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Additional Thoughts on 89-2

Lately, I revisited my 89-2 meta on Father (you can check that out in my pinned post because Tumblr hates links) while reading “The Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan” by Asuka Sango and...

I have been completely bamboolzed. Things totally just went over my head. Things have been realized.

Dated: 02/28/21

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If you haven’t read the meta or need a small refresher, here are the important points for this post:

Onryo: any vengeful spirit (though they tend to be women) that returns to haunt the living; they are born out of strong emotions at death - hatred, jealousy, a grudge, and even love - or early, tragic, or unnatural deaths. Strong onryo are believed to cause natural disasters and plagues.

Goryo (goryoujin seems to be regional or historical variant of this word): literally “honorable ghost”; they are onryo who have been deified and pacified by people to avoid or put a stop to natural disasters. While the word has evolved to mean any onryo that has been distinguished, in the Heian period, they were specifically the onryo of aristocrats and politicians who were martyred, disgraced, or murdered in their lifetimes, like Tenjin.

Ebisu asserted that Father is a goryo/goryoujin - a human who died with a grudge around 1100 years ago, in the Heian era- and his grave must still exist. 

Judging by his clothing in the Sakura flashbacks and the terminology associated with him (karma, Liberation, etc), Father was a Buddhist monk.

While I was writing my initial Goryoujin meta, I was working on two assumptions:

That what Ebisu meant by “goryoujin”/goryo was its evolved definition - the goryo who could be born out of any vengeful spirit as opposed to Heian era goryo who were figures with higher social standing;

That Father had been an “ordinary” Buddhist priest with no connections to the court of Heian.

To explain why my assumption on the first one was wrong, we need to first tackle the second.

Any info we have on Father in canon right now is either vague at best and purely speculative at worst. However, I will go out on a limb here and present a theory I’ve had for... quite a while but only fleshed out further while doing my research for a Twitte thread on astrology and divination in the Heian period in the context of Father.

I was sorely disappointed and disheartened by the time I was through with reading a paper on Buddhist divination and astrology in the Heian period. To my dismay, esoteric astral magic and, later, the more advanced sukuyodo mainly dealt with the divination of auspicious dates for events and ceremonies. Nothing to do with influencing or divining the fate of the world of men, as Father so cryptically put it.

But in all that reading, I found a most interesting term: tenmondo. Tenmondo was the art of recording and interpreting unusual/rare astronomical events, which were thought to significantly influence nations on Earth and their rulers. The phenomena that was looked out for included lunar and solar eclipses, comets, unusual closeness between the moon and stars, and... shooting stars. Interesting. (thinking face emoji)

The problem with the practice of tenmon is that it was done pretty much exclusively for the Heian court and it wasn't part of Buddhist tradition - this practice had more in common with onmyodo ("The Way of the Yin and Yang") than it did with Buddhist astrology at the time.

In fact, tenmondo was put under the supervision of Onmyoryo bureau of the government which oversaw divination, astronomy, time, and calendar. The Onmyoryo was headed by onmyoji, practitioners of onmyodo. This definitely posed a few questions:

1. If Father's comment really is alluding to something similar to the tenmondo way of divination, how could he have known about it? He's a Buddhist priest, clearly. Which gave rise to:

2. Is it possible that Father was, at one point, involved with the Heian court?

Why, yes. It’s certainly a possibility that I am now entertaining quite seriously - and not based only on some outsourced, non-manga speculation but on a line from the manga that has struck me as significant for a long time:

(Official trans.: The beautiful court ladies, the great warriors and noble men. They all carry that inside them.)

“The beautiful court ladies, the great warriors and noble men”...? The court of Heian was a highly insulated community whose members rarely showed themselves to the public, if ever. The reality was that the common person had no concept of these court ladies, great warriors, and noble men or their workings - so why is it that Father, who I had originally speculated to be an “ordinary” Buddhist monk, specifically pointed out these three groups to also have that same karma within them? (Let’s not mention Father demonstrates extensive knowledge of Chinese astrology in an era where common people were illiterate.)

Unlike today - where religion and state/government are usually seen as two separate entities - religious authority and civil authority were often overlapped in the court of Heian. The Buddhist community at the time had direct ties to the imperial court, a sort of “antagonistic symbiotic relationship” as it is described in Sango’s book: the number of ordinations were limited by the state, records of all ordained nuns and monks were kept by certain offices, yet the imperial court also needed Buddhist monks and the religious authority they held to legitimize their rule and later, solidify imperial authority through ritual. The highest ranking Buddhist monks held office positions in a division known as Sōgō and an annual ritual known as the Misai-e Assembly gathered many monks, officials, and even the emperor himself to listen to lectures on the Golden Light Sutra and participate in repentance rites.

(Bonus: some Buddhist monks also made masks for a type of now-extinct Buddhist drama known as gigaku. Though it was starting to decline in popularity during the 10th century, it was still around and kicking.)

The bottom line: Heian period monks were involved with the court and could (and did) accumulate political power to become figures of higher social standing.

Which brings me to my second probably wrong assumption: “What Ebisu meant by “goryoujin”/goryo was its evolved definition - the goryo who could be born out of any vengeful spirit as opposed to Heian era goryo who were figures with higher social standing.”

It’s... a possible subtle implication that I didn’t notice until very recently:

Ebisu mentions the oldest mask is from around 1100 years ago (around 910) as estimated by carbon dating; “right around the time when Tenjin showed up.”

Everyone turns to Tenjin. Tenjin (or, Sugawara no Michizane) is a Heian period goryo -  he died in exile and various calamities & natural disasters were attributed to his onryo. He was commemorated as a goryo and later deified as Tenjin, the god of learning.

From that, Ebisu concludes the Sorcerer must have been a human who died with a grudge - a goryoujin - and his grave must still exist.*

Kofuku immediately jumps to ask Tenjin whether he knew the Sorcerer since they’re from the same era. Tenjin, who was a court official.

The implication here is that Ebisu was more likely than not talking about Heian era goryo - from specifically mentioning 1100 years, to associating it with Tenjin, to Kofuku herself asking whether they knew each other - which feeds into the theory that Father was a figure of some social standing to have become what would be considered a goryo in the Heian period specifically.

*I was originally bewildered by the suggestion that his grave might still exist, looking at it from the perspective of Father being an ordinary monk who probably wouldn’t have gotten much ado. But if Father was involved with the court, I would say it is much less far-fetched to say that his grave still exists in some capacity - and if not his grave, then some record of his existence. A division of the Heian court kept records of all ordained nuns and monks. Still, why would he have a grave if he explicitly recalls having been called a god, Buddha, and monster by people after his return from Yomi/resurrection? Maybe that’s why he hides his face in the flashbacks. Either way, Adachitoka explain.

That about wraps up my additions to the goryoujin meta. There’s not too much concrete evidence to go on except implications but in the end, I do at least hope this is more or less on the right track...?

I hope that, at least, it gives people something to think about!