Kasuga, the Deer, and the Separation of 1868

Kasuga Taisha was founded as the shrine of the Fujiwara, the family that supplied empresses and ministers for centuries. Its principal deity is said to have come from Kashima in the east riding a white deer, which is why the deer that wander the park and the shrine approach have been treated as messengers of the god and protected for a thousand years. Thousands of stone and bronze lanterns line the paths, given by donors over the centuries and lit twice a year.

Beside it stands Kofuku-ji, the Fujiwara temple, and the pairing is the point. Medieval Japanese religion worked on the understanding that the kami of a place were local manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, an arrangement given theoretical form as original ground and traces left behind. Kasuga and Kofuku-ji were administered together for most of their history, monks served at the shrine, and painted mandalas of Kasuga show the shrine buildings in the landscape with the corresponding buddhas above them.

That arrangement was broken by government order. In 1868 the new Meiji administration commanded the separation of kami from buddhas, expelling Buddhist clergy from shrines, removing Buddhist images and titles, and setting off a wave of destruction of temple property that the order had not explicitly demanded but did nothing to restrain. Kofuku-ji lost its lands, its monks were laicised and its five storey pagoda was offered for sale. The two institutions are separate today, and the thousand year synthesis they embodied has to be reconstructed from what survives.