Shōtoku

Abstract

Prince Shōtoku, the purported founder of Japanese Buddhism, was one of the greatest cultural icons of pre-modern Japan. The cult that grew up around his memory is recognized as one of the most important religious phenomena of the time. This book examines the creation and evolution of the Shōtoku cult over the roughly 200 years following his death—a period that saw a series of revolutionary developments in the history of Japanese religion. It highlights the activities of a cluster of kinship groups who claimed descent from ancestors from the Korean kingdom of Silla. It places these groups in their socio-cultural context and demonstrates their pivotal role in bringing continental influences to almost every aspect of government and community ideology in Japan. It argues that these immigrant kinship groups were not only responsible for the construction of the Shōtoku cult, but were also associated with the introduction of the continental systems of writing, ritual, and governance. By comparing the ancestral legends of these groups to the Shōtoku legend corpus and Imperial chronicles, the book shows that these kinship groups not only played a major role in the formation of the Japanese Buddhist tradition, they also to a large degree shaped the paradigms in terms of which the Japanese Imperial cult and the nation of Japan were conceptualized and created.