Transformations of Shame: Repentance and Shamelessness in Late Heian Pure Land Buddhism

This paper examines two kinds of transformations of shame (zanki) in late Heian Pure Land discourse through the contrasting ideas of emotion and affect. First, subjective remorse was formalized into standardized rites of repentance (sange). This formalization generated a strong emphasis on ritual expression of shame, as opposed to the internal emotion itself. It effectively converted invisible individual feelings into an intersubjective affective field accessible to other individuals. Second, the perceived lack of shame was paradoxically redefined as a performative gateway to spiritual success. By self-portraying as shameless, practitioners strategically aligned themselves with a particular category of people expounded in Pure Land teachings as an object of salvation, thereby ensuring their position within the soteriological system. This paper argues that the emotion of shame functioned not merely as a psychological state but as a conceptual matrix for ritual embodiment and performative self-definition.