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Abstract

This paper examines the affective and multi-sensorial narratives in Yoshishige no Yasutane’s Nihon Ōjōgokuraku-ki, the foundational collection of medieval Japanese Pure Land Buddhist rebirth tales (ōjōden). Composed at the threshold of a dark age in which Buddhist salvation through ordinary practice was believed to be impossible, the collection spoke directly to a faith community haunted by worldly suffering and their own spiritual inadequacy. Engaging with sensory studies and narratology, this paper challenges the binary divide between doctrinal expositions and didactic narratives in the study of Buddhism. Rather than treating the Nihon Ōjōgokuraku-ki as secondary supplements to scholar-monks’ systematic treatises, this paper argues that ōjōden narratives constitute a mediating rhetorical device through which Pure Land doctrines are activated and domesticated in medieval Japan. Through a multi-sensorial schema for retelling the miraculous visions, celestial music, and prophetic dreams, ōjōden narratives encouraged faith in the reader’s mind, particularly at extraordinary moments when the boundary between this world and the Pure Land grows thin. Situated within Yasutane’s intellectual biography and the Pure Land fraternities he initiated, the paper ultimately proposes a hermeneutic centered on sense and affection in approaching how the sacred Pure Land was perceived, negotiated, and testified in early medieval Japan.

Author Biography

Qingxuan Wang (he/they) is an M.A. student in East Asian Buddhism at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Their current research examines the transmission of Buddhist doctrines, liturgies, and expressive forms within and beyond the medieval Chinese empire. They are particularly interested in the homiletic performance across spiritual traditions and its implications for broader histories of senses, statecraft, and globalization in the premodern world.

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