Battling "Tengu", Battling Conceit: Visualizing Abstraction in "The Tale of the Handcart Priest"

The sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Tale of the Handcart Priest tells of an eccentric Zen practitioner's encounter with the legendary Tarōbō, a tengu of Mt. Atago who is attracted to the priest because of the priest's excessive pride. This article provides a close reading of The Ta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJapanese journal of religious studies Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 275 - 305
Main Author Kimbrough, R. Keller
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Nagoya Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture 01.01.2012
Nanzan University
Subjects
Academic libraries
Buddhism
Carts
Fiction
Handcarts
Historical text analysis
Japanese language
Literary criticism
Medieval history
Noh theater
Priests
Religious studies
Tales
Vehicles
Zen Buddhism
New York
Ann Arbor Michigan
United States > US
Japan
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Summary:The sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Tale of the Handcart Priest tells of an eccentric Zen practitioner's encounter with the legendary Tarōbō, a tengu of Mt. Atago who is attracted to the priest because of the priest's excessive pride. This article provides a close reading of The Tale of the Handcart Priest in its historical and literary context, drawing upon such related works as the noh plays Kuruma-zō and Zegai, the otogizōshi Matsuhime monogatari and Itozakura no monogatari, and the puppet play Shuten Dōji wakazakari. I discuss the significance of tengu, carts, and handcart priests in Japanese textual and pictorial sources from the twelfth through eighteenth centuries, as well as the possibilities for psychological realism in the larger world of medieval Japanese fiction. Taking a psychoanalytic interpretive approach, I argue that in Kuruma-zō sōshi and other medieval and Edo-period literary sources, characters' struggles with tengu can often be read allegorically as externalized depictions of those characters' internal struggles with their own "demons" of conceit.
ISSN:0304-1042
DOI:10.18874/jjrs.39.2.2012.275-305