François Lachaud
Field Stories of an Antiquary: The Quest for Japanese Vernacular Religion
What happens to an antiquarian when he leaves his study to explore the great outdoors? For the better part of a century, research on Japanese religions at the EFEO focused on Buddhism as a textual corpus connected to Chinese (Sino-Japanese) sources and, beyond them, Indian/Sanskrit originals. To borrow Donald Lopez’s felicitous phrase, generations of EFEO ‘Orientalists’ were looking for the ‘historical’ or ‘scientific’ Buddha. The Buddhist Canon in Chinese Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (大正新脩大藏經) was their main object of study. The unfinished encyclopaedia of Buddhism known as Hōbōgirin 法寶義林 epitomized this approach. Other scholars from Noël Peri (1865-1922) to Anne Bouchy (1952-) tried to observe how Buddhism impregnated various strata of Japanese society using historical sources, material culture, and ethnographic research. Their work opened the way to a reappraisal of Japanese religion in its vernacular context through the study of movements like Popular Arts 民藝 and folkloristics. This presentation illustrates through three examples –the cult of Mazu 媽祖信仰, the ‘shamans’ of Tsugaru津輕的靈媒師, and the worship of Oshirasama– all based on personal field work how the ‘journey towards the historical Buddha’ morphed into a quest for an ever-elusive ‘vernacular religion’ 民俗宗教.