Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2021)
Deathbed miracles in St. Gregory’s Dialogues and ''Nihon ?j? Gokuraku ki''
Abstract
Comparative study of Christian and Buddhist traditions can be based on various reasons, including the similarity of genre markers. We compare two selections of short stories about people facing the death hour and miracles at their deathbed. Such a selection is contained in book IV of Dialogues (593–594). Similar Buddhist tales are included in Yoshishige no Yasutane Nihon ?j? Gokuraku ki (983–985). There is a similarity between the most important motives between these texts: a person knows anticipatorily the exact term of his/her death; others will miraculously learn of his impending demise; the dying sees those whom he/she honored in life; the messengers reveal his/her good or evil posthumous fate; at the end a wonderful light shines, music sounds, a fragrance fills the room. The very construction of these short stories is similar: in them, in contrast to more detailed narratives about the lives of saints, most of the information about the life of a person remains outside the scope, and thus the main thing is highlighted: what a person encounters at the time of death; how the experience of dying can be realized and shared with others. Numerous coincidences between the texts of the two traditions do not interfere, but, on the contrary, help focus on the differences between them. The main one is that the stories from Nihon ?j? Gokuraku ki are self-contained, enumeration of miracles gives the fi nal answer to the question of the posthumous fate of man; in the stories from Dialogues such a listing does not solve the problem, but only leads to its correct formulation.
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