Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition

The book investigates the making of the Shōtoku cult as a major case study in the formation of Japanese Buddhism and early Japanese cultural identity. Como argues that the legendary image of Shōtoku as founder of Japanese Buddhism, sage ruler, Dharma king, and cultural hero was not simply inherited from the life of a historical prince, but was constructed through ritual, textual, political, and ethnic processes after his death. The chapters examine the founding legend of Japanese Buddhism, Pure Land and millennial expectations, ancestral and royal cults, the politics of literacy, rites of violence and purification, the relationship between Shōtoku and Gyōki, and the later adoption of Shōtoku by Nara and early Heian Buddhist institutions. Through this structure, the book presents Shōtoku as a strategic religious symbol through which immigrant kinship groups, Buddhist institutions, and the Yamato court negotiated authority, legitimacy, memory, and identity in early Japan.