Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks

Abstract

Collections of medieval Japanese Buddhist didactic stories are a genre known as setsuwa (literally, “explanatory tales”). Compiled between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, these narratives typically focus on karmic consequence and the need to faithfully practice the Dharma. These stories are a rich source of information about medieval Japanese Buddhist practice and belief, including rituals performed, deities worshipped, and Buddhist concepts deployed. The tales prominently invoke ideas and imagery drawn from sutras and commentaries that were used, inter alia, to legitimate the events depicted and the behaviors that lead to good and bad karmic consequence. Sometimes, too, setsuwa were utilized in Buddhist sermons. The importance of these explanatory tales for understanding medieval Japanese Buddhist religiosity is underscored by the fact that a great deal of research on setsuwa already exists in both Japanese- and English-language scholarship. Charlotte Eubanks's Miracles of Book and Body embarks on a different theoretical course and, as a result, is a significant addition to existing setsuwa scholarship. In brief, she explores setsuwa as an instance of medieval Japanese Buddhist “textual culture” framed by a central question that motivates her inquiry: “how does Buddhist rhetoric, as materialized on the written page, work on human bodies?” (16).