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The Religious Traveller in the Edo Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Carmen Blacker
Carmen Blacker
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

A curious and as yet little discussed phenomenon of the Edo period is the immense increase among ordinary lay people in journeys of pilgrimage. From the middle of the seventeenth century people of all classes, alone and in groups, began to make their way in ever larger throngs to the Ise Shrines, to Kōyasan, to Zenkōji, to Fujisan, and to the various circuits of thirty-three places dedicated to Kannon and the eighty-eight places dedicated to Kōbō Daishi.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 1984 , pp. 593 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 Tsunezō, Shinjō, Shaji sankei no shakai keizai shiteki kenkyū (1964), pp. 621––4.Google Scholar

2 Takeo, Ono, Gokaidō Fūzokushi (1979), pp. 51––9.Google Scholar

3 See particularly the work of Gorai Shigeru on the figure of the yūgyōsha. From a number of books and articles, the following are particularly useful: Kōya Hijiri (1975); Shugendō Nyūmon (1980), ‘Henro, junrei, yūgyō hijiri’, in Bukkyō to Minzoku (1976), pp. 206–17.Google Scholar

4 See, for example, the Sarashina Nikki and the Kagerō Nikki, English translations by Ivan Morris and Edward Seidensticker, As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams, and The Gossamer Years (1964). Also the Ishiyamadera Engie.

5 Sansom's translation of the Sōniryō is in his ‘Early Japanese Law and Administration’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, second series, Vol. XI (December 1934), pp. 127–34. See also Gorai Shigeru, ‘Yosute to yūgyō’, in Bukkyō to Minzoku, pp. 224–44.Google Scholar

6 Gorai (see note 3).

7 Ruth Mellinkoff, The Mark of Cain (1981).Google Scholar

8 Gorai Shigeru, ‘Sōi-mokujiki no nembutsu hijiri: Tansei to Chōzen’.

9 Shigeru, Gorai, Enkūbutsu (2nd edn, 1975). His visit to the Ōta Kengen cave is described on pp. 154–5; ‘Yasei to shomin shūkyō no geijutsu: Enkūbutsu’, in Enkū: Yasei no geijutsu, published 1980 by the Asahi Shimbun to accompany the Enkū Exhibition in Tokyo and Osaka.Google Scholar

10 The only account of this remarkable and virtually forgotten character is an equally remarkable book Shashin Gyōja Jitsukaga no Shugendō (1978), by Annu Mari Busshi (Anne Marie Bouchy), to whose initiative entirely we owe the discovery of the diaries, breviaries of ritual and other literary remains of Jitsukaga, the establishment of the fragile and worm-eaten texts, and the final piecing together of Jitsukaga's life from these materials. For a discussion of the concept of metsuzai in Japanese religion, see Gorai Shigeru, ‘Shomin shinkō ni okeru metsuzai no ronri’.

11 Ichirō, Hori, Waga kuni minkan shinkōshi no kenkyū, Vol. 2, pp. 380–95, 554–96.Google ScholarSee also Hori's essay in Studies in Japanese Folklore, edited by Dorson, R. (1963), ‘Mysterious visitors from the harvest to the New Year’.Google Scholar

12 Eiki, Hoshino, ‘Kihi to kōgū: Shikoku henrosha no tachiba’, in Bukkyō Minzoku no Ryoiki (1978), edited by Kōryū, Nakamura.Google Scholar

13 Shinjō Tsunezō (see note 1), pp. 734–46.Google Scholar

14 Hoshino (see note 12), pp. 170–5.Google Scholar

15 ibid., pp. 175–7.

16 For studies of the Kōbō-densetsu, see Noboru, Miyata, Mirokushinkō no kenkyü (1975), pp. 97––113.Google ScholarGorai Shigeru, ‘Kōbō-shimizu’, in Mikkyō Kenkyū, No. 81 (1942). Hiroko Ikeda in her Type and Motif Index of Japanese Folklore (1971), distinguishes the various subtypes of the legend under Type 751A, p. 176.Google Scholar

17 Victor Turner has applied the term ‘liminal’ to people who lie outside the social order, and notes that absence of structure and status characterizes the groups which are thus relegated beyond the threshold. See his ‘The Centre out there: Pilgrim's Goal’, in History of Religions (February 1973).

Hoshino Eiki discusses the relevance of Victor Turner's ideas to the phenomenon of pilgrimage in Japan in his interesting recent Junrei: sei to zoku no genshōgaku (1981): also in his ‘kihi to kōgu’, pp. 178–81.Google Scholar So also does Lafleur, William in ‘Points of Departure: Comments on Religious Pilgrimage in Sri Lanka and Japan”, in the Journal of Asian Studies (February 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar So also does Norman Havens in his ‘Japanese pilgrimage practices in a view of structure and antistructure’, 1979, so far as I know as yet unpublished.