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Paper short abstract

The mid-Heian kanbun anthology Honchō monzui has been described as a collection of “model texts” meant for imitation by court bureaucrats, but various aspects of that scholarly narrative are problematic. This paper proposes reading the work as a vision of Heian Sinitic cultural history writ large.

Paper long abstract

Honchō monzui (The literary essence of our court, ca. 1066) is, by the established account, “a repository of model pieces featuring genres that an educated Heian man needed to master in order to participate in court life, perform duties within the court bureaucracy, or draft texts for patrons of religious ceremonies” (Cam. Hist. J. Lit., 188). In other words, scholars consider the anthology the province of a particular class of kanbun writer, the bunjin, its contents having been compiled for the explicit purpose of imitation and internalisation.

Indeed, having been compiled by a Court Academy professor, Honchō monzui was certainly the product of the Heian bunjin class, and its contents would go on to influence many later writers. In this paper, however, I will question the collection’s conceived role as reference text within the bunjin paradigm. Instead, I will argue that it can more fruitfully be read as a cultural model, not for bunjin alone, but as a vision of Heian culture at large.

To do so, I will first dismantle several of the assumptions that underlie the “model text” paradigm. These include issues with Honchō monzui’s reception; presumptions about the documentary vs. the literary, the utilitarian vs. the aesthetic; the nature of imitation and the use of model texts in East Asian literary culture. I will then shift our attention to a number of the anthology’s marginal genres and texts whose presence scholars frequently explain biographically – “pieces that fit [the anthologer’s] wits – from regretful and reclusive to parodic and graphic” (ibid.), but that cannot cogently be read as writing models for kanbun bureaucrats.

I will conclude by arguing that although Honchō monzui may have been used as a model for writing, what it models is something larger: namely, the cultured world of mon (wen 文) as it appeared to its compiler. This text therefore offers more than textual templates, and instead of reduction to utility and toolkit, Honchō monzui deserves a more engaged and sympathetic reading to gain a glimpse at the mid-Heian kanbun world whose cultural realities it enshrines.

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Paper short abstract

The paper will focus on the Tuqiu fu (Tuqiu, 977) a rhapsody composed by Prince Kaneakira (914–987) around 977. Written in the wake of the most authentic Chinese tradition, this outstanding piece of literature is a political protest made by a high representative of the middle Heian ruling elite.

Paper long abstract

The first book of the Honchō monzui (The Literary Essence of Our Court, 1058-1065?) opens with fifteen fu (rhapsodies) composed in a period ranging from the ninth to the tenth century. All of them show a symbolic alignment with Chinese civilization, both in style and contents. It has already been clarified that part of the legacy associated with the fu is its use as a form of sociopolitical protest, such as the theme of the loyal minister who has been unjustly exiled by the ruler or those in power at the court, rather than receiving the promotion and respect which he truly deserves. This aspect is clearly revealed in particular in the Tuqiu fu (Tuqiu, 977) by Prince Kaneakira (914–987), a powerful text of political criticism unique not only in the literary landscape of the 10th century but in all classical Japanese literature. “Unjustly removed by those in power”, as he writes referring to Fujiwara family, Kaneakira denounces the misconduct of ministers usurping the sovereign power, and announce his retirement form service, adopting the Taoist way to express his protest and showing an attitude similar to that of a Chinese literatus in his same condition. Kaneakira reclusion is by no means a “literary divertissement” proposed as the intellectual repertoire of a scholar-official, nor can be regarded simply as another of the Honchō monzui “model texts”; it is, on the contrary, a moral exigency. Not only in literature but also in the real life, Kaneakira embodies the model of the virtuous man celebrated in Chinese tradition, where reclusion was a pattern of disengagement from political corruption very often expressed through Taoist literary rhetoric. Thanks to this work, which brought him undisputed fame until the dawn of the 19th century, Prince Kaneakira embodied in the eyes of his contemporaries and posterity the ideal figure of a Confucian scholar and official, both for the stylistic excellence of his writings and the consistency of his conduct.

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This presentation will aim, through a careful examination of the various catalogues of the Shinpuku-ji libraries, at reconstituting the backdrop of kanbun literacy against which the Shōmon-ki was written.

Paper long abstract

The Shōmon-ki (Chronicle of Taira no Masakado's) is a relatively long hentai-kanbun text narrating Masakado's short-lived uprising in the Eastern provinces around the years 939-940.

It was presumably written between the end of the Xth and the beginning of the XIth century, possibly by a monk, as suggested by Hoshino Hisashi as early as 1890. The Shōmon-ki has been passed down to us through two manuscripts, the most extensive one being that preserved by the Shinpuku-ji, copied in 1099 and rediscovered in the late XVIIIth century.

This shingon temple was founded in 1324 in the Nakajima district of Owari province (in nowadays Gifu Prefecture) and was later moved to Nagoya in 1612. As a repository of sacred and literary texts, it has occupied a prominent position in the transmission of manuscripts from the premodern corpus, a position it owes to its role as a tangisho (a center for training Buddhist monks), attested since 1337, and to the skill with which the temple's abbots maintained close ties to Capital elites and to temples in Nara (such as the Tōdai-ji-tōnan-in).

The Shinpuku-ji library collections, which have become a topic of renewed academic interest with the extensive publishing of catalogues in the 2000s, offer us an insight into the variety of kanbun material which made up the Sinitic literacy of Medieval monks : the library was stacked with Tang and Song works of poetry and dictionaries (Hanlin-xueshi-ji, Diaoyu-ji), Japanese works of Sinitic poetry (Honchō-monzui), composition manuals (Sakumon-daitai, Bunpō-shō, Kuchizusami) as well as texts written in more vernacularized forms of Sinitic (such as the 988 Owari-gebumi).

This presentation will aim, through a careful examination of the various catalogues, at reconstituting the backdrop of kanbun literacy against which the Shōmon-ki was written. It will show how wide-spread kanbun literacy was and attempt to rethink the interconnection between elite and non-elite, central and peripheric, religious and worldly realms of Sinitic writing.

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Paper short abstract

By examining ganmon 願文 (prayer or vow texts) written for socially obscure and anonymous patrons during the late Heian period, this paper expands the social history of literary kanbun to include women, low-ranking noblemen in military and provincial service, and others.

Paper long abstract

Names carry power. That truism may not be universal, but it profoundly influences the study of Japanese literature and history. And for good reason: names allow us to adduce the physical, social, and temporal locations of our sources. This paper, however, turns away from familiar, name-based canons of importance to explore the methodological provocations and affordances of anonymity. By examining late-Heian prayer or vow texts (ganmon 願文) written for socially obscure and anonymous patrons, it seeks to expand the social history of literary kanbun.

Ganmon enjoyed literary prestige throughout the Heian period; they also exerted considerable social reach. Although most surviving examples were written by aristocratic men of letters, ganmon were commissioned for ritual use in Buddhist offering rites by a wide range of sponsors—female and male, lay and ordained, common and royal, obscure and famous. In fact, the largest extant corpus of such texts, Ōe no Masafusa’s 大江匡房 Gōtotoku nagon ganmonshū 江都督納言願文集 (Collected prayers by the Ōe governor-councilor, hereafter GGS), includes compositions written not only for emperors and regents but also for nuns, minor aristocrats in provincial service, and at least one commoner. Moreover, Masafusa composed approximately 10% of the GGS’s 120-plus texts for patrons whose names are lost to history because they were deemed of lesser social consequence.

Combining elements of distant and close reading, this paper defines a set of ganmon commissioned by obscure and anonymous sponsors and then analyzes them to sketch out the low-status side of the GGS’s social world. In addition to developing an aggregate view of these texts, their investments, and their sponsors, the discussion also employs telling examples to illustrate the literary and social force of individual ganmon. Looking away from the court and attending to sponsors rather than writers, this project redirects and expands our understanding of who participated in the production and use of literary kanbun, how, and why.