Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan

D. Max Moerman is a scholar of Japanese religion, and this Harvard University Asia Center book is his scholarly study of the Kumano pilgrimage, examining how the mountainous Kumano region of Japan came to be understood as a physically accessible earthly paradise within premodern Japanese Buddhism. Its strength is that Moerman combines textual, art historical and geographic analysis to explain how a specific landscape was religiously constructed as sacred space, rather than treating the pilgrimage route as a simple physical fact. Its limit is that it is focused on Kumano specifically within the premodern period, so a claim about a different Japanese pilgrimage tradition or about Kumano's modern practice needs a separate source.