Localizing paradise: Kumano pilgrimage in medieval Japan

The three Kumano shrines of Hongu, Shingu, and Nachi, located in the southern reaches of the Kii peninsula, were for centuries among the most visited pilgrimage sites of medieval Japan. Kumano was a primary site for the historical interaction of Buddhist and local traditions, for redefining the place of death and its conquest, for expressing the relationship between religious and political authority, and for articulating the religious position of women. Kumano thus represented a landscape that, while at the geographic margins of medieval society, was very much at its cultural center. Using such sources as imperial chronicles, Buddhist tale literature, shrine and temple legends (jisha engi), poetry, pilgrimage diaries, and religious paintings (Kumano mandara) this dissertation explores the place that Kumano occupied in Japan's medieval imagination. It examines the practices and desires of diverse groups of pilgrims: itinerant ascetics, abdicated emperors, medieval women, and the regional communities associated with Kumano's extensive system of branch shrines. The dissertation analyzes Kumano in terms of the dynamics of syncretism, the ritualization of death, the politics of pilgrimage, the construction of gender, and the replication and circulation of this particular landscape within the larger religious culture of medieval Japan.