Jinja Shinpō started a new article series in the 24th November issue, in which people will write about items relevant to the history of Shinto held by Kokugakuin and Kōgakkan Universities. This looks interesting, and I may well write about these articles quite frequently. (The plan is one every other week, so I guess one per university per month.)
The first article was about an item owned by Kokugakuin University (國學院大學), called Kumano Engi (熊野縁起). This is a pair of picture scrolls, dating from the early Edo period, telling the story of the origin of the kami of the Kumano jinja in Wakayama Prefecture. Although there are two scrolls now, the story (which is known from many other sources) starts part way through, and so they are probably the last two of a three-volume set. The scrolls are paper and both are about 28 cm wide. The first is almost nine metres long, and the second almost 6.5 m.
The story is that the king of Makata in Tenjiku (India) had a thousand wives, but no children. One of his wives, Gosuiden, was devoted to Kannon, and loved by the king, and she became pregnant. As a result, all the other wives became jealous of her, bullied her, and had her taken away and murdered in the mountains, by cutting off her head.
Before she was decapitated, she gave birth to a prince. The prince nursed from her body, and was raised by the animals of the mountains. He grew up there until he was found by a Buddhist monk who lived at the base of the mountain. At length, the prince met the king, and the queen was resurrected by the monk. The four of them got in a flying car, flew to Japan, and became the kami of Kumano.
The scrolls at Kokugakuin start with the scene of the animals raising the prince, which is why people assume that there was originally a “volume one”. The second half of the second volume shows an aerial view of some of the pilgrimage routes to Kumano, as the four fly over on their way to the jinja, and the scrolls finish with views of the three jinja, with many pilgrims.
A lot of scrolls and single pictures recounting this story were made, because they were part of the advertising campaign for the Kumano jinja. The basic form of the story is found elsewhere (the one I have translated is for Mishima Daimyōjin in the Izu Peninsula), and the Kumano legend is the representative “medieval Shinto” story. These are the kind of stories that were suppressed after the Meiji Revolution in the late nineteenth century, but they were a central part of Shinto for centuries.
I can’t put photographs of the items on this blog (I don’t have permission, or image files), so I may not be able to talk about everything they introduce. I do, however, think it will be an interesting window into the history of Shinto culture.