Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1: 71–87© 2015 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

D. Max Moerman

The Buddha and the Bathwater
Defilement and Enlightenment in the Onsenji engi

This article examines the origins of Onsenji, a temple at the Arima hot springs,
together with a set of closely related tales of other sites of curative bathing
where religious exemplars encounter Buddhist deities of healing, to explore
the narrative and doctrinal patterns of the engi genre. It suggests how a common literary trope, of deities who appear as lepers to test the compassion andperception of their followers, serves the institutional priorities of particular
local sites and how the contents of these tales articulate Buddhist claims about
pollution and purity, ignorance and insight, and sickness and salvation. It
argues that the soteriology of these stories, in which mental defilements areshown to be the origin and engine of all human suffering, express in narrative
form the meaning of the term engi as a Buddhist technical term for the theoryof dependent origination.

keywords: Onsen engi—Gyōki—Yakushi—lepers—bathhouses—healing

D. Max Moerman is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern
Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University.

71

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n the seventh day of the fourth month of 1452, Zuikei Shūhō 瑞渓
周鳳 (1392–1473)—literatus, historian, diplomat, confidant of Ashikaga
Yoshimitsu 足利義満, and abbot of the Zen monastery Shōkokuji
相国寺—left his residence in Kyoto and journeyed to the Arima Onsen 有馬
温泉. The Arima hot springs were but a day’s journey from the capital and attracted

members of the capital elite long before and long after Zuikei’s mid-fifteenth century visit. The Nihon shoki 日本書記 notes that the sovereign Jomei 除明 (593–641)
traveled to the Arima Onsen in the autumn of 631 and again in the autumn of 638,
spending a period of three months there during each visit (nkbt 68: 229, 232).
Although Jomei was the first royal pilgrim of record, many other eminent visitors
were to follow. Arima’s later patrons included such figures as the Regent Fujiwara
no Yorimichi 藤原頼通 (990–1074), the Abdicated Sovereign Horikawa 堀河院(1079–1107), the Abdicated Sovereign Go-Shirakawa 後白河 (1127–1192), Toyotomi
Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1536–1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1542–1616), who
all traveled to the hot springs for the healing waters and the sacred blessing of theMedicine Master Buddha, Yakushi (薬師; Sk. Bhaiṣajyaguru). The early fourteenthcentury handscroll Zegaibō-e 是害房絵 describes Arima as “the place where theMedicine King appears and where the Bodhisattva Gyōki 行基 experienced his
blessings. There is a sacred image of Yakushi and the medicinal waters of the hotsprings flow from the Buddha’s body” (Umezu 1978, 100).
During his three-week stay at the hot springs, Zuikei visited Onsenji 温泉寺,
the temple of the hot springs that enshrined the sacred image of Yakushi; there
he “listened to the history of the temple while viewing a painting” (Fujiwara
2007a, 11). The painting, the Onsenji engi-e 温泉寺縁起絵 (Illustrated origins ofOnsenji), still exists. It is a large-format hanging scroll in ink and colors on silk
dating from the late-thirteenth or early-fourteenth century.1 Accounts of thetemple’s history are also extant in multiple textual sources. The earliest iterationof the narrative is in Tachibana no Narisue’s 橘成季 Kokon chomonjū 古今著聞集(Notable tales old and new) of 1254. It next appears in the Onsenyama jūsō yaku
no ki 温泉山住僧薬能記, written in 1279 by the resident Buddhist monk of Onsen
jinja, the temple-shrine at the hot springs.2 It is found as well in the fourteenth1. The painting is currently kept at the Kyoto National Museum. It was housed at Onsenji
until 1743, when it was transferred to Miidera’s Kangakuin 三井寺勧学院 and stored at Saishōin
最勝院, a subtemple of Byōdōin 平等院.
2. On this text, see Fujiwara (2007b). Whereas the temple’s origin narrative is the same inall iterations, the name of the temple is not. In the Kokon chomonjū, the temple is Koyadera72moerman: the onsenji engi | 73

century Onsenji engi 温泉寺縁起, the account that Zuikei heard (Katō 2010, 251).
Although each of these retellings contain essentially the same story, they should
not be conflated. Engi are neither unitary nor stable entities. They migrate acrosstime, literary format, and media. They constitute a composite and fluid genre,
one in which multiple narratives and diverse interests are sutured together toformulate a single and singular history. Zuikei’s description of having “listened
to the history of the temple while viewing a painting” also reminds us that the
textual and visual modes were often coarticulated and that engi should also be
understood as performative: they belonged to the repertoire of picture recitation (etoki 絵解き) enacted through dramatic utterance and conveyed throughthe public explication of images.
The history of the temple that Zuikei was shown and told was itself composed of multiple stories, drawn from different sources, assembled at different
times, and represented in different spatial registers in the painting. This article
is concerned with only one of these stories: that of the monk Gyōki, the Buddha
Yakushi, and the founding of Onsenji. This account appears at the lowest registerof the hanging scroll and occupies the smallest area of the painting’s surface.
The majority of the painting, however, narrates two other tales. The middle register tells the story of the local deities and taboos associated with the site, andthe upper register is filled with the account of the monk Son’ei’s 尊恵 visit to
Enma’s tribunal in the underworld.3 The miraculous stories of Gyōki and Son’ei
were composed at different times and for different reasons. According to Nishio
Masahito, the account of Gyōki founding the temple dates from the end of theeleventh century, when the monk Ninsai 仁西 began a fundraising campaign torebuild the site after it suffered flood damage in 1098. The story of Son’ei journeying to the underworld dates from a century later, when another fundraising
campaign was carried out in the 1180s (Nishio 1987, 76–79).4
One of the later retellings of the engi is found in the Onsenji saiken kanjinchō
温泉寺再建勧進帳 (List of funds raised for the rebuilding of Onsenji), of 1528
(Katō 2010, 251). The title of this work, like the eleventh- and twelfth-century
fundraising campaigns responsible for the engi’s multiple narratives, signals the
economic function of the engi. One purpose of such rare and miraculous histories was to attract popular support by distinguishing the institution in what wassurely a crowded marketplace of pious appeals. This particularist imperative,
昆陽寺 but in the Onsenyama jūsō yaku no ki and the Onsenji engi, the temple has become
Onsenji.
3. On the tale of the local deities of Arima, see “Nyotai no gongen: Arima onsen ni tenkai
suru sanrin shinkon setsuwa” in Nishimura (1999, 273–83).
4. The tale of Son’ei, like that of Gyōki, appears in multiple sources, such as Kokon chomonjūand Heike monogatari.

74 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
emphasizing the exceptional history of a single sacred site, is a quality common
to the engi genre. Attentive to this quality, much scholarship on engi has been concerned with how partisans of a particular institution sought to construct a unique
identity. By contrast, this project works to invert such particularist assumptions
about how engi operate: its subject is not a unique institutional history but rather
a common narrative topos, one that appears across different sites, genres, andmedia; one that participates in larger narrative and doctrinal patterns found acrossJapan. Within the articles collected in this journal issue, the term engi refers to theorigin narratives of Buddhist temples, images, or practices. In Buddhist scholastic
discourse, however, engi has a more technical denotation. It translates the Sanskrit term, pratītyasaṃutpāda, the doctrine that explains the conditioned origin
or dependent arising of all phenomena. The earliest formulation of this model of
causality is represented in the twelve nidānas, or twelve links of dependent arising, in which the mental defilements (kleśa) of ignorance, attachment, and anger
are said to perpetuate the cycle of samsara. It is here that the engi of Onsenji, andof other temples with purifying and healing waters, returns to its etymologicalmeaning: translating soteriological formulae into narrative texts and images that
articulate the origins and the overcoming of human suffering.
According to Zuikei’s account, and as represented in the lower horizontal
register of the painting, Onsenji was founded by the legendary holy man Gyōki,
the Nara-period monk revered as an incarnation of the Bodhisattva Monju (Sk.
Mañjuśrī) and renowned for his charitable works, compassion for the destitute,and supernormal powers. As Zuikei tells the story, Gyōki was once travelingthrough the mountains of Arima, where he encountered a man suffering from
leprosy lying prostrate on the ground.5 Gyōki inquired after the ailing man andoffered him some rice to eat. The leper replied, however, that he would prefersome fresh fish. In order to satisfy the man’s request, Gyōki went to the Nakagawa River 中川, procured some fish from a fisherman, and returned with it to
the sick man. The leper then asked Gyōki to cook the fish and to taste it himself
to ensure that it was properly seasoned. By interacting with the leper, Gyōki hadcome into contact with a figure embodying the most profound form of physicalpollution. Furthermore, in cooking and tasting the fish, he broke his monastic
precepts. Yet the coup de grâce and true trail of Gyōki’s compassion occurs when
the leper, in the hope of soothing his itching body, asked the holy man to lick his
diseased skin. Just as Gyōki began to do so, however, the leper revealed himself
5. Although the term rai 癩 was used to designate Hansen’s disease, it also embraced a wider
range of meanings. According to Andrew Goble, “In medieval Japan, rai was an affliction that
contained multiple cultural meanings. The term rai was applied to a number of conditions that
affected face, torso, and limbs. Symptoms included a variety of sores, hair loss, scaly skin, andloss of fingers and toes” (Goble 2011, 67). On leprosy in medieval Japan, see Kanai 2003.

moerman: the onsenji engi | 75

to be the Healing Buddha, who had assumed this diseased and polluted form
to test the monk’s piety. Yakushi thereupon named Gyōki the “holy man of the
hot springs” and directed him to the nearby Arima Onsen, whose waters, hepromised, would cure all disease. Gyōki thereupon created a statue of the Healing Buddha, constructed a temple to house it, and recited a sutra before the local
deity of the hot springs and asked that she protect the temple.
The story of Onsenji’s founding has all of the elements one would expect to findin an engi narrative. Its characters and events are of a type common to the legendary origins of countless sacred sites: a wandering holy man, a strange encounter, adivine revelation, the construction of an image and image hall, even the conversionof the local deity as temple guardian. Although engi categorically assert their own
specificity, they are composed with a limited set of narrative conventions. Gyōki,a charismatic monk revered for his compassion and insight as well as for his public works, appears in the engi of numerous hot springs temples, many of which
are similarly dedicated to the Healing Buddha. Yakushi’s powers of healing havebeen venerated in Japan since the late seventh century and became the object of astate-centered cult in the eighth century. Rituals to the Healing Buddha were performed for the sick and dying, to prevent or respond to epidemics and famine,
to expel pollution from the land, and to cleanse individuals and the state of thekarmic defilements that were seen as the cause of such misfortune (Suzuki 2012,
11–24). The two scriptures dedicated to Yakushi—the Yakushi rurikō nyorai hongan
kudoku kyō 藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經 (Sutra on the merit of the original vowsof the Medicine Master Tathāgata of Lapis Light; T no. 450, 14.404–408) and theYakushi rurikō shichibutsu hongan kudoku kyō 藥師琉璃光七佛本願功德經; (Sutraon the merit of the original vows of the Medicine Master of the Seven Buddhas of
Lapis Light; T no. 451, 14.409–418)—celebrate Yakushi’s specific vows to cure all“who are rheumatic, deaf, blind, mute, bent, lame, hunchbacked, leprous, or boundand constrained by the suffering of all sorts of disease” (T no. 450, 14.405a26–27).
Yakushi was venerated at hot springs as early as the eighth century and figures prominently in the engi of at least twenty-seven hot springs throughout thearchipelago. Although the engi of the different onsen vary in how they articulate
the causal relationship between the healing powers of Yakushi and the medicinal
effects of the hot spring, all concur in linking the Buddha with the bathwater. In
more than a dozen of these engi, the hot springs are said to have been revealed byYakushi in dreams; five other engi describe the healing waters as having miraculously sprung forth where temples or images of Yakushi were constructed; andeight more engi note that the discovery of the hot spring was followed by theestablishment of an image of the Healing Buddha. The engi of Onsenji, linking
Gyōki and Yakushi with the curative powers of its waters, is thus far from unique.
Rather, it belongs to a larger network of legendary literature that grounds thecult of the Healing Buddha at hot springs throughout Japan (Nishio 2000, 233).

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Even what may appear the most transgressive element in the tale, the leper’s request to have the holy man lick his diseased skin, is nothing new. There
are other stories of Buddhist deities who manifest themselves in defiled form
to test the enlightened compassion of their followers. The twelfth-century talecollection Konjaku monogatarishū 今昔物語集 contains one example that sharesmuch with the account of Gyōki and Yakushi although it describes the encounter between a different holy man and a different deity. It is a story about the Tangpilgrim Xuanzang 玄奘 on his way to India:
When crossing a strange mountain, Xuanzang came to a remote place where
no humans or animals were to be seen. Suddenly he smelled a stench that was
unbearably pungent. Holding his nose, he backed away, but as the smell wasmost unusual, he approached the odorous area where he saw only withered
trees and grasses. As he came closer, he saw a corpse, which apparently caused
the stench. But when he stepped toward it, he thought it moved. Thinking
that it might be someone still alive, he came closer and asked the prone body,“Who are you and with what sort of illness are you lying here like this?” It
was a sick woman who said, “My parents have discarded me in these remotemountains because my body has become festered and is covered with scabs
from head to toe, which exude a stinking odor.” Feeling deep pity, Xuanzang
asked her, “When you contracted this disease, didn’t anyone tell you of medicines or remedies?” “At home I tried all sort of remedies in vain. A doctor said
that I might be cured if the pus was sucked from all of my scabs. But since
my body smells terribly, no one who came near me would dare.” Hearing this,Xuanzang said in tears, “My body does not appear to be impure but in fact is. It
is foolish to think others’ bodies impure while one’s own body is just as defiled
as the bodies of others. I will suck the pus from your body and cure you.” …
Her skin looked like mud and the incomparable stench was so strong as tocause one to vomit or faint. Yet with his strong feelings of compassion, Xuanzang withstood the odor and began to suck the pus out of the scabs from herneck down to her hips. As he sucked the pus from her scabs, he immediately
spat it out. As his tongue touched her soiled scabby skin, the scabs disappeared and her skin began to be restored to its original condition. Suddenly
he smelled a most delicate fragrance of sandalwood and aloes, and saw lights
as brilliant as the sun’s rays at sunrise. And lo and behold, the sick woman was
instantaneously transformed into the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, who said to
Xuanzang, “You are truly a holy man of pure and sincere heart. I assumed theform of a sick woman to test your mind and found that you are most noble.”		
		(nkbt 23: 65–69; see, for example, Dykstra 1994, 1: 36–37)

The story of Xuanzang underscores, perhaps even more so than that of Gyōki,
the somaticity of the holy man’s intimacy with the polluted body of the leper.
That the body is female seems only to make such intimacy even more scandal-

moerman: the onsenji engi | 77

ous. As with the tale of Gyōki, the story of Xuanzang also reveals the test to be
more about the mind than the body. As Xuanzang explains, “It is foolish to thinkothers’ bodies impure while one’s own body is just as defiled.”
The narrative is at once fixed and adaptable. The characters are interchangeable but the lesson about insight and understanding remains the same. There isthus little original about the Origins of Onsenji. Nor is there meant to be. The
tale derives its power not from its originality but rather from its familiarity. Its
resonance depends on the depth of its intertextuality, its thick associative context, its place in a complex discursive network structured—to use a Mahayana
metaphor—like a jeweled net with each narrative node reflecting and relying onothers. To appreciate all that the Origins of Onsenji has to tell us about pollution
and purity, suffering and salvation, and healing baths and Healing Buddhas, weneed to situate it within a larger landscape of place, legend, and practice.
Buddhas and Bathwater
Japan’s sacred waters have long been revered as sites for ritual purification andtherapeutic bathing. In the earliest Japanese records, cleansing with water isshown to remove the pollution of death and also to produce new life. According to the mythologies of the Kojiki 古事記 and Nihon shoki, after the creator
deity Izanagi 伊邪那岐 encountered the putrefying corpse of his wife, he purified himself by bathing in the local waters, whereupon numerous deities wereborn from his ablutions. The earliest provincial gazetteers of the eighth century
also praise the beneficial effects of hot springs bathing. The Hizen no kuni fudoki
肥前国風土記 describes the Ureshino hot springs 嬉野温泉 as “effective in healing human disease” (Aoki 1977, 267). The Izumo no kuni fudoki 出雲国風土記
praises the curative waters at Tamatsukuri 玉造 in similar terms: “One dip in thesprings improves physical beauty and two dips heals all ailments. Since ancient
times, the good effect of bathing here has never failed. Therefore the people callit ‘the hot springs of the kami’” (Aoki 1977, 88).
Ablution rituals, however, were not limited to kami worship. Although the
Izumo fudoki names only a shrine, Tamatsukuri Onsen Jinja, the hot springs
would later have a temple dedicated to the Healing Buddha (Aoki 1977, 89). Thistransformation from “the hot springs of the kami” to the hot springs of the Buddhas was a gradual, incomplete, and contested process. The final scene in the
Illustrated Origins of Onsenji, in which Gyōki chants sutras before Arima’s local
deity, however, presents the conversion of autochthonous forces into Buddhist
guardians as a fait accompli. The Onsenyama jūsō yaku no ki takes this relationship one step further by identifying the local deity as a manifestation (gongen)of Yakushi. As the Heike monogatari 平家物語 (Engyō-bon 延慶本) explains, “the78 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
spiritual efficacy of the Arima Onsen is due to the protection of Yakushi and the
manifestation of the local deity” (Katō 2010, 253).
According to the Gangōji garan engi 元興寺伽藍縁起, an engi that claims tonarrate the very origins of Buddhism in Japan,6 “the Buddha Dharma was firsttransmitted to the land of Great Yamato when King Sóngmyóong of Paekche
sent an image of Prince Siddhartha, together with a vessel and a set of implements for bathing the Buddha” (Stevenson 1999, 304–305).7 The ritual bathingof Buddhist images were performed annually thereafter, in reenactment of thelustrations the Buddha received at birth. Purifying water is central as well tothe abhiṣeka consecration of esoteric Buddhist initiates in which “the water of
wisdom and compassion, impregnated with goodness, is poured on the Dharma
Prince’s mind” (Abé 1999, 136; T 18.667a). As in China and Korea, bathing was
an institutionalized Buddhist practice and the bathhouse was an integral part ofJapan’s earliest monasteries. Hōryūji 法隆寺, Tōdaiji 東大寺, Kōfukuji 興福寺, andTōshōdaiji 唐招提寺 all included bathhouses to insure the physical purity necessary for ritual efficacy (Hashimoto 1990, 207–208).
The religious significance of bathing was promoted in early Japanese Buddhist literature, cited in canonical sutra texts, and formalized in monastic practice and temple institutions. In his Sanbō ekotoba 三宝絵詞 of 984, Minamotono Tamenori describes the intimate connection between monastic bathing andritual purity: “On the fourteenth and twenty-ninth days of each month, a great
bath is prepared in every temple, and all of the monks bathe. This is because thePrecepts Meeting (fusatsu 布薩) is held on the following day” (Kamens 1988,
260). Tamenori then cites the Unshitsu senyoku shusōkyō 温室洗浴衆僧經 (Sutraon bathing the Sangha in the bathhouse) to explain the bath as a site of physical and mental purification for monastics and of merit making for the laity. The
sutra tells how the Buddha’s physician, Jīvaka, prepared a bath for the Buddha
and his disciples with a prayer for physical and mental purification, so that “allsentient beings may be cleansed of worldly filth and ignorance” (Kamens 1988,
260; t 16.802c22–23). In his response to Jīvaka’s vow, the Buddha promised thatanyone who provides baths for monks will be reborn
with pleasant features admired by others, with pure, clean, and lustrous skin,… as the son of a great king, to be bathed with fragrant incense and perfumed
water, protected in all directions by the Four Celestial Kings, illuminated in
the darkness of night by the sun, moon, and stars, adorned with the Seven Jewels of Indra, enjoy a long life, have a fragrant body, revel in the pleasures of the
Heaven of the Sixth Realm of Desire, and dwell in Brahma’s Heaven.		
		(Kamens 1988, 260–61; t 16.803a24–b18)
6. See the article on the Gangōji engi by Yoshida Kazuhiko in this issue, 89–107.
7. On the significance of this ritual in East Asian Buddhism, see Boucher 1995.

moerman: the onsenji engi | 79

Tamenori also emphasizes the medicinal value of bathwater that has beenused by monks. He quotes from the Shotoku fukudenkyō 諸德福田經 (Sutraon the fields of merit), which describes a former life of the Buddha’s discipleĀnanda in which hesuddenly broke out in strange pockmarks that, though treated, would not heal.
Someone told him, “If you prepare a bath for monks and take the water used
for the bath and wash your pockmarks with it, they will heal immediately. Alsoyou will gain other fortunate benefits as well.” So he went to a temple and didthese things and was immediately cured. In every life into which he was born
thereafter, he was lovely in form and pure in person. For ninety-one kalpas hereceived this fortunate benefit. Now he is with the Buddha, and all the pollutions within his mind have been extinguished.		
(Kamens 1988, 261; t 16.778a6–14)
		

In all of these narratives of Buddhist bathing—in sutra sources as in Japanesecommentarial, tale, and engi literature—pollution, purity, illness, and healing arepresented as both physical and mental phenomena. Within Buddhist discourse,
impurity and disease are understood as ultimately matters of perception. Jīvaka
prayed that “all sentient beings may be cleansed of worldly filth and ignorance”
and Ananda had “the pollutions within his mind extinguished.” The Vimalakīrti
Sutra similarly teaches that illness “is born of ignorance and feelings of attachment” (Watson 1997, 65; t no. 475, 14.544b20–21) and urges the bodhisattva “tobecome a king of physicians who can heal the ailments of the assembly” (Watson 1997, 68; t 14.544c24–25). Prince Siddhartha’s quest for enlightenment was
motivated by his recognition of physical infirmity of old age, sickness, and death,and throughout the sutra literature Buddhas and bodhisattvas are described asphysicians and medicine serves as a root metaphor for the dharma (Birnbaum
1979; Demiéville 1985). The etiology of suffering that the term engi describes,
and which the Buddha’s teaching are said to cure, find their origins in mental
rather than physical defilements. If pratītyasaṃutpāda (Jp. engi) provides a doctrinal formulation for the origins of human suffering, the engi of Onsenji, andother tales of Buddhist bathing, present narrative and visual illustrations of its
arising and cessation.
The Leper in the Bathhouse
The bath, as a locus of Buddhist purification, and the leper, as the symbol of
Buddhist defilement, have long been linked. Although temple baths were initially reserved for monastics, by the eleventh century they were also being usedby the laity and urban bathhouses were soon established beyond the confinesof temples (Kuroda 1986, 245). Taking Gyōki as his model, the twelfth-century
monk Chōgen 重源 built bathhouses for monks and commoners where the name80 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)of Amida Buddha was chanted during bathing for physical and spiritual cleansing (Gorai 1975, 182). By the twelfth century, bathhouses were built for the communities of lepers, the physically disabled, and others classified as hinin 非人 in
Kyoto and Nara. These settlements of outcasts were located beside temples at
the urban periphery such as Kiyomizuzaka 清水坂 at the base of Kiyomizudera
清水寺 in southern Kyoto and Kitayama 北山 (also known as Narazaka 奈良坂)
just beyond Hannyaji 般若寺, at Nara’s northern extremity.8 Although situatedoutside of the temples themselves, these were not secular communities. Theirleaders received monastic titles and the settlements were under the authorityof major temples such as Enryakuji 延暦寺 and Kōfukuji. To support such bathhouses was a pious act, known as kudokuyu 功徳湯 or “hot water alms,” the meritof which could be transferred to deceased ancestors. In 1184, for example, on theanniversary of his father’s death, Yoshida Tsunefusa 吉田経房 “followed precedent and provided charity to the bathhouse at Kiyomizuzaka as well as those atvarious prisons” (Fujiwara no Tsunefusa 2002–2008, 4: 176–77). In 1305, on
the occasion of the funeral of the retired sovereign Gofukakusa 後深草, increased
funding was provided to the bathhouse at Kiyomizuzaka and four other outcast
communities (Kuroda 1986, 245).
The practice of bathhouse philanthropy has its own genesis narrative, whichshares much in common with the tale of Gyōki’s encounter with Yakushi at the
Arima hot springs. Like the Onsenji engi, it is a medieval narrative that locatesits origins in an earlier time, a golden age in the Japanese Buddhist imagination.
It similarly includes an eighth-century exemplar of Buddhist piety, a Healing
Buddha who takes the form of a leper, a test of mental purity, and an institution
of Buddhist bathing. The protagonist of the legend is Kōmyō Kōgō 光明皇后,
the queen-consort associated with the founding of such major Nara temples as
Tōdaiji and Hokkeji 法華寺. As told in Kokan Shiren’s 虎関師錬 Genkō shakusho
元亨釈書 of 1332, Kōmyō had a dream in which a voice from the sky commanded
her to build a bathhouse as an act of merit:
Kōmyō rejoiced in awe and built a warm-water bathhouse forthwith, that persons of both exalted and humble condition might be bathed. She also madea vow: “I myself will personally cleanse the bodies of one thousand people.”
Her lord and ministers were apprehensive but her powerful will was not to bechecked. She had finished washing 999, and there was only one last man left.
The stench from the leprous eruptions that covered his entire body filled thehall. She was afraid to cleanse him, but thought to herself, “I am on the verge
8. These outcast settlements (hinin shuku 非人宿) were collective communities organized as
occupational guilds charged with removing impurities associated with the death of humans andanimals from temple-controlled territories and authorized by those temples to beg in designatedareas in return for contributing a portion of their income as tax to the temples; see Abe 1998, 120.

moerman: the onsenji engi | 81of completing the thousand, how can I shirk fulfillment of my vow?” and shepersevered and scrubbed away at the man’s back. The sick man said, “It is along time since, contracting a grievous disease, I became afflicted with theseboils. By chance I met a healer who instructed me that if I should get someone
to suck the pus out of them by mouth I would be certain to be cured. But inall the world there is no one of profound compassion, and hence this stubborn illness has continued to this day. You, Queen-Consort, are revered foryour unbounded mercy. Have pity on me, I beg you.” Kōmyō, unable to refuse,sucked out the pus from the boils over his whole body, from the top of his headto his heels, and spat it out. Then she said to the sick man, “Keep this a secret
and tell no none that I have sucked your boils.” At this moment the sick man
emitted a radiant light and announced, “That your Majesty has cleansed the
body of the Buddha Ashuku (Sk. Akṣobhya) you must keep secret, telling noone.” She gazed at him in astonishment and saw that his marvelous form wasperfect in beauty, radiant, and sweetly fragrant.
(Ury 2002, 194)

As Abe Yasuro (1998, 17–64) has shown, there are many versions of this tale.
In the earliest iteration, dated 1191, the leper is referred to as “a person from
Kiyomizuzaka,” the community of lepers in southern Kyoto.9 The legend was
known at least twenty-five years earlier still. A document from 1165, recording
the donation of land for the support of Kōmyō’s bathhouse, refers to “the brilliant revelation of Ashuku when the Queen Consort Kōmyō fulfilled her vow towash one thousand monks and laity” (hi 7: 2655). Although Gyōki’s leper was
revealed to be Yakushi and Kōmyō’s Ashuku, the two Buddhas, both with eastern pure lands, were said to inhabit the same body and were often conflated inmedieval Japan (hg 1: 40). Other early engi, such as the Hokke metsuzaiji engi
法華滅罪寺縁起 of 1304, identified “Yakushi and his twelve attendants with the
hot water cauldron” of Kōmyō’s bathhouse (Abe 1998, 21). In the Tōdaiji engi
東大寺縁起, a set of fourteenth-century hanging scrolls, and also in the Sangoku
denki 三国伝記 of 1431, the leper of the bathhouse is revealed to be the Bodhisattva Monju (Sk. Mañjuśrī) who, in East Asia at least, shared the role played byYakushi and Ashuku in our stories.
The manifestation of Yakushi, Kannon, Ashuku, and Monju as a leper is a matter of great significance. In the Onsenji engi e, the leper’s body is dark, deformed,
and bloated like a corpse as depicted in the standard iconography of the ninestages of death. In the fourteenth-century Tōdaiji engi, and in the fifteenth-century
Tōdaiji engi emaki, the leper in the bathhouse is similarly dark and demonic, likethe red-skinned oni of the popular imagination. Lepers represented the walking dead, the zombies of medieval Japan, the very embodiment of disease and9. This version, from the Kenkyū gojunreiki 建久御巡礼記 , is translated in Meeks (2010,
36–37).

82 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
defilement. Like other outcasts, they were responsible for the removal and purification (kiyome 清め) of pollution (kegare 穢れ) associated with the handlingof animal and human corpses and the jailing and execution of criminals. Lepers, however, occupied the most reviled position in medieval Japanese society
and were stigmatized and marginalized even within the outcast communities
in which they lived (Kuroda 1986, 146). The Konjaku monogatarishū includes
a tale of a jealous monk who disrupted a Buddhist ritual; as karmic retribution
in his present life (genpō 現報), he “contracted white leprosy (byakurai 白癩).
Even his wet nurse, who had vowed to be his parent, considered him defiled
and would not let him approach her. Since he had nowhere to go, he went tolive in a hut at the foot of the Kiyomizu slope. But here too he was loathed by
the other outcasts and died in just three months” (nkbt 25: 201; see also Dykstra 1994–2003, 4: 217). Leprosy, seen as both a moral and physical defilement,
was understood as karmic retribution for past transgressions. The Daichidoron
大智度論 (t no. 1509, 25.479a11–12) describes it as “the most severe of all diseases, caused by karmic transgressions.” Perhaps the most familiar scriptural
source for the moral cause of leprosy in medieval Japan was the Lotus Sutra,
which teaches that anyone who blasphemes the Buddha’s teachings, “shall get
white leprosy.” Moreover, “His teeth shall be far apart and decayed, he shall haveugly lips and a flat nose, his arms and legs shall be crooked, his eyes shall bepointed and the pupils out of symmetry, his body shall stink, he shall have sores
running pus and blood, his belly shall be watery and his breath short; in brief, heshall have all manner of evil and grave ailments” (Hurvitz 2005, 309; t no. 262,
9.62a16–23). As leprosy was understood as a karmic illness (gōbyō 業病), and inparticular as the karmic consequences of religious offense, the disease occupied
a significant position within Buddhist discourse and nosology.
Indeed, in medieval Japan, it was the very monks who attended to lepers andprovided them with charitable relief who emphasized this view of leprosy as karmic retribution for past misdeeds and explicitly articulated the responsibility
that lepers bore for their own suffering. The Shingon Ritsu 眞言律 movementfounded by Eison 叡尊 (1201–1290) and his disciple Ninshō 忍性 (1217–1303) specifically addressed the conditions of lepers, beggars, and the disabled in theirpresent and future lives. They emulated Gyōki in constructing shelters, medical facilities, and bathhouses and also held mass ceremonies in which lepers
received the medicine of the dharma through mantra and dhāraṇī and theconferral of the eight lay precepts (Quinter 2008). In a text that Eison composed for one such ceremony, he wrote that “the karmic retribution of … thoseafflicted with the disease of leprosy” is the result of “past karma, which is noneother than the sin of slandering the Mahayana” (Quinter 2007b, 471). The text
was composed for the enshrinement of a statue of the Bodhisattva Monju at
Hannyaji during a grand ritual involving two thousand lepers and other beg-moerman: the onsenji engi | 83

gars and one thousand monks. During the ceremony the lepers were given
provisions and other offerings, received the conferral of the precepts, werevenerated with lamps and music, and then circumambulated by the monks.
The ritual, in which the lepers were treated as objects of devotion, enacted ina performative mode the same identification between leper and deity articulated in the narratives of Gyōki and Kōmyō. As Eison wrote, “The Mañjuśrī
[Parinirvāna] Sutra states, ‘the Dharma Prince Mañjuśrī turns into an impoverished, solitary, or afflicted sentient being and appears before practitioners.…
To promote compassion, Mañjuśrī appears in the form of a suffering being’”(Quinter 2007a, 441).
The identification of Bodhisattva and beggar expressed in both ritual andscripture is equally germane to Eison’s selection of image and place. Eison
described Hannyaji as “a numinous place,… which affords lepers a meansof repenting residual sins” (Quinter 2007b, 472). Hannyaji and the deity it
enshrined were deeply informed by the Chinese cult of Mañjuśri at Mount Wutai
五台山. Indeed, Hannyaji was named after a temple of the same name, Boresi(Prajña Temple), on Wutai, which was itself said to replicate the conjured temple
where the eighth-century pilgrim Wuzhou encountered Mañjuśri. Hannyaji,
a replica of a replica (an architectural mise en abyme at once containing andcollapsing in on its prototype) also enshrined a sculpture of Mañjuśri with his
attendants, seated on his lion mount, which replicated the iconography of thebodhisattva found at the Chinese mountain. Wutai was the setting of numerous
Chinese tales in which the bodhisattva appears in disguise to test the piety of
his followers. Such tales were known in Japan by at least the mid-ninth century.
For example, in his Nittō guhō junreikōki 入唐求法巡禮行記 (Record of a journey
to China in search of the dharma), the Tendai patriarch Ennin 圓仁 relates astory of “long ago” when “commoners, beggars, and the destitute” came to a vegetarian feast prepared for monks on Wutai. “Among the beggars was a pregnant
woman heavy with child, and, after she received her full portion, she demanded
a portion for the child in her womb.” When she was reviled and refused her second portion the woman “transformed into Mañjuśrī, emitting light which filled
the hall with dazzling brightness” (Reischauer 1955, 258).
By the twelfth century, Ennin’s Chinese tale of the manifestation of Mañjuśrī
had developed into a detailed (and by now familiar) story of a leper at the bathhouse. In the Konjaku monogatarishū, the story is associated with anotherJapanese monk, Jakushō 寂照 (962–1034), who is said to have visited the Chinese
mountain in the tenth century:
Jakushō made a pilgrimage to Mount Wutai. There he performed various acts
designed to bring religious benefit, such as having water heated to provide abath for the community of monks. When the monks had gathered at that time84 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/1 (2015)
to enjoy a communal meal, a very dirty-looking woman, carrying a child andaccompanied by a dog, appeared in front of Jakushō. Because the woman wascovered with unspeakably ugly sores, the others in the group were repulsed
and tried to drive her away. But Jakushō, restraining them, gave the woman
her helping of food and prepared to send her off. The woman said, “My bodyis covered with sores that are almost too much to endure. I’ve come so I canbathe in the water. Please let me receive a little benefit from the hot water!” Theothers, hearing this, drove her back, so she was forced to withdraw to a distance. Nevertheless she managed to steal into the bathhouse, where, holding
the child and accompanied by the dog, she splashed about in the water.
When the others heard what she was doing, they cried, “Drive her out!”
But when they looked in the bathhouse, she had disappeared as though bymagic. They were startled and mystified by this, but when they emerged fromthe bathhouse and looked around, they saw a purple cloud gleaming and rising beyond the eaves. “It must have been Monju, who changed into the shapeof a woman and appeared here!” they exclaimed. Weeping tears of regret, they
bowed to the ground in obeisance, but by that time it was already too late.		
		(nkbt 25: 60; see also Borgen 2003, 105)

As a narrative genre, engi articulate the unique origins of sacred sites, images,
or practices. Yet the story of Onsenji’s origins has proven to be neither unique
nor original. It offers a genealogy whose genesis seems forever deferred, denying
the very possibility of a unique singularity in favor of multiple and interdependent origins. The stories of Gyōki and Yakushi at Arima, Xuanzang and Kannon
in India, Kōmyō and Ashuku at Hokkeji, and Jakushō and Monju at Wutaishan
have been presented here sequentially. The linking of these tales, however, iscyclical rather than linear. Like the chain of dependent arising after which it isnamed, engi articulate a network of causality larger than any single instantiation.
The individual elements of these origin narratives—religious exemplars such as
Gyōki, Kōmyō, or Jakushō; sacred sites such as Onsenji, Hokkeji, or Wutaishan;or buddhas and bodhisattvas of healing such as Yakushi, Ashuku, or Monju—
are almost interchangeable. Indeed, as we have seen, there are versions of the
Kōmyō legend that employ all three deities. Two elements, however, remain constant: the leper, as the embodiment of impurity, and the bathwater, as the locusof transformation. This pericope—recurring across time, genre, and media—
reveals that whereas an initial encounter with sickness and death occasionedŚakyamuni’s recognition of impermanence, the creation and the conquest of suffering is, in the Buddhist tradition, ultimately a matter of the mind. The leper,the darkest image of disease and defilement, is revealed, in all of the tales, to benone other than a glorious Buddha. And the bath offers the ideal setting for thisrevelatory drama, the theater of possibility and of human transformation. As
the Hokkemetsuzaiji engi declares, “people whose bodies enter the bath will bemoerman: the onsenji engi | 85

cleansed of the three kleśa, protected from all illness, and gain comfort in bodyand mind” (Abe 1998, 21). The three kleśa—ignorance, attachment, and anger—
are the mental defilements that lie at the root of all human suffering. They are
the mental impurities that fuel the cycle of causality that is the etymological origin of the term engi. The bath is where these defilements are washed away, where
the poisons are flushed out. It is where the body and mind are cleansed, where
all illness is cured, and where the suffering leper becomes the Healing Buddha.

references
abbreviations
hg

hi
nkbt
t

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