Unearthing Practice: Networked Authenticity and Sutra Interment

In this article, I conduct a case study of sutra-interment rituals conducted at Buzōji in northwestern Kyushu. Placing twelfth-century practices of sutra burial into crea-tive dialogue with twentieth-century practices of sutra excavation, I propose a model of “networked authenticity.” Thinking about authenticity as networked—distributed across several interconnected nodes—rather than as generated from any single point provides a way of valuing devotional attention as sincere and meaningful, even when aspects of specific instances of devotion may be imperfect. This model opens a way to evaluate the efficacy of imagined traditions, rotted manuscripts, looted sites, and apocryphal texts by recognizing them as part of a larger, interconnected web whose strands may span cen-turies. I show that sacred texts are products of social negotiation around meaning and authenticity, not the sources of it.