“When the soul was floating free, it was called a hitodama, and it was imagined as being round with a tail, like a tadpole,” Koyama notes. The soul regularly detached itself from the body before returning, but if it could not come back, that meant the person was dead. Koyama says that in ancient Japan, as in China, people were thought of as being composed of a physical body and a soul. They were differentiated from malicious spirits like mononoke.
In whichever case, they were unable to curse people, and the word frequently appeared in the context of memorial services. Through the medieval period, yūrei was used to refer to souls, or sometimes the departed in general. A Tang disciple who learned from him in China and followed him when he returned to Japan copied out the 600 volumes of the Daihannyakyō (Great Wisdom Sutra) to mark the first anniversary of Genbō’s death, as part of a prayer in which he described Genbō’s soul as a yūrei. In 745, he was exiled to Kyūshū, and he died the following year. Although deeply trusted by Emperor Shōmu, he lost influence with the rise to power of Fujiwara no Nakamaro. Genbō was a learned priest who had traveled to Tang China. “While it was Zeami who created the idea of a yūrei visible to the living, the word first appears in writing in 747 in a prayer by a disciple of the Buddhist priest Genbō, imploring that he attain Buddhahood. However, the religious historian Koyama Satoko says that it has earlier origins. The word is commonly said to have been an invention of the nō drama pioneer Zeami (1363–1443). In ancient and medieval Japan, when there was considerable “commerce” between the people of this world and spirits, the word yūrei typically referred to the souls of the dead, who neither showed themselves nor enacted curses. Yūrei have only been considered frightening since the early modern era. The Japanese word yūrei conjures up an image today of a spiteful ghost, but its meaning has changed considerably over the centuries.
0 kommentar(er)
