Le saimon des Princes de la Terre à Monobe-Mura (Kōchi)

The saimon of the Princes of the Earth analyzed and translated in this article comes from a poor mountain village, Monobe-mura, on Tosa Island, in Kōchi prefecture, Kami district. It was chosen as the subject of an article honoring the memory of Anna Seidel because of its significance in the history of mythico-ritual representation in Japan. Coming probably from the time of the transition to the modern era (in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), this text shows that the acceptance by the peasant elite of Chinese structural principles of cosmogony and political ideology proceeded hand in hand with an extraordinary wealth of mythico-ritual creativity. The text under consideration was apparently compiled by local ritual masters, tayū, who were inspired by the Japanese version of the legend of Pan K'ou (Banko) in which this figure was identified with the deity Dokkū of the ommyōdō and the god Kōjin, who occupies a central place in various religious currents emerging from medieval civilization. The original nature of this saimon lies in the way it presents a theory of ritual as the basis of the socio-cosmic order; (a) Pan K'ou and his five sons, as the King and Princes of the Earth, give shape to both space and time, especially the morphology of the chief's house and the kagura dances that recapitulate the history of the creation of Japan told in the saimon; (b) the ancient kagura pattern called that of the iwato-biraki, the "opening of the grotto," is given a new sense, with the hot/cold syndrome representing the yin/yang balance that controls solar energy, dividing the political and natural order; (c) the polarity between political chiefs and ritual masters, is presented as homologous to that between exoteric and esoteric practice, with the local priestly caste thus holding the keys to peace among men and among the five cosmic agents; (d) mastery of the teaching allows the achievement, by means of ritual, of the incarnation of the originally undifferentiated cosmic energy through the "royal" individual and the head of the agnatic family on the one hand, and, through its secret double, the guardian deity of esoterism on the other. Banko is the primordial model revealing this possibility, that is to say, the passage from chaos to a diacritical hierarchical order.