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- Convenor:
-
Ryan Hintzman
(Yale University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Location:
- Auditorium 5 Jeanne Weimer
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel considers literary devotional and oracular texts (primarily uta, kanshi and ganmon) as efficacious votive objects that mediate between humans and divinities; the panel also thinks about votive practices at the interstices of literature, religion, and material culture.
Long Abstract:
This panel considers literary devotional texts (primarily uta and ganmon) as efficacious votive objects that mediate between humans and divinities; the panel also thinks about votive practices at the interstices of literature, religion, and material culture.
In language adapted from the Shijing commentarial tradition, Tsurayuki’s “Kana preface” asserts that uta “moves the gods and demons, invisible to human eyes, to deep feeling” (aware to omowase). This familiar statement nevertheless poses a challenge to poetics: to whom, and how, is the poem addressed? What is the nature and origin of poetic language, and how does poetry imagine the loci and mechanisms of its efficacity? How is human feeling contained within a poem, and how does this medium produce further effects in the world of visible things? What do poems and other poetic writings such as ganmon share with other practices of prayer and devotion?
The panel’s two key terms offer particular angles to approach these questions. “Votive” asks how poems and prayer texts work as flexible material media to register and represent human desires and imagination in efficacious forms that might move the deities, in an act of compassion (aware), to alter reality. The “votive” object is tasked, as Georges Didi-Huberman has suggested, with joining the generic and the formulaic with the absolutely particular: the desires of a particular subject who articulates their prayer as yet another example in a long chain of similar devotional offerings. “Occasion,” on the other hand, prompts a consideration of the act of textual production as an ensemble of practices, techniques, and tactics that respond to real disequilibrium in the inner and outer worlds of the writer. Moving beyond “context,” “occasion” also asks how these texts situate themselves as particular “cases” within ongoing histories and models of votive activity.
The panel builds on recent efforts in Japanese scholarship to consider the long history of the practice of offering poems to temples and shrines (hōnō waka 奉納和歌) and on recent attempts to think of Japanese literary production in and as religious and material practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Ryan Hintzman (Yale University)
Paper short abstract:
Thinking with and through examples from the 9th through 15th centuries, this paper discusses votive waka as efficacious objects produced on and for particular “emergent occasions.” I develop an interdisciplinary conceptual vocabulary for the lyrical, occasional poetics of devotion.
Paper long abstract:
This paper works to situate and theorize the particular history and poetics of votive waka within a comparative, interdisciplinary framework. Drawing examples from the long history of Japanese poetry offered to deities, I argue that waka are distinguished by their specifically literary ability to incorporate efficacious and affecting forms of language within their brief compass—kagura, prayers, incantations, intertexts—and as objective repositories or reliquaries in which human energies (kokoro) might be stored up and repurposed to work in and through some ongoing situation.
Taking a cue from the English poet John Donne, I develop the idea of the “emergent occasion,” a temporal category that describes the urgent and disorienting force of a phenomenon that makes itself felt from somewhere beyond the control of the individual subject, perhaps in the realm of the body—illness, eros, the precariousness of travel—and of the social: isolation, mourning, exile, and frustrated ambition. I track poets who turn to waka as they are “overfilled with feeling” (omohi-amari). I therefore describe the “votive occasion” as a special case of the emergent: as a set of strategies deployed to invoke and charm the deities through the incantatory power of poetic language, to make new vows or remind the deities of their existing obligations in the world, and to direct the attention of the deities toward specific occasions and circumstances that require intervention.
These features of waka poetics invite comparison to other votive practices, Japanese and otherwise. As the art historian Christopher Wood (writing about medieval European as well as Mexican votive portraits) has suggested, “the subject matter of the ex voto is the transformation of the time of emergency back into everyday time.” Georges Didi-Huberman has likewise written that the votive object gives shape to “psychic” rather than historical or social time. Putting these and other art historians in conversation with the Japanese tradition’s own schemas for thinking about lyric poetry, and making use of Thomas Greene’s classic work on poetry as charm and incantation, I ask how, in various senses, votive waka give “form” to the emergencies of inner life.
Edward Kamens (Yale University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will build upon the panel’s conception of “the votive occasion” with specific examples from the Classical Japanese waka corpus. Poems offered to Buddhas, kami, spirits of the living and the dead and more will be interpreted as votive productions with long, if unwitnessed, afterlives.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will build upon the panel’s general conception and theorization of “the votive occasion” as a trans-cultural, trans-literary and trans-medial phenomenon with specific examples from the Classical Japanese waka corpus. In some ways, it would be tempting to argue that all waka arise from and record votive occasions. In doing so, I would avoid the problematic term and notion of kotodama (given its limited use in the classical corpus itself), but would recognize that the foundations of uta, and waka, are in spoken and sung charms and spells, cajoling seen and unseen occult energies. Then, given the manner in which, across the ages, waka poets approached their creative opportunities and tasks, we see and hear how every waka makes a reverent gesture to its predecessors and successors—or, now and then, an irreverent one that nevertheless acknowledges its inheritance and its place in a continuum of the wringing of changes within familiar contours. However, in this paper I will confine the discussion to examples of waka composed as votive offerings in specifically religious contexts: as Buddhist devotional verses, contemplations and transformed appropriations of scripture, prayerful intercessions for the deceased, verse articulations in praise of deities whether kami, Buddhas, or both, and the like. I will suggest that the chanted songs and inscribed screen poems presented in the Daijōe since very early times and continuing into the present qualify as “votive” in that their figural schemes and modes of address are calibrated so as to please the natural/divine forces that order the realm and ensure its prosperity. Other examples will be drawn from Daisaiin Senshi’s Hosshin wakashū (early 11th century); Saigyō’s Mimosusogawa utaawase and Miyagawa utaawase (late 12th century) and various works by Fujiwara no Teika, Jien and other late-Heian/early Kamakura-period poets. An important question in each case will be: what becomes of the materiality as well as the metaphysical energy produced in such occasions? Where do the poems go? Who hears, sees, or reads, or possesses them in their afterlives, in what forms, by what means, and do their intended positive effects persist?
Tae Hirano (Seikei University)
Paper short abstract:
The omikuji (fortunes or oracles) found today at temples throughout Japan are based on sets of oracular verses attributed to Avalokiteśvara (Kannon) that took shape in thirteenth-century China. In this presentation, I discuss how these omikuji were received and took root in Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The omikuji (fortunes/oracular verses) drawn at temples and shrines are oracles from the kami or Buddhas. These oracles are written as waka (Japanese poems) or kanshi (Sinitic verse). In this presentation, I focus on a set of oracular verses attributed to Avalokiteśvara (Kannon) known as Tenjiku reisen . By the fifteenth century, these oracles had been transmitted from China to Japan, where they circulated widely during the Edo period. These texts were printed and circulated in numerous editions and with various commentaries. In comparing these oracle books, it becomes clear that, while the texts of Kannon’s oracular verses themselves did not change, the interpretive apparatus and accompanying illustrations changed significantly over time. These books record detailed instructions as to how one should recite the Kannon-gyō, chant Kannon mantras, and read out prayer texts (ganmon) before drawing a fortune. By examining these materials, we can understand why and how humans needed and made use of divine oracles, as well as the practices through which they received and interpreted them.
Heather Blair (Indiana University)
Paper short abstract:
Arguing that both literature and devotion are fundamentally social, this paper analyzes relationships of clientage and worship in Buddhist prayer texts (ganmon) commissioned by lower-ranking noblemen from the noted Heian man of letters Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111).
Paper long abstract:
Far from resting in a zone of representation, both literature and devotion in fact create and sustain social relationships. To argue that point, this paper explores how Buddhist prayer texts (ganmon) composed during the Heian period enacted relationships among humans, buddhas, and gods. More specifically, it examines several ganmon commissioned by lower-ranking noblemen from the well-known man of letters Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111) in the years around 1100. In each case, the sponsor put his prayer to ritual use in consecrating a buddha hall he had just built. But as this paper shows, these men’s devotional projects, which were already at once ritual, literary, and institutional, also served complex relational purposes. On the one hand, through transfer of merit and symbolic action, they aimed to establish or affirm relations of clientage between a particular sponsor and Retired Emperor Shirakawa (1053–1129). On the other, through gestures of prayer and offering, they sought to sustain protective, sanctifying relationships with local gods and more or less universal Buddhist figures. By analyzing patterns of clientage and devotion as they intersected on the stage of the “votive occasion,” this paper expands the reach of the social to embrace the divine and shows prayer to be both literary and relational.