Buddhas and Kami in Japan

<p>This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the combinatory tradition that dominated premodern and early modern Japanese religion known as <em>honji suijaku</em> (<em>originals and their traces</em>). It questions received simplified accounts of the interactions between Shinto and Japanese Buddhism and presents a more dynamic and variegated religious world one in which the deities' Buddhist originals and local traces did not constitute one-to-one associations but complex combinations of multiple deities based on semiotic operations doctrines myths and legends. The book's essays all based on specific case studies discuss the <em>honji suijaku</em> paradigm from a number of different perspectives always integrating historical and doctrinal analysis with interpretive insights.</p>