ABSTRACT
The notion of transculturality has not been explicitly used as a key term in the study of premodern Japan and its religiosity too often. However, as a result of rigorous studies during the past few decades, it has become abundantly clear that the processes of transculturation and creative adaptation of foreign, particularly Buddhist, ideas to Japan’s many local contexts played significant roles in the formation of what has so far been perceived as ‘premodern Japan’. Buddhism, itself a transcultural force, is historically equipped with a multitude of conceptual tools, rituals and scriptural sources; throughout the mid-centuries of the first millennium, Buddhist concepts and practices were a subject of dynamic cultural adaptation and translation from Central Asia’s and India’s to East Asia’s languages and contexts. Japan, being a terminus of terrestrial and maritime networks in early East Asia, had also become a part of the emerging Buddhist world. After its introduction from Korea around 552, Buddhism continued to be subtly reconfigured to suit Japan’s local needs for several more centuries. It acted as a major intellectual stimulant for an exuberant textual and material production, particularly during the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1336) periods. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the processes of transculturation and adaptation of Buddhist concepts traversing the geographical spaces from Central Asia and India to China, Korea and, eventually, Japan increasingly enter the scholarly analytical framework as major research topics. 2 Let us briefly survey the most relevant scholarly developments here, and the selected examples of the transcultural processes as reflected and recorded in the Japanese premodern sources further below.
