Immortals and Immortality: Combining Buddhist and Taoist Traditions in Konjaku monogatari-shū

Abstract

It is possible to speak about the connection of the Buddhist and Taoist traditions in Japan at different levels: everyday, ritual, philosophical, and others, including the level of word usage in texts that are far from terminological accuracy and do not belong to any of the scholarly traditions. Such are collections of setsuwa didactic tales. In the largest of them, Konjaku monogatari-shū (1120s), there are a number of stories about Taoists (dōshi), but the concept of “immortal” (sen, sennin), important to Taoism, is more common and has a wider range of meanings. Following the Chinese translators of Indian Buddhist texts, the narrators in tales about India call the Indian sages who lived before Buddha sennin. In the tales about China, in the disputes between Buddhists and Taoists, the word “Great Immortal,” daisen, refers to Buddha himself, who taught not about prolonging life, but about complete liberation from the cycle of births and deaths. At the same time, the teachings of Chuang Tzu are spoken of with great reverence. In the very first tale about Japan, Taoists appear as former-life interlocutors of the Japanese prince Shōtoku. Immortals live in the mountains of Japan, many of them belong to the number of ascetics of the Lotus Sūtra, which teaches about the eternal life of the Buddha. If we compare all these tales with stories from the collection Honchō Shinsen-den (turn of 11th–12th centuries), it is clear that the concept of immortal in both texts implies a departure from the world and overcoming suffering inherent in human life, the acquisition of miraculous abilities and their use for the benefit of people; whatever way it is achieved, it sets a good example, and therefore the search for immortals, whether in the mountains or in books, constitutes a useful experience from the Buddhist point of view.

Keywords

• history of japanese thought
• buddhism
• taoism
• setsuwa didactic tales