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>