New Books In Buddhist Studies

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site for mountain asceticism. Focusing her attention on aristocratic, male lay patrons–women were barred from climbing the mountain–she shows how the urban elite saw the mountains (and, in this case, specifically Kinpusen) as the capital’s opposite, as an untamed place to which one might go to gain something not accessible in the ordered world of the city of Kyoto. And she describes how some understood the pilgrimage to Kinpusen to correspond to the path to awakening, thereby practicing what Blair calls “spatial soteriology.” A central theme in this book is the difficulty of neatly fitting Kinpusen into a single category, such as “Buddhist” or “Daoist.” A