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ecosophia
As a slightly early solstice gift this year I received, from a friend who spent several months in Japan, a short Japanese book (in the classic accordion-folded variety) which contains instructions on the practice of Kuji-In, the nine mudras or hand seals that play a central role in most traditions of Japanese occultism. (Done in sequence, they fill exactly the same role that a banishing ritual has in Western magic.) It's a charming little document, and the only disadvantage with it is that I don't read Japanese. That's a disadvantage, in turn, because the Kuji-In are a classic bit of multicultural magic that deserve more distribution outside Japan than they've had. The nine characters on which the Kuji-In are based come from a book by the Taoist alchemist Ko Hung; the mudras themselves are Buddhist in origin; the Kuji-In are assigned by Buddhist practitioners to esoteric Buddhist deities, by Shinto practitioners to Shinto kami, by practitioners of Japanese planetary magic to the seven planets and the two lunar nodes, and so on. So they're symbolically very flexible.
I learned one way of doing them some time ago, but more information would be very welcome. That being the case, it occurs to me that I have readers who are fluent in Japanese. Is anyone potentially willing to translate the text if I email scans? It's only 23 pages long, and they're small pages with relatively large print on them...
***I've just discovered that there's a copy of the document online in the library of the Diet, Japan's equivalent of the Library of Congress. It can be found here. The copy I have has slightly different illustrations but the text appears to be the same.***
