Buddhism and the Imperial Body Politic of Japan

This paper explores the symbiosis of state-sangha relations in premodern Buddhist Japan, where temples gained state sponsorship in exchange for performing state-protecting rites. It specifically examines how Buddhist doctrine, art, and ritual equated the emperor’s own body with the greater state polity of Japan, and how these imperial body-schemes rhetorically invoked, artistically imagined, and ritually reinforced religio-political authority throughout Japan’s clerical and governmental power structures. It primarily focuses on the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods, but it also notes modern echoes of these themes as well. The Buddhist reformer Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) used the Buddha’s hand as a metaphor for discussing the inseparability of personal and state morality, and Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) integrated pre-existing Buddhist corporeal tropes into his ‘organ theory of government.’ As a result, this paper demonstrates the centrality of the emperor’s body in bridging both religious authority and political power in Japan.