Re-Presenting Chigo: The Figure of the Acolyte in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Literature

In Japanese culture, the figure of the Buddhist acolyte, or chigo, has been a popular object of artistic depiction, both in image and in text. In fact, during the medieval period, and especially the twelfth to the thirteen centuries, the figure of the chigo inspired an entire sub-genre of literature, known as the chigo monogatari (or acolyte tales). These tales often depict romantic and sexual relationships between young acolytes and monks, and also valorize the acolyte as a potent spiritual being, somewhere between deity and human child. The goal of this project is to offer readings of these stories on their own terms, freeing their reception from normative scholarly interpretations that have so far narrowed their significance to how they serve as indexes to socio-historical "reality.

Defending the Dharma: Buddhist Apologetics and Print Culture in Early Modern Japan

When taken together, the chapters of this dissertation provide the first comprehensive intellectual history of early modern (1603–1868) Buddhist apologetics in Japan. In previous scholarship, apologetic treatises have only been remarked upon in passing, and have tended to be dismissed as reactionary works with nothing of value to provide for intellectual historians and specialists of early modern Buddhism. This study proposes a different perspective. By situating both Buddhist apologetics and the anti-Buddhist polemics they respond to within the nascent print culture of the period, this dissertation argues that the intellectual conflict that emerged around Buddhism in early modern Japan provides inroads into a variety of issues pertinent to the intellectual history of the period, Buddhist or otherwise. These include the formation of sectarianism during the early modern period, the history of publication in Japan, the development of methods of philological and textual criticism, Tokugawa political discourse, nascent notions of historical and scientific method, and so forth. By viewing printed apologetic discourses as active sites of negotiation that allowed Buddhist scholar-monks to engage with a range of intellectual problems not normally recognized in scholarship, this study highlights the involvement of Buddhism in the larger currents of the era’s intellectual history. At the same time, this study contends that apologetic treatises ought to be assessed not only for their relative degrees of success (or failure) in refuting anti-Buddhist critics. Instead, it asks after what apologetics can teach us of how Buddhists navigated the changing ideological stakes of the early modern period of Japanese history and recognizes them as constituting a rich intellectual tradition in their own right