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Throughout the premodern era, many Japanese created representations of India and of India’s relations to Japan. References to India (often referred to with its Buddhist name, Tenjiku) can be found in a wide variety of texts, including origin narratives about deities, sacred places, professions and professional tools. A striking aspect of the Japanese imagination about India is that many sources claim that significant aspects of Japan and Japanese culture originated in India: mountains flying from India to Japan, Japanese kami being reincarnations of Indian people, professional tools coming in from India; even some samurai clans claimed that they were carrying out in Japan the struggle opposing the devas to the asuras (of course, on the side of the former). It goes without saying that most of this was largely imaginary and owed very little to actual interactions. In fact, a very few people from India are known to have ever reached Japan, and we have no certain information about any Japanese ever reaching India until the sixteenth century. Thus, Japanese knowledge about India was essentially based on the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s (ca. 602–664) account of his travels there in the seventh century, and on additional information scattered in the Buddhist canon. Considering this lack of direct communication, the fascination of the Japanese for India is even more striking. I have elsewhere proposed the term “Indianization” to describe the impact of Indian culture to Japan – which goes beyond more or less imaginary origins. For instance, knowledge of Sanskrit was influential in the developing of the kana syllabaries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Indian narrative elements concurred in the development of classical and medieval Japanese literature; knowledge of political theories and of the caste system contributed to the organization of premodern Japanese society; and Indian ideas about the sacred, not limited to Buddhism, contributed to the development of Japanese religiosity.

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7. In the Footprints of the Buddha: Ceylon and the Quest for the Origin of Buddhism in Early Modern Japan – A Minor Episode in the History of the Japanese Imagination of India