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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.