Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition

Prince Shotoku (573?-622?), the purported founder of Japanese Buddhism, was one of the greatest cultural icons of pre-modern Japan. The cult that grew up around his memory is recognized as one of the most important religious phenomena of the time. This book examines the creation and evolution of the Shotoku cult over the roughly 200 years following his death - a period that saw a series of revolutionary developments in the history of Japanese religion. Como highlights the activities of a cluster of kinship groups who claimed descent from ancestors from the Korean kingdom of Silla. By comparing the ancestral legends of these groups to the Shotoku legend corpus and Imperial chronicles, Como shows that these kinship groups not only played a major role in the formation of the Japanese Buddhist tradition, they also to a large degree shaped the paradigms in terms of which the Japanese Imperial cult and the nation of Japan were conceptualized and created.