I apologize for the hiatus between Ursa Major stories! This particular post required more research than I anticipated, but thankfully I was given an incredible resource on this particular topic by Prof. Carolyn Wargula of the Williams College Art Department. You’ll also notice that I titled this post “History of Myōken” rather than “Buddhist Mythology” or “Japanese Mythology.” As I was researching Myōken, I found that this deity is particularly elusive, and I could not synthesize the vast range of his mythologies into a single digestible story. Instead, I found the history of Myōken as he moved through various faiths and forms to be particularly interesting, and it seemed to better convey his relationship to the Big Dipper, as well as the significance of the asterism. Still, there was a lot to cover, and the length of this post is a testament to that. I hope I have done this astral deity justice and that you, therefore, find his story as engaging as I did!
As the stars revolved above them, cultures across the Northern Hemisphere were quick to recognize both the apparent immobility of Polaris and the circumpolar nature of Ursa Major. Furthermore, the cyclical position and orientation of the prominent Big Dipper could be used as effective measures of the hour of the night and the time of year. As such, the asterism, along with the North Star, seemed to dictate the very nature of Heaven and Earth itself, and the two have often been deified as panoptic rulers of the motions of the cosmos and the fates of all those who reside in it. A prime example of this phenomenon is Myōken, an astral deity of Buddhist mythology who rose to prominence in medieval Japan. Today, I will focus on the story of this figure as told in The Fluid Pantheon: Gods of Medieval Japan by Bernard Faure.
Despite his cardinal place in Buddhist cosmology, Myōken’s true domain is ambiguous. He is simultaneously a deva, a god of Buddhist canon, and a bodhisattva, a person who has purposely delayed their ascendence to Buddhahood to help others attain enlightenment. There is also no consensus on which astral body he represents, for he has been identified as the North Star, the seven stars of the Big Dipper, or even both. One more specific identification worth mentioning is with the star Alcor, from the Arabic “Al-Khawwār” for “the faint one” (1). This star is a part of a sextuple system with its brighter companion Mizar, from the Arabic “Al-Mi’zar” for “the apron,” one of the seven stars of the Big Dipper (1). The ability to distinguish Alcor from Mizar was an eye test in India, while in China it brought longevity to the viewer. Iconography of this type depicts Myōken as a small deity next to seven deities represented by the asterism’s stars. Worship of these seven deities could be found in various forms in the Vedas, Daoism, and Buddhism. For this week’s theme, we will discuss Myōken as he relates to the Big Dipper as a whole, but the mysterious nature of the deity suggests that how he is represented matters far less than what he symbolizes.
The worship of the Big Dipper as a deity of destiny has been largely tied to royal institutions. Kings and emperors were identified as the asterism itself, for they too occupied a centralized position and dictated the motions of their realms. In China, this was particularly prevalent in Daoism as the Big Dipper came to be associated with the deity Xuanwu, or Zhenwu, the Dark Warrior, who governs the northern cardinal direction. These Daoist rituals spread to Korea, and then immigrants from the peninsula brought them to the Japanese city of Yatsushiro, where a shrine to the deity exists to this day. In Japan, the deity was known as Chintaku Reifujin, and as the governor of the cosmos, he was often depicted as surrounded by seventy-two talismans representing the constellations. By the Heian Period (794 - 1185), Daoist worship of the deities of Big Dipper permeated the imperial courts of China, Korea, and Japan. Concurrently, these rituals were being absorbed into esoteric Buddhism, known in Japan as Mikkyō.
The origins of Myōken in Japan are elusive, but one popular legend relates the deity to the arrival of the Korean prince Imseong, known in Japan as Rinshō Taishi (577 - 657), during the reign of Empress Suiko (r. 593 - 628). The legend goes that in the year 595, a large star fell onto the branch of a pine tree, where it remained for seven days. On the seventh day, that star declared that it was Myōken, and in three years, Prince Rinshō of Paekche would arrive in Japan. Sure enough, in 598, Prince Rinshō landed on Tatara Beach in Suō Province. As such, Myōken, then as Chintaku Reifujin, became incredibly important among Japanese clans of Korean descent.
The Ōuchi Clan was instrumental in the development of Myōken in Japan. Their founder, Ōuchi no Masatsune, claimed direct descent from Prince Rinshō. He transformed Myōken into a deity of Mikkyō, and he even portrayed himself as a reincarnation of the deity. As the Ōuchi Clan grew in power, they attributed their success to the protection of Myōken. That is, of course, until they were defeated. It was the hubris of the clan's ultimate leader, Ōuchi Yoskitaka (1507 - 1551), who boasted of his royal Korean heritage, that reportedly led to Myōken’s forsaking the Ōuchi and their ultimate destruction at the hands of the Mōri Clan.
As the worship of Myōken began to spread throughout Japan, the tradition that arose at Miidera Temple in the city of Ōtsu established itself as the most influential. The temple belongs to the prominent Tendai school of Mikkyō. The priests of Miidera gave Myōken the name Sonjōō, which they claimed to be his true cosmic form. In this form, he was all the deities of the planets, the constellations, the elements, the cardinal directions, and the calendar. They claimed sole knowledge of this higher form of Myōken, which had manifested itself in the water pouring forth from the sacred spring of Miidera.
The tradition of Miidera Temple had a great influence on the Chiba Clan of the Bōso Peninsula. Legend has it that the ancestor of the clan, Taira no Yoshifumi, was close to being defeated by his older brother Kunika in battle when Myōken appeared and rescued him. When Yoshifumi went to express his gratitude to the mysterious deity, he found seven statues and wondered which one had been his savior. A voice told him that it was the statue with the muddy feet, which Yoshifumi found. This image of Myōken became the protector of the Chiba Clan, and it was eventually moved to the site of the present-day Chiba Shrine. As the patron of the Chiba Clan, Myōken’s domain expanded beyond the protection of imperial courts and clans. He became a deity of battle and archery, and he began to resemble the Shinto deity Hachiman, who had previously been the patron of the Chiba.
Like the Ōuchi, the Chiba eventually lost the favor of Myōken and were destroyed in 1590. Before their demise, however, the Chiba converted to Nichiren Buddhism. This led to the Nichiren Buddhists’ adopting the worship of Myōken, which subsequently flourished throughout Japan. Around this time, the Nichiren priest Nikken (1560 - 1635) brought about a reckoning between the Buddhist deity and his Daoist origins. Nikken was allegedly the first to officially equate Myōken with Chintaku Reifujin. Despite the efforts of Daoists to maintain the distinction between the two deities, the perception that they were in fact identical remained popular. This union was only solidified by another Nichiren priest named Nittō Shōnin. In 1630, a vision compelled him to initiate the worship of Myōken under the name Hokushin Sonjōō Genbu-shin, an amalgamation of his Mikkyō name from Miidera Temple and the Japanese version of his original Daoist name, Xuanwu. Nittō Shōnin went on the build the Enjōji Temple on the site of the old Reiganji Temple, where some of the first shrines to Myōken were established. Enjōji Temple became a thriving center of worship to the deity, now with Daoist, Buddhist, and Shinto qualities.
Myōken’s long history and evolution in Japan led to the development of several different iconographic forms depicting the astral deity. In Mikkyō, imagery originating from Miidera Temple became the most popular. In this form, Myōken as Sonjōō is standing on a dragon, as seen in Figure 4, or a cloud, as seen in Figure 1, and the deity can be represented with two to four arms. It was also common for Sonjōō to be encircled by sun and moon disks and to be holding a staff or lotus supporting a diagram of the Big Dipper, as seen in Figure 1. Another form arose as a fusion of Myōken and his Daoist predecessor Xuanwu. In China, Xuanwu evolved from being represented as a tortoise-snake hybrid to a long-haired man riding the same creature. This anthropomorphized version arrived in Japan as Chintaku Reifujin, and for a while, he and Myōken developed independently in the country. Over time, however, they came to be the same, with Myōken mounted on the tortoise-snake hybrid of his Daoist past, as seen in Figure 7. A third representation worth mentioning is the form of Myōken worshipped by the Chiba Clan. This was a unique warrior deity that drew upon Myōken’s Daoist, Buddhist, and even Shinto influences. Brandishing a sword or surrounded by armed acolytes, as in Figures 5 and 6, respectively, the adoption of this image by Nichiren Buddhism led to its being a common representation of Myōken across Japan to this day.
Myōken suffered greatly under the early Meiji Restoration from 1868 to 1873. Fueled by nativism and anti-Buddhist sentiment, the government of Emperor Meiji instituted policies of shinbutsu bunri, or the separation of Shinto and Buddhism (2). Since the introduction to Buddhism in Japan, as evidenced by Myōken’s own history, Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and devas had slowly been combined with kami, deities of Shinto canon. This led to the theory of honji suijaku, where the kami were viewed as the local manifestations of the original bodhisattvas of India (2). Indeed, the Nichiren Buddhists even referred to a number of their own deities as kami (2). Under these new policies, however, strict measures were taken to separate the faiths and “restore” Buddhist temples to Shinto shrines. The Chiba Shrine, which had been dedicated to Myōken as patron of the Chiba Clan, and the Yatsushiro Shrine, where Korean immigrants had first introduced Myōken to Japan, shifted allegiances to the kami Ame no Minakanushi (3). Just like Myōken, this primordial deity dwells at the center of the cosmos, and so the shift was relatively smooth. Iconography for this kami, however, is quite limited, and today festivals celebrated at these temples by Buddhists and Shintoists alike carry the name and imagery of Myōken. (4)
References
http://eos.kokugakuin.ac.jp/modules/xwords/entry.php?entryID=1110
Faure, B. (2016). UNDER THE GAZE OF THE STARS Myōken and the Northern Dipper. The Fluid Pantheon: Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 1, 51 - 114. HONOLULU: University of Hawai'i Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvn7hp
Figures
Faure, B. (2016). UNDER THE GAZE OF THE STARS Myōken and the Northern Dipper. The Fluid Pantheon: Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 1, 51 - 114. HONOLULU: University of Hawai'i Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvn7hp
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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