Maigre Feasts or Abstinence Rites
Ross Bender
Lisa Kochinski
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Michael Pye
Indeed, a facinating question which often ocurred to me when
reading de Visser's *Ancient Buddhism in Japan*, the word maigre not
being widely used in English.
I think we are referring to a non-sumptuous meal served in
connection with Buddhist rites. Calling the meal a rite in itself is
perhaps a jot or tittle too far. So the word "repast" could be part of
the solution. Being non-sumptuous it is presumably meatless, and so
the word "vegetarian" leaps to mind. However the food was perhaps not
fully and truly vegetarian, so the expression could be a little
intrusive.
If meatlessness is to be emphasised, then "meatless repast" would
do, but rather than meatlessness per se, I imagine it is the tasteful
slightness of the ritualised meal which counts. Meagre is ok for the
French maigre (also linked to German mager, as in Magermilch etc). It
suggests both the thinness of the materials and the modesty of the
servings (and hence was used to refer to Friday food in Catholicism.
My suggestion is therefore: "a meagre repast". That is not
necessarily a technical term, I admit, but in the context,
occasionally repeated, it could more or less become one. It should fit
smoothly into sentences where it occurs.
best wishes
Michael (Pye)
Zitat von Ross Bender <rosslyn...@gmail.com>:
> In translating *Shoku Nihongi* I have long used the term 'abstinence rites'
> but not only, for deceased sovereigns at Buddhist temples. In one case in
> whom, advised me to use abstinence rites. Now that I am revisiting the
> issue, it seems that 'abstinence rites' doesn't convey the meaning of some
> sort of meal. The term is obviously polyvalent.
>
> I'm sure that someone on this list has confronted the problem, and I'd be
> curious to know what others have used.
>
> Thanks,
> Ross Bender
>
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Professor of the Study of Religions (em.), University of Marburg, Germany
Raji Steineck
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 2. März 2023 19:35
An: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Betreff: Re: [PMJS] Maigre Feasts or Abstinence Rites
Jacqueline I. Stone
The term 斎has undergone some semantic shifting and can actually have both meanings that Dr. Bender notes. Please see Yi Ding’s “Transformation of Poṣadha/Zhai in Early Medieval China,” Buddhist Studies Review 36.1 (2019), available at academia.edu.
Best wishes,
Jackie Stone
--
Ross Bender
"Third, although a feast as the mainstay of a zhai event provides the initial focal
point of lay-monastic interaction and perhaps the main reason for the participants
to be present, the entire event as a long-running program could involve rituals that
were not necessarily related to the poşada/zhai. During the early medieval period,
it became increasingly possible for a zhai event to incorporate other ritual elements,
including praying, the pronouncement of vows, preaching, exorcism, meditation,
repentance, donation, recitation, memorial services, ordination, or even
self-immolation. allowed it to eventually morph into a host of public liturgies that carry the vestigial genre label zhai."
It is not at all clear from the portions of Shoku Nihongi that I've translated what exactly was involved in the rite. In a Buddhist sense, it most often has to do with memorial observances, such as for Retired Female Emperor Jitō, or Emperor Shōmu. Thus for example 斎大会 or 斎会之儀.
But it is also used in Shinto contexts, most notably for the Ise Abstinence Maiden -- 斎王, or 斎宮 itsuki no miya. Her abstinence refers not to vegetarianism, but to celibacy. There is also something known as the 神斎賀事 kamuiwai no yogoto, recited by the Izumo Miyatsuko on his ritual visits to court. There is one interesting reference to a Shinto shrine, the
月斎社 tsukimatsuri yashiro.
Which all goes to show, I suppose, that there is no easy way to translate the term 斎 in all its many contexts. But my feeling at this point is that the sense has more to do with some sort of abstinence, than simply a meal for Buddhist priests.
As for German terms, there is Fastnachtdienstag -- meaning Shrovetide or Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. In some German-American traditions the doughnuts made for the occasion are in fact termed "Fastnachts." Fastnachts Donut Recipe Pennsylvania Dutch - No Plate Like Home
Ross Bender
Abe, Ryuichi
Dear Dr. Bender,
This is a topic I was interested in my research several years ago. Please let me write down things I remember that I think are relevant to your inquiry. Shōmu’s funerary and commemorative rites were ground-breaking in many areas in early Japanese religious history – esp. in relationship to the newly built Tōdaiji. My reading of the words in question, which I believe follows a standard reading adopted by specialists of early Japanese historical documents, differs from yours a bit. To put the words in the context of the former Emperor Shōmu’s passing earlier this year, I give my rendition of the longer passages that includes the words as below.
勅す。明年の国忌•御斎はまさに東大寺に設くべし。その大仏殿の歩廊はよろしく
六道諸国に造営せしめて、忌日に合わすべし。怠緩すべからず。
The word 御斎 in the first half of the Nara period historical documents means the seventh day commemorative rite (first 7th to the 49th) for emperors. The earliest recorded example of 御斎 is the one for the female emperor Jitō. Her 14th day ritual was performed on the 5th day of the first month of Taihō 3 (703) at four major temples, and the 49th day rite at thirty-three temples. Some textbooks wrongly put the date of her death as the first month of Taihō 3, but that was when her 御斎 was performed. She died on the 22nd day of the twelfth month of Taihō 2.
What’s unique about the passage above is that the edict is saying that the 御斎for Shōmu was to be held one year after his death. This is the first known example of the 御斎 being observed for emperor one year after his/her death -- And that event was to be observed as 国忌, that is the particularly important funerary and commemorative rites reserved for highly ranked imperial family members and courtiers that are observed as the rite of mourning for the entire nation. During the 国忌 all the work and services of the court were halted (hence, “abstinence rites”). By early Heian period there were too many 国忌 days, so that the court decided to limit and narrow down the occasions of 国忌 rather drastically.
To glorify Shōmu, the court did other unique things for his funerary ritual. What I remember among these is the addition of the Chinese style exorcists 方相氏in the funeral in accordance of Zhao Rites (周礼). As the venue to perform for the first time the one year commemorative rite for the deceased Shōmu, both as 国忌 and 御斎、the edict was intended to elevate the prestige of Tōdaiji. The walkway 歩廊to be built around the Daibutus Hall was for the monks to perform the ritual of 行香 (the monks’ ritual processions around the hall or from one hall to another in the temple precinct). 行香 is one of the two major rituals that made up the ceremony of 国忌, the other was 設斎 (providing vegetarian meals to monks).
With best,
Ryūichi Abé
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Ross Bender
《大宝二年（七〇三）十二月乙巳（十三）》○乙巳。太上天皇不予。大赦天下。度一百人出家。令四畿内講金光明経。
Taihō 2.12.13 [January 4, 703]
The Retired Female Emperor Jitō fell ill. There was a Great Amnesty throughout the realm. One hundred men were allowed to enter the Buddhist priesthood. The Golden Light Sutra was ordered to be read in the four home provinces.
《大宝二年（七〇三）十二月甲寅（廿二）》○甲寅。太上天皇崩。遺詔。勿素服挙哀。内外文武官釐務如常。喪葬之事、務従倹約。
Taihō 2.12.22 [January 13, 703]
The Retired Female Emperor Jitō died. There was a posthumous edict to the effect that mourning clothing and laments were not necessary. Civil and military officials inside and outside the capital were to conduct business as usual. The funeral ceremonies were to be simple.
《大宝二年（七〇三）十二月丁巳（廿五）》○丁巳。設斎於四大寺。
Taihō 2.12.25 [January 16, 702]
Abstinence rites[1] in the four great temples.
《大宝三年（七〇三）正月丁卯（五）》○丁卯。奉為太上天皇。設斎于大安。薬師。元興。弘福四寺。
Taihō 3.1.5 [January 26, 703]
Abstinence rites were held at Daianji, Yakushiji, Gangoji, and Gufukuji for the late Retired Female Emperor Jitō.
《大宝三年（七〇三）二月癸卯（十一）》○癸卯。是日、当太上天皇七七。遣使四大寺及四天王・山田等卅三寺。設斎焉。」大宰史生、更加十員。
Taihō 3.2.11 [March 3, 703]
This day being the forty-ninth day after the death of Retired Female Emperor Jitō, messengers were sent to the four great temples and thirty-three temples including Shitennōji and Yamadadera to command abstinence rituals.
[1]斎 – sai. The term is polyvalent and can also mean a Buddhist vegetarian meal, sometimes translated as ‘maigre feast.’
One of the fascinating aspects surrounding her death is that, although she was the first monarch to be cremated, the practice of reading eulogies at the mogari no miya 殯宮 (which I translate as 'temporary imperial mortuary') was still current. As far as I know, this was the end of the system of 'double burial.'
I see that you do use the translation of 'providing vegetarian meals for monks' for 設斎. As I have noted, the question of whether to use this or simply 'abstinence rites' still vexes me.
Again, thank you for commenting on this intriguing topic.
Ross Bender
Lisa Kochinski
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Ross Bender
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Ross Bender
《大宝二年（七〇二）三月己卯（十二）》○己卯。鎮大安殿大祓。天皇御新宮正殿斎戒。惣頒幣帛於畿内及七道諸社。
Taihō 2.3.12 [April 13, 702]
The Great Purification ceremony was held at the Hall of Great Peace. The Emperor went to the main hall of the new palace and performed purification ceremonies.[1] Mitegura were distributed to the shrines of the home provinces and the seven circuits.
[1] 斎戒 – saikai. Charles Muller’s Digital Dictionary of Buddhism notes that the term appears as early as Mencius, meaning a practice of purification before making offerings to the spirits.
Dear Dr. Abe,
Abe, Ryuichi
Dear Ross (If I may call you so),
Thank you very much for your reply and also your addendum. Including all the historical events you cited, I learned a lot from your posts. I sent my previous reply to your original post before your second post in response to Yi Ding’s article appeared. Together with that post, I can’t agree more with you on your point of the polyvalent nature of the word 斎。 Before I read your comments I always thought of the word 忌御斎as an earlier prototypical concept that later developed into 国忌御斎 and 周忌御斎。But having read your comments, I believe that the nuance coming from the native Japanese tradition is also important. For example, the word 忌 is attached to generic nouns such as 詞 and 館 （忌詞、忌館） in order repel Buddhist elements from the kami worship at Ise at the end of the 8th century (延喜儀式帳). Accordingly, word 塔is prohibited and had to be replaced by the word 阿良良岐 (“araragi,” high structure). 経 is replaced by 染紙、and most interestingly, 斎 in the Buddhist sense of upoṣada is replaced by 片膳（katasonae or katashiki, one-sided, i.e., vegetarian meal）. So, it is possible to think of 忌御斎 as something like the ritual of necessary evil – the court needed the Buddhist rites to expel the greatest possible impurity of the realm, the emperor’s death, but because the ritual was attached tightly to the gravest impurity, the ritual itself was regarded as not desirable from the kame worship’s point of view. As you know the court’s attitude toward Buddhism continue to change, rather drastically, from the pre-Nara to the early Heian period. It may be possible to think that when the court was more favorable to Buddhism, the positive sense of 忌御斎 was brought to the fore in the historical records, but the opposite might be as true. In short, the word 斎in the Shoku nihongi cannot be reduced to the Buddhist sense of it even if we include the early Chinese transformation/expansion of its meaning. You point somehow reminded me of Ogyū Sorai’s famous statement that in all the Buddhist sutras the Buddha never taught monks to perform funerary rites. I have more to say about the interchangeable use in ancient Japan of the words 斎 and 忌 which has also to do with the question of nuns in the court ritual. But that’s probably too long for this thread. I’ll send my additional comments directly to you and Ms. Kochinski.
Thank you,
Ryuichi
From: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ross Bender <rosslyn...@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 1:56 PM
To: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
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Raji Steineck
Gesendet: Dienstag, 7. März 2023 01:47
An: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Betreff: Re: [PMJS] Maigre Feasts or Abstinence Rites
Lisa Kochinski
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Abe, Ryuichi
Dear Professor Steineck,
Thank you for your note. Please find below what I wrote to Ross and Lisa. I removed my personal comments and questions to them from what I put down below.
Thank you,
Ryuichi
……….
Having reviewed my old notes, I found that before the systematic integration of Buddhist rites into the rituals of the court that began at the victory of Tenmu over Tenchi, the words 忌 and 斎 were used interchangeably. According to scholars like Okada Shigekiyo (岡田重精『古代の斎忌（イミ）』), both denote either abstaining from, or expelling, impure or sinful events/things. Both terms were pronounced as イ or ユ, with the verbal form of them イム and ユム ; and ユ（忌、斎）ユユシ（忌） ユメ（忌、慎）are the noun derivatives. That is to say, both words, before Buddhism was thoroughly integrated into the court ritual during the Tenmu-Jitō era, had a dual meaning: 1) “abstaining” from impurities; and 2) the very impurities one needs to abstain from.
This seems to explain why the court’s attitude toward Buddhists, as it was best expressed by the treatment of nuns, shifted back and forth throughout the Nara period. Jitō was the first former emperor who was cremated – i.e., the Buddhist ritual that do not require any purificatory rites related to burials. But already from 727 (神亀４年) onward, the court began excluding the participation of nuns in the rituals of the inner court (牛山佳幸「律令制展開期における尼と尼寺」) -- mainly because having both monks and nuns performing the same rites in a same site was considered inappropriate, the idea that went against the ideal of 忌、斎. In the reigns of Shōmu-Kōken, the integration of Buddhist rites in the court rituals increased and nuns became more active again (勝浦令子「八世紀の内裏仏事と女性」). However, after the fall of the Shōtoku-Dōkyō regime, removal of Buddhists from various aspects of kami worship became the standard. So, depending on the court’s attitude toward Buddhism, which continued to evolve throughout the Nara period, the meaning of the word 忌御斎 very likely had quite different nuances. When the court was favorable to Buddhism, its purificatory function against the greatest pollution for the realm, the emperor’s death, was brought to the fore. On the other hand, when the court was less sympathetic to Buddhism, the negative connotation probably had more weight.
This explains why 斎宮 was understood as both pure and impure. Those ladies who were chosen to be saigū were considered pure because they abstained from taking part in Buddhist rites. But they were regarded impure because they were not able to take part in the Buddhist purificatory rites and were not able to accumulate religious merit from them.
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Lisa Kochinski
Abe, Ryuichi
Dear Lisa (if I may call you so),
Thank you for your excellent comments and questions. I think the question of blood pollution is better answered by Lori Meeks, and Senshi by Ed Kames. But I love Senshi’s poems and used her poem on Dragon Princess as an example of showing that the divinity had nothing to do with the typical sectarian misrepresentation of her role in the lines henjō nanshi, 変成男子 So I write below what I remember.
Best,
Ryuichi
……………….
First, I think it’s important that we do a thorough historicization of the issues you pointed out. The compilation of typical “bukki ryō” actually took place from the late Kamakura period and reflects in their codes lots of androcentric biased views against women typical of the worrier household system. Examples of most thorough bukki ryō are Bunpoki 『文保記（文保服仮令）』 and Korō kujitsuden 『古老口実伝』from the mid- to late Kamakura periods. Both present all sorts of rules of taboos of kami worship as if they were transmitted from much earlier periods. But more recent research on them has revealed that was not necessarily the case. For example. earlier rules (form the ancient to Nara periods) treated child-delivery as pollutive but not mensuration. I believe that’s because childbirth was regarded as dangerous for both mother and child, but that was not the case for mensuration.
Second, on the question of blood pollution itself, I think we acutely need the same attention to the thorough historicization – in order to free ourselves from conventional misconceptions. It seems to me that in the ancient period blood is often understood as the sign of vitality and life itself and not necessary regarded as polluted. The famous episode in the Kojiki relates Yamato-takeru’s romantic meeting with Miyazuhime ( 美夜受比売 ) in which she was mensurating that evening, but Miyazuhime gave him permission to make love. According to Katsuura Noriko, the first report of a saigū at Ise who was not able to perform purification rite because of mensuration happened in 886; and the first report of a saiin at Kamo on the same problem of mensuration was 914-915 (Alas, I didn’t write down which book of Katsuura’s I found these info.). Obviously, before these occasions, the mensuration of priestesses was not problematized as pollution in both Ise and Kamo.
Third, I believe we need to clearly distinguish the function of the priestesses at Isa (斎宮) from that of the priestesses at Kamo (斎院). The prohibitions for Ise priestesses were always more strict and severe than those for Kamo priestesses. As far as I know, that’s because sending the new priestesses to Ise became an important part of the emperor’s coronation ritual. For example, taboo of Buddhist words ( 内忌詞) applied for Ise priestesses in Engishiki was never applied to Kamo priestesses. As late as the reign of Emperor Sutoku, a nun was appointed as the administrative head (bettō) of the Kamo Priestess office. When the male ministers of the court discovered that that nun constantly had access to the Kamo Shrine proper and was entering the inner sanctum together with the Kamo Priestess, finally the residence of nuns at Kamo was prohibited (Chōshūki, Chōshō 2, 5th day of the nineth month 『長秋記』長承二年九月五日条).
Finally about Princess Senshi: since Kuboki published an article questioning Senshi’s authorship of Hosshin wakashū in 2016 (久保木秀夫. "『発心和歌集』 選子内親王作者説存疑." 中古文学 97 (2016): 76-86.), it seems to me that scholars of Japanese literature cannot determine whether the collection actually was penned by Princess Senshi. However, most scholars agree that Senshi devoted herself to Buddhism, and thus her inner struggle of keeping her Buddhist faith, on the one hand, and serving Kamo by abstaining from Buddhism, was true. As you know better than I do, Senshi, Shikishi naishinnō, and many other princesses who served as Kamo and Ise priestesses composed poems in which they deplored their inability to take part in Buddhist rituals and their resultant sinfulness, esp. in regard to what would happen in their afterlife.
What interests me most is Senshi’s sudden resignation from the Kamo priestess position. A few scholars have speculated a shocking incident that happened a few months prior to her resignation in the 9th month of Chōshō 4 urged her to resign. In the 6th month of the same year, Princess Senshi, 嫥子女王 while serving a rite at Ise, was possessed by the Ise god. Crazed, she delivered the words of Amaterasu that criticized the administrators of Ise as well as the court’s policy toward Ise (『後拾遺和歌集』巻２０、雑６、神祇)。It’s interesting to note that possibly destructive power of priestesses – as in the ancient period -- was felt as an actual threat for the legitimacy of the Heian imperial court. For Senshi at Kamo, however, this possession of the Ise priestess by the Ise god must have been an event that wiped out the value of her life-long effort to make a peaceful co-existence between Buddhism, kami worship at Kamo, and the court. In any case, both these priestesses seem to have worked hard to resist the court’s effort to contain the power of priestesses by mean of institutionalization, i.e., by means of creating so many taboos around them.
Considering all these things, I tend to think of “blood pollution” as a conceptual tool aimed at suppressing women that was made particularly influential by the male-centered religious and political authorities during the latter part of medieval period -- and by means of their production of various texts that projected the taboos backward to earlier history – to justify their suppression of women in their own society.
From:
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Date: Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 8:28 PM
To: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [PMJS] Maigre Feasts or Abstinence Rites
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