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Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan (Hardcover)
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Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan (Hardcover)
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Scholars have long remarked on the frequency with which Japanese
myths portrayed gods (kami) as old men or okina . Many of these
""sacred elders"" came to be featured in premodern theater, most
prominently in Noh. In the closing decades of the
twentieth-century, as the number of Japan's senior citizens climbed
steadily, the sacred elder of premodern myth became a subject of
renewed interest and was seen by some as evidence that the elderly
in Japan had once been accorded a level of respect unknown in
recent times. In Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in
Medieval Japan, Edward R. Drott charts the shifting sets of
meanings ascribed to old age in medieval Japan, tracing the
processes by which the aged body was transformed into a symbol of
otherworldly power and the cultural, political, and religious
circumstances that inspired its reimagination. Drott examines how
the aged body was used to conceptualize forms of difference and to
convey religious meanings in a variety of texts: official
chronicles, literary works, Buddhist legends and didactic tales. In
early Japan, old age was most commonly seen as a mark of negative
distinction, one that represented the ugliness, barrenness, and
pollution against which the imperial court sought to define itself.
From the late-Heian period, however, certain Buddhist authors
seized upon the aged body as a symbolic medium though which to
challenge traditional dichotomies between center and margin, high
and low, and purity and defilement, crafting narratives that
associated aged saints and avatars with the cults, lineages, sacred
sites, or religious practices these authors sought to promote.
Contributing to a burgeoning literature on religion and the body,
Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan
applies approaches developed in gender studies to ""denaturalize""
old age as a matter of representation, identity, and performance.
By tracking the ideological uses of old age in premodern Japan,
this work breaks new ground, revealing the role of religion in the
construction of generational categories and the ways in which
religious ideas and practices can serve not only to naturalize, but
also challenge ""common sense"" about the body.
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