JJRS > Volume 37 Issue 2 Changing the Calendar: Royal Political Theology and the Suppression of the Tachibana Naramaro Conspiracy of 757

Bender, Ross

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In the aftermath of the suppression of the Tachibana Naramaro conspiracy of 757, the Empress Kōken (“Kōken/Shōtoku Tennō”) issued two edicts articulating the royal political theology of the time. The first edict was a senmyō, inscribed in the Shoku Nihongi in Old Japanese; the second was a choku in Chinese. A miraculous omen, the apparition of a silkworm cocoon with a message woven into its surface, was interpreted as the occasion for a change in the calendrical era name, or nengō. This article argues that the imperial edicts express a coherent ideology combining ideas from a cultic matrix in which may be discerned proto-Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian elements.