Sometime in the late 1190s the Japanese Buddhist monk Myōe (1173–1232) decided that a shaved head was not a reliable enough symbol of a person’s devotion or true intentions. Thus, as a sign of his sincerity, he picked up a dagger and sawed off his right ear, spattering blood over the various ritual implements arrayed before him. According to his disciple Kikai, Myōe’s logic in choosing to cut off his ear was as follows: “If he plucked out an eye, he would grieve over not being able to see the scriptures. If he cut off his nose, snot would...

The final chapter of theLotus Sutraopens on a very curious scene. The bodhisattva Fugen (Sk: Samantabhadra), long abiding in the eastern quarter of the cosmos, has heard that a buddha is preaching theLotus Sutraon Earth. He arrives, with a multitude of beings trailing him, at the foot of the historical Buddha. After circumambulating the Buddha seven times, he announces, “I have come to listen receptively. I beg of the World Honored One to preach [theLotus Sutra] to us!”¹ He immediately follows this request with a question: “After the extinction of the Thus Come One, how...

On the twenty-sixth day of the Sixth Month of 1110, the otherwise unknown priest Kyōshakubō delivered a sermon before an audience of high-ranking aristocrats in the imperial capital of Heian. His sermon was part of a multiday event organized in accordance with a vow made by one of the imperial princesses. Seated before the assembly, he opened his address with the following words: “The heart of the Dhāranī [chapter of theLotus Sutra], on which I will lecture today, is that this chapter tells how the bodhisattva Medicine King, the bodhisattva Brave Donor, the four deva kings, and various other...

Let us return now to the story of Myōe (1173–1232), the Japanese monk who chose to cut off his ear as a sign of his deep devotion and with whose example I began this book. As I suggested in the introduction, Myōe’s act, although a singular one, could not have been wholly unexpected in medieval Japan, simply because his bodily self-sacrifice responds to and is contextualized by Buddhist metaphors, tropes, and figures that were pervasive in scripture and in the visual, literary, and musical arts of his time. Myōe’s act performs, in essence, an excruciatingly literal reading of the...

Narratives of bodily decomposition and sacrifice are not the only kind of performative writing in the Buddhist tradition. Their focus on disappearance and disintegration into textual fragment is balanced against other religious writings and art forms that feature the performative reintegration of textual fragment into body. In chapter 1 I have already discussed the literary mechanisms through which sutras take on the characteristics of a symbiotic life form, and in chapter 2 I explored the performance venue of setsuwa collections, which are often figured as food or medicine, that is, as substances to be ingested by the human body and...

I began this book with the figure of Myōe (1173–1232), the monk who cut off his own ear, believing wholeheartedly in the material connection between the sacred words he read from the sutras’ pages and the physical matter of his own body. To mark one was to mark the other. And I ended the last chapter with the complementary image of the sutra-reading noblewoman (painted in 1164), whose figure provides a metacommentary on the ways in which medieval Japanese Buddhists conceived of the text-flesh continuum. The reading voice allows reality to pulse between the word (buddha) and the thing...