Events The Second Buddhist Text Translation Seminar: Jien’s Kōtaishi godan tantoku
June 28th, 2024. 10:30~12:00 JST
online
Speakers Eric Swanson
The Buddhist Text Translation Seminar is designed to provide researchers who are working on long-term translation projects to discuss their ongoing work in a casual, online format with fellow researchers. The seminar will meet on the morning of the last Friday of the month, six months per year. Participants may join by invitation only. Please contact us if you wish to join the mailing list for the seminar.
The June seminar will be hosted by Eric Haruki Swanson (Loyola Marymount University), who will discuss the topic "Animating the Salvific Resonance of Prince Shōtoku in Medieval Japan: A Translation of Jien’s Exaltations of the Imperial Prince in Five Sections."
During the years of political uncertainty in the early 13th century, scholar-monk Jien (1155–1225) turned to the veneration of Prince Shōtoku (574–622), a regent known for his contributions to constitutional governance and patronage of Buddhism, composing a liturgical text in honor of the legendary prince titled Exaltations of the Imperial Prince in Five Sections (Kōtaishi godan tandoku 皇太子五段歎徳). Written hundreds of years after Prince Shōtoku’s death, the purpose of this liturgical text was not only to remember the prince’s past deeds. Rather, a close reading of the text reveals Jien’s careful assembling of existing hagiographic accounts with his own liturgical vision, which presented the prince as simultaneously a historical figure of the distant past and the manifestation of bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara who continued to respond to the suffering of sentient beings in the present. In other words, the liturgical performance of the text served to illustrate how Prince Shōtoku’s deep compassion to save all beings transcended spatial and temporal boundaries, animating the prince’s salvific actions in the present and into the future. By placing this text within the social historical context of Jien’s broader activities and analyzing how it effectively embedded hagiographic accounts into its liturgical structure, the text reflects a hagiographic process that sought to both legitimize Jien’s soteriological and political vision at the turn of the 13th century, with important implications to the way Prince Shōtoku worship continued to develop in medieval Japan.
The June seminar will be hosted by Eric Haruki Swanson (Loyola Marymount University), who will discuss the topic "Animating the Salvific Resonance of Prince Shōtoku in Medieval Japan: A Translation of Jien’s Exaltations of the Imperial Prince in Five Sections."
During the years of political uncertainty in the early 13th century, scholar-monk Jien (1155–1225) turned to the veneration of Prince Shōtoku (574–622), a regent known for his contributions to constitutional governance and patronage of Buddhism, composing a liturgical text in honor of the legendary prince titled Exaltations of the Imperial Prince in Five Sections (Kōtaishi godan tandoku 皇太子五段歎徳). Written hundreds of years after Prince Shōtoku’s death, the purpose of this liturgical text was not only to remember the prince’s past deeds. Rather, a close reading of the text reveals Jien’s careful assembling of existing hagiographic accounts with his own liturgical vision, which presented the prince as simultaneously a historical figure of the distant past and the manifestation of bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara who continued to respond to the suffering of sentient beings in the present. In other words, the liturgical performance of the text served to illustrate how Prince Shōtoku’s deep compassion to save all beings transcended spatial and temporal boundaries, animating the prince’s salvific actions in the present and into the future. By placing this text within the social historical context of Jien’s broader activities and analyzing how it effectively embedded hagiographic accounts into its liturgical structure, the text reflects a hagiographic process that sought to both legitimize Jien’s soteriological and political vision at the turn of the 13th century, with important implications to the way Prince Shōtoku worship continued to develop in medieval Japan.