On April 12, 2018, we (Yuanpu Ma, Amanda Michael, Ian Troost, Joseph Weiss) conducted a video interview with Dr. Vyjayanthi Selinger and discussed many things, including but not limited to the role of women in the The Tale of the Heike, Buddhism used as a terror tool, and the imperial sword.
Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. She was born in India and got her bachelor's degree Jawaharlal Nehru University. She went on to move to the United States where she earned her master’s degree at Harvard and her Ph.D. at Cornell. She is now a scholar in Japanese culture and literature, publishing books and making presentations in both the United States and Japan. Her research is focused on the depictions of conflict in literature on medieval Japan. Her book Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Culture in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order is about how the birth of the shogunate resulting from the Genpei War is described in Japanese literary works, particularly The Tale of the Heike, and how those works used symbolic logic to grant legitimacy to the new form of government and maintain order. She is also interested in the cross-cultural flows between India and Japan, and she is currently working on a project titled “Transforming the Ramayana: The Chaste Sita in Hobutsushū and Beyond” which explores this topic. Furthermore, she is currently working on another book called The Law in Letters: The Legal Imagination of Medieval Japanese Literature investigating how medieval Japanese literature portrays legal disputes.
Q: What led you into studying Japanese and Japanese culture?
A: I was 8 years old and my father was transferred from India to Japan. So I spend 3 years of my childhood there. I went to International school, I didn’t speak any Japanese, so in collage I studied Japanese as my major in India. Then as I moved to the U.S. for graduate school, I had two amazing mentors who led me the direction to medieval literature.
Q: Do you see any similarities in Japanese and Indian literature?
A: That is very interesting because what they share is a Buddhist cultural canon. The Indian Buddha, sutras, around the 10th century were translated into Chinese and from there they moved to Japan. These stories became very mobile once translated and generated more and more stories. As soon as wood block printing was available as a technology, they started printed it and that made it move even faster.
Q: What other connections do you see between Japan and India if there are many?
A: Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism. They were also traveled from China to Japan.
Q: Do you think the women feel desire, and somehow could harm the men in the Tale of the Heike?
A: The Tale of the Heike, you often have dutiful wives who are bidding farewell, so desire is out of the question. What you have instead, is dutiful wives who promise to pray for the spirits of their dying or exiled husbands. This is one of the reasons why the Heike is given to new wives as a text for, “this is how you should be”. The only character who has desire built into it, is Giō. She initially begins as a figure of sexual desire, then ends as a figure of religious desire.
Q: What is the difference between present day Buddhism and it during when the Tale of the Heike was written and even during the Genpei War?
A: It’s similar in the way that we would ask “is there a difference between Christianity and that of the past?” For instance, in medieval England, the church was intimately the state of authority – it reigned the king; it blessed the king; the king had to consult with them. The same can be said about medieval Japan, that Buddhism was an armed state of authority
Q: Do you think Buddhism, as an arm of the state, led to corruption at all?
A: The monks at Hiei certainly use Buddhism as a terror tool. We often think Buddhism as a non-violent religion, there’s lots of interesting scholarship coming out on Buddhism, at what point did it get rebranded as a non-violent religion?
Q: Do you think some of the [imperial] sword stories after the Tale of the Heike, could have acted as propaganda?
A: In the sense that they vested authority with the Shoguns? Yes. But sword stories are so diverse; it’s not just about the imperial sword and what happened to it, it’s about various swords that are passed down warrior families. So it’s a huge matrix of sword stories that are collectively constructing the samurai as keepers of peace.
Q: What exactly are you doing now while you’re in Japan?
A: On Monday, I travel to Kyoto, to talk about why there is no blood in the Tale of the Heike. It’s a pretty violent tale, but there are no bloody deaths. It’s a kind of puzzle, because war tales in China and Europe are quite bloody, even earlier and later war tales in Japan get bloodier. But the Heike avoids depicting blood coming out of the wounded body; the only part that the Heike depicts blood coming out is the forehead. I looked at the database of medieval documents, a kind of a global search for blood, and blood only ever falls in Medieval Japan from the forehead, because blood had a unique role in Medieval Japan as a polluting substance. You only depict it when it makes blood with a sacred object. The head is an exception because the head is also the most sacred part of the body and where the Buddha resides.