Multiple Choice: Justifications for Rulership around the Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800.

Multiple Choice: Justifications for Rulership around the Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800.

Herman Ooms - Professor, History Department, University of California at Los Angeles

Thursday, May 8, 2008 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Room 200, Old Art Gallery See map
56 High Street
New Haven, CT 6510

Political ideology in ancient Japan was not limited to divine imperial ancestry as spelled out in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Mytho-history constituted only one phase or layer of multiple ways of symbolizing Yamato’s new ruling authority; and vertical sacralization was only half of its message. Posthumous names for rulers also reveal alternate, patterned ways in which individual reigns were conceived and represented. Daoist symbols were used; some rulers presented themselves as servants of the Buddha. Finally, the new palace-cities of Fujiwara-kyō and Heijō-kyō were designed to give spatial expression to the nature of politico-religious rule. This paper analyzes the plurality of these symbolics centered on the Tenmu dynasty.

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