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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.