This panel explores the diverse ways hagiography functions in Japanese Buddhism, challenging approaches that privilege hagiographies resembling the literary archetype of the saint’s life prevalent in Euro-Christian contexts. Focusing on the retelling of stories about iconic Buddhist founders such as Dōgen, Shinran, and Nichiren, the panel's papers examine how these narratives have been adapted across different media, from medieval Zen initiation documents to modern visual arts and public debates. Through a transsectarian comparison, the panel reveals how Japanese Buddhist communities have reinvented their founders' lives to reflect changing doctrinal and political landscapes, while also addressing broader issues in the study of hagiography. By drawing on examples from both premodern and modern contexts, as well as across a wide range of media, the panel promotes a broader understanding of Japanese Buddhist hagiography that transcends traditional boundaries, and invites comparative dialogue across cultural and religious contexts.
This paper investigates how the biography, work, and legacy of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the supposed founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, was manipulated in medieval esoteric transmission materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper slips.” Whereas much scholarship postulates a recovery of Dōgen’s lost importance during the Tokugawa period, and in the course of Sōtō sectarian reform, the paper argues that such recovery happened against a backdrop of constant, esoteric reinvention of the founder’s hagiography during the medieval period, a reinvention that, just as the supposed Tokugawa recovery, served concrete needs for legitimizing sectarian practices and doctrinal innovations in the face of a changing, and often hostile, religio-political landscape. In addition, it challenges perspectives that would argue for a simple continuity between medieval and early modern hermeneutical stances by demonstrating that Dōgen’s Tokugawa rebirths were effected by reinscribing the founder’s life and thought into a new epistemological regime.
Scholarship on Shinran hagiography tends to focus on the production of narrative accounts of the life of this Japanese Buddhist founder, while overlooking controversies and debates surrounding details of his life. This paper challenges that prioritization, arguing that such controversies are themselves moments of hagiographical production—key moments when a founder’s life is contested, reinterpreted, and mobilized in different ways. Focusing on an influential controversy from the eighteenth century surrounding the Tradition of the True Lineage of Saint Shinran (Shinran shōnin shōtōden, 1715), it examines how disputes over Shinran’s life reshaped both his image and sectarian authority within the Shin Buddhist community. Rather than relying on narrative storytelling, this mode of hagiographical construction unfolded through explicit argumentation and debates over historical authenticity. Analyzing key texts from Ryōkū and his critics, the paper demonstrates how such controversies actively shaped Shin Buddhist history and calls for a broader approach to hagiography.
Since the nineteenth and early twentieth century, biographers of Nichiren have not been limited to clerics and lay devotees, and Nichiren has not been represented exclusively as the founder of the Nichirenshū. However, most modern elaborations have premodern roots and therefore represent as much continuity as innovation. The life story of Nichiren has been elaborated in a wide range of literary, visual and performing arts genres, including hagiographies, novels, kabuki plays, paintings, and films. Following an overview of the premodern Nichiren images and hagiographies and their defining characteristics, this study explores how the accounts of Nichiren’s life were modified and amplified by nonclerical authors in modern Japan. It argues that for Japanese Buddhism, modernity entailed not only the demythologization of the founder’s image, but also its remythologization in a new manner, which served the needs of the narrators and their audiences.
| Massimo Rondolino | mrondoli@carrollu.edu | View |