“If the cause was a mononoke, a priest would pray using, for example, mudras and mantras to harness supernatural powers to reveal the spirit’s identity and drive it out by getting it to possess a medium called a yorimashi. First, the yin-yang masters would use divination to ascertain the cause of the illness, which determined the treatment method. In the tenth century, when aristocrats were ill, yin-yang masters, doctors, and priests would cooperate to cure them. While onryō may cause great harm to society as a whole, the victims of mononoke tend to be individuals or their relatives. Souls that cannot move on after death become mononoke, approaching people they feel resentment toward, and making them sick or even killing them. Koyama explains that the word mononoke emerged around the middle of the tenth century to mean either spirits of the dead whose identity is unknown, or the sense of their presence. Famous examples include Sugawara no Michizane and Taira no Masakado, who died untimely deaths.” Possession and Disease Spirits thought to cause plague, natural disaster, or other such large-scale calamities were feared as onryō, and people tried to console and pacify them. “When souls could not return to their bodies, they might be fortunate enough to be reborn in the Pure Land, but delusions or earthly attachments that persisted at the time of death could lead to them wandering the world and causing harm. While people had great respect for ancestors, by today’s standards they showed little interest in their bones. ![]() Even Fujiwara no Michinaga, the most powerful man of his age, did not have a named grave, and the graves of the Fujiwaras were not properly maintained. “Noble families had graveyards, but they did not visit them and make offerings. “The bodies of commoners were simply exposed to the elements, while aristocrats and priests were often cremated,” Koyama says. Once the soul had parted, people did not attach much value to the “shell” of the corpse or remains. Ancestral spirits were really believed to be protecting their descendants.”Ī hitodama illustrated in the 1715 encyclopedia Wakan sansai zue (Japanese-Chinese Illustrated Assemblage of the Three Components of the Universe). Ancient spirits were also seen as having powers that humans did not have, and as being almost kami or gods. “Yin-yang masters performed rituals invoking the dead to bring the soul back to the body. “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.
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