15
Religion in Nara and Heian Japan
Mikaël Bauer
When Empress Genmei (661–721) announced the establishment of the new capital, Heijō-kyō, in
708, Fujiwara no Fuhito (659–720) created a new city that formed one whole with several Bud-
dhist temples. During the eighth century, Tōdaiji and Kōfukuji, representing the Kegon and
Hossō schools respectively, became increasingly significant in both religious and institutional
terms. It is unclear just how well developed these monastic complexes were at their foundation
in the Nara period (710–794) but over the course of the following Heian period (794–1185) these
Nara temples gradually developed into powerful “gates of power” (kenmon) consisting of elabo-
rate internal lineages and sub- temples, or monzeki. When the capital moved to Heian- kyō (Kyoto)
in 794, the temples continued to flourish, and became known as the Southern Temples, in con-
trast with the new capital’s Northern Temples—among which Tendai’s Enryakuji was undoubt-
edly the most important. Both the Northern and the Southern establishment developed their
own elaborate ritual and institutional framework, but there was much more to classical and early
medieval Japan’s religiosity than these large Buddhist institutions.
Located in a religious landscape centered on yin- yang divination, female shamans, monks and
nuns, and worship of local divinities, these temple complexes were only one part of premodern
Japan’s dynamic horizon of meaning. While Buddhism and its rituals became the main basis for
formulating sovereignty during the Heian period and dominated the court, the Nara state was “a
regime whose ruling ideology was still predominantly Confucian.”^1 Throughout the Heian
period, however, Confucianism gradually lost its centrality, to be replaced by esoteric Buddhism
as the state’s main conceptual framework.
Alongside an institutional organization characterized by the ritsuryō legal codes (formulated in
Confucian terms) and the sovereignty of the tennō (literally “heavenly sovereign” but most com-
monly rendered into English as “emperor”), the Nara capital and its temples developed within an
eclectic religious universe in which geomantic principles, native divinities, rituals, and debates all
had their place. In the words of Ivan Morris’s early scholarship, we could label Nara and Heian
period religiosity as a form of eclecticism in which “various religions and superstitions [had]
become ... inextricably entwined.”^2
Contrary to the general assumption that only men dominated religion institutionally and
doctrinally, women also participated prominently in religious activities. As demonstrated by
Brian Ruppert, women were not just patrons of rituals but actively joined in various forms of