Le Roi Māra du Sixième Ciel et le mythe médiéval de la création du Japon
Authors: Iyanaga Nobumi 
Published: March 2010

A curious myth of the creation of Japan can be found in many medieval Japanese literary texts. When the creator god (Izanagi or Amaterasu) is about to create Japan, King Māra of the Sixth Heaven comes to prevent him from doing so, because he foresees that if this country is created, Buddhism will flourish there, and he will lose his power. Izanagi or Amaterasu is compelled to make a promise that he (or she) will not tolerate the coming of Buddhism. Under this condition, he (or she) is permitted to create Japan, and because of this promise, Buddhism is taboo in the Shrine of Ise. This article examines this myth from various points of view.

Māra is mentioned in Indian Buddhist texts. He appears there as the tyrannical and jealous king of this world, attacking the Buddha and Buddhism because he is afraid of losing his power, the Beings being able to escape from his realm by the teaching of the True Law. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, we find that Māra is sometimes confounded with Īśvara or Maheśvara, because of his role as the enemy of Buddhism, and also because the Chinese translation of his other name, Vaśavartin, i.e., Zizai-tian, is the same as the translation of the name Īśvara. And more generally speaking, Māra is more or less confounded (in some Japanese texts) with the greatest deities of the Buddhist heavenly hierarchy (of Brahmanic origin), such as Mahābrahmā or Maheśvara.

In some of the Japanese texts mentioning the myth of King Māra of the Sixth Heaven, he gives the creator god of Japan a contract in which he warrants the continuity of the Japanese imperial dynasty (because the latter promises to ward off Buddhism in the new country); it is said that this is the origin of the Divine Seal (shinshi), one of the Three Divine Treasures of the Imperial Dynasty (sanshu jingi). Thus, the Japanese kingship is guaranteed by a contract made between Māra and its creator god. On the other hand, there are some texts in which Izanagi himself is identified with Īśāna (another name of Mahesvara), and through him, with Māra (because Īśāna is considered as the King of the Sixth Heaven). Some texts belonging to the early medieval Shinto-Buddhist ideology reveal that certain deities of Brahmanic origin have a very important role, in some cases even being described as the primordial god of creation. In some literary sources the "Path of Māra" (Ma-dō) is represented as a special path of destiny where the monks of immoral behavior, who still have magical power because of their practice, will be born again. There are even some powerful lay persons who, before dying of resentment, have wished to be born again in the "Path of Māra" with the intent of getting their revenge on the spite which they had been the object of.

Thus, the figure of Māra in the Japanese medieval imaginaire appears as a being having a supreme magical power, even if from the moral point of view, he represents evil — we would even say that his power comes from his evilness. The myth of the creation of Japan in which King Māra intervenes belongs to the literature commonly called "Medieval (chūsei) Nihon-gi," that is to say, a loose set of mythical texts which reinterpret and re-invent (often in Buddhist allegorical terms) the stories of classical Japanese mythology. By connecting Māra with the origin of Japan, our myth tries to stress the magically powerful nature of this country and its imperial dynasty.