The Longue Durée of Deathbed Rites

During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.

Anxieties

Behind the idealized imagery of purple clouds, divine music, and the Buddha’s welcoming descent lurked the fears that one’s last moments might not go as hoped. Deathbed ritual manuals and didactic literature warn that correct mental focus at the end might be threatened by excruciating pain, loss of consciousness, or demonic attack. Tales of failed ascetic suicide stress the danger of worldly attachment at the time of death. Bad deaths also had social consequences, whether for surviving relatives who worried about their loved ones’ postmortem fate or disciples whose teacher’s inelegant death might compromise the reputation of their lineage. Evidence suggest that people dealt with anxiety about their own manner of death by adopting advance measures to enhance the likelihood of meeting their last moments in a proper state of mind. These included prayer, prognostication, death rehearsals, and massive, quantifiable acts of merit accumulation, such as chanting a million nenbutsu.

The Beginnings of Deathbed Practice in Japan

Deathbed practices emerged during Japan’s Heian period (794-1185) in connection with growing aspirations for birth after death in a pure land, whether of Amida or of some other buddha or bodhisattva. The ideal of mindful death was stimulated by three seminal events: Yoshishige no Yasutane’s completion of the first Japanese collection of ōjōden, or accounts of men and women said to have been born in Amida Buddha’s realm; the monk Genshin’s authoring of Japan’s first set of instructions for deathbed practice in his Ōjō yōshū; and the formation of the Twenty-Five Samādhi Society, an association of monks committed to assisting one another’s practice at the time of death. Hopes for Amida’s welcoming descent (raigō) and notions of exemplary death leading to birth in the Pure Land, along with corollary fears about falling into the hells, spread through doctrinal developments, religious associations, literature, liturgical performance, songs, and artistic representations.

Introduction

Buddhism in early medieval Japan encompassed multiple discourses, logics, and explanatory frameworks for addressing death. Understanding Buddhism not as a fixed, internally unified system but as a shifting repertoire or “toolkit” of resources makes sense of such tensions and inconsistencies without privileging one element as normative and the others as second-tier accommodations. It also challenges the stance of Buddhist modernism that would dismiss concern with death and the afterlife as a falling away from the Buddha’s putative original focus on the “here and now” and his no-self doctrine. Belief in the power of the last thought to affect one’s postmortem destination is attested in early Indian Buddhist sources. With the rise of the Mahāyāna, especially in China, it was assimilated to aspirations for birth in a pure land (ōjō), such as Amida Buddha’s realm. Daoxuan, Daoshi, and Shandao wrote instructions for deathbed practice that would prove influential in Japan.

Conclusion

William LaFleur has argued that, in existential matters, efforts to solve one problem often generate others: doctrines of karma and rebirth, which premodern Japanese found cognitively satisfying, were also existentially disturbing and prompted strategies for escaping karmic suffering in the six paths, such as aspirations for birth in a pure land. But birth in a pure land required that one die with a focused mind, which in turn encouraged the emergence of deathbed practices and the role of the ritual attendant, ratcheting up the level of anxiety with each new interpretive turn. Despite the fears it generated, people embraced the ideal of dying with “right thoughts” because it made death meaningful. As with our contemporary notions of “death with dignity,” the odds against achieving it did not discourage its pursuit. Especially in a context where fulfillment of the religious life takes place at death, people wanted to die well.

Deathbed Attendants

The role of the zenchishiki or deathbed attendant emerged in early medieval Japan as a distinct area of ritual specialization. Securing in the services of a religious guide who would assist one at the end was a crucial preparatory measure for maximizing one’s chances of a good death. Instructions for deathbed practice detail the responsibilities of these attendants, including nursing and encouraging the terminally ill, interpreting their visions, dispelling demonic hindrances, leading the chanting central to deathbed practice, and chanting on behalf of the dying should they fall unconscious. Courtier diaries and official records offer clues to the identity of monks who served in this capacity. Deathbed attendants tended to be, not official monks (kansō) holding clerical rank but semi-reclusive, ascetic monks (tonseisō) whose status “outside” both lay society and formal temple administration enabled them to manage death pollution and claim special expertise over the liminal realm of dying.

Exemplary Death

Premodern Japanese hagiographies called ōjōden provide a model of ideal death. Persons who are to be born in Pure Land withdraw before dying to a separate room or chapel (mujōin), which helped separate them from worldly attachments (and also protected the living from death pollution). There they lie or sit upright before a buddha image and pass away calmly, chanting the nenbutsu, the Lotus Sutra, or other holy invocations. Afterward, marvelous signs manifest, such as purple clouds or unearthly music. Such signs both inspired and were shaped by Buddhist art and liturgical performances. Since survivors could not know whether the deceased had died with a focused mind or not, conformity to this model was the standard by which a good death was judged as such. Exemplary death was both the cause for achieving birth in the Pure Land and the “proof” that it had been achieved.

A Realm Apart

Aspirations for the Pure Land were often framed in terms of an ascetic ethos of world denial. While not always mirrored in actual practice, normative discourse of “shunning this defiled world and aspiring to the Pure Land” provides a convenient thread to tease out complex thematic strands in how people envisioned the relation of the Pure Land to this present world in terms of cosmology, social relations, and conventional morality. Was the Pure Land close at hand, accessible through nondual insight or by visiting sacred sites such as Tennōji or Mt. Kōya? Or was it far away? Once born there, would one retain one’s personal identity, gender, and human ties? Could evildoers attain birth there (akunin ōjō)? While factors such as age, social location, and individual inclination gave rise to varying interpretations, in the end, the Pure Land was seen as irreducibly “other” and not subject to this-worldly conventions.

Interpreting the Signs

Auspicious signs attesting to particular individuals’ ōjō gave assurance to the bereaved that their dead had indeed achieved the Pure Land. They legitimated the practices of specific religious communities and were also linked to the forming of favorable karmic connections (kechien)—to teachings, persons, places, or objects—deemed able to assist one’s own efforts to achieve ōjō. Signs showed which practitioners, living or dead, were worthy of reverence as objects of kechien. Corporeal signs, such as remarkable preservation of the corpse, helped people to negotiate otherwise incommensurable understandings of death as both defiling and as the moment of encounter with the Buddha. Identifying auspicious signs, often through revelatory dreams, also allowed those concerned to cope with deaths that would otherwise have seemed senseless or tragic by recasting them as instances of ōjō. Since signs could be recognized only by the living, ōjō as a social fact was determined by survivors.