Abstract

There was a type of short story in medieval Japan which was essentially a cleric’s public meditation on his or her previous lay life and his or her experience of religious awakening. These revelatory tales, or zange monogatari 懺;海物語, are a literary transformation of a Buddhist meditative or devotional practice called sange 懺悔. The profound importance of Bud­ dhism in medieval Japanese literature has been studied primarily in terms of cultural content, but revelatory tales are a relatively rare instance in which religious practice influenced literary/omz.1 In the medieval Japanese context a religious awakening is the sudden revelatory experience of the Buddhist tenet that human sorrows are caused by our ignorant refusal to accept the inevitability of change (mujo 無常) .2 By forming attachments to changeable things we virtually invite suffering into our lives. When we grasp the fundamental truth of the inevitability of change, we may be inspired to abandon mundane passions and to strive for enlightenment. Realizing that past emotional attachments hinder enlighten­ ment, we renounce them in order to devote ourselves exclusively to the cultivation of an understanding of religious truths, knowledge of which emancipates us from pain and suffering. Sange was the practice of medita­ tively reviewing those attachments in order to deepen the previously experi­ enced realization of transience. This practice is directly reflected in revelatory tales in which multiple narrators recount, in the first person, their former attachments and emotional losses.

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