Taming Dragons: The Buddhist Mythmaking of Sacred Violence in Medieval Buddhist Tales Samgukyusa and Konjaku Monogatarishū

Abstract

The insights available in Japanese medieval Buddhist narratives on the appropriation and reconstruction of various non-Buddhist divine characters has long been overlooked. Yet an examination of these narratives reveals Buddhist thinkers’ endeavors to reconfigure the religious and cultural roles of folk religious worship and related figures into essential tools through which they could popularize Buddhism, legitimize Buddhist cosmology, and, ultimately, to dominate the religious and cultural milieu of medieval Japan. This essay compares such medieval Buddhist narratives of Japan with Korean mythic tale literature. It pays particular attention to representations of folk religious figures in the works, and in particular, the dragon, an exceptionally prominent character associated with particular roles and symbolism in the simplified, popularized Buddhist framework represented in the dragon character in Korean literature Samgukyusa (三國遺事) and Japanese Konjaku monogatarishū (今昔物語集). The essay investigates various representations of the dragon, which was apparently understood in ambivalent terms—as both a sacred figure and a being inferior to Buddhist figures. Moreover, the way in which such representation is related to medieval Japanese discourse of defilement and threatening power is illuminated. Consequently, the essay discusses how Buddhist mythographers in medieval Japan devised a sophisticated literary strategy to accommodate non-Buddhist religious symbols and, simultaneously, to marginalize them.