Editors' Introduction: Vernacular Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Literature

[...]like their more popular cousins rooted in medieval oral traditions, such as the otogizoshi Hachikazuki ... and the kowakamai Shizuka ..., which Monika Dix and Elizabeth Oyler discuss in their articles, they can provide insights into medieval religious culture that are unavailable through the study of standard Buddhist texts. The trend in Japanese scholarship in recent decades has been to eschew the former in favor of the latter; the implications of this preference are the abandonment of a model, suggested by the term minkan shinko, of a particularistic view of Japanese religion that posits an underlying unity in folk practice. a view once promoted by such luminaries as Yanagita Kunio, the father of Japanese folklore studies, and Hori Ichiro, a major figure from a later period in the study of Japanese religions.2 The term minzoku shokyo, on the other hand, suggests the adoption of a closely contextual approach rooted in local customs and practices. The term "vernacular," on the other hand, suggests a kind of translation into local language, a transformation of the foreign into the familiar for purposes of communication.3 Like "popular religion," it clearly includes Buddhism as it was preached and experienced on the street, in the marketplace, and at busy crossroads and bridges, but it also includes temple preaching to lay and monastic audiences (sekkyo ...), as well as some religious ceremonies conducted at court and private residences: wherever, that is, Buddhism was represented in a way that conformed to local interests and local forms. [...]in his article on the "Island of Women," a fictitious female preserve that played an important role in the Japanese literary and visual imagination, Max Moerman draws upon diverse sources from the jataka (tales of the former lives of the Buddha) of ancient India to sixteenth-century European maps.