“The Buddha,” notes R. F. Gombrich, “was not an essentialist. [He] . . . was interested in how things worked rather than in what they were.”(1) Buddhism, many commentators have argued, is pragmatic.(2) It teaches us how to live better, how to see more clearly; how, in the words of David Webster, to “become more skilled practitioners of wanting.”(3) Generative anthropologists may well hear in this last phrase the human project writ large—certainly the project of any and all of us who seek or at least entertain the possibility of human progress. The most consequential of all human innovations, the sign, is very precisely a praxis of safer and more productive wanting, a means of accommodating ever more wanting, and more having. More having and more wanting, of course, are not the terms in which Buddhist doctrines have traditionally been framed, to say the least, and to use GA to inquire into the nature of the skills Buddhism might be offering is to ask, in effect, how it co-exists with, or whether and in what ways it might contribute to, the ethical development of our own epoch.

Buddhism’s trajectory through modernity, through a world increasingly dominated by the structure and practices of the market, does resemble those followed by other great faiths. Comparison—invidious or liberating as the case may seem—has irrevocably intervened. Where once, from the security of their discrete, pre-modern domains, the major religions offered means by which to apprehend the human condition in its ostensibly universal character, and the communal comforts and protections to be derived from such an apprehension, they have now been required to take their places as particularist options—individual and proprietary paths to salvation—or in more familiar terms, attributes of identity, postures of difference in a global market. Not, we should of course add, that any of them have ceased at the same time to be experienced by substantial populations in older or more fully embedded ways, in societies passing through a long transition which need never, in principle, be considered complete.(4) But even in the most isolated or defensive places, the brilliance of erstwhile certainty is shaded by, if not fully “gone gray” from the breath, the various breathings, of the Other.(5) Buddhism’s position is notable, however, in that it seems never to have been the sole religion in the countries in which it has been practiced—it has always been in competition and debate, which may have bearing on its eventual posture in the modern market. Where Constantine imposed,(6) Asoka famously tolerated, and indeed this most significant of early Buddhist converts may even be seen as anticipating the modern pluralist state with his doctrine of religious diversity, his aversion to sacrificial violence, and his conception of the role of political power as facilitating rather than restraining human desire.(7) And ever since, though it has had its reverses, Buddhism has been more adaptable than most,(8) its successes including the penetration of the Western reaches of that market, to which it has offered a prestigious, which is to say, effective set of differences.(9) Above all, and this is fairly widely understood, its particularly forceful rejection of worldly desire has modelled a potent serenity from within which to dominate modern humanity’s feverish struggles to avoid subjection.

Prevailing in those struggles, fashioning a posture in that market, has also been the pragmatics of the set of practices and ideals generally referred to as Romanticism. And many more commentators have worked to understand and define the connections and commonalities between Buddhism and the Romantics than have, for example, those between the Romantics and Islam, or the Romantics and Confucianism. Indeed, this has been true more or less from the beginning of the relationship between the Western world and Buddhism, whose most important texts arrived in Europe during the Romantic period, and were indeed, by some accounts a crucial determinant of what Raymond Schwab memorably proclaimed its “Oriental Renaissance.”(10)

Very broadly speaking, then, Romanticism and Buddhism have both offered modernity desirable postures or identities through a strategy of resisting desire or, more properly, as René Girard characterized it, resisting the mimetic contagion, the universal gravitational pull of the desires of other human beings.(11) In both cases, resistance has proceeded by a process of at least ostensible demystification, the assumption of a position of superiority and control, a personal denial of the power of desire.(12) This strategy, too, framed as paradoxical or, less sympathetically, as hypocritical or deluded—Girard’s mensonge romantique—has been quite widely understood. Not that it has always been given its due, by Girard or by others. The strategy can surely be characterized as having been genuinely productive of human good, as having reduced our suffering, whether we attribute that suffering to mediated or unmediated desire itself, or to the violence produced by desire. It has arguably contributed, in particular—and for all that some more radical confrontation with the truths of desire has been called for by the sages or ascetics—to the easing of anxieties and distresses attendant on the advent of market structure, and done so by charting a path which the Buddha called a “middle way” or Romantics often characterized as a striving to be in the social world, but not of it.(13)

The case for the parallels, as well as differences, between the two would doubtless benefit from a fuller demonstration than is possible here, but let us offer a couple of hopefully suggestive comparisons. There might at first glance seem few less similar figures than the bodhisattva of compassion and a Byronic hero like the imperious Manfred of the English romantic poet’s 1819 play of the same name. Such a bodhisattva, as for example Avalokiteśvara in the Mahayana tradition, delays his own ascent to enlightenment until it can be shared by all humanity.(14) Indeed, their “awakening, or Bodhi . . . enables bodhisattvas to ‘leave the world’ while still remaining in it and to work with compassion towards the salvation of all beings.”(15) Lord Byron’s heroically alienated and transgressive protagonist, meanwhile, loudly and repeatedly proclaims his difference from the “herd” of other human beings. But in his famous final words, having found at last the mortal transcendence he has been seeking, Manfred turns back to the representative of the rest of us (an Abbot) not with his usual disdain, but with an expression and a gesture of surprising comfort. “Old man,” he says, taking his hand in unprecedented fellowship, “’tis not so difficult to die.”(16) This might, of course, be more vaunting, but may also be, more potently, an offer, a modelling of serenity and confidence, even an altruism. Here, let me show you: if you can finally purge yourself of socially mediated desire, if you are willing to stake all on the cause of autonomy, you too can be free, both of such desires and of the fears that always accompany them. Truly to live, to be in the world, is to be prepared thus to leave it, as I authenticate for you now with my own self-willed extinction.

Or one might see the two postures combined, after a fashion, in Rudyard Kipling’s one great novel (of 1900): the Tibetan Buddhist lama who turns back from his own ostensible salvation, his long-sought sacred stream, to remain with and guide that other if later romantic seeker, that equally paradigmatic child of the global market, the “friend” indeed “of all the world,” its eponymous hero Kim. That the modern novel’s necessary irony whispers to us that Teshoo Lama’s belief is but a foible, a charming feature of an identity picked out of the world’s rich pageant of differences, doesn’t finally so much undercut as somehow amplify the nobility, the generosity of the action, and the value of its prospective human outcomes.

There is a case, in short, for a deep and pragmatic compassion in both Romanticism and Buddhism. There are reasons to believe, however the effects are to be measured, that they have indeed offered operative ethics, better ways of wanting.

All this we take, with the reader’s indulgence perhaps, as given, grounds for further inquiry. The remainder of this essay will look more closely at the approach to desire in both systems, their ethics, using the heuristic offered by GA. In particular, we will try to test an intuition that the core praxis or technique offered by both Buddhism and Romanticism is what might be called an aestheticization of experience.

Many disclaimers are of course due, especially with regard to the scale of such generalizations. It should quickly be admitted that a deep familiarity with historical Buddhism, through the study of original texts or lived experience of Buddhist culture, is unavailable to the present discussion—we must work largely from easily accessible or common knowledge. And there are many Buddhisms, with a number of major streams of thought and practice—we must try to confine ourselves to features consistent to all or most of them, most particularly as they are received and able to exercise influence in the modern world. This perhaps amounts to conceding that we will deal here with something close to what Bernard Faure denigrates as “Neo-Buddhism,” a “sort of impersonal, flavorless and odorless spirituality” (139).(17) In justification for such a procedure, we can only appeal to the minimality of the GA hypothesis, as permitting one to ask at least the most basic questions about human experience of any kind. GA, too, is concerned with how things work. Human things.

The aesthetic, like every other fundamental category of fully human experience, is established on GA’s hypothetical originary scene, as is human desire (as distinct from the appetitive impulses experienced across the sensate spectrum). Eric Gans defines aesthetic experience as “the oscillation between the contemplation of the sign representing the central object and the contemplation of the object as referred to by the sign.”(18) Aesthetic contemplation, however brief, aesthetic pleasure, however fleeting, contributed crucially to the deferral of appropriation and violence that enabled the human. Fully human desire is the primordially appetitive attraction to that object as mediated by the sign. Such mediation, even as it qualifies, defers and ultimately intensifies the appetitive or appropriative, refracting it into the broad spectrum of human wanting, is never entirely divorced from it, from mere appetite.

Appropriative desire is thus, at least as hypothesized by GA, always part of the aesthetic experience; the aesthetic experience is always involved, paradoxically, with the desire to have. Paradoxically, because only by not—yet—having, may one experience beauty, but only that which can be experienced as beautiful, is desirable, ultimately or imaginably susceptible of appropriation. The human experience of such paradox is an unstable, restless shifting of attention, an oscillation. To end paradox, to achieve complete serenity let us say, is, must be, to still this oscillation, to abolish it. The experience of beauty is productive of pleasure but, in its paradoxical contingency, its alluring inaccessibility, it is also troubling. The greater the beauty, the more troubling. But might the experience of a beauty so great that it abolishes itself be different?

It is perhaps useful to remind ourselves here that the distinction between the sacred and profane is also a product of the originary scene. The sacred center is established by the shared sign, in contrast with the profane periphery from which the sign is issued. Sacrality is a result of the competing desires for the object at the center, and of the potential violence inherent in those desires—experienced as a repulsive force exerted by the center. The experience of sacrality resembles but is distinct from the aesthetic experience in that the latter is of the inseparability of the sign and the object of desire—the object is at some level understood to be desirable in its connection to and because of the sign, and unattainable for the same reason—as Gans puts it, “oscillation between imaginary possession and recognized inviolability is characteristic of all aesthetic experience.”(19) The path to literal appropriation of that which occupies the sacred center runs through ritual, and culminates in the sparagmos or sacrificial feast, which enables appropriation but leaves memorable the locus of sacred centrality for re-deployment in deferring and then reconciling the potentially antagonist wantings of the future, in the community the completed process creates. But appropriation ends the aesthetic effect, which is inseparable from a suspended wanting that the sign intensifies as it sustains.

I think this distinction matters when we turn our attention to Buddhism, where the question of sacrality as opposed to what I’m calling aesthetic contemplation has often seemed basic, even to the point where it has been debated whether Buddhism is indeed accurately to be called a religion at all.(20)

Musashi Tachikawa helpfully conceptualizes the relationship of sacred and profane as that between “two poles of single unity . . . between which electricity flows. Even in the simplest religious phenomenon there exists the ‘direct current’ of human action in the form of the movement of energy between these two poles . . . . The ‘voltage’,” as he ingeniously extends the metaphor, “varies according to the form assumed by a particular religious act.” However, when there is no flow, no sense by anyone that the poles are different, one may no longer speak of a religious phenomenon.(21) And it is the character of Eastern thought, and Buddhist thought most rigorously, to deny a fundamental difference between sacred and profane, between, for example, delusion and enlightenment, man and Buddha, or conventional and ultimate truth.(22) Furthermore, “The sacred and profane are meaningless in the absence of human action.”(23)

Into an intensified, oppressive but diffuse atmosphere of competition, frenzied appetite and impending violence, the emission of the first human sign flashes, the aborted gesture of appropriation, establishing a great and lasting polarization. This is the GA hypothesis, its version of what Mircea Eliade calls “hierophany”—the manifestation of the sacred.(24) The production of that sign, that pointing, is the first human action, creating the meaningful distinction between sacred and profane, activating the circuit. The alternating human actions of sign production and literal, sparagmatic appropriation sustain the polarity, keep the current of human experience running—we cannot do without the sacred, in the GA analysis, even where the word or concept designating it is absent.(25) Wherever there is centrality—that which converging human desires and the signs that create them designate—there is sacrality. Wherever there is centrality, there is a periphery, the profane. Wherever there is centrality, we may say, a wheel turns. Even the aesthetic oscillation of attention, repeating in individual consciousness the pulse of deferral and appropriation which animates the human scene, may be thought of as an action, virtual and invisible as it may be. The end of that action, again, is the end of oscillation. And because it is the action of the human mind created by the human sign that establishes them, the abolition of all differences, not merely the foundational difference of sacred and profane, is the necessary condition or indeed consequence of the end of all distinctly human action.(26)

It is in this broader sense that I think we must understand the pursuit of unity that both Buddhism and Romanticism mandate, rather than merely, as it has often been framed, as a rejection of an arid Western philosophical dualism. Although no doubt the contention does play out in the philosophical dimension as well. But as with paradoxical aesthetic experience itself, the value or ethical productivity of this pursuit may lie in its processes rather than in any measurable achievement of its ostensible or formal goals.

Romantic demystification involves the rejection of the validity, the centrality, of the public scene.(27) It denounces that scene as mere form, mere spectacle, in favour, for example, of Hamlet’s famous claim that “I have that within which passeth show.”(28) Lord Byron, one of the Danish prince’s better-known progeny, echoes his prototypical words in one of his own most celebrated passages, identifying even more explicitly the antagonistic character of the struggle between the public flow of desire and the private centrality of individual experience, whose power and authenticity is guaranteed by suffering, isolation, and victimhood.

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain,
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.(29)

Victorious victimhood, that is; heroic, not tragic suffering; towering, indeed commanding isolation. Of course, in a grammatical turn which has become almost the emblem of market society, there is no explicit antecedent for the pronoun “they” in this passage. None is needed. They, them, other people. Us. And indeed, don’t we love him now? We appreciate him, not in resentful rivalry as at first we might have done, but as remembered music, the tones of a lyre just now fallen mute. We see his beauty. We see the beauty of his posture. We too can have that beauty, the rapt aesthetic appreciation of others. That confidence, that serenity.

The Byronic posture does not, of course, exhaust the range of Romantic responses to desire and the market world, of Romantic demystifications and denials. These have been fairly widely discussed, however, and we perhaps need not tarry here.(30)

The Buddhist resistance, as noted, also proceeds through demystification. But Buddhism does not see the operation of desire in the socially mediated way that Hamlet and Byron, or for that matter, Girard and GA do. “They” do not feature so openly in its diagnosis of the human predicament. Rather, desire is deemed part of a broader illusion that Buddhism approaches through the foundational concept of dependent origination (paticca-samuppadda in Pali). This is, of course, an idea of great, indeed, potentially engulfing complexity. The Buddha, pragmatist that he was, warned against the attempt to formulate it in any metaphysical way.(31) For present purposes, perhaps the crucial element is the doctrine’s denial of causation, or at rate of any singular or distinguishable relations of cause and effect. Conditions, rather than agents, allow for the arising of other conditions.(32) Causation proceeds, can only proceed, from one unity to another—in one metaphor, “multiple fruit from multiple causes.”(33) Dependant origination is thus a vision of innumerable successive unities, a process, that permits no meaningful distinctions, no consistently extant things, no identities, only relationality. Buddhists plausibly point to the way this view of things anticipates developments in modern physics.(34)

The ethical and aesthetic significance here is that in Buddhism desire, too, is denied any specificity of cause, very much—if implicitly—including the social nexus of mediation. Other people don’t cause desire, either in Girard’s vaguely osmotic way or, as GA has it, through the mediation of the sign. Nor, we might add, is there a first cause of desire, as GA’s punctual theory of human origination insists. Rather, there is a constant co-dependency, as it were, of such elements as ignorance, consciousness, sensation, craving, clinging—with a numerological referent of twelve: twelve nidanas, twelvefold path—but suggestive of indefinite extension.(35) These are sometimes called a “chain”—at least for the purposes of ordinary human consumption (and motivation), in the language of “conventional truth,” the Buddha’s compassionate concession to the limitations of human understanding.(36) But there are hints of the deeper or “ultimate truth” in their illustration as positions around the rim of the bhavachakra or symbolic wheel, with all its implications of motion without displacement, activity without fundamental change, a constant condition of birth and rebirth, of self-reinforcing human experiences, all recurring endlessly.

Rather than a counsel of despair, however, dependant origination offers, in the very grasping of its totality, potential transcendence. This transcendence, however, the route to nibbana (or nirvana), is once again not something to be theorized and abstracted, but a matter of seeing and experiencing. One sees when one is no longer distracted by what GA might call the rivalries of identity, of mediated desire, by any or all of the mendacious and distracting inducements to craving and sensation. One sees when one is able to ignore the temporality implied by linear cause and effect, or for that matter, by deferral and appropriation. Transcendence involves, in the familiar exhortation of both Romantic and Buddhist, living in the present moment. Escaping the wheel.

One may meditate. At any rate, action ceases. Wanting ceases, and thus also both explicit and imagined sacrificial appropriation. “In Buddhism,” points out Raffaele Pettazoni, “one suppressed the sacrifice to retain only the vigil.”(37) One waits and watches. Life itself suspended, or almost, one sees in a qualitatively different way, as in the paradigmatic lines of another important Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, surely evoking a liminal condition closely analogous to that sought for in Buddhism:

. . . that blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.(38)

With a “quiet” eye one sees, in Buddhism itself, not isolate causes and effects, but the autonomous creativity of everything at every moment. “Each dhamma,” asserts Nolan Pliny Jacobson, making what will perhaps seem to us now the inescapable comparison, each moment “inherits along innumerable lines, synthesizing the relevant qualities into a world that is creative in every cell. Each such organic unity is like a work of art in the wholeness it confers on every part, and the serenity the Buddhist finds in such ‘pulsations of experience’ is the same serenity the art lover finds in great art. The movement in this process of the ‘many’ into the eminent ‘one’ of the fulfilled now is the rhythm of the universe as an organic whole.”(39)

“We Japanese,” according to one Buddhist of that nation, “do not believe in religion. We enjoy it!”(40)

But in GA’s conception of the human, as we have said, such pleasure, such serenity or joy, is only one phase of an oscillation, at least in our encounter with human art, even the greatest we have thus far known. No doubt the apogee of religious experience, in any tradition, approaches and/or imagines transcending the limits of the human. And while GA may leave undecidable, as Eric Gans has repeatedly made clear, the question of our origin in either the human gesture or the divine word, on the originary scene the hypothesis is emphatic about the ineluctability of the paradox of aesthetic experience.(41) The trouble of art, that inviolability, definitively prevents a complete embrace of the moment-as-artwork, prevents the absolute “fulfillment” of now. One recalls the potent longing awakened by art-works which strongly affect us, a longing for the absolute and impossible fulfillment of the world of possibility they evoke, a longing for the art-work to continue, never age, never end—that dying strain, that beloved human face, that magical kingdom—even as we intuitively understand that such continuation, such violation of form, would destroy the beauty that awakened our desires in the first place. Not that originary thinking doesn’t allow us to develop important differences of degree. GA distinguishes between the poles of high and low art—the former emphasizing, or lengthening the contemplative phase of oscillated attention, the latter the moment of imagined consumption or appropriation of the object designated by the sign. Perhaps meditation is the experience of the highest of high arts, and nibbana the ultimate degree of art, an art that abolishes itself. Perhaps indeed art and even aesthetic experience itself are to be thought of as functioning like the raft, in the Buddha’s famous image for his teachings, which allows us to cross the river but is to be abandoned once we do.(42)

Doubtless, then, the sign itself must also be left behind. For the important early Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, the profane is to be associated with “linguistic proliferation.”(43) As Tachikawa summarizes his position, “action and mental defilements arise from ‘discriminating thought’. . . born of linguistic proliferation . . . the ‘division’ into diverse elements that is unavoidable in verbal expression.” Language, in short, is a system of differences, and if this sounds familiar, so also does Nāgārjuna’s “method of refutation,” which “was to negate the validity of propositions . . . by bringing to light the contradictions into which these propositions, expressed by language inevitably characterized by ‘expansion’ had to lapse,” leading the philosopher to such oracular or shall we say proto-deconstructionist utterances as “things do not arise” and a “traverser does not traverse.”(44) This second-century Derrida’s “relentless . . . determination to exhaust the subject under discussion is overwhelming” but, we are assured, “at the conclusion of this long and gruelling process to completely extinguish linguistic proliferation there awaits the perspective of a vision of emptiness in which ‘nothing exists (or everything is empty)’.”(45) Il n’y a pas de hors-texte?(46)

In GA’s history of the human, of course, that first sign does nothing but proliferate, and the project Nāgārjuna pursues sounds in GA terms like the determined rolling back of that process, back and back, perhaps to the mere ostensive itself, and then to the pre- or post-human condition of stilled oscillation, the unified sacred and profane, the end of desire.

Buddhism seeks, as other commentators on Nāgārjuna consistently assert, “to set free the sense of the real from its moorings in abstractions”(47) and the sign is, of course, the first and most consequential abstraction, inflicting in its deferral of appropriation that wound, that division or alienation from the intuitively “real,” mourned ever after in myriad ways by a humanity thus imprisoned in its own wanting. This is at bottom a mourning—we alluded to it above in the form of aesthetic longing—over the ineluctability of that which we may finally also call the paradox of desire, or broadly summarize, extending Freud’s great insight, as “the human condition and its discontents.”(48)

How, then, to conclude, would or could an experience of beauty be so great as to abolish itself—or to abolish at any rate the paradox which makes it troubling? We must surely answer: by ceasing to oscillate. By becoming an experience exclusively of sign or, what may finally be no different, of referent. The problematic of inaccessibility is of course overcome when sign and object merge—when one can have the object as easily and completely as one possesses the sign, on one’s internal, virtual scene. Or, when the object’s solidity guarantees the satisfactions once merely beckoned to by the sign. One might add, the cessation of oscillation implies or must be accompanied by the cessation of human community, or at any rate, human community as understood as an ethical praxis necessitated by the mimetic and rivalrous character of desire. René Girard, contemplating the inexorable and to his mind inevitably violent operation of mimetic desire, once spoke of a community with no scapegoat, no outsiders, an entire society “with no outside” as the only possible solution.(49) A return, or leap forward, to a Christian universalism. The end of oscillation which would seem to be the final goal of Buddhist pilgrimage might also imply such a world. A community—if that is still the word—with no boundaries, nothing which is not and nothing which is the community. A world of process and no things, process and nothing.

How might seeing or seeking this contribute to human betterment in the market world we currently experience? Can the model of an individually experienced transcendence of oscillation, call it even a personal “aesthetic apocalypse,” replace the communally acknowledged sacred in its life-preserving work?

Eric Gans, in his own recent reflections on Nāgārjuna and Buddhism, does not put this question in explicitly aesthetic or oscillatory terms. Rather, the idea of Buddhist enlightenment at the end of linguistic proliferation demonstrates a “truly minimal” faith:

Whereas in the West we insist on the object of consciousness (Husserl’s “consciousness is always consciousness of something”), Buddhism understands that the scene of representation itself, although it can only come into being occupied by a sacred object, does not need such an object to maintain itself. On the contrary, it is as an empty scene that it reveals itself in its minimal essence. Buddha-like understanding of the sacred is the enlightenment that empties, whether it be through paradoxical thought or meditation or the repetition of a mantra or by some other means, the phenomenal world of words and their meaning, leaving only the universal faith in shared meaning itself that connects all humanity. (Chronicle 516)

This perspective, Gans generously suggests, in contrast with that of the ostensibly more violent West in the midst of its present convulsions of victimary resentment, might provide the market world its very means of survival, modelling the “solution of putting our object-desire away from us to let everyone share the universal human scene that offers humanity its one remaining chance of salvation.”(50)

No doubt any thoroughgoing renunciation of mediated human desire, whether offered by Buddhism, Girardian Christianity, or Romanticism, if carried, universally, to its logical or literal conclusion, would indeed save humanity. Short of that, one would need to enter into comparative calculations of efficacy, measuring relative incidences of human violence, and trying to understand more fully than now we do the causes both of the continuation and, where it unquestionably has happened, of the diminishment of such violence.(51) This work too is well beyond the capacity of the current essay, and its prospect must bring us to a pause.

We might only add that prominent amongst our premises has been the conviction that originary thinking is not apocalyptical thinking. As we note above, GA does not have a version of the human without sacrality, without the current running between the poles, without language, or the community of shared attention. It contemplates no replacements, only a long and perhaps never to be completed transition, a steady shifting of balances, emphases, experiences of mediation. A pursuit, a praxis that leads to the relative or even near-perfect attainment of serenity it can certainly comprehend, though. It must watch and weigh and indeed celebrate the contributions made by both Buddhism and the many strands of Romanticism to the safety and peace of modern human culture. It must treat with respectful agnosticism the experiences of transcendence to which they attest, confident that even at the utmost remove from the originary scene representations of such experiences continue to perform the functions of protecting and developing the human. From its minimal set of presuppositions, that is, originary thinking needs to remain maximally receptive to the variety of human solutions to the ever-changing problem of desire. This, we would argue, constitutes—is the extent of—the “faith” GA itself is able to offer the present world.

1. A Synopsis of “Sarayashiki” (aka “Dish Mansion”) Folklore

Okiku, the heroine in Bunko Baba (1718-1759)’s Sarayashiki Bengiroku (aka “Sarayashiki” or “Dish Mansion”) (1758), along with Oiwa from Nanboku Tsuruya (1755-1824)’s Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (aka “Ghost Stories of Yotsuya”) (1825), Kasane and Otsuyu in Encho Sanyutei (1839-1900)’s Shinkei Kasanega Fuchi (aka “The Ghost of Kasane”) (1888) and Kaidan Botan Doro (aka “Tales of the Peony Lantern”) (1861), are all regarded as typical portrayals of Japanese ghosts. The folklore on which Sarayashiki Bengiroku was based is roughly summarized below.

A young girl has entered a samurai house as a maid. The girl is commonly known as “Okiku”(1). Okiku’s master was bewitched by her beauty even though she continued to turn down his advances. Feeling rejected, the master grew hateful toward Okiku and decided to take vengeance on her with his equally jealous wife. One day, they accused Okiku of breaking one of the ten dishes which, as a set, had been a valuable family heirloom. As a punishment, the couple first gave her a violent beating then tossed her into a well in the garden after slashing her to death. From that day, the ghost of Okiku would rise from the depth of the well at night-time, counting “one dish, two dishes…” before disappearing again while shrieking the words “nine dishes!” The haunting drove the master and his wife to madness, and others to scatter. Eventually, the house became nothing but a deserted ruin.

 The essence of this folklore is inarguably embodied by the very scene of a brutally murdered ghost maid who appears nightly from the well to count dishes. Such depiction can be found in many Ukiyo-e (color paintings) from the Edo period, and has since become a conventional way of personifying Japanese ghosts(2).

Sarayashiki, the Ghost of Okiku by
Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-1892)
from Shinkei 36 Kaisen, 1889-1892

2. The Propagation Pattern of “Sarayashiki”

As evident in “Bancho Sarayashiki” from Tokyo and “Banshu Sarayashiki” from Hyogo, a number of regions in Japan have also conceived their own versions of the “sarayashiki” story(3).

This nationwide propagation could have been spurred by the word “sarayashiki,” which had originally meant “a brand-new house.” In other words, these ghost stories may have been inspired by the idea of an ominous or cursed house that people created based on the fact that houses built on damp and barren lands do not last long.

As Japan is indeed a country with an abundance of damp lands, such reasoning does appear to justify the wide dissemination of haunted mansion folklore. However, it offers no insight into why the image of a “dish-counting girl”(4) was also popularized. Hence, this presentation will focus on establishing a conceptual link between a <woman> and a <house> in an attempt to fill in this theoretical void.

3. An Analysis of “Sarayashiki” Folklore – <Woman> and <House>

First, it should be noted that almost all of these stories are set in a samurai house.  During the 17^th century when “sarayashiki” folklore emerged, it was common for a samurai house to employ young girls from rural villages as maids. These girls were made to observe strict etiquette while carrying out a variety of laborious household and personal chores for the master. The resentment felt by a maid toward her master as a result of such class division and gender inequality has most likely given rise to “sarayashiki” folklore.

Second, a well is a product of modern cities(5). It was a means to extract underground water on private or community land so that livelihood could be preserved in a densely populated urban area where the river had been contaminated. Therefore, by setting “sarayashiki” folklore in a samurai house, which is normally located in a city, a symbolic reference to urban civilization can be drawn.

Furthermore, history has shown that, before the 8th century, ancient society performed rituals at wells, believing they were passages for Gods/Goddesses. In this sense, “sarayashiki” folklore could also be seen as a variant of “human pillar” tales. This so-called “human pillar” is a form of human sacrifice in which a person is buried alive at the foundation of a bridge or a house to prevent collapse. Traces of such black magic can be found throughout the ages in many different countries. For instance, England’s popular Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme, “London Bridge is Falling Down” has been thought to contain “human pillar” connotations. In other words, in order to safeguard the prosperity of the samurai house, a maid must be offered as a sacrifice on its ground along with a piece of heirloom. It is only unfortunate that, in this particular case, the intended “guardian angel” turned into an “evil spirit.” Also, when wells were used as ritual grounds in ancient society, people would also toss in some pieces of earthenware as sacred treasures. The use of a “family heirloom” in “sarayashiki” folklore is perhaps an apparatus to bring resonance to this distant memory.

In any event, folklore in the form of a ghost story can be seen as the manifestation of a rebellion against class division and gender inequality, and the idea of “offering up a woman as sacrifice to house Gods” found in Japanese folk culture could very well be echoing the concept of “ritual sacrifice” described by René Girard. This prominent local pattern can be seen as manifesting what Girard defines as “a close relation between sex and violence, which is a common heritage of all religions” (56).

Seiu Ito (1882-1961) “Nihon Keibatsu
hu-zoku zushi,” 1951. Tokyo: Kokusho
Kankokai, 2010

4. “Sarayashiki” Folklore and the Haunted Mansion

One might consider “sarayashiki” folklore, in which a ghostly voice counting “one dish, two dishes…” may be heard throughout the household, to be a variant of poltergeist tales. This is because the presence of a young woman is an essential element in popular depictions of a house haunted by poltergeist events. Young women are thought to possess hidden spiritual power which has the ability to conjure up spirits of the land. This supernatural undertone is made even stronger by “Okiku,” a name feared and avoided in pre-modern Japan as it can be shortened to “Kiku” (same pronunciation of “to listen” in Japanese language) and carries the meaning of “listening to the voice of Gods.” Hence, “sarayashiki” folklore is a justifiable form of poltergeist tale as it portrays a young woman with strong spiritual power being thrown into the passage to the Gods, who then comes back as a ghostly medium to haunt the entire household with her voice.

Incidentally, another example of poltergeist tale can be found in a Tokyo urban legend, “Women of Ikebukuro,” which circulated up to the 1960s. The legend claims that whenever an investigation is carried out in a haunted household, one of its occupants was always a female from Ikebukuro. Haunting would be said to cease as soon as that particular female occupant is driven out of the house. The name “Ikebukuro,” meaning a “pocket-shaped pond” in Japanese, immediately lends itself to the imagery of a damp land. Even though it is now a busy metropolis, Ikebukuro was only a small town on the outskirts of Tokyo up until the 1960s. Having to struggle for survival in a big city like Tokyo, people believed that the hardship endured by these young women from a rural town may have unintentionally woken the spirit of the land and led to poltergeist events. As such, “Women of Ikebukuro” can be regarded as a modern version of “Okiku” from “Sarayashiki.”

In recent years, haunted mansions have become a popular attraction in amusement parks across Japan. Themes from “Sarayashiki,” for example, the visual effects of a ghost appearing from a well or the sound of the ghost counting dishes are still widely utilized in these haunted mansions, as they represent a deep and fundamental horror to most Japanese people. It is also a reflection that this tale of resentment, in which a <woman> is sacrificed in a violent manner to the <house>, can still find sympathy among the general public today.

Notes

1. Apart from “Okiku,” names such as “Kame,” “Omasa,” and “Hana” were also used in other similar stories across Japan. The name “Okiku” had only garnered more recognition after Bunko Baba’s Sarayashiki Bengiroku (1758), which was set in Bancho in Edo, had become famous. See Yokoyama et al. and Ito. (back)
2. A common depiction being a young beauty without feet rising from a well or a pool of water surrounded by ghost fire. This imagery is still used in modern sub-cultures. (back)
3. An “Okiku Ido” (“The Well of Okiku”) can also be found in Himeji Castle, which is a World Heritage site, but this well is considered to have no actual connection to the “sarayashiki” folklore. (back)
4. Some regional versions of the “sarayashiki” folklore do not involve a ghost that counts dishes. However, in order to explore the most typical portrayal of a Japanese ghost, this presentation has limited its scope of discussion to “Sarayashiki” with a “dish-counting girl.” (back)
5. See Akita 169. (back)

Works Cited

Akita, Hiroki. A Cultural History of Objects and Humans 150: The Well. Tokyo: Housei University Press, 2010.

Girard, René. Bouryoku to Seinarumono [Violence and the Sacred]. Trans. Yukio Furuta. Tokyo: Housei University Press, 1982. Trans. of La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.

Ito, Atsushi. Sarayashiki [aka “Dish Mansion”] Folklore. Tokyo: Umitori Shuppan, 2002.

Yokoyama, Yasuko, Yosiyuki Iikura, Hidekazu Imai, Hajime Kurujima, Daisuke Washiba, and Tomonobu Hirosaka. Sarayashiki―the Ghost of Okiku and the Dish and the Well. Tokyo: Hakutaku Shuppan, 2015.

1.      “Sacrifice” and “Gisei”

In Japanese, the English word “sacrifice” is also expressed with a classical Chinese word “gisei (犠牲).” These words are a perfect match. It is because “犠gi” which is composed “牛 (cow) + 羊 (sheep as the most common offering) + 我(jagged spear to kill the offering)” means “a cow killed with a jagged spear as an offering to the Divine”, and then “牲sei” which is composed “牛 (cow) +生 (live)” means “a living cow for offering to the Divine.” It can be said that “gisei” is truly an appropriate word to translate”sacrifice.”

“我” shape spear(1)

However, in contemporary Japanese, “gisei” means not only “sacrifice” but also “victim.” This usage, which differs from the original meaning, appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, when a Japanese newspaper reported that the Chinese emperor sent a personal telegraph to the German emperor to grieve over the death of a German minster who had fallen a victim to the daggers of the Boxers (義和団) the year before, the article used “gisei” for “victim.”(2)

It is clear that this “gisei” was not an offering dedicated to a divinity. In this way, its primary meaning in modern Japanese, which is different from the original meaning as “a sacred offering” to something great, is “the unfortunate death” of the blameless.

2.     The birth of the modernized “gisei”

The hall of worship in Yasukuni-jinja Shrine

GOSEDA, Hōryū “March-off of the General Prince Ninnaji”(3)

One of the reasons the meaning of “gisei” changed essentially was due to the inundation of “gisei” in modern Japan. It could be called “the transformation of quantity into quality” (F. Engels)(4). Modern Japan suffered numerous civil wars and foreign invasions, such as the following: the Boshin civil war (1868 – 1869) between the pro-Shogunate army and the imperial New-government army, the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) which was the greatest and last civil war of the shizoku (the former samurai class), and several armed conflicts with China in Taiwan and Korea which resulted in the First Sino-Japanese war (1894 – 1895). These wars caused a number of casualties such as Japan had never experienced in the previous two centuries. Subsequently, fallen soldiers were regarded as brave men who had offered their lives on the altar of their country, and their spirits were enshrined together as a “Divine”(5) in Tokyo’s Shōkon-sha (東京招魂社) shrine (currently Yasukuni-jinja [靖国神社] shrine) by the Meiji State (1868 – 1945). They were literally “gisei” or “sacrifice” for the nation.

FUKUBA Bisei(6)
However, in reality, the Meiji State had no firm code of religious principle regarding this tutelary deity of the Empire of Japan. Not only Meiji statesmen but also Shinto priests had no concrete image of what this Divine was or what power it had. Furthermore, many Japanese intellectuals who had meritoriously contributed to establish the Meiji State were skeptical of religion, or firm atheists. The new tendency appeared among Shinto priests. For example, the priest Bisei Fukuba (福羽美静: 1831 – 1907), who had erected the first shrine (currently Kyoto Ryōzen Gokoku-jinja [京都霊山護国神社] shrine) for the spirits of loyalists in 1862, was involved in the following episode.

Inner Ise Shrine(7)

In 1868 when Emperor Meiji moved out of Kyoto to Tokyo, imperial families, nobles, and citizens of Kyoto were mostly opposed to this campaign. However, Fukuba strongly asserted a supporting argument, because he thought that the Emperor had to leave this old Capital to establish a new state. One evening, he received a letter from Ise-jingū (伊勢神宮) Shrine (enshrining Amaterasu-ōkami [天照大神] or the Divine ancestor of the Imperial Family) via Jingi-kan (神祇官: Department of Divinities), which read as follows: “the head of a torii (鳥居: an archway of Shinto shrine) in front of Inner Ise Shrine (内宮: Naikū) fell down. I [a priest of Ise-jingū] believe that this may be a sign because it happened just before the departure of His Majesty.” Because Fukuba guessed that it was a protest by adversaries, he disregarded this letter and said “essentially, there is no need to be afraid of the torii’s head falling. It was only an accident!”(8) What he was afraid of was not incurring Amaterasu’s displeasure due to having carried out this campaign but the disturbance of the people due to the suspension. He was quintessentially political.

Two Hierarchies under the Emperor in State Shintoism

Such priests, who thought and acted politically, founded State Shintoism, which was one of the important pillars of the Meiji State which encompassed religion as a means of dominating the Japanese people. After all, what was honoured in the Shōkon-sha shrine was the act of dying for their country, not the person as an individual. Therefore, it served neither as comfort of the dead nor for the salvation of souls.

Because the Meiji State founded State Shintoism with a political rather than a religious consciousness, the tendency of religious apathy appeared throughout the whole of modern Japanese society. Thus, “gisei” as a common word lost its original meaning to be given a new one as an unfortunate death which was nobody’s fault.(9) However, in modern Japan, “gisei” as “sacrifice” did not fade away; there were a lot of invisible “scapegoats” to maintain the community.

3.     True “Sacrifices”

It’s the simplest thing; there is no warfare without opponents. Hence, there were fallen soldiers in hostile country, but State Shintoism in modern Japan did not worship these spirits. This was an extraordinarily exceptional phenomenon in Japanese history. Traditionally, Japanese people had worshiped any spirits from either side after wars, because they believed that these worshiped spirits would bring not evil but good from ancient times.

For instance, in 1191, Emperor Gotoba (後鳥羽) built a temple(10) to mourn the spirits of the Taira clan (平氏), who had been defeated in the Genpei War (源平合戦: 1180 – 1185)(11). Such acts could be found not only after civil wars but after foreign wars. In fact, a temple(12) was erected for the fallen soldiers of the Mongolian Amy which attacked Japan twice in the late thirteenth century.

A monument sacred to the memory of Toshizō Hijikata (erected in 1958)(13)

However, after the Boshin civil war resulting in the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, those who were enshrined were only fallen soldiers of the winning camp; the souls of defeated soldiers were ignored by the Meiji State. Several decades after the war, some memorials for these obscure spirits were erected around old battlegrounds by relatives, but these memorials were completely different from the Shōkon-sha shrine and the spirits were forced to be social outcasts in the end.

The Meiji State encouraged Japanese people to offer their lives to the Emperor by eliminating the spirits of adversaries as a warning to others. It can be said that these spirits which had been branded as “death in vain” contributed to establishing and maintaining the Meiji State in the background or literally in the underground. On this very spot, they were exactly “gisei” as scapegoat. It is through such sorting out and rejecting of spirits that the Meiji State spun a new myth as the ideology of the modern Tenō (Imperial) system.

Closing remarks

The following sentence appeared in the speech of U.S. President Barack Obama who visited Hiroshima in May, 2016.

Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima

Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.(14)

There still remain countries or groups which treat the war dead as “sacrifices.” However, true “sacrifices” who are really offered to the Divinity called Nation are none other than those who are “oppressed and dehumanized” because of being “different.” The nation-state was founded on such a myth inscribed with “sacrifices” whether visible or invisible.

Bibliography

Books

Engels, Friedrich. Dialektik der Natur. 1883. Marx , Karl & Friedrich Engels Werke. Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag, 1962. Band 20.

Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1933-1937. in 24 volumes. (東洋文化協会『幕末・明治・大正回顧八十年史』東洋文化協会、1933-1937年、全24輯)

Yakumo, Tsuruma. An introduction of the national holidays. Osaka: Yaegaki-shoin, 1923. (八雲都留麻『大祭祝日略説』八重垣書院、1923年)

Articles

Fukuba, Bisei. “Arguments against the transfer of the capital to Tokyo.” Taiyō. Vol.4. No.9. 1898. (福羽美静「御東幸の反対論」、『太陽』4巻9号、1898年)

Newspaper articles

“Personal telegrams between the German Emperor and the Chinese Emperor” the morning edition of Asahi-shinbun. Octorber 24, 1900. (「独帝清帝の親電応酬」『朝日新聞』1900年10月24日東京朝刊)

“Visit to Hiroshima: the full text of [U.S.] President Obama’s statement” the morning edition of Yomiuri-shinbun. May 28, 2016. (「広島訪問 オバマ大統領の声明全文」『読売新聞』2016年5月28日東京朝刊)

Notes

1. Photo by ©Tomo.Yun: “No.5307 A bronze ware of ancient China [China/Beijing],” http://www.yunphoto.net/jp/photobase/yp5307.html, Retrieved August 13, 2016. (back)
2. “We are deeply grieved at the death of your Majesty’s Minister who fell a victim to a sudden uprising in China which our officers had not been able to suppress.” (“Exchanges of personal telegrams between Germany and Chinese Emperors” the morning edition of Asahi-shinbun. October 24, 1900. p. 2.) (back)
3. Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1934, vol.3. frontispiece 2. (back)
4. “Des Umschlagens von Quantität in Qualität” (Friedrich Engels. Dialektik der Natur. 1883. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Werke. Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag, 1962. Band 20. S. 348.) (back)
5. The reason why Divine is a singular form is that all their spirits were apotheosized not as a person but in one Divine. Therefore, each of their spirits is a part of a guardian deity of the country, and their personalities as individuals were effaced completely. (back)
6. Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1935, vol.17. p. 430. (back)
7. Yakumo, Tsuruma. An introduction of the national holidays. Osaka: Yaegaki-shoin, 1923. p. 90. (back)
8. Fukuba, Bisei. “Arguments against the transfer of the capital to Tokyo.” Taiyō. Vol. 4. No. 9, 1898. (back)
9. Of course, the warfare was started by the government, especially The Constitution of the Empire of Japan (1889) prescribed in Article 13 as following; “The Emperor declares war, makes peace, and concludes treaties.” However, it was difficult for Japanese citizens to inquire into the responsibility of the government or Emperor in the Meiji State. (back)
10. This was called Amida-ji Temple (阿弥陀寺: Shimonoseki City, Yamaguchi Prefecture), which is well-known as a stage of “Hoichi the Earless” in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan. However, it was destroyed due to “the Ordinance Distinguishing Shinto and Buddhism” (神仏分離令: 1868), and the Meiji State built a new shrine called Akama-jongu (赤間神宮) at the same place. (back)
11. The warfare between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan (源氏). After that, Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝) established the Kamakura Shogunate. (back)
12. This is Engaku-ji Temple (円覚寺: Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture), which was a center of the movement to modernize Zen Buddhism in Japan. For example, Shaku Sōen (釈宗演: 1859 – 1919) went to U.S. to engage in missionary work, and his disciple Suzuki Daisetsu (鈴木大拙: 1870 – 1966) wrote numerous books in English to introduce Japanese culture, including Zen Buddhism, overseas. (back)
13. Toshizō Hijikata (土方歳三: 1835-1869) was a great swordsman, the vice-commander of Shinsen-gumi (新撰組: Guards of Kyoto in Bakumatsu Japan). He joined the pro-Shogunate army, becoming an officer ranking with the army magistrate (陸軍奉行), and fell in the battle of Hakodate, which was the last stage in the Boshin civil war. This monument was moved to its present location in 1992. (back)
14. “Visit to Hiroshima: the full text of [U.S.] President Obama’s statement” the morning edition of Yomiuri-shinbun. May 28, 2016. p.14. Incidentally, in the Japanese version of this speech translated by this newspaper, “gisei” appeared six times, although the U.S. President had used the word “sacrifice” once. This serves to show how ambiguous “gisei” is. (back)

神話の誕生――明治初期における内戦と犠牲(日本語訳)

桐原 健真 (金城学院大学 教授)

1.「Sacrifice」と「犠牲」

日本語では、英単語の “sacrifice” はおおむね「犠牲」という古典漢語で表現する。これらのことばは、まことによく適合している。なぜならば、「犠」は、「牛+羊(もっとも一般的な供物)+我(供物を殺すためのギザ刃の矛)」で構成されており、また、「牛+生」から構成される「牲」は、神に捧げる生きた牛を意味するからである。「犠牲」は、「sacrifice」を翻訳するためにあることばだと言ってよい。

しかしながら、最近の日本語では、「犠牲」は「sacrifice」だけではなく「victim」も意味する。こうした原義とは異なった用法は、19世紀末に現れた。たとえば、義和団の凶刃によって命を落としたドイツ公使の死を悼むために中国皇帝がドイツ皇帝へ親電を送ったことを、ある日本の新聞が報じた際、その記事は、「victim」に「犠牲」を用いている[1]。

この「犠牲」が神々に献げるためのいかなる供物でもないことは、明らかである。このように、現代日本語におけるその第一義は、偉大なる何者かへの「神聖な供物」という原義とは異なって、罪無き者の「不幸な死」なのである。

2.近代化された「犠牲」の誕生

「犠牲」の意味が本質的に変化した一つの理由は、近代日本における「犠牲」の氾濫のせいである。それはまさに「量から質への転化」と言うべきものであった。すなわち近代日本は、以下のように、繰り返し内戦と外征を繰り返している。曰く、佐幕軍と新政府軍とのあいだによる戊辰戦争(1868~1869)、最大にして最後の士族反乱である西南戦争(1877)、そして日清戦争(1894~1895)に結果した数次にわたる台湾や朝鮮での中国との武力衝突。これらの戦争は、日本がそれまでの二世紀において経験したことのないほどの死傷者を生んだ。そして戦死者たちは、みずからの命をその国家に供した勇士として取り扱われ、彼らの魂は、明治国家(1868~1945)によって、東京招魂社(今日の靖国神社)の「神」[2]として合祀された。彼らは、文字通り国家のための「犠牲」あるいは「sacrifice」であった。

しかしながら明治国家は、実際には、この大日本帝国の守護神についての確固たる宗教的教義を有していなかった。政治家だけではなく、神官たちもまたこの神がいかに存在し、またいかなる力を有しているかということについてしっかりしたイメージがなかった。しかのみならず、明治国家の樹立に著しく貢献した日本知識人の多くは、宗教に対して懐疑的、あるいは強固な無神論者であった。このような傾向は、神官たちの間にもみられた。たとえば、1862年に、勤王の志士の魂を祀るための神社(現在の京都霊山護国神社)をはじめて設けた神官の福羽美静(1831~1907)には、次のようなエピソードがある。

明治天皇が、京都を離れて東京に行こうとした1868年、皇族・貴族、そして京都市民たちは、ほとんどがこの計画に反対した。しかし福羽は強く支持を表明していた。なぜならば、彼は、新国家建設のためには、天皇がこの古都を離れなければならないと考えていたからである。ある晩のこと、彼は神祇官を通して、伊勢神宮(天照大神つまり皇室の祖先神を祀っている)からの一通の書簡を受け取った。そこには、次のように記されていた。「内宮前にある鳥居の笠木が落下しました。陛下の出立直前にこのことが起きましたので、わたくし〔伊勢神宮の神官〕は、これは何かの兆しではないかと信じるものでございます」と。これは反対派の抵抗であると福羽は考えたので、彼はこの書簡を黙殺し、そして、次のように言った。「そもそも、鳥居の笠木が落ちることを恐れる必要はない。これは単なる偶然である」と[3]。彼が恐れていたのは、この計画を実行したことによりアマテラスの不興を招くことではなく、中止することによる人心の混乱であった。彼はまさに政治家であった。

このような、政治的に思考し、行動する神官たちによって、国家神道は基礎付けられた。そしてこの国家神道は、宗教さえも日本人民を支配するための手段とみなしていた明治国家における重要な柱の一つであった。結局のところ、招魂社で顕彰されたのは、国のために死ぬという行為であって、個人としての人間ではない。したがって、それは慰霊や魂の救済ではなかったのである。

明治国家が、宗教よりは政治的な意識のもとに、国家神道を打ち立てたがゆえに、近代日本における社会全般に、宗教的無関心の傾向が現れた。かくて一般的なことばとしての「犠牲」は、本来の意味を失い、誰の罪にも帰することのできない不幸な死という新たな意味を与えられたのである[4]。だが、近代日本において、「sacrifice」としての「犠牲」が消え去ったわけではない。そこには、共同体を維持するための目に見えぬ数多くの「scapegoats」が存在したのである。

3.真の「Sacrifices」

非常に当たり前のことだが、敵対者がいなければ戦争は存在しない。したがって敵国にも戦死者は存在したのだが、近代日本の国家神道は、これらの魂を祀ることはなかった。これは、日本の歴史において極めて例外的な現象であった。日本人は戦争が終わると双方の魂を祀ってきた。なぜならば、彼らは古えより、これら祀られた魂が、災いではなく、福をもたらしてくれるであろうと信じていたからである。

たとえば、1191年に後鳥羽天皇は、源平合戦(1180~1185)[5]によって滅亡した平氏の霊を弔うために寺院[6]を建立している。こうした行為は、国内戦争のあとだけではなく、対外戦争のあとにもみることができる。実際に、13世紀後半に日本を二度にわたって攻撃したモンゴル軍の戦死者のために、寺[7]が建てられているのである。

だが、徳川幕府の滅亡をもたらした戊辰戦争ののちに祀られた人々は戦勝軍の戦死者だけで、敗軍の兵士たちの魂は、明治国家によって無視されたのである。戦後数十年を経て、隠れていたこれらの魂のために、いくつかの慰霊碑が、縁者の手で、古戦場の周辺に立てられたが、これらの碑は、まったく招魂社とは異なるものであり、結局は日陰者とならざるを得なかった。

明治国家は、見せしめのために敵対者の魂を排除することで、日本人民にその命を天皇に捧げることを奨励した。「無意味な死」という烙印を押されたこれらの魂は、見えざるところで、あるいは文字通り地下から、明治国家を打ち立て、維持することに貢献したと言えよう。まさにこの点で、彼らはまごうことなきスケープゴートとしての「犠牲」であった。魂に対するこうした選別と排除を通して、明治国家は近代天皇制イデオロギーというあらたな神話を紡いでいったのである。

4.おわりに

2016年5月、広島で演説したバラク・オバマ米国大統領の演説に、次のような一文がある。

国家は、犠牲と協力のもとに国民を結束させる話をしながら勃興し、注目に値する功績を成し遂げることもあるが、これらはしばしば、自分たちと異なる人々に対する抑圧や人間性を奪うものとしても使われる。[8]

戦死者を「sacrifice」として取り扱う国々や集団は、いまなお存在する。しかしながら、ネイションと呼ばれる神へと本当に献げられる真の「sacrifice」は、「異なる」という理由で「抑圧や人間性を奪われた」ものたちにほかならない。国民国家は、こうした可視または不可視の「sacrifice」によって叙述された神話によって基礎付けられているのである。

[1] 「陛下の公使が突然清国に勃起し、朕が官寮〔ママ〕の鎮圧する能はざりし暴動の犠牲となりしは、朕の深く哀悼に禁へざる所なり」(「独帝清帝の親電応酬」『朝日新聞』1900年10月24日東京朝刊、2頁)

[2] 神が単数形である理由は、すべての戦死者の魂は、個人としてではなく、一箇の神のうちに祀られるからである。したがって、彼らの個々の魂は、国家の守護神の一部であり、また彼らの個人としての個性は完全に失われるのである。

[3] 福羽美静「御東幸の反対論」、『奠都三十年:明治三十年史・明治卅年間国勢一覧』博文館、1898年(『太陽』4巻9号、臨時増刊)

[4] もとより、戦争は政府によって始められる。とりわけ『大日本帝国憲法』(1889)は、その第13条に次のように規定している。曰く、「天皇は戦を宣し、和を講じ、及び諸般の条約を締結す」と。しかしながら、明治国家において、政府や天皇の責任を追及することは、日本の市民には困難なことであった。

[5] 平氏と源氏とのあいだの戦争。こののち、源頼朝が、鎌倉幕府を開いた。

[6] これは、阿弥陀寺(山口県下関市)と呼ばれ、ラフカディオ・ハーンの『怪談』に収められた「耳無し法一」の舞台として知られている。この寺は、「神仏分離令」(1868)のために破却され、明治国家は同じ場所に赤間神宮と呼ばれる新しい神社を設けた。

[7] これが円覚寺(神奈川県鎌倉市)である。ここは、日本における禅仏教の近代化運動の一つの中心地であった。たとえば、釈宗演(1859~1919)は、布教のために米国へ赴き、その弟子である鈴木大拙(1870~1966)は、禅仏教を始めとする日本文化を海外に紹介するための多くの著作を英語で著した。

[8] 「広島訪問 オバマ大統領の声明全文」『読売新聞』2016年05月28日東京朝刊、14頁。ちなみに、この演説の同紙による日本語版には、「犠牲」が6回出ているが、米国大統領は「sacrifice」という語を1回しか使っていなかった。このことは、「犠牲」の多義性をよく示している。

1. Introduction

This presentation will focus on the reception of the Shutendōji emaki in the 17th century. Originating in medieval Japan, the original “Shutendōji” story recounts how Minamoto Raikō and his retainers quelled the tale’s namesake monster. This story was pictorialized as scroll paintings (emaki) or as illustrated books. Many daimyō warriors in the Edo period owned such renditions, as did the Owari Tokugawa family, the lord of Nagoya castle, who possessed a number of books and scrolls of the “Shutendōji” narrative. This presentation will show how those painted versions were valued by the Owari Tokugawa in the Edo period (1603–1867).

2. About the Shutendōji emaki

The Shutendōji emaki in the collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum is comprised of three scrolls, believed to have been made in the early Edo period (17^th century)【fig.1, 2】(1). They were transmitted in the Owari Tokugawa family. As for the oldest surviving example, that would be the Ōeyama emaki (an alternate title for the same legend), made in the 14th century and currently held in the Itsuō Art Museum. The scrolls in Suntory Museum of Art may be the most famous, as they are painted by the distinguished painter Kanō Motonobu in the 16^th century. In Edo period, the story of Shutendōji came to proliferate through woodblock printing. Finally, I should note that the demon queller, Minamoto Yorimitsu(948-1021)(otherwise pronounced Raikō), was a real historical warrior who died in 1021.

The story is as follows. In Kyoto, the daughter of the court noble Ikeda Chūnagon goes missing. Through divination, it is discovered that she was abducted by the monster of Ōeyama. Chūnagon informs the emperor, who then orders Raikō to go subdue this demon. Before his quest, Raikō and his retainers (Watanabe Tsuna, Sakata Kintoki, Usui Sadamitsu, Fujiwara Yasumasa, and Urabe Suetake) go pray for victory at the shrines of Kumano, Sumiyoshi, and Iwashimizu Hachiman. So that their identities would not be divulged, they disguise themselves as mountain priests (yamabushi). In Tanba they meet up with three elderly men, who reveal to them that the monster is called Shutendōji, and that to defeat him, they should hold a drinking party, as he loves to drink. To this end, they give Raikō and his group a flask of magical sake and a helmet. In fact, these old men are the gods of Kumano, Sumiyoshi and Iwashimizu Hachiman. As they climb further into the mountain, by the upper reaches of a river, they encounter a woman. The old men disappear at this point, as they inquire about the woman, about seventeen or eighteen years old. It turns out that she is the daughter of the Hanazono Chūnagon. There by the river, she is washing a blood-stained robe. She tells them that the Shutendōji drinks the blood of girls as sake, and eats their flesh as dishes. This bloody robe belonged to the daughter of the Horikawa Chūnagon, who had just been eaten that morning, she tells them.

After inquiring about the whereabouts of Shutendōji, Raikō and his team arrive at an iron gate. There Shutendōji’s monsters keeping guard welcome them because the demons plan to eat them. They finally meet Shutendōji, who as his name implies, has a face that is child-like, but a pale red, gigantic, grotesque body. Raikō tells Shutendōji that they are yamabushi. For shelter that night, Raikō proposes, he would prepare some good sake. Shutendōji agrees, then holds a banquet. Raikō and his retainers pretend to eat so that they would not to be suspicious 【fig.1】.

Fig. 1
Reproduced with the permission of Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Raikō then offers Shutendōji the magical sake, and the monster gets completely intoxicated by the delicious wine. Now is their chance. As the team rushes into the monster’s bedroom, the three gods reappear, shackling Shutendōji’s arms and legs in chains 【fig.2】.

Fig. 2
Reproduced with the permission of Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The gods tell him to take his head. Turning into a demon himself, Raikō attacks Shutendōji, chopping off his head. The severed head flies up, then swoops down, taking aim at Raikō. Thanks to gods’ helmet, he escapes harm. The team then rescues the captive girls and return to the capital, where they are received with honor and are given awards by the emperor.

Shutendōji’s residence represents the supernatural realm, beyond the normal world of human beings. To express its supernatural quality, there are several telling features. While not depicted in this scroll’s painting, in the text, the Shutendōji’s residence is revealed to have a garden in which the four seasons are concurrently present, symbolizing an immortal world in which there is no passage of time. Moreover, in Shutendōji’s bedroom, the sliding screens have images of turbulent seas, as they are a symbol of another realm at the bottom of the sea.(2) Such evocative motifs were one technique by which the painter, in his visual medium that combined text and image, vividly communicated to his viewers the otherworldliness of Shutendōji’s domain.(3)

3. The Owari Tokugawa Family and their Emaki

Many daimyō warriors in the Edo period owned emaki or illustrated books that pictorialized the “Shutendōji” narrative.(4) The Owari Tokugawa family, the owner of this version, was one of the most important branch families, from which the shogun could be chosen if the main line lacked heirs. It was established by Tokugawa Yoshinao, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s ninth son. That samurai would be interested in a story about heroic warriors defeating a monster is not surprising. Still, the Owari Tokugawa fascination with “Shutendōji” was exceptional: the inventory of their collection shows five sets of “Shutendōji” scrolls or books in the span of the 18th and 19th centuries.(5) This number outstrips other narrative books, underscoring their special relationship with this work. I contend that “Shutendōji” had particular meanings for the Tokugawa family. Of course, not all of these scrolls were owned by one person, and they were acquired over the course of many generations. But they do demonstrate some conscious preoccupation with this story over others, as these gorgeous scroll paintings were especially prepared for festive occasions, such as births or weddings in the lord’s family. In fact, in light of these occasions centered on the family, I argue that the selection of “Shutendōji” reflected the samurai’s concern over lineage. It is well known that Tokugawa Ieyasu positioned himself as a descendant of the Seiwa Genji. Minamoto no Raikō, who subjugated Shutendōji, was also from this lineage. Therefore, for the Tokugawa, this story, despite its fictionality, was not simply some fairy tale about defeating a monster, but had significance as the glorification of a heroic ancestor. Furthermore, the Owari Tokugawa collection houses other works that feature the heroism of the Genji, such as The Tale of the Heike, or the “Rashōmon emaki,” which features Watanabe Tsuna, a member of Raikō’s group. These stories were not simply captivating for the eyes, but were treasured as records of the family’s ancestors and their brave exploits.

4. Conclusion

In Japanese culture, the image of the demon (oni) has often been used to represent the Other, such as violent pirates, yamabushi, entertainers, or foreigners, who were all in some manner seen as resisting the social order.(6) The “Shutendōji” can also be read as the story of a forcible pacification of a being who had evaded the social order. In this respect, the tale evokes Girard’s ideas about those who “can be slayed without the risk of retaliation.”(7) For the samurai, who claimed the mandate to rule, stories that demonstrated the pacification of other lands, including the realm of the fantastic, had status as origin myths that validated their lineages. As such, for the samurai of the Tokugawa clan, the quelling of the demon then acted as a vicarious experience, making the viewing of the scroll a ritualistic performance that linked the character of Raikō to themselves. The Shutendōji emaki was therefore a vital work to possess, as its viewing legitimized and asserted the sovereignty of this ruling family.

Translated by Takeshi Watanabe

Bibliography

Girard, René. Bouryoku to Seinarumono. Trans. Yukio Furuta. Tokyo: Housei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1982. Trans. of La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.

Baba, Akiko, Oni no Kenkyū. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1988.

Komatsu, Kazuhiko, ed. Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2000.

Kuroda, Hideo. “Emaki no Naka no Oni: Kibi Daijin to Oni.” Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku. Ed. Kazuhiko Komatsu. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000. 335-362.

Ryūsawa, Aya, “Daimyōke no Ehon Jukai to Emaki Eirihon Seisaku no Ryūsei ni Tsuite.” Setsuwa Bungaku Kenkyū, 49 (Setsuwabungaku-kai, 2014) 4-13.

Ryūsawa, Aya, “Owari Tokugawake Denrai ‘Rashōmon Emaki’ ni Tsuite.” Kinshachi Sōsho, 36 (Tokugawa Reimeikai, 2010) 43-70.

The Tokugawa Art Museum. Momoyama-Edo Kaiga no Bi. Nagoya: The Tokugawa Art Museum, 2008.

Notes

1. For more on this scroll painting, see: The Tokugawa Art Museum, Momoyama-Edo Kaiga no Bi (Nagoya: The Tokugawa Art Museum, 2008) 87, 156. (back)
2. In the Imperial Palace, there are similar screens depicting turbulent seas. Even though the Heian-period version does not survive, in Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, she describes these screens as depicting long-legged, long-armed, fearsome monsters in rough waters. (back)
3. The scroll’s texts do not describe the screens, but in the Nō play, Ōeyama, the libretto (in the Hōshō tradition) makes explicit mention of the screens as the “araumi no shōji.” (back)
4. For more on the 17th-century reception of the “Shutendōji” illustrated books, see Aya Ryūsawa, “Daimyōke no Ehon Jukai to Emaki Eirihon Seisaku no Ryūsei ni Tsuite,” Setsuwa Bungaku Kenkyū, 49, 10 (2014) 4-13. (back)
5. For more on the various works in the Owari Tokugawa collection, see Aya Ryūsawa, “Owari Tokugawake Denrai ‘Rashōmon Emaki’ ni Tsuite,” Kinko Sōsho, 36 (Tokugawa Reimeikai, 2010) 43-70. (back)
6. For an overview on “Oni” in Japanese culture, see Akiko Baba, Oni no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1988) and Kazuhiko Komatsu, ed. Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000). Hideo Kuroda pointed out that the Other including foreigners was regarded as Oni. See Hideo Kuroda “Emaki no Naka no Oni: Kibi Daijin to Oni,” (Kazuhiko Komatsu, ed., Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000) 335-362. (back)
7. René Girard, Bouryoku to Seinarumono (Tokyo: Housei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1982), trans. Yukio Furuta. trans. of La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972) 22. (back)