Professor of Buddhist Studies Pamela Winfield Presents at International Japanese Religions Conference
After serving as the Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies at McGill University in the Fall of 2024, Winfield was invited back to Montreal, Canada on Oct. 23-24, 2025 for the 6th Annual Premodern Japanese Religions Conference, hosted by McGill鈥檚 School of Religious Studies with support from the Japan Foundation and Bukky艒 Dend艒 Ky艒kai. She joined 20 junior and senior scholars from European, Japanese, Ivy League, and other select institutions to explore the conference theme of 鈥淭he Sounds and Colours of Japanese Rites.鈥
Winfield鈥檚 paper, entitled 鈥淔rom the Misai-e to the Mishuh艒: 鈥楳aking Sense鈥 of Ritual Structures in Heian, Japan,鈥 examined the evolution of imperial state-protecting New Year鈥檚 rites beginning in the early ninth century. The pre-existing Misai-e ceremony took place in the imperial palace鈥檚 large public Daigokuden Hall and focused solely on sutra recitation and analysis, but after 835, a concurrent Mishuh艒 ritual was inaugurated in a new private Shingon鈥檌n chapel near the emperor鈥檚 residence that involved all the senses.
This latter secretive Buddhist rite required vibrantly colored images of mandalas and protector deities (sight), chanted mantras and Sanskrit prayers (sound), incense offerings and smoky fire ceremonies (smell) and altar objects and ritual implements (touch). Moreover, the esoteric Buddhist patriarch K奴kai (784-835) metaphorically likened these sensational elements to the flavor of medicinal ghee (taste), which, he claimed, would protect and preserve the emperor鈥檚 body, and by extension, the larger body politic.
By recovering the embodied, lived experiences of pre-modern Buddhist and Shint艒 practitioners, the English- and Japanese-language papers of this conference contributed to the current trend in Religious Studies that investigates the role of sensory perception in religious experience.