- the deity of miwa and tendai esoteric thought 855
others that figured prominently in the records of the Nihon shoki and
the Koijiki. The prominence of these deities associated with Miwa in
eighth-century official records indicates that the kami of Miwa played
a special role in the politics of the prehistoric Yamato court and may
have been the original kami worshiped by early Yamato rulers before
the sun deity Amaterasu was adopted as the imperial progenitor.
The deity of Miwa was also connected to the sacred site at the foot
of Hieizan. During the Heian period, this kami became a part of the
group of deities venerated at the seven Great Hie shrines (Hie shi-
chisha ), and was incorporated into the star cult ( Hokuto
shichisei.
The Great Deity of Miwa as the Kami of Hie
The Nihon shoki reports that the worship of kami at Hie was impor-
tant from fairly early on. Although the early records do not name the
deities for whom places of worship were established,^1 the idea that
Ōnamuchi, the deity worshiped at Ōmiwa shrine in Yamato and one
of the most important kami in ancient times, was enshrined at the foot
of Hieizan had been held as true for centuries. Sugahara Shinkai and
Allan Grapard have argued that it was precisely because of the spe-
cial relationship of the Ōmiwa deity to the imperial family that it was
moved from Yamato to Ōtsu, enshrined and worshiped as the Great
Deity of Hie^2 (Ōbie ), and in this capacity came to dominate
the sacred landscape of Ōmi, northeast of the Heian capital (Grapard
1987, 214; Sugahara 1992, 10–11).^3
(^1) The Nihon shoki reports that in the ninth year of Emperor Tenchi’s reign (c. 670
AD) the places of worship for local deities were laid out close to Mii, not too far from
Ōtsu, (Aston 1972: II, 293).
(^2) Customary reading in contemporary Japanese scholarship of the characters
is “hiei” when it refers to the mountain, i.e., Hieizan, but “hie” when it refers
to the deities. Hence, and are pronounced “Ōbie” and “Obie” respec-
tively. (In addition to the pronunciations used here, the latter— —also appears
as “Kobie.”) At the same time, there is an intentional homophonic convergence with
characters used for the “seven Great Hie shrines” for which the characters
are always used. Such convergences are typical in medieval Japanese, whereby both
association and discrimination were achieved.
(^3) Fujiwara Nakamaro , a governor of Ōmi in the time of Emperor
Tenchi, was said to have established a shrine there in 715. A Kaifusō poem attributed
to him supports the proposition that native deities were worshipped on Mt Hiei (?)
long before the arrival of Saichō and the foundation of Enryakuji (Grapard 1987,
214).