Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 1993 20/1 Downloading the Lotus From the Public to the Private at Kiyohira’s Chuson-ji

I t is said that when the warlord Fujiwara no Kiyohira 藤原清 衡 lay dying at his mansion in Hiraizumi 平 泉 in 1 128, he remained uncom monly peaceful as he chanted quietly to himself.1 Perhaps his compo sure resulted from a deep-seated satisfaction in having brought to near completion a shrine and temple complex, Chuson-ji 中尊寺，so grand that envoys from the Kyoto court had made the two-month journey north to Hiraizumi to attend its consecration in the spring of 1126.2 Perhaps, again, such composure arose from other, less-public aspects of the Chuson-ji project that, nonetheless, are also crucial to an informed understanding ot its likely meaning to a man like Kiyohira in the immediate circumstances ot his world. Why seek out such meanings in these uneasy times, when meaning itself，like its referents，is but a kind of quicksand in the fields of his torical inquiry? In the new pedagogy, as on the pages of Borges, any thing is possible because everything is a “text. ” This study resists such a hermeneutics and flatly considers the societal and the historical, in which subject and project are a reality, not a cipher, and from which textualization seems nothing more than a flight of terror into the timeless haven of self-reflection. Hence this study situates Kiyohira as a social being in a social history. Of course there is always the question * An earlier version of this essay was read at the Third International Conference on the Lotus Sutra and Japanese Culture, held at the East-West Center, University of Hawaii, in January 1992. I wish to express my profound appreciation to Professors Willa Tanabe and George Tanabe for making possible my participation in the Conference