Preaching the Animal Realm in Late Medieval Japan

Abstract

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese visual and textual sources are replete with images and descriptions of Kumano bikuni, the itinerant and seemingly ubiquitous proselytizer-nuns known for preaching upon elaborate paintings of heavens and hells at crossroads, bridges, and other public spaces in early Edo-period Japan. Although the women's painted props survive, their stories do not. In this article, I seek to explore the likely contents of Kumano bikuni's preaching upon (non-human) animals and the animal realm by examining seemingly related stories employed in a variety of Japanese proselytizing traditions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including didactic accounts preserved in sutra commentaries, works of popular Buddhist fiction, and one official temple history. By extrapolating tales and ideas from these near-contemporaneous textual sources, I attempt to reconstruct some broad aspects of the lost sermon-stories of Kumano bikuni, as well as to illuminate some traditional (late medieval) Japanese beliefs concerning animals and human-animal relations.

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