Located in the southeast of Yamato Basin, Hasedera is a famous mountain temple in Japan. This paper focuses on Hasedera to study the relationship between religion and literature. Many kinds of activities happen around temples. In their studies on temples, scholars have often singled out distinct aspects of temple activities, such as history of Buddhism, temple art, historical incidents, and literary associations. However, activities in temples are too closely connected to one another to be looked at separately. So lately in Japan, we do not think it enough to persist only in our own separate fields of study. For example, a careful examination of texts written in Hasedera during the Kamakura era, such as Hasedera Genki, Hasedera Engimon, and Hasedera Missoki, will reveal a close and complex relationship among these texts despite their differences in contents. The emphasis on the dynamics points to abandoning the old method of subdividing the objects so that we may better apppreciate religious literature in its multifarious manifestations. Focusing on Gods of Hasedera, I therefore explore the literary world in Hasedera by considering the combination of Shinto with Buddhism.
