Early history of Japanese Buddhism in Sanboe

Abstract

The Three Jewels by Minamoto no Tamenori (Sanbôe, 984) shows, through a variety of didactic examples, how the Buddha, his teachings, and the monastic community are revered; the book was written by a layman and addressed to a laywoman preparing to take monastic vows. The narrator combines tales and quotations from books of the Buddhist canon with historical essays, mostly dealing with how Buddhist rites and customs appeared and took hold in Japan. The material is provided by earlier setsuwa tales, as well as kokushi state annals, kyaku court orders, engi temple legends, betsuden biographies of monks, along with the Chinese encyclopedic work on Buddhism Fayuan Zhulin (from which most of the quotations from the sûtras are taken), as well as the sûtras themselves (primarily the Lotus Sûtra) and some other Tripitaka texts. There is no consistent presentation of historical plots in Sanbôe; there are four stories about outstanding people of antiquity and a series of legends about the miracles of the sûtras, as well as an overview of the annual cycle of rituals, which includes biographies of the people who first performed these rituals in Japan. The beginning of the history of Japanese Buddhism here is attributed to Shôtoku-taishi at the turn of the 6 th — 7 th centuries, while earlier events are left aside. The activities of the 9 th century Tendai school teachers, Saichô and his closest disciples, are traced in particular detail. For some of the most important rites, historical excursuses are not given, probably because they had no founders; the Japanese community adopted them by itself, imitating the mainland community. For studying the history of Buddhism, Sanbôe is particularly interesting, as it reveals what information regarding the adoption of the Buddhist Dharma in Japan and the formation of the Sangha was selected for teaching a noble person and for entertaining reading. The article describes Tamenori’s approach to presenting the prehistory and history of rites, compares his interpretation of the initial stage of the Japanese Buddhist tradition with versions from other setsuwa collections, provides a translation of one of the stories about a rite (3—31), an analysis of its structure, and an overview of the historical episodes of Sanbôe.