Honji suijaku at work

This chapter discusses the symbolic role of honji suijaku discourse in the fields of ideology, economics, and social practices in medieval and early modern Japan by analyzing two different bodies of documents containing religious information on work tools and rituals for professionals and aspects of everyday life. The first body of documents is constituted by the so-called Akibito no makimono (“The Scrolls of Itinerant Merchants”), a group of texts describing myths and legends concerning the origin of itinerant merchants (akibito) and their tools. ¹ Some of these texts appeared in the fifteenth century, but most of them were written toward the end of the Muromachi period (mid-sixteenth century). Their authors were probably Kumano yamabushi. As several scholars have pointed out, the narrative parts of these texts are examples of honjimono, a literary genre of the Muromachi period about the sacred origins of people, things, places, or events. Even though these narratives have little or no historical value, they are nevertheless very important for our understanding of the mentalities of the people who wrote and used them. ² The second body of documents I discuss is a number of ritual procedures for work and everyday practices produced by the Miwa shrine-temple complex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ³ They contain instructions concerning the ritualization of labor and everyday practices. In spite of their late composition, these documents seem to be the crystallization of earlier visions of sacrality, in particular concerning the relations between the profane world and the sacred realm of buddhas and kami. I give particular attention to the rites for carpenters, many of whose texts survive, for they can give us a fairly good idea of the general outlook of such ritual labor practices.