Medieval Shinto Boundaries Real or Imaginary?

Allan G. Grapard

Where to begin? In one of his books Edward Said warned against looking for beginnings, but we must ignore him for a moment, for I have to talk briefly, not about the beginning of medieval Shinto, but about how my trajectory toward this topic was shaped.1 So that is not a real beginning, of course, because I must start at the time I was in my roaring twenties. I arrived in Kyoto in 1968 with a sense of déjà-vu, for clouds of tear-gas enveloped Kyôdai, where kidôtai cops and Zengakuren students were vying for territory. I was to study, my application for a Monbushô grant read, the influence of Buddhism on classical Japanese literature, and so I did and eventually translated into French the Nihon ryôiki B^MMfB, which I really should publish before passing away. This little exercise opened a new horizon of thought, for I became entangled in sites of cult, shrines and temples like the Miwa Shrine HË^ctt and the Kani Temple (Kanidera S^), which I visited and found to present a set of questions. Upon further readings and trips to many more sites of cult, I gained the conviction that I had found ideal topics for a lifelong work: the relations between shrines and temples, the notion of sacred space, and Esoteric Buddhism and shrine cults. When I told my advisor, Professor Sakakura Atsuyoshi tk, that I wished to translate the Sangô shiiki =LW3ûM of Kukai, which is a

Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 16 (2006-2007) : 1-18