Preaching as Performance, Performance as Preaching: Eison and Buddhist Rituals in Medieval Japan

This paper examines Eison’s (1201-90) linked preaching, ritual, and performative activities. Eison’s Shingon Ritsu movement spread broadly in medieval Japan, as he and his disciples restored temples across the islands and conferred the precepts on male and female monastics, lay elites, and commoners alike. Venues for Eison’s activities ranged from small gatherings in temples and convents; to material offering ceremonies at prisons, marketplaces, and outcast communities; to mass assemblies of monastics and laypeople and more private precept conferrals for court and warrior rulers. The paper thus uses the diversity of venues and audiences for Eison’s activities to argue for the value of understanding both “preaching as performance” (Deegalle 2006) and performance as preaching across Buddhist traditions. In so doing, I highlight how greater attention to the performative dimensions of official religious leaders can nuance still common portrayals of doctrine versus practice, elite versus popular, and institutional versus “everyday” religion.