Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the body as a central problem in the study of religion. The special issues “The Body Religious in Japan, Part 1” (2024) and Part 2 (2025) in the journal Japanese Religions brought this perspective into focus by examining how bodies in Japanese traditions functioned as historically contingent media through which religious meaning was articulated. This panel presents new research that extends this discussion. The papers analyze three distinct configurations of embodiment in Japan: the female divine body of Kisshōten (Lakṣmī) as a model of political legitimacy for women; the imperial body ritually aligned with Senju Kannon through devotional practice; and the androgynous body of the chigo in A Long Tale for an Autumn Night, where desire, gender, and religious revelation converge. Together, the papers demonstrate how bodies served as key loci through which sovereignty, devotion, and doctrinal meaning were articulated in Japanese religion.
This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.
The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.
This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.