Land and Soil in the Religious Culture of Kôyasan in Medieval and Early Modern Japan

Abstract

In traditional worldviews, the natural environment was replete with sacred powers. With a holistic worldview, people interacted with nature and sacred manifestations through ritual practices, and organized their lives in spaces suffused with supranormal beings. Nowhere is this more evident than in the religious cultures that developed at sacred mountains. Yet due partly to the sway of the normative analytical model that privileges doctrinal and ideological dimensions of religious phenomena, little attempt has been made to explore the rich relationships between nature and the sacred in the religious cultures of sacred mountains. By examining legendary narratives, rituals, and the landscape of Kôyasan Buddhist monastery in Japan, the paper investigates how elements of nature, in particular land and soil, were infused with symbolic meanings, and played vital roles in the production of a local political space and trans-local religious culture in medieval and early modern periods.