Authority over Death: Two Tales Related to the Lord of Mount Tai in <i>Konjaku Monogatarishū</i>

Abstract

Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku Monogatarishū 今昔物語集) is a Japanese setsuwa (anecdotes) collection dating from the early twelfth century. Originally contained in 31 volumes, it includes more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. Despite the fact that Daoism was rejected by the Japanese imperial court as an organized religion, Daoist philosophies and practical systems found their ways into Japan, having a significant and profound influence over Japanese esoteric cosmology and folk beliefs. This article takes the Lord of Mount Tai (CN: Taishan Fujun; JP: Taizan Fukun 泰山府君) as the focus and examines two pertinent stories in Tales of Times Now Past. By placing the texts in a broader historical, religious, and comparative Japan–China perspective, I examine the reshaping of Daoist elements and traditional Chinese philosophical principles in these two stories and thus demonstrate how the Daoist fragments transmitted to Japan were transformed into an integral part of the orthodox structure by the time of the late Heian period in the pursuit of a more organized form of government.

Keywords

• Japanese literature
• setsuwa
• Taizan Fukun
• hell narratives
• miracle/wonder stories
• Daoism