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A History of Dōmyōji to 1572 (or Maybe 1575): An Attempted Reconstruction

2007; Sophia University; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mni.2007.0019

1880-1390

Robert Borgen,

Japanese History and Culture

A History of Dōmyōji to 1572 (or Maybe 1575)An Attempted Reconstruction Robert Borgen (bio) Dōmyōji is a name shared by two religious institutions adjacent to one another in the suburbs of Osaka. The more conspicuous is a Shinto shrine, Dōmyōji Tenmangū , dedicated to Tenjin , the Heavenly Deity. Today, Tenjin is best known as the Shinto deity who assists students preparing for school entrance examinations. Originally, however, Tenjin was the angry ghost of Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), the distinguished courtier who came back to haunt his former enemies after he had been slandered and died in exile. Deification pacified the vengeful specter, and as early as 986 Tenjin already was worshiped as a patron saint of scholars. Just west of the shrine is a modest Buddhist convent known simply as Dōmyōji. Shrine and convent share a common name because formerly they were a single institution, one that boasted a long and noteworthy history. What was to become Dōmyōji was established, probably as a monastery, sometime in the seventh century, when Buddhism was relatively new in Japan. The Tenjin cult was introduced later, perhaps in the eleventh century, and two centuries or so after that Dōmyōji became a convent. Through most of its history, it was a combined Buddhist convent and Shinto shrine. This article will often refer to it as a temple, for want of an exact word in English to describe an institution with so malleable an identity, although "monastery," "shrine," and "convent" will also be used in cases where they are the more precise terms. Because Japanese leaders of the Meiji period objected to the Shinto-Buddhist syncretism that characterized traditional Japanese religion—and Dōmyōji—they mandated a partition into two distinct religions. In 1872, in response to this government policy, Dōmyōji became a Shinto shrine. A year later the convent was reestablished, its origins as a monastery long since forgotten. Dōmyōji may not rank among Japan's great temples, but neither is it totally obscure. Its name is familiar among connoisseurs of Japanese sweets and theater: sweets, because a pastry coated with a type of parched rice produced there has come to be known as "Dōmyōji"; theater, because it is the setting of a famous scene from a play still performed in both the kabuki and puppet theaters, as well as being the name of a noh play, a translation of which follows this article. The sweets are of no concern here, but the plays are of considerable interest to the historian. The popular scene is from the play A Mirror of the Sugawara Secrets of Calligraphy (Sugawara denju tenarai kagami), written in 1746 for puppets and adapted to the kabuki stage the following year.1 It is based on the well-known story of Michizane's sad parting from his aunt, the nun Kakuju , as armed guards hasten him onward from Dōmyōji to his place of exile. This episode remains a key element when both of the two modern Dōmyōji recount their respective histories, but the complete absence of any reference to Dōmyōji in the writings of Michizane or the earliest accounts of his life suggests that the story is a late fabrication. Curiously, the noh play, approximately two centuries older than the puppet version, ignores the episode, too, hinting that it may be a quite late addition indeed. The article that follows will attempt to reconstruct the history of Dōmyōji, focusing on the period from its founding, at a time when the Japanese were just beginning to create a state based on Chinese models, until it was burned during the civil wars that eventually led to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. As the title of this article suggests, the date of that fire is one of many problematic details. Close attention to primary sources will reveal how the temple created its own version of its history, including, for example, the story of Michizane's visit. Fanciful though this imagined history may be, some of its details took on a life of their own...