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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the nature of literacy seen in Sezoku genbun 世俗諺文and other collections of kanbun-based sayings and idioms compiled in mid-Heian to early Kamakura Japan, from the perspective of adaptation from kanbun knowledge into vernacular language.

Paper long abstract

Even within contemporary Japanese, there are many words originally adopted from kanbun sources – but how did they come to be absorbed into the Japanese language? In Heian and Kamakura-era Japan, scholars compiled literary phrasebooks of distinctive sayings and idioms from kanbun sources – from Minamoto no Tamenori’s Sezoku genbun (世俗諺文, 1007 preface) to early medieval examples like Fujiwara no Yoshitsune（1169-1206）’s Gyokkan hishō 玉函秘抄、Fujiwara no Takanori（1158-1233）’s Meibunshō 明文抄、and Sugawara no Tamenaga（1158-1246）’s Kanreishō 管蠡抄. These texts directly reflect the kind of literacy considered necessary at the time, revealing the process of transforming kanbun knowledge into vernacular Japanese expressions.

In this paper, I will first consider the connections between phrases collected in Sezoku genbun as ‘sayings’ (諺) and the kanbun texts cited as their sources, focusing on the way that some phrases become ‘sayings’ directly as kanbun expressions while others are first adapted into a different form from the kanbun original. I will then turn to early Kamakura-era literary phrasebooks, which began to incorporate new information, for example from text editions newly imported from Song China and from Qunshu zhiyao 群書治要, a collection of classical phrases with an emphasis on politics and governance compiled in 631 by the order of Tang Emperor Taizong. Reading marks, which appear on manuscripts of Qunshu zhiyao and of literary phrasebooks from Gyokkan hishō onward, allow us to see how phrases drawn from kanbun sources were being read and studied as Japanese; this was also the historical moment when full vernacular translations of kanbun sources, like Sugawara no Tamenaga’s Kana jōgan seiyō 仮名貞観政要, began to appear. Through the lens of literary phrasebooks, I will explore the scholarly activity informing the creation of vernacular Japanese writing based on kanbun kundoku, which would serve as an important written style from that point onward through to the modern era.