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Paper short abstract

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.