ABSTRACT
In their introductory chapter, the editors of this volume write that the Japanese honji suijaku is a “combinatory system.” Indeed, the mythical world of Japanese Middle Ages shows us an inextricable amalgam of deities and symbols of all imaginable origins, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, from the folklore of the “populace” to the elaborated rites of the courtly culture or subtle doctrines of the learned monks. In a sense, this is not surprising, since any mythical corpus of a given culture, in a given period, can be described as an “inter-referential system ad infinitum” — this is at least the image that I could get from reading the mythological studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and also from my own study of Buddhist mythology in general. 1
