Concept · Japanese Buddhist world-picture
Tenjiku
Also known as Tenjiku — India at the centre
Until the nineteenth century educated Japanese Buddhists understood the world through sangoku, the three countries — Tenjiku, Shintan and Honchō, India, China and Japan — and in that scheme India was the centre and Japan the far edge. Tenjiku was where the Buddha had lived and the Law had originated, so it was the source; China was a conduit; Japan was a distant province of the Dharma, arriving last. Very few Japanese ever reached India, which did not weaken the picture at all.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Traditional / narrative attribution
Worth knowing
The scheme produced a name for a person: Tenjiku Tokubei, a seventeenth-century Japanese traveller who got as far as Southeast Asia, was nicknamed India-Tokubei for having gone in roughly the right direction.
Sangoku was a Buddhist scholarly framework rather than a general geography, and it was displaced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by European world maps.
Connections (3)
- Shared sacred geographyXuanzang
Xuanzang's journey is the reason the Japanese picture had a shape. His account of the western regions and his return with hundreds of manuscripts fixed India in East Asian Buddhist geography as the place the Law came from and China as the place it had to be fetched to — and Japanese scholarship inherited that hierarchy at one further remove. In the sangoku scheme, Tenjiku was the centre, Shintan a conduit and Japan the far edge, which is an unusually humble self-placement for a state to sustain for a thousand years.
- TransmissionSanjūsangen-dō, Kyoto
Tenjiku was India as the source of the Law, one of the three countries in the Japanese Buddhist world-picture. Sanjūsangen-dō is where that picture has faces: the twenty-eight attendants standing before the thousand Kannon include Bonten, Taishakuten, Karura and Naraen Kengō — Brahmā, Indra, Garuḍa and Nārāyaṇa — so the country the doctrine came from is represented by its gods, in a row, carved in the thirteenth century.
- AnalogueTaprobanā and Serendib
A country as imagined from a long way off, and wrong in opposite directions. Tenjiku was India known to Japan only as the source of the Law, never visited and never doubted. Taprobanā was Sri Lanka known to the Mediterranean as a place on the maps, visited by traders and still drawn fourteen times too large on the equator. One error came from reverence and the other from arithmetic.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “India–Japan relations” and “Names of India”. Fabio Rambelli on Tenjiku and the sangoku world-view; Bernard Faure, Gods of Medieval Japan (2015).
Open Tenjiku in the repository →