. shint and esoteric buddhism 843
cisely, one opposing ignorance to enlightenment), doctrines and cults
related to the kami were primarily concerned with the original con-
dition of beings and the universe before the appearance of the first
buddha—a condition, they argued, that transcended every dualism.
For example, the Tendai monk and kami scholar Jihen (active
1333–1340) claimed in his Toyoashihara jinpū waki
that explicit representations of Buddhism were forbidden at the Ise
shrines because Buddhism preaches the difference between ignorance
and enlightenment and thus defiles the perfect unity of primordial
chaos that forms the basis of “Shintō.” Another Tendai priest, Son-
shun (1451–1514), explicitly advocated in his Monguryaku taikō
shikenmon the primacy of the kami over the bud-
dhas, claiming that the kami belong to a primeval condition of onto-
logical wholeness, which he identifies with original enlightenment as
primordial ignorance. As a result, the quest for a supposedly original
condition became one of the foci of Japanese discourses on the kami.
Thus, toward the fifteenth century certain authors were arguing that
the kami were in fact the primary, original forms of divine beings, and
buddhas and bodhisattvas were local Indian manifestations of these
Japanese originals. This reversal of dominant Buddhist ideas was the
basis for a new Shintō movement with a strong nativist character, orig-
inally centered at the Yoshida shrine in Kyōto. Its main priest,
the abovementioned Yoshida Kanetomo, had collected a number of
doctrines and rituals about the kami that were mostly related to tantric
Buddhism (mikkyō ), and he tried to establish his own tradition
by excising the most visible Buddhist features (see Scheid 2001). In
time, the Yoshida tradition became the inspiration for nativist think-
ers, anti-Buddhists, and kami priests disgruntled with the Buddhist
establishment still dominating their shrines. These were the people
and groups that contributed to a Shintō discourse distinct from Bud-
dhism during the Edo period in a process that would culminate in the
early Meiji separation of Shintō from Buddhism.
In medieval Japan, for example, certain authors began to identify
the kami with the ultimate realm, the unconditioned and absolute
dimension of blissful “ignorance” ( ganbon mumyō , “prime-
val ignorance”), which was supposed to predate the appearance of the
first buddha and, with him, of speculative thinking that differentiated
between ignorance and enlightenment. This “primeval ignorance” was
thus the ultimate form of nondualism. This surprising development
opened the way to nativist critiques of Buddhism based on ontological,