This case study aims at uncovering “sacred” and “religious” aspects of time in two medieval literary genres, the short anecdotes, which later came to be called setsuwa 説話, as well as the otogizōshi 御伽草子, short stories, which were mainly written in the Muromachi-era, and thus are often called Muromachi jidai monogatari 室町時代物語. On the conceptual level, the project is rooted in approaches which have taken shape in the wake of three recent paradigm shifts that build the framework of the SNSF project “Time and Emotion in Medeival Japanese Literature”, namely the spatial, affective, and temporal.
It has often been noted that emotions are shaped by culture, society, religion, among other things. The reality of religion shaping emotions is especially true in the case of setsuwa. The time-related emotions found in such texts are often deeply influenced by what might be called “Buddhist” ideas. As much as these literary objectivations have been shaped by Buddhist practice and thought, they for their part had transformative impact and create emotional communities or collective realities of experience. This aspect is of pivotal importance when one considers the function of setsuwa, which have often been used in proselytising activities. It stands to reason, that the temporal emotions created by these types of works were emotions conducive to awakening. This is my re-elaboration of Richard K. Payne’s covering of the phenomena of mantra as language conducive to awakening. To make sure, time itself is not a marginal subject of Buddhist thought and practice but is central to it. This is why attitudes and emotions pertaining to time are central to soteriological issues. They were understood to be in need of re-evaluation in accordance with the Buddhist truth, accessible by the way of transcendent insight (prajñā, j. hannya 般若). And at least in the first part of my case study, I aim to retrace in which way the texts thought to achieve this.
One of the most important figures in Japanese Buddhism is the so-called historical Buddha Śākyamuni, and I have embarked on my task to by looking at several anecdotes from the life of the Buddha, which provides the frame for the stories in the first three scrolls of the Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集(Collection of [Anecdotes]) which are now past). Among the questions which lend themselves to the investigation of the role of time in the hagiography of the Buddha, the following are of importance: What are the Buddha’s attitudes towards time? How are they contrasted to those of other protagonists, who have (not yet) embarked on the path to liberation? What are the implications of contrasting the human life span to that of other realms such as heavens and hells? Finally, what are the connotations of the repeated depictions of emotions related to transience, death, and loss? What role do these emotions play in the quest for liberation? The deliberate description of emotions is much more prominent in later texts belonging to the genre of the so-called Muromachi jidai monogatari. I thus will investigate variants of the Buddha, the Shaka no honji 釈迦の本地, belonging to this genre, in order to discover the emotions conducive to awakening and emotions of awakened beings as envisioned from the medieval to the early modern periods.
