Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Plotting the Prince traces the development of conceptual maps of the world created through the telling of stories about Prince Shōtoku (573?–622?), an eminent statesman who is credited with founding Buddhism in Japan. It analyzes his place in the sacred landscape and the material relics of the cult of personality dedicated to him, focusing on the art created from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. The book asks not only who Shōtoku was, but also how images of his life served the needs of devotees in early medieval Japan.

Even today Shōtoku evokes images of a half-real, half-mythical figure who embodied the highest political, social, and religious ideals. Taking up his story about four centuries after his death, this study traces the genesis and progression of Shōtoku’s sacred personas in art to illustrate their connection to major religious centers such as Shitenno-ji and Hōryū-ji. It argues that mapping and storytelling are sister acts—both structuring the world in subtle but compelling ways—that combined in visual narratives of Shōtoku’s life to shape conceptions of religious legitimacy, communal history, and sacred geography.

Plotting the Prince introduces much new material and presents provocative interpretations that call upon art historians to rethink fundamental conceptions of narrative and cultic imagery. It offers social and political historians a textured look at the creation of communal identities on both local and state levels, scholars of religion a substantially new way of understanding key developments in doctrine and practice, and those studying the past in general a clear instance of visual hagiography taking precedence over the textual tradition.

• Kevin Gray Carr, Author

• This fascinating work by a professional art historian seeks to chart the development and the complexities of the cult of Prince Shōtoku (572 621 ), who is credited with having played a major role in the introduction of Buddhism to Japan. . . . Plotting the Prince is an inspiring guide through the highways and byways of an iconography and hagiography that developed their own dynamics. . . . [and] will enjoy the rather more thematic presentation, be happily dazzled by an astonishing array of varied detail and allow themselves to be guided into sheer appreciation, both visual and intellectual, by a skilled art specialist.
  —Eastern Buddhist