Or Porath | Tel Aviv University (original) (raw)
Books by Or Porath
Religion and Society 87, 2022
In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by c... more In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by consecration rituals (kanjō) of Buddhist origin. This is the first book to address in a comprehensive way the multiple forms and aspects of these rituals also in relation to other Asian contexts.
The multidisciplinary chapters in the book address the origins of these rituals in ancient Persia and India and their developments in China and Tibet, before discussing in depth their transformations in medieval Japan. In particular, kanjō rituals are examined from various perspectives: imperial ceremonies, Buddhist monastic rituals, vernacular religious forms (Shugendō mountain cults, Shinto lineages), rituals of bodily transformation involving sexual practice, and the performing arts: a history of these developments, descriptions of actual rituals, and reference to religious and intellectual arguments based on under-examined primary sources. No other book presents so many cases of kanjō in such depth and breadth.
This book is relevant to readers interested in Buddhist studies, Japanese religions, the history of Japanese culture, and in the intersections between religious doctrines, rituals, legitimization, and performance.
Papers by Or Porath
Japanese Religions 46, 2024
Contextualizing Corporeality: New Perspectives on The Body in Japanese Religions From Cartesian d... more Contextualizing Corporeality: New Perspectives on The Body in Japanese Religions From Cartesian dualism to a Foucauldian subversion, the mind and the body are traditionally positioned as two separate entities, with the mind regarded as the source of humans' rationality and reason, and the body linked to biological drives and instinctual passions. However, recent scholarship has moved toward a more integrated view, recognizing the body as part of a mind-body continuum where sometimes bodily integrity takes precedence over the spirit. Scholarship on Asian religions, in particular, has demonstrated more diverse ways to theorize the body without necessarily relegating it to the inferior opposite of the mind. This article explores these alternative perspectives on the body, offering a thorough discussion on how bodies were understood and conceptualized in medieval Japan. It argues that any discussion of the religious body in Japan requires an "emic" approach, that is, one that grounds the body within its specific religious and cultural context.
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2023
This essay explores the potential for poetry to illuminate moments of initiative and resistance o... more This essay explores the potential for poetry to illuminate moments of initiative and resistance on the part of boy acolytes (chigo) involved in non-illicit/condoned sexual relationships with adult monks in medieval Japanese Buddhist temples. Discussing numerous poems found in various anthologies produced in Buddhist temples, some in the context of poetic exchanges, the article argues that the vision communicated in poetry suggests some chigo enjoyed a surprising degree of freedom of voice, thought, and action that is at odds with current historiography, by which measure these boys of various ages would have had no power. In addition, the monks who granted the youths this freedom expressed both anxiety and helplessness in the face of the boys' self-agency. As this suggests, some authors and compilers of such poems—including youths themselves—chose to present a realm wherein chigo maintained a remarkable autonomy within an otherwise strict, hierarchical society.
Religions, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan, 2022
Medieval Japanese culture (twelfth to sixteenth centuries) was marked by the distinctive episteme... more Medieval Japanese culture (twelfth to sixteenth centuries) was marked by the distinctive episteme of Esoteric Buddhism (Jp. mikkyō 密教). During this period, various Esoteric schools established "secret" lineages that transmitted Buddhist teachings, forms of practice, symbols of power, and Esoteric signs and meanings in order to sanctify ideas and people, but also to strengthen their own status, authority, and influence. Religious knowledge was originally limited to a selected few, but the Esoteric substrate of Buddhism soon expanded and became so pervasive that it began to shape rituals allowing for the development of extracanonical, non-religious, and even heterodox and antinomian forms of praxis and doxa. While there were many modes of transmission in Buddhist lineages, one important tool to bestow such specialized gnosis were special consecration rituals (Sk. abhiṣeka, Ch. guanding, Jp. kanjō 灌頂, lit. "pouring [water] on the top [of the head]") that functioned, depending on the context, as initiation, ordination, consecration or completion ceremonies. These rituals originated in India in the ancient period around the figure of the monarch and his polity; they were transmitted to Japan around the early Heian period (ninth century), and gradually developed to cover multiple purposes and various social contexts. Consecrations accompanied the growth of a veritable "culture of secret transmission," in which a plurality of discourses and teachings were transmitted from master to disciple through secret, oral teachings (kuden 口伝 or hiden 秘伝) in a sacerdotal lineage and passed on in textual form within an Esoteric Buddhist context.1 The consecrations themselves introduced these oral teachings in different stages of their ritual program. Consecration rituals initially had a significant soteriological and institutional import. They bestowed the initiand with salvific power, generated karmic ties between a practitioner and a Buddha (and also kami), endowed a disciple with an elated status of mastery over certain knowledge or crafts, certified his rank or hierarchical status, and located the disciple's position in the bloodline of the lineage. Ronald Davidson has argued that abhiṣeka was a crucial part of Tantric/Esoteric Buddhism.
Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan, 2022
For the argument that chigo kanjō originated in the Eshin lineage of Tendai, see Matsuoka Shinpei... more For the argument that chigo kanjō originated in the Eshin lineage of Tendai, see Matsuoka Shinpei, Utage no shintai: Basara kara Zeami e; Abe Yasurō, "Jidō setsuwa no keisei: Tendai sokui hō no seiritsu wo megutte" (jō and ge) (now included in his Chūsei Nihon no ōken shinwa, 81-153); and "Sokui hō no girei to engi." 2 See "The Flower of Dharma Nature: Sexual Consecration and Amalgamation in Medieval Japanese Buddhism." The commentarial treatises Kō chigo shōgyō hiden and Kō chigo shōgyō hiden Note: This study is based on archival research in multiple temples and repositories which was sup
Author(s): PORATH, OR | Advisor(s): Rambelli, Fabio | Abstract: This dissertation explores the co... more Author(s): PORATH, OR | Advisor(s): Rambelli, Fabio | Abstract: This dissertation explores the construction of male-male sexual practices in medieval Japanese Buddhism (tenth to sixteenth centuries). In particular, it examines the ritual and doctrinal elements of the “Consecration of Acolytes” (chigo kanjō), a sexual rite-of-passage characteristic of the Tendai Buddhist school that was practiced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hence, this dissertation provides new perspectives on the role of sexuality in temple environs, and on Buddhist discourses regarding male-male sexuality, the body, and childhood. I analyze heretofore neglected manuscripts that describe the ritual procedures and include exegetical commentaries in an effort to reconsider the ritual as an initiation that transforms acolytes into divinities—a process that empowers young acolytes (chigo) and, at the same time, allows monks to reach an awakened state. Additionally, my close analysis of the ritual and its d...
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, 2021
![Research paper thumbnail of Review of: Anna Andreeva, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan [183–185]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/65198742/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 47, 2020
Interdisciplinary Studies of Japanese Buddhism 17, 2019
The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (Bloomsbury Shinto Studies) . London: Bloomsbury Academic., 2018
What constituted a child in a Buddhist monastery? How were boys treated, what was the nature of s... more What constituted a child in a Buddhist monastery? How were boys treated, what was the nature of same-sex relations between boys and their superiors, and how did boys find space for autonomous action? This chapter, by Or Porath, highlights the fluidity of the child category, determined as it was not by biological age but by cultural demands. It delves into medieval treatises, one heavily influenced by Confucian values and another written by the monk-poet Sōgi, that shed light on the ideal boy and the disobedient boy, and it argues that the monastic boy oscillated between extremes of sacred and profane, occupied multiple social roles, and preoccupied himself with a variety of morally conflicting activities.
This article considers the characteristics of gender in modern Japanese new religions. I analyzed... more This article considers the characteristics of gender in modern Japanese new
religions. I analyzed these through three types: “Sex Complementarity,” “Sex
Polarity,” and “Sex Unity.” As examples, I take up Soka Gakkai, Reiyūkai, and
Nippon Kaigi. Many Japanese new religious groups have adopted the androcentric
“Sex Complementarity” type. This characteristic has reflected the gender
of the whole of Japanese society, and gender within new religions has also
transformed with the times. There is a need to rethink gender in Japanese society
from the perspective of gender among the new religions.
Scholars have investigated the Japanese tradition of male-male love that arose in the context of ... more Scholars have investigated the Japanese tradition of male-male love that arose in the context of the secular and commercial culture of the early modern era. Less often noted is the role of male-male sexuality within a religious framework. This article sheds light on the unexplored religious dimension of medieval Japanese male-male sexuality through an analysis of Ijiri Matakurō Tadasuke’s Nyakudō no kanjinchō (1482) and its Muromachi variant. Both works glorify male-male sexual acts and endorse their proper practice. I suggest that Kanjinchō attempts to perpetuate power relations that maintain the superiority of adult monks over young acolytes. Kanjinchō achieves this through constructing its own cosmology, built on a Buddhist cosmogony, soteriology, a pantheon of divinities and ethical norms, which, in effect, endows homoeroticism with sacrality. My analysis of Kanjinchō provides a nuanced understanding of male-male sexuality in Japanese Buddhism and the ideological context in which the text is embedded.
Conference Presentations by Or Porath
CHT Newsletter 4, 2018
Organized Conference, with Fabio Rambelli (UCSB)
Book Reviews by Or Porath
Religious Studies Review, 2022
REVIEW. This volume is the result of a conference on "consecration Rituals in the Buddhist cultur... more REVIEW. This volume is the result of a conference on "consecration Rituals in the Buddhist cultural Sphere" held in 2018 at the University of california, Santa Barbara. Whereas its focus is on kanjō 灌頂 (consecration rituals) in medieval and early modern Japan, it also includes descriptions of the ritual's roots in India (where it was called abhiṣeka) and its development in china and Tibet as well as a discussion of its discontinuation after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The nineteen chapters by eighteen contributors from Japan, Europe, and the USA, are organized in four parts. Part One
日本仏教綜合研究 21, 2023
Book review in Japanese of my co-edited volume Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premoder... more Book review in Japanese of my co-edited volume Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts. Religion and Society 87. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022
Renaissance Quarterly, 2023
Kanjō (guàndǐng in Chinese and abhiṣeka in Sanskrit) were consecration rituals held in a variety ... more Kanjō (guàndǐng in Chinese and abhiṣeka in Sanskrit) were consecration rituals held in a variety of settings in medieval Japan, including monastic consecration, the transmission of religious and artistic knowledge, and the enthronement of the emperor. This volume builds upon the papers presented during a 2018 conference held in Santa Barbara, California. Eighteen scholars write on the historical development of the kanjō: its Indian origins, its transformation in China, its arrival to Japan, and further developments up to the modern era.
Religion and Society 87, 2022
In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by c... more In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by consecration rituals (kanjō) of Buddhist origin. This is the first book to address in a comprehensive way the multiple forms and aspects of these rituals also in relation to other Asian contexts.
The multidisciplinary chapters in the book address the origins of these rituals in ancient Persia and India and their developments in China and Tibet, before discussing in depth their transformations in medieval Japan. In particular, kanjō rituals are examined from various perspectives: imperial ceremonies, Buddhist monastic rituals, vernacular religious forms (Shugendō mountain cults, Shinto lineages), rituals of bodily transformation involving sexual practice, and the performing arts: a history of these developments, descriptions of actual rituals, and reference to religious and intellectual arguments based on under-examined primary sources. No other book presents so many cases of kanjō in such depth and breadth.
This book is relevant to readers interested in Buddhist studies, Japanese religions, the history of Japanese culture, and in the intersections between religious doctrines, rituals, legitimization, and performance.
Japanese Religions 46, 2024
Contextualizing Corporeality: New Perspectives on The Body in Japanese Religions From Cartesian d... more Contextualizing Corporeality: New Perspectives on The Body in Japanese Religions From Cartesian dualism to a Foucauldian subversion, the mind and the body are traditionally positioned as two separate entities, with the mind regarded as the source of humans' rationality and reason, and the body linked to biological drives and instinctual passions. However, recent scholarship has moved toward a more integrated view, recognizing the body as part of a mind-body continuum where sometimes bodily integrity takes precedence over the spirit. Scholarship on Asian religions, in particular, has demonstrated more diverse ways to theorize the body without necessarily relegating it to the inferior opposite of the mind. This article explores these alternative perspectives on the body, offering a thorough discussion on how bodies were understood and conceptualized in medieval Japan. It argues that any discussion of the religious body in Japan requires an "emic" approach, that is, one that grounds the body within its specific religious and cultural context.
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2023
This essay explores the potential for poetry to illuminate moments of initiative and resistance o... more This essay explores the potential for poetry to illuminate moments of initiative and resistance on the part of boy acolytes (chigo) involved in non-illicit/condoned sexual relationships with adult monks in medieval Japanese Buddhist temples. Discussing numerous poems found in various anthologies produced in Buddhist temples, some in the context of poetic exchanges, the article argues that the vision communicated in poetry suggests some chigo enjoyed a surprising degree of freedom of voice, thought, and action that is at odds with current historiography, by which measure these boys of various ages would have had no power. In addition, the monks who granted the youths this freedom expressed both anxiety and helplessness in the face of the boys' self-agency. As this suggests, some authors and compilers of such poems—including youths themselves—chose to present a realm wherein chigo maintained a remarkable autonomy within an otherwise strict, hierarchical society.
Religions, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan, 2022
Medieval Japanese culture (twelfth to sixteenth centuries) was marked by the distinctive episteme... more Medieval Japanese culture (twelfth to sixteenth centuries) was marked by the distinctive episteme of Esoteric Buddhism (Jp. mikkyō 密教). During this period, various Esoteric schools established "secret" lineages that transmitted Buddhist teachings, forms of practice, symbols of power, and Esoteric signs and meanings in order to sanctify ideas and people, but also to strengthen their own status, authority, and influence. Religious knowledge was originally limited to a selected few, but the Esoteric substrate of Buddhism soon expanded and became so pervasive that it began to shape rituals allowing for the development of extracanonical, non-religious, and even heterodox and antinomian forms of praxis and doxa. While there were many modes of transmission in Buddhist lineages, one important tool to bestow such specialized gnosis were special consecration rituals (Sk. abhiṣeka, Ch. guanding, Jp. kanjō 灌頂, lit. "pouring [water] on the top [of the head]") that functioned, depending on the context, as initiation, ordination, consecration or completion ceremonies. These rituals originated in India in the ancient period around the figure of the monarch and his polity; they were transmitted to Japan around the early Heian period (ninth century), and gradually developed to cover multiple purposes and various social contexts. Consecrations accompanied the growth of a veritable "culture of secret transmission," in which a plurality of discourses and teachings were transmitted from master to disciple through secret, oral teachings (kuden 口伝 or hiden 秘伝) in a sacerdotal lineage and passed on in textual form within an Esoteric Buddhist context.1 The consecrations themselves introduced these oral teachings in different stages of their ritual program. Consecration rituals initially had a significant soteriological and institutional import. They bestowed the initiand with salvific power, generated karmic ties between a practitioner and a Buddha (and also kami), endowed a disciple with an elated status of mastery over certain knowledge or crafts, certified his rank or hierarchical status, and located the disciple's position in the bloodline of the lineage. Ronald Davidson has argued that abhiṣeka was a crucial part of Tantric/Esoteric Buddhism.
Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan, 2022
For the argument that chigo kanjō originated in the Eshin lineage of Tendai, see Matsuoka Shinpei... more For the argument that chigo kanjō originated in the Eshin lineage of Tendai, see Matsuoka Shinpei, Utage no shintai: Basara kara Zeami e; Abe Yasurō, "Jidō setsuwa no keisei: Tendai sokui hō no seiritsu wo megutte" (jō and ge) (now included in his Chūsei Nihon no ōken shinwa, 81-153); and "Sokui hō no girei to engi." 2 See "The Flower of Dharma Nature: Sexual Consecration and Amalgamation in Medieval Japanese Buddhism." The commentarial treatises Kō chigo shōgyō hiden and Kō chigo shōgyō hiden Note: This study is based on archival research in multiple temples and repositories which was sup
Author(s): PORATH, OR | Advisor(s): Rambelli, Fabio | Abstract: This dissertation explores the co... more Author(s): PORATH, OR | Advisor(s): Rambelli, Fabio | Abstract: This dissertation explores the construction of male-male sexual practices in medieval Japanese Buddhism (tenth to sixteenth centuries). In particular, it examines the ritual and doctrinal elements of the “Consecration of Acolytes” (chigo kanjō), a sexual rite-of-passage characteristic of the Tendai Buddhist school that was practiced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hence, this dissertation provides new perspectives on the role of sexuality in temple environs, and on Buddhist discourses regarding male-male sexuality, the body, and childhood. I analyze heretofore neglected manuscripts that describe the ritual procedures and include exegetical commentaries in an effort to reconsider the ritual as an initiation that transforms acolytes into divinities—a process that empowers young acolytes (chigo) and, at the same time, allows monks to reach an awakened state. Additionally, my close analysis of the ritual and its d...
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, 2021
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 47, 2020
Interdisciplinary Studies of Japanese Buddhism 17, 2019
The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (Bloomsbury Shinto Studies) . London: Bloomsbury Academic., 2018
What constituted a child in a Buddhist monastery? How were boys treated, what was the nature of s... more What constituted a child in a Buddhist monastery? How were boys treated, what was the nature of same-sex relations between boys and their superiors, and how did boys find space for autonomous action? This chapter, by Or Porath, highlights the fluidity of the child category, determined as it was not by biological age but by cultural demands. It delves into medieval treatises, one heavily influenced by Confucian values and another written by the monk-poet Sōgi, that shed light on the ideal boy and the disobedient boy, and it argues that the monastic boy oscillated between extremes of sacred and profane, occupied multiple social roles, and preoccupied himself with a variety of morally conflicting activities.
This article considers the characteristics of gender in modern Japanese new religions. I analyzed... more This article considers the characteristics of gender in modern Japanese new
religions. I analyzed these through three types: “Sex Complementarity,” “Sex
Polarity,” and “Sex Unity.” As examples, I take up Soka Gakkai, Reiyūkai, and
Nippon Kaigi. Many Japanese new religious groups have adopted the androcentric
“Sex Complementarity” type. This characteristic has reflected the gender
of the whole of Japanese society, and gender within new religions has also
transformed with the times. There is a need to rethink gender in Japanese society
from the perspective of gender among the new religions.
Scholars have investigated the Japanese tradition of male-male love that arose in the context of ... more Scholars have investigated the Japanese tradition of male-male love that arose in the context of the secular and commercial culture of the early modern era. Less often noted is the role of male-male sexuality within a religious framework. This article sheds light on the unexplored religious dimension of medieval Japanese male-male sexuality through an analysis of Ijiri Matakurō Tadasuke’s Nyakudō no kanjinchō (1482) and its Muromachi variant. Both works glorify male-male sexual acts and endorse their proper practice. I suggest that Kanjinchō attempts to perpetuate power relations that maintain the superiority of adult monks over young acolytes. Kanjinchō achieves this through constructing its own cosmology, built on a Buddhist cosmogony, soteriology, a pantheon of divinities and ethical norms, which, in effect, endows homoeroticism with sacrality. My analysis of Kanjinchō provides a nuanced understanding of male-male sexuality in Japanese Buddhism and the ideological context in which the text is embedded.
Religious Studies Review, 2022
REVIEW. This volume is the result of a conference on "consecration Rituals in the Buddhist cultur... more REVIEW. This volume is the result of a conference on "consecration Rituals in the Buddhist cultural Sphere" held in 2018 at the University of california, Santa Barbara. Whereas its focus is on kanjō 灌頂 (consecration rituals) in medieval and early modern Japan, it also includes descriptions of the ritual's roots in India (where it was called abhiṣeka) and its development in china and Tibet as well as a discussion of its discontinuation after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The nineteen chapters by eighteen contributors from Japan, Europe, and the USA, are organized in four parts. Part One
日本仏教綜合研究 21, 2023
Book review in Japanese of my co-edited volume Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premoder... more Book review in Japanese of my co-edited volume Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts. Religion and Society 87. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022
Renaissance Quarterly, 2023
Kanjō (guàndǐng in Chinese and abhiṣeka in Sanskrit) were consecration rituals held in a variety ... more Kanjō (guàndǐng in Chinese and abhiṣeka in Sanskrit) were consecration rituals held in a variety of settings in medieval Japan, including monastic consecration, the transmission of religious and artistic knowledge, and the enthronement of the emperor. This volume builds upon the papers presented during a 2018 conference held in Santa Barbara, California. Eighteen scholars write on the historical development of the kanjō: its Indian origins, its transformation in China, its arrival to Japan, and further developments up to the modern era.