- 著者
-
佐藤 弘夫
- 出版者
- リトン
- 雑誌
- 死生学年報
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.11, pp.53-69, 2015-03-31
From the 14th century, Japanese people experienced an enormous shift in terms of intellectual history. The idea of “the other world,” which during the early part of the medieval period had been overpowering reality, went through a rapid process of decline. While a wave of secularization swept society as a whole, the image of a far away Pure Land as the place for one’s rebirth after death faded among people, and the view that this present world was the only reality, began to spread. As a result, peace for dead people was no longer found in setting off for a distant Pure Land, but in abiding in a specific spot in this world, waiting for periodic visits by descendants and listening to the chanting of sutras.The formation of a general social notion according to which the dead abided in their graves meant the rise of the belief that in the afterlife, one would also be able to keep an eye on the daily lives of one’s loved ones from inside the grave. The feeling of “resting under the sod” shared by modern people developed after this cosmological shift, gradually spreading throughout early modern Japanese society. These days, as the notion of a person’s death occurring at a specific point in time demonstrates, people think there is a clear line to be drawn between life and death. Most people nowadays have a general image of someone passing from the world of the living to that of the dead more or less in an instant. However this understanding which might now be thought to have been so familiar to people in the middle ages, is entirely peculiar to the modern and contemporary periods of human history.