The Reflection of Japan Noblemen’s Religious Thought in Setsuwa Tales: Kojidan

Abstract

The paper presents an examination of ways in which religious views of medieval Japan noblemen are reflected in the didactic tales (setsuwa) literature – on the example of Kojidan (Tales About Old Matters), a setsuwa collection compiled in the early 13th century. Due to social status of the author, Minamoto-no Akikane, this collection is an instance of nobleman’s religious thought as itself. It consists of six chapters, and each one of those includes religious-themed tales. The fifth chapter is devoted to temples and shrines. Selected stories from this section became a material for analyses in this paper. Noblemen are depicted there as patrons of Buddhism in Japan like prince Shōtoku Taishi, as founders of temples and dedicated to gods kami shrines, as well as parishioners who can be awarded with miracle in response to their prayers, or evil sinners. There are greatest temple-shrines complexes that are mentioned in this chapter and be­tween heroes there are many high-standing persons as famous as Fujiwara-no Michinaga. Akikane pays attention to the formal relationships between policy and religion institutions, and the greatest interest for him lies in matters of peo­ple’s faith. There is sizable amount of sources used by compiler, some of those are earlier collections of setsuwa tales. Akikane adopted these stories and made subtle changes in them to achieve wanted impression: for instance, he made it with tale about sinner Nagate, borrowed from Nihon ryōiki