Lecture: On Beyond Shomu: Whither Buddhist Kingship?
February 17
Lecture: On Beyond Shomu: Whither Buddhist Kingship?
Joan Piggott (Professor of Japanese History, Cornell University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM
| In her Emergence of Japanese Kingship, Professor Piggott described how Shomu Tenno embraced the Mahayana ideal of chishiki as a key motif in his theater-state mode of kingship. In this presentation, she will reflect on what happened to chishiki kingship after Shomu, during the reigns of his daughter, Koken-Shotoku Tenno (749-70) as Heavenly Sovereign and Retired Heavenly Sovereign. We usually think of Koken-Shotoku as an unstintingly Buddhist monarch whose reign led to significant breaks with the past: the end of the Nara capital, the end of female sovereignty, and an end to theater—state Buddhist kingship. But Prof. Piggott argues that some revisions are needed in this common wisdom. Shomu’s daughter actually presided over the Nara court during an epoch when T’ang practices were enthusiastically being taken as models, resulting in curious contradictions: a female sovereign mandating realm—wide distribution of a canonical text of patriarchy, the Classic of Filial Piety; and a Buddhist monarch whose oral edicts were filled with references to Heavenly signs, propriety, filiality, and Heaven’s Mandate. Characterization of elements of “T’angification” and analysis of their impact on Heavenly Buddhist kingship “on beyond Shomu” into early Heian times will be foci of this presentation.
Continue the conversation with Professor Piggott at a Brown Bag Lunch on Friday, February 18th at 12:00 in the Kent Hall Lounge (primarily for Graduate Students). |
