Michaela Mross Colloqium Talk

Kōshiki 講式 is one of the most important liturgical genres of Japanese Buddhism. It developed in the late tenth century and marks the development of a liturgy in the vernacular language. The history of kōshiki in the Sōtō School starts with its founder Dōgen, who is credited with the composition of a kōshiki for the Sixteen Arhats. Later Sōtō monks composed new liturgical texts in this genre or adopted kōshiki of other traditions. Some of these are still performed at major Sōtō temples. A study of kōshiki can illuminate the importance of music as a central aspect of monastic practice as well as showcase the eclectic nature of Zen rituals.

Michaela Mross is Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow for Japanese Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her PhD in Japanese Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2014 with a thesis on kōshiki (Buddhist ceremonials) in the Sōtō school after having conducted research at the Komazawa University and the Research Institute for Japanese Music Historiography of the Ueno Gakuen University from 2007-2013. From 2013 to 2014, she was research associate (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Georg-August-University Göttingen.