Rage and ravage
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Rage and ravage
(Gods of medieval Japan, v. 3)
University of Hawai'i Press, c2022
- : cloth
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 451-521) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Rage and Ravage is the third installment of a milestone project in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism-specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual; in doing so he moves away from the usual textual, historical, and sociological approaches that constitute the ""method"" of current religious studies. Throughout, he engages theoretical insights draws from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the ""implicit pantheon"" (as opposed to the ""explicit orthodox pantheon"") of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikky?i).
In volumes one and two, The Fluid Pantheon and Predators and Protectors, Faure argued against a polarity or dichotomy between buddhas and kami by emphasizing the existence of deities that did not belong to either category, and he rejected the retrospective notion of ""hybridity."" The present work makes a similar case about the reified distinction between gods and demons to show that, due to the fluid nature of the Japanese pantheon, these terms do not represent stable identities: gods can become demons, and demons are sometimes deified. Divine protectors were often former predators, and in some instances they retained their predatory features even after being converted. After emphasizing the demonic aspects of devas as ""gods or spirits of obstacles"" in the earlier volumes, Faure now focuses on the deva-like or ""divine"" aspects of deities that have been described as ""demonic.""
Rage and Ravage and its companion volumes persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as ""Buddhism"" and ""Shinto."" Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.
by "Nielsen BookData"