion of Catholicism, the successors of Tokugawa Ieyasu maintained an unprecedented level of peace and political stability within a relatively ‘closed’ Japan for over two hundred years. Within the rigid and traditionalist social structure imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate, the culture of a new and relatively wealthy class of townspeople (chōnin) soon dominated rapidly expanding cities such as Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka. Figures 6–24 are all examples of sanja takusen produced during the Edo period (1600–1867), an indication that the sanja takusen developed too. Kōno Kunio, who in 1936 published the results of a year’s research on sanja takusen faith in the Edo period, identified many different types of published or unpublished documents of a religious character relating to the sanja takusen. His research demonstrates that the influence of the sanja takusen spread well beyond the bounds of Yoshida Shinto and came to permeate all levels of Edo society. The types of sanja takusen practice in evidence during the Edo period still included, as in preceding eras, veneration of the sanja takusen by emperors and court nobility including high-status clerics and there is evidence of sanja takusen belief among the shogunate and the bushi. At the lower levels of society also, practices relating to the sanja takusen flourished among both the peasantry and the new merchant classes.

Among the merchants, ‘sanja takusen faith’ (sanja takusen shinkō) meant not only a concern for honesty (shōjiki in the oracle of Amaterasu) within business ethics; it included also devotion to the sanja takusen as a ‘money hōju’. A hōju (or hōshu) is a wish-fulfilling gem (corresponding to the Sanskrit cintamani), ubiquitous in Buddhist iconography where it represents the inexhaustible beneficence of the Buddha or bodhisattva. It is instructive to note that most pre-1868 ‘iconic’ sanja takusen (sanja takusen with pictures representing the deities) show Amaterasu holding in her left hand a hōju gem shaped like a large droplet, while in her right hand she holds a hōbō or jeweled staff of the type wielded by bodhisattvas and other holy persons in Buddhist paintings (See for example Figures 18–23). We shall return to the iconography of Amaterasu in more detail below.

Documents of the period also show that the sanja takusen was used in religious evangelisation (shasō kyōiku) movements and among shrines and priests. Shōjiki (honesty or sincerity in the oracle of Amaterasu) has connotations of simplicity as opposed to duplicity and grandiosity, and Teeuwen reports that okina plays performed in the villages presented Ise and Amaterasu in the sanja takusen as symbols of plain dealing and straightforwardness.329

Figure 9 and Figures 12 and 13 are Edo period sanja takusen inscribed by Buddhist monks, as is the much earlier Figure 2, an example from the Tōdaiji. Figure 9 is by a monk called Geigen from the province of Tamba while Figures 12 and 13 are two examples of the sanja takusen, iconic in the sense that they show

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.