862 anna andreeva
at cultic centers and small practice halls in the vicinity of the Great Ise
shrines. The question on whether the esoteric discourse on Miwa orig-
inated locally and was indeed produced independently at Miwa during
the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or whether the
text revealing the origins of the Miwa deity was initially composed
somewhere else and was later copied at Miwa, remains to be answered.
Further discussion of this important issue could help cast light on the
process of formation and circulation of esoteric ideas about kami in
medieval Japan, but it will be taken up at length elsewhere (Andreeva,
forthcoming).
Questions for Future Study
The tradition of esoteric kami worship at Miwa, as explained in the
Miwa daimyōjin engi, has traditionally been described as an example
of Ryōbu Shinto. The fact that it owes a great part of its doctrinal jus-
tification to the esoteric tradition of Tendai raises a difficult issue of
addressing the doctrinal labels that are historically attached to surviv-
ing texts.
It is not quite clear how Taimitsu ideas became transmitted to local
sacred sites, such as Miwa, and how exactly their reinterpretation hap-
pened in the ritual context. For example, a large body of ritual manu-
als and doctrinal texts that invoke the deities of Sannō and Miwa were
transmitted at Saikyōji , one of the temples at the foot of Hie-
zan, established in the sixteenth century. The meaning of these texts,
which may cast light on many gaps in our understanding of medieval
kami worship, also needs to be assessed.
Perhaps what is important here is not so much understanding which
sacred sites produced which ideas first, but the vision of diversity and
plurality that can be discerned in texts such as the Miwa daimyōjin
engi, or the Keiranshūyōshū. Far from our previous envisioning of
medieval kami worship as something arcane and largely irrelevant, it
instead appears to be a complex and endlessly fascinating world of
ideas that expanded and contested the limits of religious thinking and
created the ground for the emergence of new concepts and theoretical
possibilities. While it is a production of the medieval mind, that mind
brought about innovation at the time.