page_title: Honji suijaku
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Honji suijaku / History
caption_attribution_description: A Detail of a Kasuga Mandala showing some "kami" and their Buddha equivalents (honji suijaku)
context_page_description: The term honji suijaku or honchi suijaku in Japanese religious terminology refers to a theory widely accepted until the Meiji period according to which Indian Buddhist deities choose to appear in Japan as native kami to more easily convert and save the Japanese. The theory states that some kami are local manifestations of Buddhist deities. The two entities form an indivisible whole called gongen and in theory should have equal standing, but this was not always the case. In the early Nara period, for example, the honji was considered more important and only later did the two come to be regarded as equals. During the late Kamakura period it was even proposed that the kami were the original deities and the buddhas their manifestations.
  The theory was never systematized but was nonetheless very pervasive and very influential. It is considered the keystone of the shinbutsu-shūgō edifice. Honji suijaku has often been seen as similar to interpretatio Romana,
  a mode of comparison promoted in antiquity by scholars such as Tacitus who argued that "barbarian" gods were just the foreign manifestations of Roman or Greek deities.
context_section_description: Early Buddhist monks did not doubt the existence of kami but saw them as inferior to their buddhas. Hindu deities had had the same reception: They were thought of as non-illuminated and prisoners of saṃsāra. Buddhist claims of superiority, however, encountered resistance; monks tried to overcome it by deliberately integrating kami in their system. Japanese Buddhists themselves wanted to somehow give the kami equal status. Several strategies to do this were developed and employed, and one of them was the honji suijaku theory.
  The expression was originally developed in China and used by Tendai Buddhists to distinguish an absolute truth from its historical manifestation (for example, the eternal Buddha from the historical Buddha, or the absolute Dharma from its historical forms, the first being the honji, the second the suijaku). The term makes its first appearance with this meaning in the Eizan Daishiden, a text believed to have been written in 825. The honji suijaku theory proper later applied it to buddhas and kami, with its first use within this context dated to 901, when the author of the Sandai Jitsuroku says that "mahasattvas (buddhas and bodhisattvas) manifest themselves at times as kings and at times as kami." The dichotomy was applied to deities only in Japan and not, for example, in China.
  A different but equivalent explanation, the idea that Buddhist deities choose not to show themselves as they are, but manifest themselves as kami, was expressed in a poetic form with the expression wakō dōjin (和光同塵), which meant that to assist sentient beings, deities "dimmed their radiance and became identical to the dust of the profane world." Their brightness would otherwise be such to destroy mere mortals.
  In the 10th and 11th centuries there are numerous examples of Buddhist deities and kami pairings: The deities are usually Kannon, Yakushi, Amida or Shaka Nyorai. The association between them was usually made after a dream or revelation made to a famous monk, later recorded in a temple's or shrine's records. By then, kami in Japan were universally understood to be the form taken by buddhas to save human beings, that is, local manifestations of universal buddhas. Around the beginning of the Kamakura period the pairings had become solidly codified in large temples or shrines. The frequency of the practice is attested by the kakebotoke (懸仏), or "hanging buddhas," found in many large shrines—metal mirrors that carry on the front the effigy of the shrine's kami and on the rear the relative Buddhist deity. The name shows that they are usually hung from a shrine's outer wall.
  As the theory gradually spread around the country, the concept of gongen ("provisional manifestation", defined as a Buddha that chooses to appear to the Japanese as a kami) evolved. One of the first examples of gongen is Hie's famous Sannō Gongen (山王権現). Under the influence of Tendai Buddhism and Shugendō, the gongen concept was adapted, for example, to religious beliefs tied to Mount Iwaki, a volcano, so that female kami Kuniyasutamahime became associated with Jūichimen Kannon Bosatsu (eleven-faced Kannon), kami Ōkuninushi with Yakushi Nyorai, and Kunitokotachi no Mikoto with Amida Nyorai.
caption: A mandala showing Buddhist deities and their kami counterparts
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