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Paper Reliquaries: Calligraphy and Mourning in Japanese Buddhist Death Rituals
Halle O’Neal
While a fading practice today, handwritten letters in medieval Japan were the primary form of communication between long-separated lovers, parents unlikely to reunite with their children, and distant friends, artists, and poets. In this rich epistolary culture, letters – reused, recycled, and reframed – figured prominently in Buddhist memorial rituals. With the death of a loved one, family members gathered the dead’s letters and transcribed sacred scripture on their surface, transforming the original missive into a letter sutra (shosokukyo). Adorning these scrolls with gold, silver, and indigo dyes, women were the first to make memorial palimpsests. Indeed, they invented a wider cultural practice in which mourners tempered grief by transforming the everyday traces of loved ones into potent objects. This talk explores the creative methods deployed by women in coping with death and loss, the ephemerality and afterlives of letters, paper fragmentation via reuse and recycling, and the haptic engagement with layered manuscripts.
Halle O’Neal is a Reader in Japanese Buddhist art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She serves as chair of The Art Bulletin and sits on the editorial board of Art in Translation. She is the author of Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art (Harvard Asia Center Press 2018), editor of Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures (Ars Orientalis 2023), and recent recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and an ACLS Ho Family Foundation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, during which time she researched her current monograph project, “Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Mourning in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts.”
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