"This study addresses the relationship between the veneration of Buddha relics and the appropriation of power in early medieval Japan. Focusing on the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, it analyzes the ways in which relics and the wish-fulfilling jewels constructed of relics functioned as material media for the interactions of Buddhist clerics, the imperial family, lay aristocrats, women in the imperial and Fujiwara lineages, and warrior society."--BOOK JACKET.