The Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley invites you to join us online for the following event:
Sacred Secrets: Networks of Secret Knowledge in Japanese Religions
March 3 – 4, 2023 | David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Featured Speaker: Susan B. Klein, University of California, Irvine
Speakers: Abe Yasurō, (Ryūkoku University); Anna Andreeva, (Ghent University, Belgium); Heather Blair, (Indiana University Bloomington); Mark L. Blum, (University of California, Berkeley); William M. Bodiford, (University of California, Los Angeles); Clark Van Doren Chilson, (University of Pittsburgh); Paul Groner, (University of Virginia); Itō Satoshi, (Ibaraki University); Kikuchi Hiroki, (The University Tōkyō); D. Max Moerman, (Barnard College); Michaela Mross, (Stanford University); Fabio Rambelli, (University of California, Santa Barbara); Marta Sanvido, (University of California, Berkeley); Unno Keisuke, (National Institute of Japanese Literature); Yoneda Mariko, (Tottori University)
Moderator: Robert H. Sharf, University of California, Berkeley
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Website: https://ieas.berkeley.edu/sacredsecrets
Hybrid Event | Registration for Zoom participants required
Zoom Registration Day 1 | Zoom Registration Day 2
For more than four centuries, the history of Japanese religions has been dominated by secrecy. Secret texts circulated in every group regardless of their affiliation or social status, showing the porosity and pervasiveness of secrecy. Why and how did secrecy become such a central component of religious life? Although works on secrecy abound in the field of European and Tantra studies, the enormous body of Japanese secret works – many of which are recently discovered – has received relatively little attention, casting a shadow on a fundamental aspect of medieval and early modern Japanese religions.
This symposium brings together scholars working on a wide range of topics in the context of Japanese religions to discuss secrecy from different perspectives and methodologies. The aim of this event is to draw attention to the role of secrecy and better illuminate the dynamics underlying the process of “secretization,” the mobility of secrecy, as well as the factors that marked the decline of the culture of secrecy. More broadly, the scope of this symposium is to foster a conversation on Japanese religions from a cross-disciplinary perspective to understand the networks and logics that participated in the creation of religious identities during the Japanese age of secrecy.