Chigo Icons: Representations of Sacred and Sexualized Male Youths in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Abstract

The twelfth through fifteenth centuries in Japan saw the development of new iconographies of Buddhist divinities in the guise of chigo, or sacred male youths who lived and worked in monastic settings serving senior Buddhist monks often including the provision of sexual favors for high-ranking members of the clergy. While paintings of these figures have often been associated with the fourteenth century rise in monk-chigo romance tales and the invention of sex-based Buddhist rituals later in the fifteenth century, this dissertation examines the development of these new chigo variants of Buddhist divinities as engaging with a variety of meanings beyond sex, and harnessed broader symbolic associations of youths to serve political, memorial and promotional needs for various Buddhist institutions. This dissertation critiques the assumption that visual, literary and ritual works surrounding chigo solely indicate the monks’ sexual desire for youths, and instead explores three specific types of youthful iconographies of Buddhist divinities—specifically, Monju, Kūkai and Kannon—each of which developed independently and engages with different symbolic understandings of youth. Despite the shared appellation of “chigo,” these icons do not always depict figures sartorially or tonsorially marked as chigo, as the naming of these works is almost always the result of modern art historical scholarship that broadly understood the term to designate a youthful variant of a particular Buddhist divinity and not necessarily as a specific historical identity and social rank. This confusion has similarly obfuscated the differences between how and why these different iconographies developed and has couched these figures in the sexual associations with chigo that later became prevalent in scholarship. Drawing from gender/sexuality theory, textual and visual analysis, as well as historiography, this project reconstructs contexts for these works that have been largely overlooked in studies on chigo as well as in art history. First, this project explores how monk-chigo sexual practices related to the broader context of male-male sex in pre-modern Japan and articulates the boundaries of what was considered sexual activity between males and the status of male-male sex within Buddhism. Next, it traces the development of Chigo Monju icons as a combination of pre-existing Chinese iconographies of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī manifesting on Mount Wutai with images of the kami of Wakamiya of Kasuga shrine in Nara. It then examines images of Chigo Daishi icons as emblematic pictorial biographies of Kūkai that highlight the belief in achieving buddhahood in a single lifetime. The final chapter examines three handscrolls featuring Kannon’s manifestations as a chigo, arguing that these tales emphasize the salvific efficacy of sculptural icons housed at Kokawa-dera, Bodai-in and Ishiyama-dera. The works examined in this dissertation point to the broader symbolic uses chigo had in medieval Japanese religious traditions beyond their association with sexual practices. It is the first in-depth consideration of chigo icons and provides a counterpoint to existing text-based scholarship on chigo and charts the changing understandings of these works from the medieval period to the current day.