Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to apprehend the process of identification of medieval Zen vis-à-vis premodern Chinese Chan through the Short Collection of Kūge's Daily Thoughts, a record of daily notes written in classical Chinese by the monk Gidō Shūshin, one of the central figures of Five Mountains Zen.

Paper long abstract:

The practice of keeping private journals emerges as a major literary tradition as early as the Heian period, one of the main forms of which is that known today as kanbun nikki 漢文日記, or “day-to-day notes in classical Chinese,” written mostly by male elites and having a public scope. Like their aristocratic and warrior counterparts, Zen monks from the medieval period onwards also resorted to this foreign language, which was prestigious yet arduous, in order to meticulously record day by day the administrative and religious affairs of the monastery, their personal spiritual practice, and various miscellaneous literary encounters.

Appreciated by modern research for their valuable content relating to the political history of the shogunate and the social history of the Zen school, these sources will be considered here from a new angle. As is well known, the monks who wrote these notes held important positions in the Five Mountains (Gozan 五山), namely the large monasteries under shogunal protection that stood at the top of the religious hierarchy. A homonymous system (Wushan 五山) established in the Chan school in China during the Song and Yuan dynasties being at the origin of these institutions, the Zen kanbun nikki are imbued with the traces of Wushan, its illustrious figures, sacred places, monastic way of life, discourses of orthodoxy, etc. The imaginary of Chinese Chan, as well as the identity-consciousness of the Japanese authors, are thus our focus here, for it was these indigenous interpretations and reinventions that would go on to decide the deployment of later Zen as effectively as the one and only "authentic" Chan.