934 william m. bodiford
lore and make copies of secret initiation documents (kirikami, also
kirigami ).^19 These initiation documents concern a wide variety of
topics: kōan training curriculums, Dharma transmission, ordinations,
consecrations, funerals, prayer rituals, deities, and ritual implements
(Ishikawa 2002, 139). They reveal how Zen teachers constructed reli-
gious identities out of Buddhist lore, Zen stories, Japanese folk beliefs,
and Chinese cosmological motifs (for examples, see Faure 1991,
191–208).
These kinds of initiation documents are not unique to Zen but
also exist in other Japanese religious (e.g., Tendai, Shingon, Nichiren,
Shugendō, Shintō) and artistic (e.g., theater, poetry, martial art) tra-
ditions. In fact, lineages in some of these traditions convey the same
initiation documents or closely related documents, indicating that
their teachers studied with one another. Cross-fertilization among
initiation lineages represents an important but little-studied feature
of premodern Japanese esoteric culture.^20 Records of secret initiations
allow us to document the ways the vocabulary and concepts of one
tradition acquired new interpretations and applications when placed
in the context of another tradition. It is difficult to investigate these
cases because initiation documents in most of these traditions remain
closely guarded secrets, rarely shared with outsiders or published.
In the case of Sōtō Zen, though, recently many old initiation docu-
ments have become available to scholars and other outsiders, primarily
through the pioneering investigations of Ishikawa Rikizan
(1943–1997). These sources allow us to document concrete examples
of the ways that Zen teachings were adapted to martial arts (Bodiford
2005b), and how tantric practices (such as the ritual mixing of bodily
(^19) Regarding these documents, see Ishikawa 2000; 2002 and Bodiford 1993, 155–
57; 2000; 2005a, 205–207; 2005b, 79–94. The word kirikami is written with Chinese
glyphs that literally mean “cut paper.” In general use it has two meanings: 1) “sheets
of paper,” especially short documents used to initiate disciples in esoteric lore; and 2)
“the craft of cutting out paper dolls.” In this latter sense the term has entered the Eng-
lish language under the variant pronunciation “kirigami.” Many Japanese-language
dictionaries give the first pronunciation for phrases such as kirikami denju
(transmission of initiation documents) and the second one for phrases such as kiri-
gami zaiku (miniature handicraft of cutting paper). In conversation most
Japanese seem to say kirigami in both contexts. Although this pronunciation is more
familiar to Western readers, I find “kirikami” preferable because it avoids confusing
historical documents with paper dolls. 20
For an important methodological consideration of the issues raised by cross-
fertilization, see Teeuwen 2006.