Nissan Seminar: Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Emotions in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts (Dr Halle O'Neal, Edinburgh)

Convener(s): Professor Hugh Whittaker and Professor Kristi Govella

Though little studied, letter sutras help us recover the stories of love, loss, and mourners turning to the things left behind in the wake of death to make something meaningful. This talk explores Japanese medieval makers who reused and recycled the epistles of their dead for the copying of sacred Buddhist text to create potent palimpsests known as letter sutras – objects that have lurked beneath the surface of Japanese material culture and punctuated the personal histories of famous figures since the ninth century. These manuscripts reveal the efficacy and intimacy of Buddhist ritual and how paper resonated with embodied presence and yet devastating grief. This talk analyses the creative methods deployed by mourners in coping with death and loss, the ephemerality and afterlives of letters, and the haptic engagement with layered manuscripts.

Halle O’Neal is a Reader in Japanese art history and Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her book, Word Embodied (Harvard 2018), explored the intersections of word and image and relics and reliquaries, as well as the performativity of Buddhist texts. Her edited volume, Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures (Ars Orientalis 2023), examined the reuse and recycling of diverse objects across Japanese history. Dr. O’Neal’s forthcoming monograph, Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Emotions in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts (Harvard 2026), analyses the intimate repurposing of handwritten letters for Buddhist death rituals. She has been awarded grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.