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’s School of Religious Studies with support from the Japan Foundation and Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai. She joined 20 junior and senior scholars from European, Japanese, Ivy League, and other select institutions to explore the conference theme of “The Sounds and Colours of Japanese Rites.”
Winfield’s paper, entitled “From the Misai-e to the Mishuhō: ‘Making Sense’ of Ritual Structures in Heian, Japan,” examined the evolution of imperial state-protecting New Year’s rites beginning in the early ninth century. The pre-existing Misai-e ceremony took place in the imperial palace’s large public Daigokuden Hall and focused solely on sutra recitation and analysis, but after 835, a concurrent Mishuhō ritual was inaugurated in a new private Shingon’in chapel near the emperor’s 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 Kūkai (784-835) metaphorically likened these sensational elements to the flavor of medicinal ghee (taste), which, he claimed, would protect and preserve the emperor’s body, and by extension, the larger body politic.
By recovering the embodied, lived experiences of pre-modern Buddhist and Shintō 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.