Jūzenji, ou l’enfance du divin

Abstract

During the medieval period and till the Meiji Restoration, Jūzenji was one of the preeminent gods of the Hie Shrines (known today as Hiyoshi Taisha). The very name “Jūzenji” sounds rather strange for a kami, and it has received various Buddhist and “Shintō” interpretations. It points toward a Buddhist monastic institution, that of the “ten dhyāna masters” (jūzenji), which was important in the Nara and Heian periods but had declined by the time Jūzenji’s cult arose, toward the eleventh century. There are few representations of Jūzenji. He is usually represented as a young monk or as a youth (dōji or chigo). Indeed, youth is his most characteristic feature, and it links him not only with a category of more or less divine or demonic deities but also with an important figure often represented as a child or an adolescent, Shōtoku Taishi. The figure of Jūzenji is also intimately related to the image of the monkey, the emissary of Sannō Gongen, the main protector of Mount Hiei. Jūzenji was above all an oracular god. He delivered his oracles not only through incubatory dreams but also through children that he possessed. The sudden and violent nature of Jūzenji’s child possession, as reported in literary sources, reveals an unruly, demonic nature. Yet Jūzenji also came to be perceived as a deity watching over the destiny of humans. This transformation was made easier through his identification with the snake deity Ugajin, and, through him, with the so-called “wild gods of the placenta” (ena kōjin). This identification took place within a specific context, that of the beliefs concerning placenta deities. In his role as placenta deity, Jūzenji was mostly a nurturing deity that brings “longevity and happiness,” yet, as “wild deity” (kōjin), he remained essentially ambivalent—and potentially dangerous when not properly initiated. The ascension of Jūzenji into the medieval pantheon led to identifying him with the “god of destiny,” Shukujin. This identification derives logically from the nature and functions of that deity—a child-deity related to Jizō, but also an oracular deity and a deity of limits, and a violent deity of the kōjin type, perceived as the aramitama of the mountain god Sannō Gongen. This latent symbolic complex was brought to the forefront with the emergence of certain social groups (the artistic guilds of the sarugakusha and biwa hōshi, and the inhabitants of the shuku, way-stations). This complex symbolic network explains how, even within the orthodox circles of Enryakuji and Hie Shrine, Jūzenji eventually became a “god of the warp and woof of Heaven and Earth.”