VOLUME 3: INTERACTION OF KNOWLEDGE

2020

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 Editorial Board
Chief Editor
Didier Davin Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese
ディディエ・ダヴァン Literature

Editors
Saitō Maori Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature
齋藤真麻理

Unno Keisuke Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature

海野 圭介

Koida Tomoko Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese

恋田 知子 Literature

Yamamoto Yoshitaka Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese

山本 嘉孝 Literature

Jeffrey Knott Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Japanese

ジェフリー・ノット Literature

Advisory Board
Jean-Noël Robert Professor at the Collège de France
ジャン＝ノエル・ロベール

X. Jie Yang Professor at the University of Calgary

楊 暁捷

Shimazaki Satoko Associate Professor at the University of California Los

嶋崎 聡子 Angeles

Michael Watson Professor at Meiji Gakuin University

マイケル・ワトソン

Araki Hiroshi Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese

荒木 浩 Studies
 Contents
Article
Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia
Jean-Noël Robert
Professor at the Collège de France   1
Article
A Forgotten Aesop:
Shiba Kōkan, European Emblems, and Aesopian Fable
Reception in Late Edo Japan
Ivo Smits
Professor at Leiden University  23
Article
From “Pointing Straight to the Human Mind” to “Pointing
Round to the Human Mind”
Yoshizawa Katsuhiro
Professor at Hanazono University
Translated by Jeffrey Knott  51
Article
The kōan in Japanese Society at the Beginning of the Early
Modern Period: Kana hōgo and kanna-zen
Didier Davin
Associate Professor at the National Institute
of Japanese Literature   67
Column
The March of Dancing Skeletons: Zen Vernacular-sermon
Picture Scrolls and Their Development
Koida Tomoko
Associate Professor at the National Institute
of Japanese Literature
Translated by Jeffrey Knott  85
Article
Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa Fans:
Considering “Applied Knowledge” in the Early Modern
Period
Suzuki Ken’ichi
Professor at Gakushuin University
Translated by Jeffrey Knott   91
Article
Medieval Buddhism and Music: Musical Notation and
the Recordability of the Voice
Inose Chihiro
Research Fellow at Nagoya University
Translated by Jeffrey Knott 113
Contributors

Submission Guidelines
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 1–22
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

Dōgen’s Religious Discourse

and Hieroglossia
Jean-Noël Robert

Introduction
There are at least two difficulties for a correct understanding of this article.1
The first one, clearly, is the precise meaning of the cryptic word “hieroglossia,”2 a
term surely opaque to anybody who comes across it for the first time. It is a
word that I partially coined myself,3 and my only hope is that the pedantic temer-
ity of this neologism will not obscure the fact that the underlying reality it tries
to evoke is sufficiently interesting for such a coinage to be not only forgiven, but
also used as a workable concept.
The second difficulty is the choice I made to focus on the writings of Dōgen
道元 (1200–1253). I do realize how impudent it is for someone who has mainly
studied the teachings of Tendai 天台 Buddhism, Japanese Buddhist poetry (par-
ticularly on the Lotus Sutra), and scholastic Buddhist debates (rongi 論義) to ad-
dress as towering a figure of Japanese Buddhism as Dōgen-zenji, who cannot be
approached without a life of study. He who perpetrates such a deed will embody
perfectly a famous line from an old French movie: “You can know a fool by the
fact that he would dare anything.”
Therefore, before entering upon the main topic, I deem it to be both a cour-
tesy and a duty to explain these two points.

1. Hieroglossia
a. Attempt at a Definition
I shall start with an explanation of “hieroglossia.” A literal analysis of the word’s

1
But first of all, I would like to express my warmest thanks to my colleagues at the National
Institute of Japanese Literature—an institution to which I have been very much indebted for a
long time—for giving me so kindly a unique opportunity to express my views before an audience
of specialists far more knowledgeable than I am in matters concerning Dōgen.
2
I proposed two possible Japanese translations: seigo-ron 聖語論 or seigo-sei 聖語制, either of
which should also be viable in Chinese. The former translation is perhaps clearer.
3
It derives directly from an adjective in Ancient Greek. The substantive hieroglossia has been
already used, in 1975, by a scholar in sociolinguistics, Conrad M. B. Brann (1925–2014), albeit in quite
a different sense. See my La hiéroglossie japonaise (Paris: Collège de France/Fayard, 2012), p. 61, n.1.

1
2 Robert

Greek roots would give something like “a (theory) of sacred language”—a Sino-
Japanese translation like seigo-ron 聖語論 would make this sense even more ex-
plicit—but to avoid any misunderstanding, it is necessary to point out, from the
start, that I do not intend by any means to assert that there exists anything that
could be called a “sacred tongue” in its very essence. Rather, in coining this new
word, I hoped to describe a remarkable phenomenon in linguistic and cultural
history that has taken place in various cultures, starting in Mesopotamia more
than four thousand years ago and spreading to both ends of Eurasia. It is simply
a useful term that had previously been missing in philological studies,4 and it cer-
tainly does not purport to assert that some languages—for instance Sanskrit,
Latin, Tibetan, etc.—are superior to others (which could be called “vulgar” or
“vernacular” as compared to the former).
In other words, what I call hieroglossia is similar in many ways to the “cosmopol-
itan language” (world language, supranational language) proposed by the Amer-
ican Indianist Sheldon Pollock.5 But in spite of this surface similarity, there is a
fundamental difference in that Prof. Pollock seems to limit the developmental
logic of supranational languages to the political and economic dimensions. I would
like, on the other hand, to emphasize that within the framework of hieroglossia,
the main dynamic force is religion itself. Here “religion” is to be taken not, in a
strict sense, as referring to a set of beliefs and practices formally transmitted, but
rather as indicating some broader dimension, beyond the scope of human activ-
ity, to which is attributed the origin and development of the language that will be
at the center of a given hieroglossia.

b. Some Examples
In order not to sound too abstract, I will give here two concrete and contrast-
ing examples of hieroglossia.
I will start with Arabic as an almost ideal example of a set of linguistic rela-
tionships centered on one language. A quick search on the internet shows that
there are currently in total 26 countries that recognize Arabic as their official lan-
guage. From that point of view, the role of Arabic as a tool for exchange be-
tween modern nations fits perfectly with the concept of a “cosmopolitan lan-
guage.” Yet if we take into account those regions of Eurasia from Albania to
Indonesia to which Islam and the Arabic Koran have spread over the centuries,
it far exceeds the number of countries where Arabic is an official language.
Across Turkey and Iran, Central Asia, all the way to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia,
and Indonesia, Arabic is a sacred language studied in religious schools and used in
daily rituals. It has also been the basis for most of the abstract lexicon of theology,

4
By “philology” here, I mean what in Japanese would be called gengo bunka shi 言語文化史,
a term for which I can find no satisfying equivalent in English or French.
5
See Sheldon Pollock’s master-work The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture,
and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 3

philosophy, art, and literature—that is, for culture in its broadest meaning—in all
the accompanying vernaculars of those parts of the world, which have now
themselves become national languages. If we take the example of Moghul India,
Arabic was the sacred language, and Persian the cosmopolitan language. Persian
was moreover imbued with Arabic vocabulary, which through it spread to Urdu.
Between Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, we thus have an exemplary case of a hiero-
glossic relationship.
On the other hand, another look at the internet will show that there are as
many as 29 countries in the world that use French as an official language, more
even than the number of Arabic-speaking countries, yet as far as I know, there is
no place in the world where French would be considered a sacred language—at
least outside the heads of a few members of the Académie française. Latin instead
held this role until recently.
It is to be emphasized also, and this will be my second example, that in contrast
to a “cosmopolitan language,” hieroglossia occurs not necessarily only between a
number of different languages, but can be shown to exist as well within a single
language over the course of its historical development. A typical example of
such “internal hieroglossia” is Armenian.
Classical Armenian (Grabar), which was born in the fifth century A.D. with the
Armenian translation of the Bible, was used as a written literary language not
only in the liturgy of the Armenian Church, but also in writings by Armenian
theologians, philosophers, and poets up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, a large movement to modernize
(i.e. Europeanize) Armenian culture was started by the monks of the Mekhitarist
Order in Venice and Vienna, who over almost two centuries of tremendous in-
dustry developed a corpus of translations from European languages and linguis-
tic tools for the expression of a modernized worldview, all of which paved the
way for the development of the Modern Armenian language in its western and
eastern forms.
Here we cannot speak of a “cosmopolitan language,” as the hieroglossic rela-
tionship that developed within Armenian culture was one between the revived
classical language and the modern vernaculars, and it was centered on the pres-
tige of the Grabar translation of the Bible.6
It would not be incongruous to compare the literary status of Grabar Arme-
nian to that of Classical Japanese within Japanese cultural history, all the more so
because the replacement of the classical language by the modern one took place
at around the same time.
So let us insist again on the fact that the “sacred language” implied by the word
hieroglossia does not mean that there exists a language intrinsically, essentially, or
ontologically sacred—i.e. one superior when compared against others. It simply

6
See for instance Karekin Sarkissian, A Brief Introduction to Armenian Christian Literature (Ber-
genfield: Michael Barour Publications, 1960).
4 Robert

aims at describing the multi-layered relationship existing between a set of several

languages that may or may not belong to the same cultural area, or even such
a relationship within a given language. In a hieroglossic relationship, a number
of vernacular (or “vulgar”7) languages are gathered around a linguistic center
and model, a model language which can be called sacred, sapiential, or referen-
tial, and which supplies “true” meanings to its surrounding “vulgar” languages.
Although I will avoid as far as possible the use of these words here, within the
frame of hieroglossia I call the “sacred” or “referential” language hierogloss and the
related “vulgar” language laogloss or “language of the people” (nothing to do
with Laotian, as some readers have misunderstood the word).
But the process does not stop here. It is indeed a phenomenon common to
most hieroglossic complexes that the vulgar language will strive to gradually as-
cend to the level of the sacred language over the course of history.8 The vernac-
ulars, originally established as written languages for purposes of commentary
and preaching on those texts and teachings transmitted in the referential lan-
guages, gradually acquire for themselves or adorn themselves with a part of the
latter’s sacredness, falling into what we may call a kind of competitive relation-
ship with the hieroglosses. To give a short and simple example I have often quoted
before, one taken from the Japanese-Chinese sprachbund, which I will deal with
below: through the regular rendering of the Chinese compound myōhō 妙法
(“sublime law”) by the Japanese locution minori 御法 in Japanese Buddhist poems
(shakkyōka 釈教歌), a semantic link was created in Japanese (but not in Chinese)
with the word minori 実り, meaning “fruit” or “harvest,” but also signifying “reality”
or “truth,” given the use of the character jitsu with that sense in Buddhist dogmatics,
especially in Tendai teachings where it refers to the reality of the Lotus Sutra’s
teaching—as opposed to the provisional nature (gon 権) of those teachings found in
previous sutras. Thus the Japanese-language rendering adds to the Chinese original
an important shade of meaning it did not possess before, though that very addi-
tion, albeit in Japanese, is itself fully understandable only by reference to Chinese.
Thus to consider only the “laoglossic” expressions—whether in a religious
context or not—without reference to the hierogloss they derive from, is to expose
oneself to many misunderstandings, or at least to only partial understandings.
As, I hope, the previous examples have shown, the foundations of the hiero-
glossic relationship are mostly religious at the start, or in some cultural areas
philosophical (as in the Greek-Latin case), most often beginning with the trans-
lation of sacred scriptures.

7
“Vulgar” being taken in the old sense of “vernacular,” with the nuance of “distinct from the
Latin language” that was the higher religious and literary means of expression in medieval and
Renaissance Europe.
8
A part of this process is analyzed in Victor Mair’s seminal article, “Buddhism and the Rise of
the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” in The Journal of Asian
Studies 53:3 (Aug. 1994), pp. 707–751.
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 5

Having now very briefly outlined what I mean by hieroglossia, we must naturally
come to ask ourselves how far it applies to the language situation in Japan.

c. Hieroglossia in Japan
Needless to say, the hieroglossic system of Japan is expressed by the relation-
ship between written classical Chinese (kanbun 漢文) and written Classical Japa-
nese (wabun 和文/bungo 文語), the dyad known from very early times as wa-kan
和漢.9 The dual-language structure implied by this locution must be recognized
as the most productive and active force in Japanese cultural history. Yet it must be
said that the religious element underpinning this hieroglossic relationship has not
been sufficiently acknowledged or analyzed amid the growing academic interest
in this phenomenon. If we compare it to closely similar cultural situations in
what I call the Sinoglossic sphere,10 mainly Korea and Vietnam—although there
are many more such cases among what are now called Chinese “cultural minori-
ties”—the main characteristic of the Japanese situation is that at a very early
stage it developed a sophisticated literary process intent on bringing the Japanese
language to the same level of prestige as the Chinese model language, long before
the influence of Western “modernity” exported to Asia its ideas on “national
languages.” Throughout this process, Buddhism played a central role, and not
Buddhism in general but specifically that current within Japanese Buddhism
characterized in modern terms as “assimilation of kami and buddhas” (shinbutsu-
shūgō 神仏習合), and in ancient times encapsulated by the locution honji-suijaku
本地垂迹, or “vestigial manifestations of fundamental states.” We can almost
follow step by step how closely the process of assimilating Japanese deities to
Buddhist entities corresponds to the growing parity of the regional language
(kokugo 国語) with the referential language.
In that long and elaborate linguistic process, a decisive part was played by what
was over the centuries built up through the efforts of literati as the most Japanese
of literary genres. This was the “Japanese poem” or waka 和歌, and within waka,
the subgenre that came to be known as shakkyōka, or “Japanese Buddhist poetry,”
which mediated as an exegetical tool (let us not forget that shaku 釈 is not only
the first character of Śākyamuni’s name in Chinese, but also itself means “explain”
or “comment”) between the Chinese-language Scriptures and the integration
into Japanese of Buddhist teachings.

9
See for instance of late from Ivo Smits, “La dynamique sino-japonaise (wakan) à l’époque de
Heian,” trans. Alban Gautier, Médiévales 72 (Spring 2017). Available on: journals.openedition.org.
10
Within the general category of hieroglossia, what I call Sinoglossia corresponds to the Japanese
locution “cultural area of written Siniticy,” kanbun bunka ken 漢文文化圏, the corresponding ad-
jective being Sinoglossic.
6 Robert

2. Dōgen and the Japanese Language

This lengthy preamble about hieroglossia was no doubt necessary. And now we
must come to the reason why, as little versed as I am in Dōgen lore and Zen
studies in general, I was bold enough to make him the subject of one of my
courses at the Collège de France under the title “Zen Between Two Tongues.”
My prime motivation was the research I did when I had to prepare my inaugu-
ral lecture at the Collège de France in February 2012. This very ritualized first
lecture is a rare chance, given to a newly appointed faculty member, to introduce
to a large audience a comprehensive aperçu of his aims and method. I was looking
a little haphazardly through a variety of materials that would be both to the point
and also not too recondite when I remembered Kawabata Yasunari’s 川端康成
famous Nobel Lecture of December 1968: “Utsukushii Nihon no watashi” 美しい
日本の私, translated by Edward Seidensticker as “Japan the Beautiful and My-
self.”11 It was actually a mention made by Didier Davin in his dissertation on Ikkyū
一休, referring to the importance Kawabata had attributed to the monk in his
acceptance speech, that had inspired me to read it again after many years. And
there, so to speak, the scales fell from my eyes when I discovered the close links
that the Japanese modern novelist had drawn between Buddhism and the aes-
thetics of the Japanese language. Kawabata’s concrete demonstration starts very
abruptly with a direct quotation—absent any commentary—of Dōgen-zenji’s fa-
mous poem:
春は花夏ほととぎす秋は月冬雪さえてすずしかりけり
Flowers in the spring, the cuckoo in summer, the moon in autumn,
and in winter the snow, so clear and cold.12
To make matters more difficult, Kawabata simply gives the mysterious title
Honrai no menmoku 本来の面目 (for which I use the translation “The Original
Face”) without any explanation. It must have been quite a challenge for Seiden-
sticker to translate it, as he seems to vacillate between two alternatives: “Innate
Spirit” (p.74) and “Innate Reality” (p.41). For the fact is that Kawabata, in his
carefully structured speech, both begins and just as abruptly also ends on the
same Dōgen poem, with the laconic conclusion: “Dōgen’s poem on the four sea-
sons is also entitled “The Original Face,” but while he sings the beauty of the
four seasons, it is actually imbued with Zen.”13
There are many quotations from Zen sources in Kawabata’s rich and dense
oration, but what can be seen as the apex of an actually quite elaborate

11
Both versions can be found in Utsukushii Nihon no watashi: sono josetsu 美しい日本の私：その
序説 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1969).
12
In the main I follow Seidensticker’s translation, with some changes. Ibid., p. 6.
道元の四季の歌も「本来の面目」と題されてをりますが、四季の美を歌ひながら、実は強
13

く禅に通じたものでせう. Ibid., p. 36.

 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 7

demonstration comes, towards the end, in a passage from the Life of Myōe
(Myōe-den 明恵伝), written by that monk’s disciple Kikai 喜海 (1178–1251),
relating an extraordinary dialogue between Myōe 明恵 (1173–1252) and the great
poet Saigyō (1118–1190) in which the latter reveals the profound meaning of
his poetry. After enumerating as signs of the four seasons the same words that
will later be used in Dōgen’s own poem, Saigyō goes on to say: “Are not all the
words and sentences ever pronounced indeed ‘words-of-truth’ [shingon 真言, i.e.
“mantra”]? . . . And those poems are the true form of the Thus Come One.”14
In other words waka (Japanese poetry) are effectively shingon, or mantra—an
idea that will later come to be expressed in the well-known formulation waka
soku darani 和歌即陀羅尼. And obviously, for Kawabata, the term “true form of
the Thus Come One” (nyorai no shin no gyōtai 如来の真の形体) in Kikai’s work is
equivalent to Dōgen’s “The Original Face” (honrai no menmoku). Kawabata takes
Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō 密教) and Zen together as the ontological basis of
waka poetry.
Going a step further, the “beautiful Japan” that Kawabata endeavors to explain
to the world is not the beauty of the Japanese landscape and nature, but the
beauty of traditional Japanese culture. For him, however, this culture is not
centered formally on the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏物語), although he
duly considers it to be “the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature,” but on the
Japanese language itself, the yamato-kotoba as displayed in waka poetry.
In my eyes, Kawabata achieved a very convincing demonstration, appealing not
only to Dōgen and Zen Buddhism, but also to Myōe-shōnin, Kegon 華厳, and
Esoteric teachings, and showed it to be in the Japanese language that the basis of
Japanese beauty resides. Yet very few people, inside or outside of Japan, seem to
have understood his ideas. For myself at least, it was a decisive inspiration for
coming back to Dōgen, on whom I had lectured for one or two years long ago.

3. Dōgen and Hieroglossia

How are we to think about the relationship between Dōgen-zenji and hieroglos-
sia? And what need is there, one could ask more shrewdly, to attempt such a re-
flection? The answer to this question is apparent from the structure of Dōgen’s
work and from his linguistic universe, which revolutionized Japanese hieroglossia.15
Up to Dōgen’s time, we can regard the wa-kan relationship as being bi-
dimensional. The hieroglossic network was limited to written classical Chinese
(kanbun, corresponding to Chinese wenyan 文言) for the kan part, and classical

14
読み出すところの言句は皆これ真言にあらずや（中略）この歌即ち如来の真の形体なり.
Ibid., p. 35.
15
One should evoke here Terada Tōru 寺田透 and his book, Dōgen no gengo-uchū 道元の言語宇宙
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), which offers a unique approach to Dōgen from the standpoint
of taking language to be a central element of his oeuvre. “Linguistic universe” or “language
world” here is my translation of Terada’s gengo-uchū.
8 Robert

Japanese (wabun 和文) for the wa part. For Japan as well as for the continent, kanbun
was exclusively a written language, and within Japan, even its oral realization was
purely in classical Japanese. Transmitted by means of education, it was never
used as a spoken language. This literary education was based on a relatively lim-
ited corpus, mainly consisting of the Five Classics, the Literary Anthology (Wen
xuan 文選), the Historical Memoirs (Shiji 史記), etc., a corpus that had become the
common heritage of the whole Sinoglossic sphere. It would not be an overstate-
ment to say that there is as much distance between classical written Chinese and
the many varieties of spoken Chinese (zokugo 俗語 or hakuwa 白話) as between
kanbun and Japanese itself.
In such a bi-dimensional linguistic—or stylistic—context, if we compare him
to his predecessor Eisai 栄西 (1141–1215), who had transmitted Rinzai 臨済
Buddhism to Japan a generation earlier, the linguistic innovation that Dōgen
brought about is remarkable indeed. While Eisai’s classical Chinese style is quite
orthodox, Dōgen introduces a revolutionary element into Sino-Japanese, by
making use in his own “writings” of the sort of colloquial or semi-colloquial
Chinese (zokugo) so conspicuous in Chinese Chan sources and materials from
the Tang dynasty on, especially those of the Song dynasty.
To be sure, a form of colloquial Chinese had been used already in translations
of Indic Buddhist texts from earliest times, creating thus a kind of Chinese Bud-
dhist idiolect, as Professor Stefano Zacchetti recently stated,16 one clearly dis-
tinct from classical Chinese, and duly utilized also in Buddhist texts written in
Chinese by Japanese clerics. This “Buddhistic” Chinese, however, is in no way to
be compared to the wholly alien style of the goroku 語録 literature, where both
grammar and vocabulary are quite different from classical literary style, making
the genre thus almost unintelligible without special study to a reader trained only
in kanbun. One is therefore reasonably led to ask oneself what kind of reader
Dōgen had in mind when he introduced to Japan such an exotic style. Or was
his intent rather to use it only as an idiolect? Yet in that case, why use it in his
teachings?
Here I would risk a comparison with Dōgen’s illustrious Buddhist predeces-
sors. Ever since Saichō 最澄 (767–822) and Kūkai’s 空海 (774–835) time at the
beginning of the ninth century, Japanese monks going to China in search of the
Dharma had often brought back home many religious and cultural rarities that
would enhance their prestige in their own country (shōraimotsu 将来物). Such ob-
jects—be they books, Buddhist images, liturgical tools, etc.—were moreover to-
kens to help establish in Japan the new Buddhist schools whose doctrines these
monks were also bringing back.
The case of Kūkai is especially interesting, as he brought back not only teach-
ings and rituals, but also, so to speak, a new philological legitimacy—which he

At the Paris Symposium “Hiéroglossie IV: La sinoglossie” (held in June 2019), to be pub-
16

lished in the future.

 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 9

displayed in great literary works such as his Bunkyō hifu ron 文鏡秘府論, which he
used for teaching Japanese literati the more subtle aspects of Chinese poetics.
He thus established his place in Japanese cultural history as a master not only of
Esoteric Buddhist teachings but also of the Chinese language, a position that
was considerably enhanced by his theoretical works in what we may call language
philosophy. It should be emphasized, too, that Kūkai’s vast religious and literary
output was exclusively in Chinese and that he never took any account of the Jap-
anese language in his deep reflections on mystical language, though his later
Heian and Kamakura commentators would do that for him.
In a sense, though this is a connection rarely made from this point of view,
Dōgen can be seen as an emulator of Kūkai in his role as linguistic innovator, the
difference between them being that Dōgen was much more radical in his impact.
We can illustrate this by a telling example: the Sōtō 曹洞 Zen that he transmitted
to Japan from Song China has been characterized by the practice of “sitting
meditation,” or zazen, in opposition to Rinzai as the bastion of kōan. But zazen is
by no means an exclusively Zen technical term, appearing already in the Lotus
Sutra several times.17 What is, however, distinctive is that Dōgen exhorts people to
this practice with the slogan shikan taza 只管打坐 (“single-mindedly just sitting”),
which has a distinctive Chinese colloquial flavor and cannot be understood from a
knowledge of kanbun alone. The fact is that Dōgen added a new dimension to the
bi-dimensional wa-kan relationship by giving to colloquial (or pseudo-colloquial)
Chinese, or zokugo, a religious status previously unknown to it, developing
thereby a three-tiered hieroglossic network.
Before him, Japanese monks able to speak Chinese fluently were few. We may
mention among these Saichō’s disciple and successor Gishin 義真 (781–833),
who acted as his interpreter in China; or Ennin 円仁 (794–864), who having
stayed almost ten years in China, acquired a working knowledge of the colloquial
that allowed him to describe the continental society of his time, though language
at that level does not appear in his memoirs. In contrast to the high renown that
Kūkai acquired through his unique knowledge of literary Chinese, a mastery of
the Chinese colloquial was not appreciated in erudite Japanese circles, where it
was considered merely an artisanal skill.
Dōgen’s attitude to the Chinese vernacular was radically different: he chose it
as a tool for practicing and teaching. We must first emphasize that together with
his use of Chinese colloquial speech, Dōgen was also an innovator for his time
in his promotion of the Japanese language as a tool for explicating Buddhism.
One could say that he was preceded in that movement by the Tendai scholiast
and hierarch Jien 慈円 (1155–1225), especially with his best-known work, An Essay
on History (Gukanshō 愚管抄). Nonetheless it is clear, if we read the reasons given
by Jien for choosing to write in Japanese rather than in kanbun, that he did thus in

17
Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭 et al., eds., Taishō shinshū
daizōkyō 大正新脩大蔵経 (Tokyo: Taishō Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–1932), vol. 9, pp. 37b, 45c, 49b.
10 Robert

order to be understood by less sophisticated people—possibly the newly-emergent

rulers of Japan at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Jien was undoubtedly
a master of the Japanese language, but for him its ontological value was to be
found in waka poetry, not in expository prose.
In contrast to Jien, Dōgen, although he never wrote specifically about his
views regarding the Japanese language, made full use of the vernacular (of
course in its classical form—contemporary Japanese as actually spoken was not
put into writing until the sixteenth century) for the purpose of propagating his
teachings, though he did not use it exclusively. Unlike Jien’s Gukanshō, or even
the Tannishō 歎異抄 by Shinran 親鸞 (1173–1262)—which can be seen as the
third main Buddhist work written in Japanese during this period—Dōgen’s mas-
terwork, the Shōbō genzō 正法眼蔵 (collected sermons from 1231 to 1253), pres-
ents the sort of stylistic novelty that marks it as an epoch-making monument,
which I can only compare in linguistic importance, albeit in a totally different
genre and with a totally different literary afterlife, to the Tale of Genji. While Jien
was aware of the novelty of his attempt to write in Japanese about Buddhist
matters and history, we do not find any statement by Dōgen regarding his style,
though he was no doubt conscious of his own audacity in introducing into the
Japanese language a new form of Chinese.
Coming back to Japan after four years of study and practice in Song China
(1223–1227), Dōgen around 1233 began preaching the sermons that would be
collected in the Shōbō genzō, throughout which he employed a unique blend of
Japanese together with words and expressions drawn from spoken Chinese, or
from the pseudo-colloquial that had become the characteristic style of Chan
sources. This was merely ten years after Jien’s An Essay on History. Dōgen made
use of this new Chinese style in his sermons, in the same way that Japanese clerics
preceding him, Jien very much included, had themselves made use of kanbun
locutions. And in the same way that familiar kanbun locutions when employed
within Japanese texts had been tokens or symbols of a scriptural authority, linking
Jien’s new reflections to orthodox Tendai dogmatics, so too did Dōgen’s liberal and
theretofore unheard-of sprinkling of Chinese vernacular and pseudo-vernacular
(zokugo) Chinese locutions serve themselves as linguistic markers of the new teach-
ings he hoped to bring to Japan—and of his own legitimacy as their bearer. At first
glance, there seems to be no connection between the language worlds of these two
Buddhist clerics and thinkers, but was there really no link between them?
I would venture to advance that there was indeed a connection, and that this
was none other than Tendai doctrine itself. Although the matter has practically
never been investigated from the standpoint of language, I would like to make
such an attempt here. After entering religious life at the foot of Mount Hiei un-
der the influence of his uncle Ryōkan 良観, who was a Tendai monk, Dōgen re-
ceived the tonsure at the age of thirteen after some years of practice at Yokawa
横川 under Kōen 公円 (1168−1235), who was then patriarch (zasu 座主) of the
Tendai School—precisely in the very year (1213) during which Dōgen’s own
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 11

distant Kujō-clan 九条 relative, Jien, was also appointed twice to that same eccle-
siastical post. Such a rapid turnover of abbots at Enryaku-ji Temple 延暦寺 is
tellingly indicative of the various internal disturbances caused by the political
turmoil of the time. However, it would be very hard to deny the possibility, and
even the high probability, that Dōgen received direct guidance in waka poetry
from Jien, who in Buddhist poetry (shakkyōka) was the luminary of his time.
This could be viewed at first as a flight of speculative imagination, but these
were decisively formative years for Dōgen, who underwent training with both
the “Mountain Gate” (sanmon 山門) and “Temple Gate” ( jimon 寺門) branches of
the Tendai school—rivals at the time. From the second of these, another of his
relatives, the Monastic Prefect Kōin 公胤僧都 (1145–1216), redirected him to-
ward Kennin-ji Temple 建仁寺, and to the Zen of Eisai. Although Dōgen’s time
spent studying Tendai Buddhist doctrine and practice was relatively short, it
must have left a deep imprint on the young boy’s mind. It should therefore not
be presumed a baseless pursuit to look for any possible influence Jien may have
had on Dōgen, especially in the matter of language.
The best thing would be to take up a concrete example of this possible impact.
A well-known locution describes in four words the characteristics of Mount
Hiei 比叡, the center of the Tendai school, and its main monastery Enryaku-ji:
kan-shitsu ron-hin 寒湿論貧—“cold and wet, debate and poverty.” This emblem-
atic proverb points to the practice of scholastic debate, or rongi 論義, as being the
religious exercise par excellence of the Tendai school, as natural and innate of an
attribute as the monastery’s own climate and social penury. To be an apprentice
in the School was to receive training from an early age in the practice of debate,
which allowed students to deepen their understanding of the most abstruse te-
nets of Tendai teachings. Young Dōgen could not have remained unaffected by
such a fundamental training. It is therefore interesting to find in the sixty-fifth
“case” (kosoku 古則) among the ninety collected in volume 9 of Eihei kōroku
永平広録, the following famous Chinese “enigma” (kōan 公案):
An earthworm is cut into two parts, and the two heads writhe together; yet it is
unclear within which of the heads the Buddha-nature is found.18
After a quatrain by the ninth-century Chan master Changsha Jingcen 長沙景岑,
the Kōroku gives a poem by Dōgen of which we need only quote the first line here:
Trying to debate the Buddha-nature, the two heads are writhing.19
Impossible to ignore here is the light satiric touch in the comparison between
the squirming parts of the earthworm and the bald heads of Tendai scholiasts
engaged in heated debate about one of the most important topics (rondai 論題)

18
蚯蚓斬為両段，両頭俱動，未審，仏性在阿那箇頭. Text in Kagamishima Genryū 鏡島元隆
et al., eds., Dōgen Zenji zenshū 道元禅師全集 (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1999–2013), vol. 12, p. 303.
19
欲論仏性両頭動. Ibid.
12 Robert

in their school’s disputation repertory, the Buddha-nature; yet equally salient here
is the impression that such debates seem to have made on a youthful Dōgen’s
memory. It is probable that only in Japan could this allusion have been under-
stood in its full range. There are other traces besides of the influence of such
rongi in Dōgen’s work, but we must leave them now for another occasion.
Two other fundamental Tendai doctrines must here be presented before going
any further into Dōgen’s poetry.
The first is that of kyōsō hanjaku 教相判釈 (usually abbreviated into kyōhan 教判
or hangyō 判教) the principle of “critical classification of doctrines,” which con-
sists in dividing up the teachings preached by the Buddha over the course of
his lifetime into five periods and eight doctrines (goji hakkyō 五時八教), at the
apex of which is the final, or almost final, revelation of the Lotus Sutra. This first
tenet secures the supreme place of that sutra in Tendai dogmatics. The second
tenet pertains to the exegetical method of the School and is closely linked to
the first: it is the doctrine of “four-fold exegesis” (shishaku-hō 四釈法), which
postulates that any Buddhist scripture, and more specifically the Lotus Sutra,
should be understood according to four ascending levels of reading.20 We shall
only consider here the fourth level, that of kanjin-shaku 観心釈, or “exegesis by
contemplating the mind,” which consists of observing within one’s own mind the
effect induced by a reading of scripture. I have shown elsewhere that, especially
in Jien’s explicative poetry on the Lotus Sutra, the notion of kanjin-shaku is the
underlying raison d’être of the subgenre known as hōmonka 法文歌 or “scriptural
poetry.”
The predominant position of the Lotus Sutra in Japanese culture, independent
of any sectarian divisions, meant that, unlike in the Chinese Chan tradition, the
Rinzai and Sōtō schools never stopped studying it. This is most conspicuous in
Dōgen’s Shōbō genzō, which can be said to be suffused with quotations from the
Lotus Sutra.

4. The Lotus Sutra in Dōgen’s Poetry

Here, however, I would like to examine some examples of the influence of the
Lotus Sutra and its traditional Tendai exegesis on Dōgen, from that collection of
sixty-nine waka poems attributed to him known as the Sanshō-dōei 傘松道詠, or
“Sanshō Poems on the Way” (Sanshō being a name for the site of Dōgen’s Eihei-ji
永平寺 Temple). The collection itself was published only in the eighteenth century,
but an important number of the poems therein were already included in a
fifteenth-century biographical work on Dōgen, the Kenzeiki 建撕記, albeit with
slight textual divergences. It is difficult to vouch for the authenticity of all its
poems, which are reported to have been composed by the Master between 1245

20
These are: (a) innen-jaku 因縁釈, (b) yakkyō-shaku 約教釈, (c) honjaku-shaku 本迹釈, and
(d) kanjin-shaku 観心釈.
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 13

and 1253, the year of his death. Nonetheless, as we will see, some of them are so
surprising from the brush of a Zen monk, yet so typical of a Tendai scholiast, that
their very doctrinal discrepancy may be seen as some token of their authenticity.
It is particularly worthwhile to pay attention to a short series of five poems put
together under the heading “Praise of the Lotus Sutra” (Ei-Hokekyō 詠法華経),
as they are surprisingly close, coming from a Zen master, to the most basic Tendai
dogmatics. For instance, here is poem 30:
四つの馬三つの車にのらぬひとまことの道をいかで知らまし
Those who have never ridden the four horses or the three carts,
How would they ever know the way of reality?21
This verse is typical of the shakkyōka genre and is built entirely on the “doctri-
nal classification” principle of the Tendai school: the “four horses” is a meta-
phor coming from the Agon-gyō 阿含経 (Āgama corpus) and refers to the “teach-
ing of the Three Baskets” (sanzōkyō 三蔵教) as the first and lowest of the Four
Teachings, at the time a synonym for the Lesser Vehicle 小乗 (and the verb noru
乗る, “ride,” as currently written with the same character jō 乗 of course
strengthens the allusion). The reference is equally obvious in the case of the
“three carts,” which refers, needless to say, to the famous parable in chapter 3
(Hiyu-hon 譬喻品) of the Lotus Sutra about the Three Vehicles being superseded
by the transcendental Lotus teaching. This latter is the teaching here called “a
teaching of reality,” or makoto, currently written in that sense with the character
jitsu 実, or minori, as we have seen already. It is therefore the Lotus Sutra itself. The
locution makoto no michi had already been used by Jien frequently in his own Bud-
dhist poetry with the same meaning.22 Thus, in this simply-worded shakkyōka that
Jien himself might well have written, Dōgen reiterates the Tendai dogma of the
four teachings ascending from the “teaching of the Three Baskets” (zō 蔵)—
here represented by the Āgama corpus—to the ultimate truth (en 円) of the Lotus
Sutra, in conformity with Tendai doctrinal summaries. The poem is much more
a Tendai than a Zen verse.
It is indeed a piece so imbued with Tendai teachings that one would be entitled
to suppose Dōgen had composed it well before the year 1245 (to which ostensi-
bly the earliest poems in the collection are dated), and that here we might well
possess some trace of his more youthful, and ingenuous years as a poet. This,
were it not for the fact that the ninth book of his Shōbō genzō has the very locution
“Four Horses” (shime 四馬) as its title, making it difficult to dismiss out of hand
the possibility of a later date, and the intriguing vista such a date would open on a
mature Dōgen’s real position regarding Tendai teachings.

21
Poem 30. Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 et al., eds., Shakkyō kaei zenshū 釈教歌詠全集 (Osaka:
Tōhō Shuppan, 1978), vol. 2, p. 170.
22
See my La Centurie du Lotus (Paris: Collège de France - Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises,
2008), particularly the glossary, s.v. “makoto” and “makoto no michi.”
14 Robert

The same deep and uncomplicated devotion felt by Dōgen toward the Lotus
Sutra is expressed in poem 26, the first of the five:
夜もすがら終日になすのりのみちみなこの經のこゑとこゝろと
All night long, and all day practicing the way of the Law,
everything becomes the sound and the meaning of this sutra.23
We will find the same idea below in two other poems in this series, thus estab-
lishing a coherence in the presentation of the Lotus Sutra within Dōgen’s Japa-
nese poetry, in which the presence of the true Law (shōbō 正法) within the sutra
is strongly emphasized. It would be natural to think that such poems were com-
posed by Dōgen when he was still a teenage apprentice on Mount Hiei, but we
have in volume 10 of the Eihei kōroku a series of fifteen poems on solitary life in
the mountains (sankyo jūgoshu 山居十五首) which likewise reflects a very close de-
votion to the sutra:
幾悅山居尤寂寞 因斯常讀法花經 專精樹下何憎愛 妬矣秋深夜雨聲
How I enjoy the solitude of my mountain dwelling!
It allows me to read ceaselessly the Lotus Sutra.
Single-mindedly under the trees, what then of love or hate?
How I envy the sound of nightly rain in the deep of autumn!24
The beginning of the third line, “single-mindedly under the trees” is a quota-
tion mixing together two sentences from chapter 19 of the Lotus Sutra, where
the locution zazen occurs as well,25 as was noted previously, though linked there
to the practice of reciting the sutra and not to the practice of Sōtō Zen. And the
last line means that the poet would like to read the scripture with as persistent a
regularity as the rain in autumn. It is thus obvious that Dōgen’s devotion was not
limited to his younger years and that it appears in his Chinese-language writings
as well.
Another waka (poem 28) displays the idea of the universality of the Lotus
teaching within the profane world:
此経のこゝろを得れば世の中のうりかふ声ものりを説くなり
For those who have acquired the meaning of that Scripture,
even the world’s voices of buying and selling actually preach the Law.26
All mundane activities are to be seen as preachings of the Dharma in the eyes
of those who have attained a real understanding of the Lotus Sutra. Two further
poems in the series directly allude to the important Tendai dogma of “preaching
of the Law by the inanimate” (mujō-seppō 無情説法). The first of these (poem 27)

23
Poem 26. Shakkyō kaei zenshū (op. cit.), p. 199.
24
Text in Dōgen Zenji zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 13, p. 215.
25
及読誦経法，或在林樹下，専精而坐禅. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (op. cit.), vol. 9, p. 49b.
26
Poem 28. Shakkyō kaei zenshū (op. cit.), p. 169.
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 15

puts animals and inanimate nature together in such preachings of the Lotus
Sutra:
渓のひゞき嶺に鳴くましらたえだえにたゞこの経をと説くとこそきけ
The echo in the valley, the monkey crying on the peak—though haltingly,
as I hear them, they do but preach this Scripture.27
Occurring after this, a second verse (poem 29) suppresses the animate half to
concentrate on the inanimate:
みねの色たにのひゞきもみななから我が釈迦牟尼のこゑと姿と
Figures of the mountains, echoes in the valleys, all as they are
are but the voice and aspect of our lord Śākyamuni.28
The relationship between this poem and the one about the “Original Face”
(honrai no menmoku) is obvious, as is also the link with Jien’s shakkyōka, where the
words koe 声 and kotoba 言葉 (or koto no ha) occur together.29 This link with Jien’s
poetry is moreover an important preliminary to pieces by Dōgen on mujō-seppō,
one that helps us understand Dōgen’s own relationship to Tendai dogmatics.
It is thus all the more surprising, from such a point of view, to find in sermon
46 of the Shōbō genzō the following words about the preaching of the Law by the
inanimate: “To understand, as simpletons do, the rustling of trees or the falling
of leaves as the preaching of the Law by the inanimate, is unworthy of a student
of Buddhism [. . .] Thus to understand plants and stones as the inanimate shows
imperfect doctrine.”30
From such a passage it would seem clear that Dōgen must have held Jien’s po-
etry, where such an understanding of the mujō-seppō dogma is abundantly illus-
trated, to be simplistic. But what about his own waka poetry, where we note the
same doctrine’s presence with our own eyes, unless we choose to disregard that
poetry as spurious? Yet there is no need to impute to him such a contradiction
in poetical statements. We can simply infer that Dōgen as a waka poet did not
feel obliged to follow the same path of thought as in his sermons, and that he
was only yielding to the prevailing poetical discourse as delineated by Jien.

5. Dōgen and Jien

And it is in the light of that Tendai poetic discourse that we must pay attention
to the importance of the term for “word”—kotoba or koto no ha—within the

27
Poem 27. Ibid.
28
Poem 29. Ibid.
29
Cf. for instance poem 40 in La Centurie du Lotus (op. cit.), p. 61.
愚人おもはくは、樹林の鳴条する、葉花の開落するを無情説法と認ずるは、学仏法の漢に
30

あらず（中略）しかあるを、草木瓦礫を認じて無情とするは不遍学なり. Mizuno Yaoko 水野

弥穂子, ed., Shōbō genzō 正法眼蔵 (Iwanami Bunko, 1999), vol. 3, pp. 58–59.
16 Robert

poems of the Sanshō dōei. That importance is made explicit from the first poem
in the collection:
なが月の紅葉の上にゆきふりぬ見るひとたれか言の葉のなき
In the Ninth Month the snow fell on the maple leaves—
of those who contemplate it, who would lack for words?31
It must be noted that here the Kenzeiki version presents a slight divergence, the
last line reading instead: “who would not compose poetry?” (uta wo yomazaran).32
The existence of such a variant only emphasizes the near synonymy between uta
(poem) and kotoba (word/language), as the Japanese poem is considered to be
the mode of expression par excellence of the kotoba, which is also none other than
the Japanese language itself, an idea already visible in the Japanese preface to the
Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 (905) and with greater force later reiterated by Jien.
Moreover, this relationship between uta and kotoba on one side, and the snow
( yuki 雪) on the other, as the condition for the former’s very production, per-
fectly illustrates the meaning of the poem “Honrai no menmoku” or “Original Face.”
The same idea is latent in poem 53 of the Sanshō dōei collection, together there
with the idea of the preaching of the inanimate:
はるかぜに我が言の葉のちりけるを花の歌とや人のみるらん
Dispersed are my words in the spring breeze,
will people see them as poems of flowers?33
Here too, the language points clearly to the link between poetry, the contempla-
tion of nature, and meditation on the Buddha’s words. Irresistibly this idea
makes us think of a poem by Jien written under the heading “Nyoze gamon”
如是我聞, the initial sentence of the Lotus Sutra (and of all other sutras as well):
いはし水は今いふ人のことの葉のさなからうかふなかれなりけり
Mute waters of Iwashimizu, the words of the One now speaking
are indeed but leaves that float thus down the stream.34
In the light of his predecessor Jien’s Buddhist poetry, Dōgen’s own use of
kotoba takes on an importance fully concordant with the kind of complex lin-
guistic process we can perceive in the stylistic and linguistic circumvolutions
of his magnum opus, the Shōbō genzō. It is true that a number of Dōgen scholars
have cast doubt on the authenticity of the Sanshō dōei, but any recognition of

31
Shakkyō kaei zenshū (op. cit.), p. 161.
32
長月ノ紅葉ノ上ニ雪フリヌ見ン人誰カ歌ヲヨマサラン. Kawamura Kōdō 河村孝道, ed.,
Shohon taikō: Eihei kaizan Dōgen Zenji gyōjō, Kenzeiki 諸本対校：永平開山道元禅師行状・建撕記
(Tokyo: Taishūkan, 1975), p. 87.
33
Shakkyō kaei zenshū (op. cit.), p. 175.
34
See Centurie (op. cit.), p. 6.
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 17

the work’s spuriousness would only displace the problem further into the Jap-
anese Sōtō tradition and its perceptions of the role of kotoba in the Master’s
thought.
We can, moreover, find evidence of the importance of kotoba for Dōgen himself,
encrypted into his Chinese language poetry. Let us quote here the entirety of the
verse about the earthworm:
欲論仏性両頭動 風火散時全体寒 生死従来無定主 等閑莫説此言端
Trying to debate the Buddha-nature, the two heads are writhing.
When wind and fire disperse, the whole body is cold.
There has never been a subject to experience birth or death,
So do not prattle idly about these words.35
The last two characters of the original poem, forming together a Sino-Japanese
compound read gontan 言端 by “phonetic reading” or ondoku 音読, can also be
read kotoba by “explicative reading” or kundoku 訓読. Yet the rules for reading
kanshi 漢詩, or Sino-Japanese poetry, would require the word to be here orally
pronounced as gontan, or even as gentan, but surely not as kotoba. It can only be in
the poet’s mind that this Japanese reading was carefully hidden, though by com-
paring this line with Dōgen’s poetry in Japanese, we may safely assume that such
was indeed what he had in mind.

6. A Reexamination of “shinjin datsuraku”

Such a trans-linguistic overlaying of gontan and kotoba may provide a hint for
explaining another famously cryptic utterance of the Master, and for detecting,
so to speak, hieroglossia in the making. In principle, the direction of hieroglossic
influence would mainly be from the “sacred tongue” to the “vulgar tongue,”
from the “hierogloss ” to the “laogloss.” Yet it may happen that an idea or concept
born within the “vulgar language” needs to be transposed into the realm of the
“sacred language” in order to gain authority and circulation. If this sounds too
abstract, let us give Dōgen’s most famous saying as an example.
As is well-known, Dōgen-zenji entered Song China in 1225, attained satori 悟り
(enlightenment) under the guidance of Rujing 如浄, abbot of the Jingde Temple
景徳寺, and then returned to Japan, bringing back with him what he presented
as a new practice founded on that enlightenment, which was also proof of his
legitimacy as bearer to Japan of the lineage of the Sōtō school. This legitimacy
was emphasized by his second-generation disciple Keizan 瑩山 (1268–1325) in
his Denkōroku 伝光録, a history of the transmission of Zen teaching from India
to Japan. The saying that triggered Dōgen’s satori, needless to say, was Rujing’s
utterance: “casting off body and mind” (shinjin datsuraku 身心脱落). According
to Keizan’s narration, Dōgen suddenly achieved “great enlightenment” (daigo 大悟)

35
Dōgen Zenji zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 12, p. 303.
18 Robert

immediately upon hearing Rujing’s words during a sermon. This utterance is

considered to be a kōan, an enigma which not only led Dōgen to his own satori
but also legitimated his place as the fifty-first master of the Sōtō lineage, which
went back to the Buddha Śākyamuni, and as moreover the first Japanese patri-
arch of that lineage.
There have been not a few discussions about not only the meaning, but indeed
even the factuality of Rujing’s words, as it has been pointed out that such an ex-
pression in its entirely can be found nowhere in that master’s works, nor indeed
in Chinese texts more generally. This conspicuous absence has led some scholars
to suppose that Dōgen simply misunderstood Rujing’s Chinese, interpreting in
his own way a slightly different sentence. Although it has been said of late that a
Chinese source has at last been found, I would like to suggest here a completely
different possibility for the origin of what is still an enigma indeed.
Some years before Dōgen’s lifetime the famous wandering hermit (hijiri 聖)
and poet Saigyō, who besides leaving behind a considerable poetical corpus (col-
lected in the Sankashū 山家集) came to feature also as protagonist in a number
of deeply interesting Buddhist narrative collections of the thirteenth century,
inter alia the Saigyō monogatari 西行物語 and the Senjūshō 撰集抄, wherein a number
of his own poems and teachings are inserted between tales of the religious and
the supernatural. We find in these a surprisingly frequent use of the Japanese ex-
pression “discard the body”—mi wo sutsu 身を捨つ36—for instance in the Sankashū:
惜しからぬ身を捨てやらで経る程に長き闇にや又迷ひなん
As long as I go on unable to discard fully a body I care nothing for,
shall I wander ever further in perpetual dark?37
There are other poems as well, but I will quote the following, not from Saigyō’s
own poetry collection but from the Saigyō monogatari:
世[身]を捨つる人はまことに捨つるかは捨てぬひとをぞ捨つるなりけれ
He who discards the world (var.: the body), in truth is that what he discards?
Rather, what is discarded is he who would not discard.38
But especially worthy of note in this context is an episode in book 1 of the
Senjūshō, where a Tendai monk by the name of Zōga 僧賀, harboring doubts
about the efficacy of Tendai practice, goes in pilgrimage to the Ise shrine, where
a deity blesses him with a revelation (jigen 示現) in these words:

36
It is to be noted that although this is a straightforward Japanese reading (kundoku) of the
Chinese locution shashin 捨身 found frequently in Buddhist texts, as in the episode of the Bodhi-
sattva offering his body to feed the tigress (e.g., 捨身飼虎), in Japanese the locution is mainly used
in a figurative sense.
37
Sankashū 山家集 738 (Iwanami Bunko, 1983), p. 115.
38
Poem 137. Kubota Jun 久保田淳 and Yoshino Tomomi 𠮷野朋美, eds., Saigyō zenkashū 西行
全歌集 (Iwanami Bunko, 2013), p. 409. For the variant 身を捨つる, see p. 462.
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 19

道心を発さんと思はば、此身を身とな思そ。
If you want to produce the Bodhi-mind, do not think of this body as a body.39
The interesting part, that directly relating to our main subject, is how Zōga re-
acts upon hearing this revelation: he takes off all his clothes and goes out naked
into a new life. Here it is evident that the expression “to discard the body” refers
not to the physical body of the flesh, but rather to the status expressed by the
clothes, and that therefore this “body” is a synonym of myōri 名利—wealth and
social reputation.
There is an echo of this moral in book 6 of the Senjūshō, where in this case it is
a noble courtier (kuge 公家) receiving a revelation, from the deity Kasuga myōjin
春日明神:
この文の詮には、たゞ心をも心とてなとめそといへる趣とやらん。
The point of this text is the idea that you should not fixate on your mind as
mind.40
Both utterances put together reflect an idea current from Saigyō onward: “the
discarding of body and mind.” Yet these examples, to which we could add many
others taken from the same texts, demonstrate that the expression was taken in
a very typically Japanese sense, wherein “body” refers more to one’s social status
than to one’s physical body.
And we find in the commentary by Keizan in the Denkōroku two very interest-
ing glosses, separated by a few pages, on the same locution shinjin-datsuraku: the
second of these two is a regular kundoku reading: “shinjin mo nuke-otsu” 身心モ
ヌケオツ41 (even the body and mind slip and fall away), but the first is an adap-
tation, based on the locutions we have seen to be current in use in poetry and
narrative from Saigyō onward: “mi wo sute kokoro wo hanaru beshi ” 身ヲステ心ヲ
ハナルべシ42 (one is to discard body and withdraw from mind).
This brings us to an unexpected conclusion: the search for the source of that
foundational formulation shinjin datsuraku, instead of taking us ever deeper into an
elusive quest through Chinese texts, leads us rather to the contemporary language
of Japanese vernacular Buddhism and to kotoba, to the expressive mode of waka
poetry. Dōgen has simply endowed the vernacular with the more respectable-
seeming syntax and vocabulary of Chinese, in order to reimport it into Japanese
Buddhism, adorned now with a new hieroglossic respectability.

39
Kojima Takayuki 小島孝之 and Asami Kazuhiko 浅見和彦, eds., Senjūshō (Tokyo: Ōfūsha,
1985), p. 8.
40
Ibid., p. 177.
41
Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (op. cit.), vol. 82, p. 408c.
42
Ibid., vol. 82, p. 408a.
20 Robert

Conclusion
I have several times witnessed during the year I spent delving into Dōgen’s
language-world at the Collège de France a most gratifying reaction from several
students and listeners who had had for the first time a direct encounter with
Dōgen’s texts. They told me that they had actually felt they were dealing with an
exceptional personality, and truly extraordinary thought. Such feelings are
doubtless not evidence for the objective existence of such qualities, but they also
cannot be simply dismissed. Judging from further exchanges of views with those
students, it seems clear that the main cause of this attraction is none other than
Dōgen’s language itself, an unclassifiable literary phenomenon that was not to be
imitated for centuries, although the Chinese Chan vulgar style he relied upon has
been in continuous use up to the present day in China and can, for example, be
found in Xuyun’s 虚雲 sermons in the twentieth century. The greatest originality
in Dōgen’s masterly handling of this Chinese zokugo is that he succeeded in in-
verting, so to speak, the telltale signs of that Chinese style: while in China it was
intended to be close to the colloquial and thus distinguish itself from the artifi-
cial flavor of a literary Chinese Buddhist style, when transferred into Japanese
text, it became a true hierogloss, that is, a language marking the religious character
of its enunciations. One can even say it became a cryptolect insulating Sōtō Zen
from the rest of the Buddhist world in Japan. While classical Chinese had already
possessed a high hieroglossic status in the wa-kan relationship, the Chinese
zokugo as cleverly handled by Dōgen added a new dimension from the Chinese
language to the Japanese language-world. By doing this, Dōgen went farther
than Jien in achieving the sacralization of Japanese as a Buddhist language. Jien
concentrated all his literary power on the waka as a language-act parallel to the
Chinese poem (kanshi), but did not seem to think too much of Japanese writing
in prose. Dōgen heightened Japanese prose to the level of a religious language in
its own right, through the introduction to Japan of a theretofore unknown aspect
of the Chinese language. His Japanese style is immediately identifiable, if not
readily understandable, and we may rightfully ask ourselves who among his lis-
teners and disciples could have understood his oral utterances. Similarly with the
wholly Chinese-language sermons of the Eihei-kōroku, we may wonder whether
they were read aloud in Japanese or in Chinese, and, if the latter was the case,
whether his Japanese disciples were able to understand him, and whether his
Chinese followers could have understood his Japanese accent. Nor do we know
whether the zokugo in the sermons of the Shōbō genzō were pronounced in Japa-
nese or in Chinese, in phonetic or in explicative reading. What is certain is the
role that he conferred upon Chinese zokugo within Japanese, in order to bring his
own language to the religiously expressive level of Chinese Chan literature. And
we can see in his poetic compositions in Japanese, all imbued with Jien’s influ-
ence when it comes to shakkyōka about the Lotus Sutra, that he was also fully
aware of the importance of kotoba as the basis of religious experience and
 Dōgen’s Religious Discourse and Hieroglossia 21

religious expression. It is therefore a fascinating study to investigate in detail the

hieroglossic triangle delineated by Dōgen between classical Chinese, Chinese
zokugo, and Japanese. None of the vertices of that triangle can be understood
without considering the other two.43

43
All my thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Knott for correcting my poor English and checking the quota-
tions and the translations, and also my most heartfelt gratitude to my young colleague Dr. Didier
Davin, for endeavouring to make out of my hasty draft a text that would somewhat better bear
the reading of more exigent readers.
22 Robert

Figure 1. An ofuda お札 picturing Dōgen.

(Collège de France, Bernard Frank Col-
lection).
http://ofuda.crcao.fr/ofuda/F-13-09
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 23–50
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

A Forgotten Aesop: Shiba Kōkan,

European Emblems, and Aesopian Fable
Reception in Late Edo Japan1
Ivo Smits

By Way of Introduction
When Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century entered a period of
rapid modernization and orientation towards the West, Aesopian fables became
a prominent presence in didactic literature of the modern age, with several trans-
lations into Japanese from 1873 onwards. When Jesuit missionaries and the Por-
tuguese were expelled from Japan in 1639, this marked the beginning of the sup-
pression of European books in that country. The only title introduced by the
Jesuits to survive in Japan was a collection of Aesop’s fables.2 Its contents were
not seen as Christian by the authorities and therefore they were not potentially
dangerous. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, a number of
Japanese editions of the fables were published. However, after the middle of the
century, Aesop appeared to have faded from sight in Japan. In a sense, Aesop’s
fables bookend early modern Japan’s image of a “closed country,” and their ap-
pearance, disappearance, and subsequent reappearance seem to symbolize the
bracketing of its isolation from European literature.
Between 1639 and 1854, Japan’s contacts with the Western world, especially
Europe, were limited to its contacts with its sole European trade partner, Hol-
land, and to a lesser extent through mediation by Chinese traders. Bleak views of
these contacts paint a history of missed opportunities. In such narratives both
parties learned little from each other; or, worse, if they tried to learn, they mis-
understood. This misunderstanding arose largely from the inability of both par-
ties to frame outside of prevailing worldviews whatever was learned; no one was
capable of “thinking outside the box.” For Japan, this translates as the view that
the study of Europe was framed within templates for studying Chinese classics,
neo-Confucianism (or perhaps better “Zhu Xi learning,” Jp. shushigaku 朱子学),

1
This article is part of preparatory research for a monograph on mid- to late-Edo reception
of European emblems in Japan, with the working title Emblem as Episteme.
2
Elisonas, J.S.A., “Fables and Imitations: Kirishitan Literature in the Forest of Simple Let-
ters,” Bulletin of Portuguese Japanese Studies 4 (2002), pp. 9–36, esp. p. 12.

23
24 Smits

“national learning” (kokugaku 国学), martial studies (heigaku 兵学), et cetera; Eu-
rope could make sense only in East Asian terms, necessarily explained with ex-
isting concepts and terminology, and within institutional settings modeled after
traditional fields of scholarship, the so-called “academies” ( juku 塾).
More positive presentations of knowledge contacts between Japan and Eu-
rope in the Edo period, when Japan in the period 1639–1854 supposedly was a
“closed country” (sakoku 鎖国) to the rest of the world and to Europe in partic-
ular, focus on a Japanese curiosity that embraced almost all things European.
The larger narrative of this Japanese interest is that initially Japanese were pri-
marily attracted to objects from Europe for their curiosity value, and that only in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century did certain circles of Japanese intellec-
tuals start to focus more systematically on what Japan might learn from Europe.
‘Europe’ in this period was represented by Holland, Japan’s sole Western trading
partner, and the later eighteenth century saw the rise of a scholarly field termed
“Dutch studies,” or “Hollandology” (rangaku 蘭学). One form the contacts be-
tween Europe and Japan took was through books, and European books, whether
in the original or in Chinese translations, became the prime means through
which Japanese would learn about the West. In 1720, in the context of what be-
came known as the first wave of the Kyōhō 享保 Reforms of 1716–1722, shōgun
Tokugawa Yoshimune 徳川吉宗 (1684–1751) lifted the ban on the import of cer-
tain European books, in the expectation that Japan could access learning with
practical applications. Histories of this field of “Hollandology” stress an emphasis
on empirical studies, such as medicine, astronomy, natural sciences, and principles
of perspective and techniques of copper etchings in the arts.
Aesop’s fables present a good model for rethinking these two dominant narra-
tives. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Aesop was
never completely absent from Japan. The fables both constitute a link between
the Portuguese-Jesuit heritage and Dutch studies, and also demonstrate that
there was an early modern Japanese interest in European discursive practices,
however problematic its understanding may have been. A point of entry will be
the painter and popular writer Shiba Kōkan 司馬江漢 (1747–1818).

Beginnings
When in the very first year of the Meiji period Toyama Masakazu 外山正一
(1848–1900) returned from his studies in England, he brought with him a copy
of a modern version of Aesop’s Fables, written by the reverend Thomas James
and first published in London by John Murray in 1848. This was translated into
Japanese by the English scholar and entrepreneur Watanabe On 渡部温 (1837–
1898). Watanabe’s Tsūzoku Isoppu monogatari 通俗伊蘇普物語 (A Popularized Aesop’s
Tales) was published in 1872 in a woodblock edition. Its illustrations were re-
workings of the original illustrations by John Tenniel by, among others, the well-
known painter Kawanabe Kyōsai 河鍋暁斎 (1831–1889). Inspired by Watanabe’s
 A Forgotten Aesop 25

translation, Kyōsai in 1873 began publishing a lavishly colored nishiki-e 錦絵 print

series on the theme of “Among the tales of Aesop” (Isoppu monogatari no uchi
伊蘇普物語之内).3 Watanabe’s book quickly became a bestseller, with reprints set
in type, and was used as a textbook in the new primary school system that was
established in that very same year. Several versions of Aesop’s fables were to fol-
low, creating an ‘Aesop boom’ and establishing the tales as one of the earliest
Meiji absorptions of European literature. It is fairly safe to claim that Meiji’s in-
terest in Western literature began large-scale with Aesop’s fables.
Few in Japan at the time realized that by 1872 Aesop’s fables had already been
present in Japan for nearly three centuries. Today, it is fairly common knowledge
that as part of their enterprise in Japan, the Jesuits established a printing center
with a press that was brought to Kazusa 加津佐, Kyushu, in 1590, and which
from 1592 onwards was located on the island of Amakusa 天草, not too far
from Nagasaki, where the printing operation was conducted under the protec-
tion of its Christian daimyō.4 In 1593, the Jesuit mission press printed a Japanese
translation of Aesop’s fables, type-set with Roman letters in a transcription sys-
tem that the Jesuits had developed, titled ESOPONO FABULAS, “translated
from the Latin to Japanese speech” (Latinuo vaxite Nippon no cuchi to nasu mono
nari).5 In addition to its professed aim to introduce European moral ideas, an im-
portant goal of this publication seems to have been to help Europeans learn the
Japanese language: “Not only is this [book] truly dependable when learning the
Japanese language, but it can also be an instrument in teaching people the right
way.” (Core macotoni Niponno cotoba qeicono tameni tayorito naru nominarazu, yoqi
michiuo fitoni voxiye cataru tayoritomo narubeqi mono nari).6 What this targeting of
non-Japanese readers meant for the circulation of this early Japanese translation
of the fables is an open question; in any case, the fables ultimately did reach a
Japanese readership.
The Jesuit edition of Aesop’s fables was followed by a number of so-called
kana-zōshi 仮名草子 editions in the first half of the seventeenth century, that is,

3
Sadamura Koto 定村来人, “Kawanabe Kyōsai ‘Isoppu monogatari no uchi’ no seisakunen ni
tsuite: Isuraeru Gōrudoman korekushon-zō no jūyonzu kara wakaru koto” 河鍋暁斎《伊蘇普
物語之内》の制作年について：イスラエル・ゴールドマン・コレクション蔵の一四図から分か
ること, Kyōsai: Kawanabe Kyōsai kenkyūshi 暁斎：河鍋暁斎研究誌 115 (2015), pp. 226–230.
4
For this and more information treating the so-called Amakusa edition (Amakusa-bon) of 1593
and the 1659 illustrated Manji edition of early Japanese translations of Aesop’s fables, see
Michael Watson, “A Slave’s Wit: Early Japanese Translations of the Life of Aesop,” Transactions of
the Asiatic Society of Japan (4th series) 20 (2006), pp. 1–22; and Endō Jun’ichi 遠藤潤一, Hōyaku nishu
Isoho monogatari no gententeki kenkyū (seihen) 邦訳二種伊曽保物語の原典的研究 (正編) (Tokyo:
Kazama Shobō, 1983), pp. 113–470. On specifically the Jesuit edition, see also Pack Carnes,
“ ‘Esopo no fabulas’: More Notes on Aesop in Sixteenth-Century Japan,” Reinardus 14 (2001),
pp. 99–113.
5
Shima Shōzō 島正三, Amakusa-bon Isoho monogatari nado no koto (hoteiban) 天草本伊曽保物語など
のこと (補訂版) (Tokyo: Bunka Shobō Hakubunsha, 1984), p. 1.
6
Ibid., p. 2.
26 Smits

early Edo books printed mostly in kana, with limited use of kanji, targeting a
non-specialist readership. However, these Japanese editions did not derive directly
from the Jesuit translation. Rather, there seems to have been a Japanese proto-
Aesop (gen-Isoho monogatari 原・伊曽保物語, assumed, 1580s) on which both the
Jesuit edition and the Japanese editions based themselves. There are telling dif-
ferences between the Jesuit translation and the Japanese popularizing editions,
the most glaring of which is that the Jesuit version is written in colloquial speech
(kōgotai 口語体) and usually has an explicit moral (“xitagocoro,” shitagokoro 下心) at
the end of a fable, while the kanazōshi (or so-called kokuji 国字, that is, printed
with kana and kanji) editions adhere to a literary style of Japanese (bungotai 文語体).
One assumption is that the kanazōshi editions more faithfully follow the proto-
Aesop, which would have been written in kana.7 The best known of these edi-
tions, of which eleven different ones are extant, is what is presumably the last
one, published in 1659 (Manji 万治 2) by a certain Itō San’emon 伊藤三右衛門,
usually referred to as the Manji e-iri-bon Isoho monogatari 万治絵入本伊曽保物語,
“Illustrated Edition of Aesop’s Tales from the Manji Period.” It would be this
illustrated edition in particular that was to catch the attention of later Edo-period
readers, among them Shiba Kōkan.
Since the fifteenth century, the Japanese had seen an increase in stories fea-
turing animals rather than people. These stories, often in the form of otogi-zōshi
御伽草子 (“companion booklets”), songs, or comic plays, but also sometimes
Buddhist parables, are nowadays referred to as iruimono 異類物, “pieces about
other species.” These stories may have helped to pave the way for the success of
Aesop’s animal fables.
It is important to realize that roughly half of ESOPONO FABULAS and Isoho
monogatari is indeed “the tale of Aesop,” rather than “tales by Aesop,” in the
sense that it deals with Aesop’s life. This was a standard feature of classical and
medieval European editions of Aesop’s fables. In this way, Japanese readers were
from the very first page confronted with a world outside Asia, filled with such
enigmatic place names as Hirija (Phrygia) and Toroya (Troy), or such curious
personal names as Shanto (Xanto).
How many readers interacted with Aesop is, as always, difficult to say. Back in
1978, Nakagawa Yoshio was quite sober about the possible success of the early
seventeenth-century editions: he believed that they were little read and that the
fables’ didactic form failed to reach an audience beyond a more elite readership.
This may have had to do with the niche position that kirishitan (‘Christian,’ that
is: European) texts occupied anyway.8 However, despite his activities in a near-
mythical Europe, the figure of Aesop may very well have been a recognizable

7
Kobori Kei’ichirō 小堀桂一郎, Isoppu gūwa: sono denshō to hen’yō イソップ寓話：その伝承と変容
(Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1978), pp. 159–163.
8
Nakagawa Yoshio 中川芳雄, “Kaidai” 解題, in Kokatsuji-ban Isoho monogatari 古活字版伊曽保物語
(Tokyo: Benseisha, 1976), pp. 235–253.
 A Forgotten Aesop 27

character to Japanese readers of the early seventeenth century. As Komine

Kazuaki has pointed out, Aesop’s quick wit and subservient position resonated
with the image of the late medieval otogishū 御伽衆, or personal entertainer or con-
versationalist to a daimyō, not unlike the legendary sixteenth-century rakugo artist
Sorori Shinzaemon 曽呂利新左衛門, who allegedly was an otogishū to the warlord
Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1537–1598).9 There are physical signs of reader
interaction with the fables: Aesop is described as exceedingly ugly; this seems to
have been a feature that some readers picked up on. The National Institute of Jap-
anese Literature owns a copy of the 1659 illustrated edition in which a reader has
consistently by hand in all illustrations added pock marks to Aesop’s face to under-
line his ugliness, for example in a scene in which he is seated before the pharaoh
of Egypt, who is visually rendered as a Chinese-style emperor (Figure 1).10

Late Edo Sightings of the Fables

After 1659, Aesop disappears from the Japanese radar, or so it seems, only to
resurface in 1872 with Watanabe On’s translation of Thomas James’ version of
the fables. This change appears to coincide with a drop, after the seventeenth
century, in the popularity of the kana-zōshi genre in general. However, there is
proof that belies such an apparent oversight of Aesop in the intervening two
centuries. Aesop was not totally unread in mid- to late Edo Japan.
The best proof of Aesop’s vitality throughout the early modern period is
probably a curiously little-studied printed edition by what is surely one of late
Edo’s better-known popular authors. The successful gesaku 戯作 author Tamenaga
Shunsui 為永春水 (1790–1844) reworked sixteen fables from the Aesopian rep-
ertoire in his E-iri kyōkun chikamichi 絵入教訓ちかみち (var. 絵入教訓近道, An
Illustrated Shortcut to Moral Teaching) of 1844 (Tenpō 天保 15).11 The book
came with illustrations by Utagawa Kuniteru 歌川国輝 I, drawing under the
name of Sadashige 貞重 (dates unknown, active 1818–1860), and was published
by the Edo-based publisher Chōjiya Heibei 丁子屋平兵衛 (dates unknown), who
in the 1830s had been co-publisher of Kyokutei Bakin’s 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848)
immensely popular gesaku series Nansō satomi hakkenden 南総里見八犬伝 (Biogra-
phies of Eight Dogs, 1814–1842). Shunsui’s use of the fables raises the thorny
issue of how in the early nineteenth century one could get her or his hands on
kana-zōshi published some two centuries before, a point I will return to shortly.
Of course, there existed lending libraries (kashihon’ya 貸本屋) that presumably

9
Komine Kazuaki 小峯和明, “Seiyō kara kita setsuwa: Isoppu to seijaden” 西洋から来た説話：
イソップと聖者伝, in Setsuwa no mori: tengu, tōzoku, igyō no dōke 説話の森：天狗・盗賊・異形の道化
(Tokyo: Taishūkan Shoten, 1991), pp. 256–280.
10
Isoho monogatari 伊曽保物語 2.2 ([Place unknown:] Itō San’emon 伊藤三右衛門, Manji 2/1659).
In the collections of the National Institute of Japanese Literature, call no. ナ4-985.
11
Mutō Sadao 武藤禎夫, “Kaisetsu” 解説, in Isoho monogatari: Manji e-iri-bon 伊曽保物語: 万治
絵入本 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000), pp. 323–325.
28 Smits

Figure 1. Left: Aesop before the Pharaoh of Egypt. Illustration from Isoho
monogatari 伊曽保物語 2.2, pub. Itō San’emon 伊藤三右衛門, Manji 2/1659.
(National Institute of Japanese Literature).
https://doi.org/10.20730/200021086

Figure 1a. Upper right: Aesop before the Pharaoh of Egypt. Detail from
Figure 1. Note the added pockmarks on Aesop’s face.
Figure 1b. Lower right: Another copy of the same edition, showing the origi-
nally unmarked design. (National Diet Library).
https: //doi.org/10.11501/2532213

also dealt in old titles, but one has to wonder how great of a chance there was
that through such a channel one could read a two-hundred-year-old book that
may not have been that widely read in the first half of the seventeenth century
to begin with. Be that as it may, Shunsui obviously had access to a version of
Aesop’s fables. Among others, he selected a fable that resonated throughout the
Edo period (Figure 2):
The Parable of the Wolf and the Crane
Once, a wolf got a bone stuck in his throat, and while he was in pain a crane came
flying to him. “Why are you in such pain?” he asked. The wolf shed tears and
howled, “I have gotten a bone stuck in my throat, and it causes me great pain.
 A Forgotten Aesop 29

Figure 2. The wolf and the crane. Illustration

by Utagawa Kuniteru 歌川国輝 I, in Tamenaga
Shunsui 為永春水, E-iri kyōkun chikamichi 絵入
教訓ちかみち, pub. Chōjiya Heibei 丁子屋平兵衛,
Tenpō 15/1844. From Mutō Sadao 武藤禎夫,
E-iri Isoho monogatari wo yomu 絵入伊曽保物語を
読む, p. 81 (see note 12).

There is no one who can help me but you. So, please pull out this bone!” Thus he
begged, and the crane, feeling sorry for him, opened the wolf ’s mouth and with
his long beak pulled out the bone, and saved the wolf ’s life. The crane said to the
wolf, “From now on, we have a special bond and should be friends.” The wolf
scowled, “How much of a favor have you done me, to say something like that? I
was thinking of chewing off your head, but now I feel only sorry for you and am
inclined to let you go. Be thankful for that!” The crane was in shock and flew away.
If you do a bad person a good deed, it can happen that he turns on you. How-
ever, to do good by people is your duty to the Lord of Heaven.12

12
E-iri kyōkun chikamichi 5, in Mutō Sadao, E-iri isoho monogatari wo yomu 絵入伊曽保物語を読む
(Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 1997), pp. 81–82; and Mutō, Isoho monogatari: Manji e-iri-bon (op. cit.),
pp. 210–212. This is a reworking of Isoho monogatari 2.16, for which see Kana-zōshi shū 仮名草子集,
vol. 90 of Nihon koten bungaku taikei 日本古典文学大系, eds. Morita Takeshi 森田武, et al. (Iwanami
Shoten, 1965), pp. 407–408. “Parable” here translates tatoe たとへ.
30 Smits

Shunsui adapted the seventeenth-century kana-zōshi text to more contempo-

rary Japanese, omitting for example such early-Edo appellations as gohen 御辺 for
“you.” Intriguing are Utagawa Kuniteru’s anthropomorphic illustrations that fur-
nish the emblematic animals with human bodies, which are a deviation from the
more or less standardized iconography of the so-called iruimono illustrated tales.
Incidentally, further indication that the illustrated kana-zōshi edition of 1659
did have an afterlife is provided by Lawrence E. Marceau’s identification of an
Edo-period illustrated scroll that goes by the descriptive name E-iri kansubon
Isoho monogatari 絵入巻子本伊曽保物語 (Illustrated scroll of Aesop’s tales, ca. 1670).
The scroll contains scenes that undeniably trace back to illustrations of the Manji-
period illustrated kana-zōshi edition of 1659.13
Based on references in his Honkyō gaihen 本教外篇 (Outer Chapters of Our
Doctrine, 1806), a work that among others explores the Christian worldview
with references to Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) writings, there are strong indica-
tions that Hirata Atsutane 平田篤胤 (1776–1843) a few decades earlier had read
a Sinitic version of the fables. Presumably he picked them up through Matteo
Ricci’s Jiren shipian 畸人十篇 (Ten Chapters on Extraordinary Men, 1608), a col-
lection of dialogues between the Jesuit Ricci and nine of his literati friends, held
in the Chinese capital between 1595 and 1601, and published in early 1608. This
compilation work reflects an interest by contemporary literati in Christian views
on such issues as death, and was read in Japan as well, serving as an important
source of information for Hirata’s Honkyō gaihen.14
Such examples ultimately all trace back to the Jesuit legacy, especially that of
the Amakusa press. Yet, the European Aesopian legacy was emphatically not an
exclusively southern European affair.

Edo Confrontations with the Emblematic Aesopian World

From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, animal fables from the Aesopian
tradition increasingly reached European readers in the template of the em-
blem book. As a specific image-text combination, the emblem (Latin emblema)
has its origins in a work by the Paris-based lawyer Andrea Alciato (1492–1550),
who in 1531 published the first edition of his Emblematum liber (aka Emblemata,
“A book of emblems”). Alciato’s emblems may be thought of as highly intellectual

13
One eagerly awaits Lawrence Marceau’s forthcoming edition of this illustrated scroll (publi-
cation expected through Rinsen Shoten), on which he has given numerous lectures. See for ex-
ample, Lawrence E. Marceau, “Reconsidering the Isopo monogatari Scrolls,” unpublished confer-
ence presentation, Meiji University, October 23, 2015.
14
Mutō Sadao, “Kaisetsu,” in Isoho monogatari: Manji e-iri-bon (op. cit.), p. 340; Devine, Richard,
“Hirata Atsutane and Christian Sources,” Monumenta Nipponica 36:1 (1981), pp. 37–54. On Jesuit
reworkings of Aesopian fables in China, see Sher-shiueh Li, “The Art of Misreading: An Anal-
ysis of the Jesuit ‘Fables’ in Late Ming China,” in Luo Xuanmin and He Yuanjin, eds., Translating
China (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2009), pp. 71–94.
 A Forgotten Aesop 31

association games, in which the central image (pictura), as a rule accompanied

by a heading (inscriptio, or motto), as well as an epigrammatic poem underneath
(the subscriptio), functioned as a coded visualization of the moral message of
the emblem as a whole. In Alciato’s template, the combination of motto and
pictura presented an enigma, for which the epigrammatic subscriptio pointed
towards the solution. In the narrow, historical sense, an emblem is a specific
combination of epigram and image that has been rightly called one of the
most influential creations of the late Renaissance.15 The emblem quickly be-
came quite a hit with readers and the template for many other emblem books.
Between the mid-sixteenth century and the early eighteenth century, Europe
was awash with the emblem genre. Estimates calculate that over two thou­sand
titles, possibly representing over a million copies, of emblem books circulated
in Europe.16 While Alciato wrote in Latin, quite soon, already later in the six-
teenth century, Europe saw the rise of emblem books in vernacular languages.
Aesopian animal fables became staple fare for the vernacular version of the
genre. By the early eighteenth century, the emblem book had developed into
a widely used didactic format, one that also propagated explicitly Christian
values.
One highly attractive feature of the emblem was its use of images. Especially
in the Low Countries, production was abundant and the books came with cop-
per etchings of often unmatched quality. The pervasive presence of the em-
blem book and its high-quality images will have played a role in Dutch traders
bringing the emblem to Japan. The first attested recognition of the genre by a
Japanese that I can find is datable to 1779. In the second month of that year,
shogun Tokugawa Ieharu 徳川家治 (1737–1786) received a translation of the
captions (subscriptiones) of a set of copper-plate etchings that the delegation of
the Dutch trading post at Dejima, Nagasaki, had presented him with on a pre-
vious occasion. The translator in question was the Edo-based Maeno Ryōtaku
前野良沢 (1723–1803), a samurai scholar from the Fukuoka domain in Kyushu,
trained in medicine and above all in the budding field of Hollandology. He had
spent time in Nagasaki to learn Dutch and to gain first-hand knowledge of
Western sciences, especially medicine, an academic rite of passage known as a
‘Nagasaki study sojourn’ (Nagasaki yūgaku 長崎遊学). He was so dedicated to his

15
Ashworth, William B., Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic Worldview,” in David C.
Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 303–333, esp. p. 310. See also Hessel Miedema, “The Term Emblema in Alciati,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968), pp. 234–250.
16
Porteman, K., Inleiding tot de Nederlandse emblemataliteratuur [Introduction to Dutch Emblem
Literature] (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1977), p. 7; Manning, John, The Emblem (London:
Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 16. Porteman refers to individual copies, not titles, when he mentions
numbers possibly “in the seven digits.” Estimates depend a great deal on what is, and is not,
included in the genre definition of an emblem book.
32 Smits

Dutch studies that his lord supposed he “had gone Dutch” (ranka 蘭化).17 One
result was Ryōtaku’s heavy involvement in the translation project that led to Kaitai
shinsho 解体新書 (A New Book of Anatomy, 1774), which had appeared five
years earlier and would become the first major landmark of Hollandology.18
Quite likely it was Ryōtaku’s involvement in precisely this medical translation
project that had put him on the shogunal radar in 1779. It is assumed that shogunal
physician Katsuragawa Hoshū 桂川甫周 (1751–1809) had alerted the shogun to
Ryōtaku’s prowess in reading “the horizontal script” ( yokomoji 横文字), that is,
the Dutch language.19 What exactly triggered the shogunal command is not
quite clear; Ieharu’s reputation was one of a total lack of intellectual interests.20
Ryōtaku was deeply unhappy with the shogun’s request. He felt not up to the
translation assignment, but one could not refuse such a command. His unhappi-
ness was more than simply the standard deprecation of one’s own talents. In this
case it is not difficult to imagine the agony that he must have felt. Ryōtaku had
noticed that the etchings’ captions were not in Dutch, but in Latin. Dutch schol-
ars were trained in Dutch, and hardly knew the first thing about Latin. In the
introduction to the translation that he eventually did produce, Ryōtaku elabo-
rated on the difficulties presented by Latin as a language:21

17
Numata Jirō, Western Learning: A Short History of the Study of Western Science in Early Modern
Japan (Tokyo: The Japan-Netherlands Institute, 1992), p. 82. Maeno seems to have agreed with
his daimyō Okudaira Masaka, as he later adopted Ranka as his pen name.
18
For a treatment of the translation process of Kaitai shinsho, see e.g. Numata, Western Learning
(v.s.), pp. 51–79; Goodman, Grant K., Japan: The Dutch Experience (London: Athlone, 1986),
pp. 82–85.
19
Torii Yumiko 鳥井裕美子, Maeno Ryōtaku: shōgai ichijitsu no gotoku 前野良沢：生涯一日のごとく
(Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2015), p. 139.
20
For negative assessments by both Japanese and Dutch contemporaries of Ieharu’s intellec-
tual, administrative, or other qualities, see Timon Screech, The Shogun’s Painted Culture: Fear and
Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760–1829 (Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 93.
21
For text, see Seiyō gasan yakubun kō 西洋画賛訳文稿 [A Translation of Captions to Images
from the West], in Maeno Ryōtaku shiryōshū 前野良沢資料集, ed. Ōita Kenritsu Sentetsu Shiryōkan
大分県立先哲史料館, vol. 2 (Ōita-ken Kyōiku Iinkai, 2009), pp. 70–71. This is a transcription of
the Seikadō 静嘉堂 (or Ōtsuki 大槻) manuscript in Maeno’s hand. Ryōtaku wrote the “Introduc-
tion” (daigen 題言) to his manuscript in Sinitic (kanbun); for a ‘Japanized’ (kakikudashi) version of
Ryōtaku’s kanbun text, see Harada Hiroshi 原田裕司, “Maeno Ryōtaku Seiyō gasan yakubunkō no
ratengo genten” 前野良沢『西洋画賛訳文稿』のラテン語原典, (Ōsaka Daigaku Gengo Bunkabu,
Gengo Bunka Kenkyūka-hen) Gengo bunka kenkyū (大阪大学言語文化部・言語文化研究科編) 言語文化
研究 26 (2000), pp. 152–153. Donald Keene also alludes to Ryōtaku’s frustration over Latin;
Keene, Donald, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 78.
For Seiyō gasan yakubunkō generally, see also Harada Hiroshi “Maeno Ryōtaku Seiyō gasan
yakubunkō no ratengo genten,” pp. 149–178; Harada Hiroshi, “Maeno Ryōtaku Seiyō gasan
yakubunkō no ratengo genten (hoi)” 前野良沢『西洋画賛訳文稿』のラテン語原典 (補遺), (Ōsaka
Daigaku Gengo Bunkabu, Gengo Bunka Kenkyūka-hen) Gengo bunka kenkyū (大阪大学言語文化部・
言語文化研究科編) 言語文化研究 27 (2001), pp. 255–259; Isozaki Yasuhiko 磯崎康彦, Edo jidai no
ranga to ransho: kinsei nichiran hikaku bijutsushi ( jōkan) 江戸時代の蘭画と蘭書：近世日蘭比較美術史
(上巻) (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2004), pp. 366–367.
 A Forgotten Aesop 33

Our Lord ordered me,22 his servant, to translate the images with inscriptions
from the West. I respectfully looked through them and found that they were
made in France and that their texts make use of Latin. (I will explain about
‘France’ and ‘Latin’ below.)
Certainly, Latin is that from which the French language is derived. It is sophis-
ticated and concise, yet its meaning is profound. This is why even people from
France or Holland have no knowledge of it, unless they are learned men—not
to mention us in Nagasaki! I have yet to hear of someone who understands it
well. If I read through a normal Dutch book and I come across passages in this
language, I always skip them because I cannot read them properly. Since there
is no one who really understands this, I can only make sense of Latin books
through Dutch translations and from time to time by this means I seek out their
meaning. But even as I resent this and study alone, I am unable to properly
probe its abstruseness.
Now one cannot refuse a command of one’s lord and so I made an effort to
inquire after glosses and at last search for the meaning, but it comes as from a
great distance and all of it is difficult to communicate.23
For all his laments Ryōtaku managed to do quite a fair job. Given the circum-
stances, it is quite incredible that he got as much right as he did. He was aware
of the existence of a Latin school in Batavia, and in fact managed to consult
Latin dictionaries.24
We know which text it was that the shogun ordered Ryōtaku to translate. A
copy (although probably not the copy that Ryōtaku had access to) is in the
Tokugawa Bijutsukan in Nagoya, labeled Orandajin sesshō no zu 阿蘭陀人殺生図
(Images of Dutchmen Slaughtering Living Beings). It is a book published two
centuries earlier by the Flemish Jan Van der Straet, who operated under his Lati-
nized name Stradanus (1523–1605). His Venationes: ferarum, avium, piscium (Hunts:
Wild Beasts, Birds, and Fish, 1578) was reprinted several times and presumably
it was a later edition that the Dutch delegation offered as a gift to the shogun.
Given the success with Japanese audiences of European books with meticulous
copper etchings, we may assume that the copper etchings were a major motiva-
tion for the Dutch in offering this particular set.
For all his groaning, Ryōtaku proved once again to be an admirable champion
of textual analysis. He was very accurate in his assessment of the category of
book to which Hunts: Wild Beasts, Birds, and Fish belonged:

22
Maeno Ryōtaku refers to himself here by his proper name (na 名), which was Yomisu 熹. As
Harada Hiroshi points out, the manuscript mistakenly gives his name as Yorokobi 喜. Harada,
“Maeno Ryōtaku Seiyō gasan yakubunkō no ratengo genten” (op. cit.), p. 152.
23
Seiyō gasan yakubunkō (op. cit.), p. 70.
24
For the existence in Japan of Latin dictionaries, see Seiyō gasan yakubunkō, pp. 89–91; Harada
Hiroshi 原田裕司, “Maeno Ryōtaku no ratengo jiten to kinsei Nihon yunyū ratengogaku shoshi”
前野良沢のラテン語辞典と近世日本輸入ラテン語学書誌, Nichiran gakkai kaishi 日蘭学会会誌 26:1,
no. 48 (2001), pp. 37–59; Torii, Maeno Ryōtaku: shōgai ichijitsu no gotoku (op. cit.), pp. 143–144.
34 Smits

窃按此画大抵因羅甸所伝之譬喩寓言等以設之図者也 蓋将使童蒙因画図而自
解文辞也 故其所攈摭在目前近小之事耶 彼方之画類類于此者多矣
I conclude that these pictures take their cue from parables and fables and the
like that were transmitted in Latin and made into images. Essentially these
things are aimed at children and youngsters and attempt to explain by them-
selves the words of the texts through pictures. Must its salient points therefore
be something minute right in front of one’s eyes? Of this type of picture from
over there, there are many.25
What is especially interesting is that Ryōtaku claimed that there were many
texts from Europe that were firmly intertwined with images and which were
supposed to somehow “by themselves” convey meaning. The message of this
gift from the Dutch delegation, even if it may have been an unconscious one,
was that emblematic images were a pivotal medium of European culture. It was
also irritatingly clear to him that the proper way to decode these images was
“right in front of one’s eyes.” But, of course, you needed to know the key.
Maeno Ryōtaku was well aware that this particular type of image-text relation-
ship had a name:
エム ブ レ マ
羅甸之言名曰奄 岪烈瑪

In Latin these are called emblema ( Jp. emuburema).26

In other words, the Dutch had given the Shogun a book of emblems. At the end
of his translation of Van der Straet’s Hunts: Wild Beasts, Birds, and Fish, Ryōtaku
explains in somewhat more detail what an emblema is.
奄岪烈瑪 是仏朗察ニテ称スル所ノ名ナリ コレヲ和蘭ノ語ニ翻訳スルハ
「シンネベ ヱルド」ト云フナリ 私ニ按スルニ シンネ」トハ此ニ云意識ナ
リ「ベヱルド」トハ 此ニ云形ヲ図ニ造ルコトナリ 是則意趣ヲ形容スルト云
フコトニシテ 無声ノ詩ト云フノ類ナリ
‘Emblem’: This is what one calls it in French. If one translates it into Dutch, it
is called a ‘zinnebeeld’ ( Jp. shinnebērudo). As I understand it, ‘zin’ is awareness, and
‘beeld’ is to put an outward form into an image. Thus, it is to give visible form to
an intention and [as such] it is a kind of silent poem.27
Ryōtaku accurately identified the Dutch copper prints as allegorical pictures
(gūizu 寓意図) and assessed correctly that the Latin text accompanying these im-
ages had a didactic meaning.28 It is also clear that for Ryōtaku, an ‘emblem’
hinged primarily, if not exclusively, on the image.

25
Seiyō gasan yakubunkō (op. cit.), p. 71.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., p. 88. This last designation, of emblems as a category (tagui 類) of “silent poem” (musei
no shi 無声ノ詩), taps into a rhetoric of long standing in China.
28
Ibid., pp. 70–71.
 A Forgotten Aesop 35

A Dutch Aesop in Kanagawa

One intriguing case is presented by the existence of hand-copied pages from
an early seventeenth-century Dutch reworking of a selection of Aesopian ani-
mal fables. Vorstelijcke warande der dieren (Royal Display of Animals, 1617) was the
product of an entrepreneurial publisher, Dirck Pietersz. Pers (1581–1659), and
the young poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). Pers had
managed to get his hands on the copper etching plates of an earlier Flemish edi-
tion of a set of animal fables presented in the emblem template, which itself had
been grafted onto on an even earlier emblem book in French. One of the first
European books to combine animal fables and emblems was Les fables du très-ancien
Ésope (The Fables of the Very Ancient Aesop, 1542) published in Paris by the
humanist Gilles Corrozet and based on Latin, humanist reworkings of Aesopian
fables. This French book has the format that would become standard practice,
elaborating on the Alciato template: each fable occupies two facing pages. On
one page is an illustration with a caption on top and a subscriptio at the bottom,
on the other page is the fable itself, with the moral, creating the subgenre of
what has been called the ‘emblem fable.’29
The Flemish artist Marcus Gheeraerts (ca. 1520–ca. 1590) used this French fable
book for his own De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (The Truthful Fables of the
Animals, 1567), published in Antwerp with his own copper etchings and with
texts by Eduard de Dene. The pictures by Gheeraerts proved an incredible suc-
cess. The Flemish painter and early art historian Karel van Mander (1548–1606)
wrote of Gheeraerts’ book: “When in the year 1566 the Arts were at an impasse,
he [Gheeraerts] made and etched the Book of Fables Esopi, which is a beautiful
thing and well executed.”30 Gheeraerts’ copper engravings were used again and
again with different accompanying texts, starting with the Esbatement moral des
animaux (Moral Entertainment by Animals, 1578). Eventually, the copper plates
made their way to the northern Netherlands. Importantly, Gheeraerts’ book for
the first time introduced a so-called ‘emblematic’ way of presenting (and read-
ing) fable literature in Dutch. The method was, of course, borrowed from
France, but it was new for a Flemish and Dutch public.
It was the complete set of Gheeraerts’ 118 copper etching plates that Pers got
hold of, and would expand to a total of 125. This was a new era, when publishers
began to play an important role in the literary field. They were the ones to start
book projects and attract authors to work out their ideas. Pers contracted Vondel

29
Geirnaert, Dirk, and Paul J. Smith, “The Sources of the Emblematic Fable Book De warachtige
fabulen der dieren (1567),” in John Manning, Karel Porteman, and Marc van Vaeck, eds., The Emblem
Tradition in the Low Countries (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 23–38.
30
Van Mander, Karel, Het Schilder-boeck (Haarlem, 1604), fol. 258a; Molkenboer, B. H., De jonge
Vondel (Amsterdam: Parnassus, 1950), p. 356. Pers quotes this passage in the introduction to his
1617 Warande der dieren.
36 Smits

Figure 3. Donkey carrying nourishment (Spijsedraghende Ezel), emblem page with accom-
panying poem. Illustration by Marcus Gheeraerts, in Joost van den Vondel, Vorstelijcke
warande der dieren (Amsterdam: Sander Wybrantsz., 1682), p. 116. openlibrary.org.
https://archive.org/details/vorstelijckewara00vond/page/n245

for the publication of the Royal Display of Animals in 1617, for which Vondel wrote
new texts for the independent facing pages that retold each fable in the form of a
page-long poem. This particular emblem book of Aesopian animal fables would
go through a number of reprints, especially in the eighteenth century (Figure 3).
Somehow, Vondel’s book with Gheeraerts’ etchings made its way to Japan. We
do not know when it reached Japan, nor which edition it was. An assumption—
but nothing more—is that a Dutch trader took a copy, or perhaps even loose
printed sheets from this book, with him to Japan when, in the eighteenth cen-
tury, Vondel’s Royal Display of Animals became popular again. In that case, there
would not be a particularly large time gap between the moment that the Dutch
original was brought to Japan and the moment that a Japanese samurai patrician
took notice of it.
A hand-copied set of six sheets (twelve pages) from the Royal Display of Animals
was made by order of Maeda Naotada 前田直方 (1748–1823), the sixth daimyō
in that line of the Kaga 加賀 domain, in 1791 (Kansei 寛政 3), eight years before
Maeno Ryōtaku submitted his translations of the captions for Van der Straet’s
emblem series to the shogun. It now rests in the Maeda Tosanokami-ke Shiryōkan
前田土佐守家資料館 in Kanazawa, but its existence was not made public until
 A Forgotten Aesop 37

Figure 4. Donkey carrying nourishment (Spi-

jsedraghende Ezel). Hand-copied illustration
by Yata Shijoken 矢田四如軒, text copied by
Yamaguchi Tamenori 山口為範, after Joost van
den Vondel, Vorstelijcke warande der dieren. (Maeda
Tosanokami-ke Shiryōkan).

Shinmura Izuru 新村出 (1876–1967) wrote about it in 1929.31 At the time, Shinmura
identified the pages as “pages from a Dutch Aesop” (ranbun Isoho monogatari dankan
蘭文伊曽保物語断簡), but it is not certain that the Kaga samurai recognized the
animal fable emblems as explicitly Aesopian. It is a curious set, apparently an
attempt to create hand-produced facsimiles of pages from a printed European
book, in which, somewhat uncharacteristically for Japan, both sides of the paper
were used (more commonly one would use only one side of a sheet that was then
folded in two).
The Vondel edition gives the emblem proper (that is, motto/pictura/subscriptio)
under Arab numbering on the left-hand page, with Vondel’s accompanying
poem on the facing right-hand page under Roman numbering. Individual sheets

Shinmura Izuru 新村出, “Eimo ranbun kohan e-iri Isoho monogatari no dankan” 影模蘭文
31

古版絵入伊曽保物語の断簡, in Bibliophilia/Shomotsu no shumi 書物の趣味 4 (1929).

38 Smits

contain the emblem proper on one side, whereas the reverse side of that same
page will show Vondel’s poem for the previous emblem, which is unconnected to
the image-text set on that same sheet of paper. An effort was made to reproduce
the Dutch octavo size, resulting in a decidedly unusual format for Japanese
books. The Kaga copy consists of the following six recto-verso sets: XVIII
[Wolf and sheep]/19 [Shepherd and idol]; L [Fox and grapes]/51 [Monkey and
cat]; LXI [Hedgehog and snake]/62 [Chameleon]; LXII [Chameleon]/63 [Bull
and ram]; LXXIII [Lion and traveler]/74 [Lion, donkey, and fox]; and CXV
[Tortoise and hare]/116 [Donkey carrying nourishment]. The Dutch printed
texts were hand-copied by one Yamaguchi Tamenori 山口為範, about whom
nothing is known. It has been suggested by Sugano Yō that he could have been
a rangaku scholar or a doctor trained in Western medicine.32 The Gheeraerts’
copper etchings were redrawn by hand by Yata Shijoken 矢田四如軒 (‘real name’
Yata Hirotsura 矢田広貫, or Rokurōbei 六郎兵衛, 1718–1794), who had been the
senior house councilor (karō 家老) to the Maeda family and had trained in the
Hasegawa 長谷川 school of painting (Figure 4).33
Perhaps on occasion only separate sheets of Dutch books reached Japan. The
Kaga copy of the Royal Display of Animals would suggest that, in Europe, it was
standard practice to go to a bookseller, choose the best quality sheets available
and have the total bound as a complete set. In other words, books were not sold
as bound copies, but as loose sheets that were bound after the sale.34 This prac-
tice resulted in left-over sheets at the book sellers’ workplace. It is indeed very
possible that someone bought such left-overs for sale in Japan. If that were the
case, it would help explain why the set ordered by the Maeda lord of the Kaga
domain is such a disconnected collection: we would be dealing with hand-drawn
copies of six loose sheets, possibly originally printed together on a single larger
sheet (as part of a quire), not a selection made from a bound copy.

Kōkan, Tairō, Saisuke

Sugano Yō has speculated that either the Kaga copy or the original Royal Display
of Animals may have been seen outside the Kaga domain, specifically by the
painter, science popularizer, and fringe Hollandologist Shiba Kōkan, but speculates

32
Sugano Yō, “Kansei san-nen ni mosha sareta ransho dōbutsu gūwashū no dōbanga” 寛政三年
に模写された蘭書動物寓話集の銅版画, Yamato bunka 大和文化 77 (1986), p. 15.
33
On the Kanagawa copy of Warande der dieren, see Shinmura Izuru, “Eimo ranbun kohan e-iri
Isoho monogatari no dankan” (op. cit.), pp. 1–18; Sugano Yō 菅野陽, “Shiba Kōkan to Isoho
monogatari” 司馬江漢と伊曽保物語, Rangaku Shiryō Kenkyūkai kenkyū hōkoku 蘭学資料研究会
研究報告 308 (1976), pp. 1–12; Sugano Yō, “Edo-ki denrai no bijutsu kankei ransho nishu (ge)”
江戸期伝来の美術関係蘭書二種 (下), Kobijutsu 古美術 54 (1977), pp. 78–86; Sugano Yō, “Kansei
san-nen ni mosha sareta ransho dōbutsu gūwashū no dōbanga” (op. cit.), pp. 13–27.
34
Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 146–
147.
 A Forgotten Aesop 39

that if that was the case, one would have to wonder whether he would have recog-
nized the emblems as explicitly Aesopian, or indeed been able to truly understand
Vondel’s poems.35 It is nonetheless certain that by the early nineteenth century
Kōkan had developed a special interest in Aesopian fable literature from Europe.
That Kōkan may indeed have seen the original Royal Display of Animals is not
impossible. As Katsumori Noriko points out, the painter Ishikawa Tairō 石川大浪
(1762?–1817) had a great interest in European books, and among these his spe-
cial predilection was for Dutch emblem books.36 Several respected amateur
painters with a samurai background had since the later eighteenth century devel-
oped a keen interest in producing “Dutch paintings” (ranga 蘭画).37 Two such
artists were the brothers Ishikawa Tairō and Mōkō 孟高 (1763?–1828?), mem-
bers of a hatamoto 旗本 family. Tairō had first studied with the Kanō school, but
then turned to European book illustrations and copper etchings. These illustra-
tions in European books became the major source for the two brothers’ “Dutch
paintings.” One of Tairō’s paintings of a lion, signed “Tafelberg,”38 is unmistak-
ably copied from Vondel’s Royal Display of Animals.39 Emblem fable no. 10, “The
Lion and the Mouse,” comes with a copper etching by Marcus Gheeraerts that
depicts a roaring lion caught in a net, about to be freed by a mouse. Tairō mir-
rored the lion and removed the net (and got rid of the mouse), but otherwise his
animal is the spitting image of Gheeraerts’ version. It is less likely that someone
had also imported the Antwerp 1567 edition of The Truthful Fables of the Animals,
in addition to the 1617 edition (or early eighteenth-century reprint) of Vondel’s
Royal Display of Animals with the very same illustration. Tairō’s model lion is not
included in the Kaga copy, so it may well be that the entire Dutch edition (or yet
a separate unbound sheet) was imported to Japan as well. Incidentally, we know
that Tairō was in possession of a French edition of Aesop’s fables as well, which
presumably came with illustrations.40 Be that as it may, the point is that a version
of Royal Display of Animals circulated in Japan, outside the Kaga domain. This
means that Kōkan, too, may have had access to a copy of Royal Display of Animals,
as he moved in the same circles as did Tairō.
35
Sugano, “Kansei san-nen ni mosha sareta ransho dōbutsu gūwashū no dōbanga” (op. cit.), p. 15.
36
Katsumori Noriko 勝盛典子, Kinsei ikoku shumi bijutsu no shiteki kenkyū 近世異国趣味美術の
史的研究 (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 2011), pp. 118–119.
37
See e.g. Hiroko Johnson, Western Influences on Japanese Art: The Akita Ranga Art School and
Foreign Books (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005).
38
Tairō, whose art name literally translates as “Big Wave,” styled himself “Tafelberg,” after
Table Mountain on South Africa’s cape, then a Dutch trading post, a mountain that in Sino-
Japanese was called Tairōzan 大浪山, or “Mount Big Wave.” His younger brother Mōkō, who
also painted in the Dutch style, termed himself “Leeuwenberg” (Mount Lion), after the adjacent
mountain on the South Africa cape. For Tairō in general, see Screech, The Shogun’s Painted Culture
(op. cit.), p. 46; Katsumori, Kinsei ikoku shumi bijutsu no shiteki kenkyū (op. cit.), pp. 87–207.
39
“Shishi no zu” 獅子図. In the collections of Kōbe Shiritsu Hakubutsukan 神戸市立博物館. See
Katsumori, Kinsei ikoku shumi bijutsu no shiteki kenkyū (op. cit.), p. 48, ill. 2-3, ill. 12.
40
Sugano, “Edo-ki denrai no bijutsu kankei ransho nishu (ge)” (op. cit.), p. 84.
40 Smits

For Tairō, an important point of access to European book illustrations and

copper etchings was his association with Yamamura Saisuke 山村才助 (1770–
1807), a rising star at the Shirandō 芝蘭堂 academy of Hollandology in Edo.41
From a young age, Saisuke, a samurai from the Tsuchiura 土浦 domain, had been
interested in geography. Through his maternal uncle Ichikawa Kansai 市河寛斎
(1749–1820), a Confucian scholar with a special interest in Sinitic poetry who
had instructed him in Chinese studies, he was introduced in 1789 to the re-
nowned Hollandologist Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄沢 (1757–1827) at the latter’s
newly established rangaku Shirandō academy in Edo. Ōtsuki in turn initiated
Saisuke into the world of Hollandology and specifically the study of world ge-
ography. Saisuke turned out to be a prodigious student, and earned the nickname
of being one of “the four heavenly kings” (shitennō 四天王, i.e. outstanding schol-
ars) of Gentaku’s academy. His status within the Shirandō group is underscored
by one of the trappings of its academic community-building events. Ever since
late 1794 (Kansei 6), the Shirandō academy had celebrated “Dutch New Year”
(Oranda shōgatsu おらんだ正月) on the first day of the solar calendar ( January 1st).
For a number of these celebrations, tongue-in-cheek “analogy ranking-lists” (mitate
banzuke) were made that listed participants in the form of a playbill, etc. On the
“Dutch scholars’ sumō wrestlers’ ranking list” (rangakusha sumō mitate banzuke 蘭学者
相撲見立番付) made for the Shirandō’s “Dutch New Year” gathering of January 1,
1799 (Kansei 10, 1798), Saisuke is listed among the principal participants as sekiwake
関脇 (runner-up champion) for the west side. Listed as one of the maegashira 前頭
( Junior wrestler) for the same west side is Shiba Kōkan.42
Among other texts, Saisuke compiled a fascinating but largely overlooked text-
book that resulted from communal readings in the Shirandō academy, the Seiyō
zakki 西洋雑記 (Miscellaneous Notes on the West, 1801). It is a repository of
information on ancient European history and world geography that reflects
the collective knowledge of this Hollandology academy. Saisuke’s work on
Miscellaneous Notes on the West and its 1804 sequel reflects both an acute awareness
of the emblem genre and a foundational knowledge of Aesop’s fables. His entry
“How Western pictures contain analogies” remarks that:

41
Katsumori, Kinsei ikoku shumi bijutsu no shiteki kenkyū (op. cit.), pp. 145–184.
42
The Shirandō academy started celebrating “Dutch New Year” on Kansei 6 (1794).11 (inter-
calary).11 ( January 1, 1795). Gentaku quite likely picked up this habit from the Nagasaki inter-
preter Yoshio Kōgyū 吉雄耕牛 (1724–1800), whose 1785 New Year’s banquet he had attended in
Nagasaki. Some forty-four celebrations are known. For an elaborate analysis of the first celebra-
tion, see Reinier H. Hesselink, “A Dutch New Year at the Shirandō Academy: 1 January 1795,”
Monumenta Nipponica 50:2 (1995), pp. 189–234. For Yamamura Saisuke as nishi no sekiwake and
Shiba Kōkan as sixth maegashira for the same west side, see e.g. the copy of the sumō mitate banzuke
collected by Matsudaira Naritami 松平斉民 (1814–1891) in volume 10 of his 17-volume scrap-
book Geikai yoha 芸海余波. In the collections of Waseda University Library (call. no. i 05 01646).
The mock bill was designed by gesaku author and amateur Hollandologist Morishima Chūryō
森島中良 (1754?–1810).
 A Forgotten Aesop 41

Western pictures are extremely exact and their utmost precision is well known
to the world. Very often they create analogies in their pictures. For example, at
the head of a book they draw a picture of the author; to the side they depict an
“engel” [angel] (a heavenly creature with wings). The image of the angel playing
a flute is as if you can hear from afar the sound of the flute played by this angel
flying far-off, and implies that one can hear from afar the worth of the author’s
voice.43
Here, Saisuke puts the finger on a phenomenon that earlier Morishima Chūryō
had identified as well: that a great number of European pictures were not ‘real-
istic,’ but in fact culturally coded, symbolic images that required an understand-
ing of a European worldview in order to decode them. The example he refers to
involves winged creatures. He knew well that an author’s portrait above which
hovered putti indicated the eminence of the person depicted.44
In 1804, Saisuke compiled a sequel (“Part 2”, or nihen 二編) to Miscellaneous
Notes on the West. This sequel exists only in a single manuscript copy and has
never been made available in any textual edition. In its first volume, Saisuke has
written up an entry that deals with the figure of Aesop, mentioning how he is
known for his fables:
About “Aesop’s Fables” 45
There is a book in three volumes called Aesop’s Fables (Isoho monogatari ). This is a
translation of what originally was a Western book; it is not known who wrote it.

43
“Seiyō zuga ni hiyu wo mōkuru setsu” 西洋図画に譬喩を設くる説, in Seiyō zakki 西洋雑記
(Nihonbashi Kitajikkendana, Bun’enkaku, 1848), vol. 2, pp. 26r–28v. This hanpon edition of
Yamamura Saisuke’s 1801 manuscript is accessible through Waseda University’s library website:
http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko08/bunko08_c0309/
44
One example of such an author’s portrait that was well known to rangaku scholars of the
time was a portrait of the physician Lorenz Heister (1683–1758) on the frontispiece of his
Heelkundige onderwyzingen (Medical Instructions, trans. 1776; original Chirurgie, 1718). Interest-
ingly the frontispiece also features a cartouche with the portrait of the Dutch translator and
editor, the physician Hendrik Ulhoorn (ca. 1692–1746). Heister’s and Ulhoorn’s portraits, in-
cluding the angels, were copied by Maki Bokusen 牧墨仙 (1775–1824) in a copper etching for
the frontispiece (tobira-e 扉絵) of the Japanese translation of Heister’s book, Yōka seisen zukai
瘍科精選図解, by Shirandō scholar Koshimura Tokuki 越邑徳基 (1784–1826). See Hashimoto
Hiroko 橋本寛子, “Kitayama Kangan-hitsu ‘Heisteru-zō’ wo megutte” 北山寒巌筆《ヘイステル
像》をめぐって, Bijutsushi 美術史 60:2 (2011), pp. 246–262, esp. p. 247 (ill. 2). In 1788, Shiba
Kōkan painted a portrait of his Nagasaki host Yoshio Kōgyū 吉雄耕牛 (1724–1800) with putti
above his head, actively applying his knowledge of this particular instance of European ico-
nography.
45
“Isoho monogatari no setsu” 伊曽保物語の説, in Seiyō zakki nihen 西洋雑記二編, vol. 1,
pp. 3r–6v (unnumbered pages). This Part Two was never printed. The only copy of volume 1 that
I know of is in the collection of the Seikadō Bunko 静嘉堂文庫, Tokyo (call no.: hako 97, ka 25 ki ),
containing volumes 1 and 2. Ayusawa Shintarō mentions that only two manuscript copies of Seiyō
zakki nihen exist; Ayusawa Shintarō 鮎沢信太郎, Yamamura Saisuke 山村才助 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa
Kōbunkan, 1959), pp. 107–108. Kagoshima University’s Tamasato Bunko 玉里文庫 has a copy
that contains volumes 2 through 4 (call. no. ten-no-bu 181-1181).
42 Smits

At the end [of the book], it says that it was published in the third year of Manji
[1660].46 However, [the original] must have been written much earlier than that.
Aesop ( Jp. Isoho) was a person born in a village called Amonia in Troy in the
land of Phrygia. No one in the world was uglier than he, yet his wisdom was un-
challenged. Then war broke out and his village was invaded by soldiers and he
was taken captive and sold to a man called Xanto [Xanctus] in the place Athens
( Jp. Araerusu).47 [The book] records how he stayed in Xanto’s household and
later travelled to such countries as Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece ( Jp. Gereshia), an
account of his life, and several tens of his didactic fables. This reminds me that
there is a short biography of Esope in Buys’ Complete Book of Scholarship and
Arts.48 “Esope” is in fact Aesop. (In the West, people are known by different
names depending on the country. For example, someone who in France is
called ‘Louis’ is called ‘Ludovicus’ in Latin and ‘Lodewijk’ in Dutch.)
His ugliness is also described in the Fables of Aesop, as well as the fact that he was
a person from Amorio in the land of Phrygië.49 (Phrygië is another name for Phrygia; see
below for details. Amorio is another name for Amonia.) This reminds me that Matteo
Ricci states: “Esope was an enlightened man from the past who unhappily was cut
off from his homeland, taken prisoner, and enslaved in the house of Xanto.”50
Also, [the story that] when this Xanto came upon his [ugly] countenance, he ended
up buying his ready wit, is also the same as in Aesop’s Fables (Isoho mono­gatari ).51
However, none of the three books [of the Japanese Isoho monogatari] mention
where he came from,52 nor is he mentioned in The Complete History of the West ( Jp.
Seiyō zenshi 西洋全史).53 If you check this in an atlas, Phrygia and Phrygië are called
Phrygiën ( Jp. Fureijiin) in Dutch. (In Chinese this is Hiriga 非里雅 [Ch. Fei­liya].) This

46
Saisuke must be referring to the so-called “illustrated Manji edition” (manji e-iri-bon) of 1659
(Manji 2).
47
Isoho monogatari (1.1) states that Aesop was first sold to “a man called Arishitesu in Ateeresu”
(a corruption of “Athens”; Yamamura Saisuke gives “Araerusu”). Xanto ( Jp. Shan[to]) is some-
one who visits the household, interrogates Aesop, and ends up buying him. Isoho monogatari, in
vol. 90 of Nihon koten bungaku taikei (op. cit.), pp. 361–363 (see note 12).
48
Saisuke refers to Egbert Buys (?–1769), Gakugei zensho 学芸全書 (The Complete Book of
Scholarship and Arts), that is, the ten-volume encyclopedia Nieuw en volkomen woordenboek van konsten
en wetenschappen (New and Complete Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, 1769–1778). For the
entry “Esopus,” see volume 3 (1771), pp. 705–706.
49
Here, Saisuke is following the Dutch text in Buys’ New and Complete Dictionary of the Arts and
Sciences.
50 エ ソ ペ シヤン ト
阨瑣伯氏は上古明士不幸本国被伐身為俘虜鬻于蔵徳氏之家と. Saisuke quotes in Chinese
from a text by, or ascribed to, Matteo Ricci ( Jp. Ri Matō, Ch. Li Madou 利瑪竇, 1552–1610), pre-
sumably his Jiren shipian (Ten Stories of Extraordinary Men, 1608), which contains references to
Aesop’s fables; see above.
51
Saisuke writes that Xanto “bought [Aesop’s] tongue” (shita wo kau 舌を買ふ), which I take to
be an elliptical way of saying that Xanto was intrigued by Aesop’s wit, which in turn was the main
reason for procuring Aesop as his slave.
52
This is an odd statement. The very first story in Isoho monogatari opens by emphatically placing
Aesop’s origins in Phrygia.
53
Saisuke had read a Seiyō zenshi 西洋全史 (Complete History of the West) by “the Dutchman
Gottfried” (Oranda goddoriido). This is the Dutch translation of Historische chronica (Historical
Chronicle, 1660) by the German Johan Ludwig Gottfried.
 A Forgotten Aesop 43

is the name of a country from the past; it lies in Asia Minor. This region is divided
into two parts, Great and Little. These days, Great Phrygië is called G*** ( Jp.
Zeruman), and Little Phrygië is called S*** ( Jp. Sarukyumu).54 In the past, in this re-
gion there was a celebrated castle town called Troy. This was Priam’s royal capital.
However, since the time of the 1870th year since the creation of the West (this
coincides with [unidentifiable character] of the mizunoto-boar year, the first year
of the reign of King Kang of the Zhou in China55), they sent soldiers from
Greece ( Jp. Gereshia) and laid siege to it for ten years, and eventually took the
castle town of Troy and destroyed it completely. Later, the great king Alexander
united all countries and as Troy had been a famous castle town since antiquity,
he ordered to have it rebuilt. This battle of Troy is most famous in the world; in
several books from the West there are a great number of records saying “before
the battle of Troy” and “after the battle.”
Also, this Ateerusu where Aesop was held captive is also known by the name
Ateenen (Athens) or Atona 亜徳那 (Ch. Yadena56) which lies in Greece. If you
consider all these points taken together, then we can assume that Aesop was
someone [living] at the time of the battle for Troy, and that when Troy was de-
stroyed, he was taken captive and imprisoned in Athens.
So, were these Fables something recorded by dictation from a Portuguese
during the foundation of our country [that is, at the beginning of Tokugawa
rule], or can it be that they were translated into our language by someone from
that country who had been living in our country for a long time?
In the Fables there is a story of how two samurai tell Aesop about a dream. One
says that in his dream he went up to heaven; the other tells how he went down
to inferno ( Jp. inheruno).57 “Inferno” is a Portuguese word and means “hell.” In
Latin it is inferna ( Jp. inheruna); in Dutch it is hel ( Jp. heru). This may serve as
proof [that Aesop’s fables reached Japan through Portuguese, not Dutch].
Also, in Dutch, fables ( Jp. hiyu gūgen 譬諭寓言) are called fabel; if you look up
“fabel” in the dictionary compiled by Halma, you can see that it says that the
fabels by Esope were translated by a Phaedrus (someone’s name);58 this goes to

54
I have not yet been able to identify zeruman and sarukyumu. The names might be a distortion
of respectively Gordium (Phrygia’s capital) and Sakarya [River].
55
King Kang (Kang wang 康王) was a mythical ruler of the Zhou dynasty, supposedly reigning
1020–996 BCE.
56
This transcription of the place name Athens appears in Matteo Ricci’s Jiren shipian, as does its
variant Yadena 亜得納. Compare Li, “The Art of Misreading: An Analysis of the Jesuit ‘Fables’ in
Late Ming China” (op. cit.), p. 76.
57
Yamamura Saisuke is referring to story 1.16 in Isoho monogatari, which indeed gives “inheruno”
ゐんへる野 (in opposition to tenchō 天朝, “[court, or kingdom, of] heaven”). See Isoho monogatari 1.16,
in vol. 90 of Nihon koten bungaku taikei (op. cit.), p. 384. One wonders whether seventeenth-century
Japanese readers would have readily understood this term. Saisuke also provides the entire text
of Isoho monogatari 1.16 at the end of his section on Aesop.
58
Indeed, both François Halma’s Dutch-French dictionary and the Japanese ‘Haruma’ based on
it give the example sentence, under the entry “Fabel”: “The fables of Aesop were translated by
Phaedrus (Du. Fedrus)” ( Jp. esōpyusu no toraetaru shōsetsumono wa hederyusu ga yaku-seri ヱソーピュスの
捕へたる小説物はヘデリュスが訳せり). See François Halma, Woordenboek der Nederduitscheen
Fransche taalen, 2nd edn. (Amsterdam: W. van de Water, 1729), p. 710.
44 Smits

show that they have a good reputation in that country. (I have heard that a few
years ago a Dutchman brought with him a biography of Aesop that was printed
in the West. Someone got hold of it and said that all the images in the book
were the same as recorded in Isoho monogatari. Where this book is now, I do not
know.)
In a headnote, Yamamura Saisuke gives the complete text of Isoho monogatari
1.16, “How Aesop and two samurai discuss dreams” (Isoho to ninin no saburai
yume-monogatari no koto いそほと二人の侍夢物語の事).
Among other things, this entry makes clear that within Hollandologists’ circles
in Edo, not only were some of the early seventeenth-century kana-zōshi editions
somehow available, but that these scholars fully realized that these Japanese
translations were based on a ‘Portuguese’ version that likely predated the Dutch
presence in Japan. In the case of scholars, academies constructed libraries of
some form and such collections provided not only access to, but also awareness
of, older texts.59 Aesop’s tales, also in their early seventeenth-century Japanese
incarnation as popular literature, were recognized to be a link between ‘Dutch’
knowledge and the access to European culture provided two centuries previ-
ously by Portuguese traders and the Jesuits. This was an insight shared by the so-
called “Dutch interpreters” (Oranda tsūji 阿蘭陀通詞) in Nagasaki. The interpret-
ers, whose primary function was to facilitate and help control interactions with
the Dutch trading post on Dejima, came to represent an important knowledge
hub for the different subfields of Hollandology; Nagasaki provided an essential
training ground for anyone serious about ‘Dutch studies.’ When in 1799 the Mito
scholar Tachihara Suiken 立原翠軒 (1744–1823) had a chance to debrief the inter-
preter Narabayashi Jūbei 楢林重兵衛 (1750–1801) on all sorts of information
pertaining to Europe, he noted, “The book Aesop’s Fables (Isoho monogatari ) is the
Japanese translation of a book from the past called Esopi ( Jp. Isowohisu). It is an
old book.”60
The observation that Aesop’s fables represented a very early presence of
European literature in Japan was echoed by Shiba Kōkan. In his Shunparō hikki
春波楼筆記 (Shunparō’s Jottings) of 1811, Kōkan related how several years ear-
lier he had come across a copy of Aesop’s fables in the library of the lord of the
Kishū 紀州 (aka Kii 紀伊) domain. Presumably the daimyō in question was
Tokugawa Harutomi 徳川治宝 (1771–1853), the tenth lord of the Kishū domain
during the period 1789–1824, who enjoyed a wide reputation for his interests in

59
Kornicki, Peter, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 389. The size of such very specialized libraries is difficult to ascertain.
For example, when it comes to books in Dutch, the Mitsukuri, a family of Western scholars, by
1866 appears to have had collected no more than fifty titles. Kornicki, The Book in Japan, p. 303.
60
イソホものがたりと云書は、昔イソヲヒスと云書の和解なり、古書なり. Narabayashi zatsuwa
楢林雑話, in Kaihyō sōsho 海表叢書, vol. 2, in Nanban kōmō shiryō 南蛮紅毛史料, vol. 1, ed. Shinmura
Izuru 新村出 (Kyoto: Kōseikaku, 1930), p. 32.
 A Forgotten Aesop 45

scholarship and painting. In the same Shunparō’s Jottings, Kōkan notes that he was
invited to lecture to this lord on astronomy, presumably at the daimyō’s resi-
dence in Edo, which is where he must have seen Aesop’s fables.61 His renown as
a popularizer of Western knowledge, including astronomy, a field in which he
had published a number of books, will have brought him to Harutomi’s atten-
tion. Besides this, there was a family connection tying Kōkan to this particular
domain; one of Kōkan’s forefathers came from Kishū.62
The encounter with this early version of Aesop’s fables made a lasting impres-
sion on Kōkan, and would have a major impact on his ideas about the applica-
bility in Japan of European didactic techniques and the echoes between Western
and Japanese morality.
Aesop’s Fables (Isoho monogatari ) is the translation of a Western book. The original
is [in the library] of the lord of the Kishū domain. I had a look at it myself: all
[the stories in it] use analogies to teach morality. Here I will give one or two ex-
amples.63
Kōkan proceeds to recount respectively the fable of the wolf and the crane
(Isoho monogatari 2.16), the fable of the monkey and the man (2.39), and the fable
of the preaching bird (3.31). Then he remarks, “This book is two hundred years
old and it is all written in kana [=the Japanese syllabic script],” which strongly
suggests he was looking at the kana-zōshi edition. After a digression, of the
kind rather typical for him, which deals with the differences between the lan-
guage of the early seventeenth century and that of late Edo, especially in forms of
address, Kōkan considers the nature of the European original of the Aesopian
fables.
This book is a Western book; [its genre] is called zinnebeeld ( Jp. shinnebēru シンネ
ベール, or emblem), that is, an analogy. It contains words that nowadays are dif-
ficult to understand for someone studying Dutch books. But we must realize
that two hundred years ago there [already] were people occupied with Western
Studies.

Animal Fables in a Japanese Emblem Book

Like Maeno Ryōtaku before him, Kōkan used the Dutch term zinnebeeld, the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch term for emblem. Kōkan had hit

Shunparō hikki 春波楼筆記, in Asakura Haruhiko 朝倉治彦 et al., eds., Shiba Kōkan zenshū 司馬
61

江漢全集 (Tokyo: Yasaka Shobō, 1992–1994), vol. 2, p. 94. See also Calvin L. French, Shiba
Kōkan: Artist, Innovator and Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1974),
pp. 142–143. This particular copy of Aesop’s fables in the collection of the Kii domain has yet
to be identified.
62
This was why Shiba styled himself ‘Kō-Kan’ 江漢, after the two main rivers of that domain.
See Shunparō hikki, in Shiba Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.),vol. 2, pp. 50–51.
63
For this and the following quotations, see Shunparō hikki, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 90–91.
46 Smits

upon the notion of emblem minimally as early as 1798, when he wrote his
Oranda zokuwa おらんだ俗話 (Anecdotes about Holland).64 And like Ryōtaku, he
did see a pivotal role for images that through analogy helped to convey a moral
message. Nevertheless, Aesop’s fables struck him immediately as ‘emblematic,’
or a form of zinnebeeld. That is to say, the emblematic was not exclusively visual.
The combination of animal fables and their apparent connection with culturally
coded images will have helped late-Edo Japanese to some extent to merge the
concept of the European emblematic image and the moral analogies provided
by Aesop’s stories into the idea of zinnebeeld as analogy ( Jp. hiyu, tatoe), with usu-
ally a visual element,65 and to understand this as a dominant template in Euro-
pean discourse.
Around that same year 1811, when Kōkan was reminiscing about his encoun-
ter with Aesop’s fables in the library of the daimyō of Kii, he painted a 132cm-
long hanging scroll depicting a traveler, quoting the fable of the preaching bird
from the early seventeenth-century Isoho mongatari (3.31) that he had also invoked
in his Shunparō’s Jottings.66 Assuming that this scroll, like just about any other
painting that Kōkan executed, was intended for sale, it goes to show that Kōkan
was busy pushing his interests in Aesopian fables beyond a merely private fasci-
nation and was intent on extending the moral message-system Aesopian fables
represented to help it reach a broader audience.
A long-time prolific publicist, by 1810 Kōkan had given up on commercial
publication projects, deeming his Japanese readers too lethargic to bother with:
“We Japanese do not like to investigate things.”67 He did not stop writing, how-
ever, but rather decided to no longer publish. Nonetheless, Aesop’s fables even-
tually seduced him into reconsidering this position. While he seems to have been
sharing his enthusiasm for Aesopian-style morality with his direct patrons in the
later Bunka 文化 period (1804–1818), Kōkan embarked upon a book project
that would become the active application in a Japanese context of his under-
standing of the dynamics of the European emblem, and the appeal of the Ae-
sopian fable. At some point in the early 1810s, he began to collect, write, and edit
an anthology of moral anecdotes culled from ancient Chinese sources as well as
from the Aesopian tradition, and augmented these with fables of his own mak-
ing, all of which he completed by the seventh month of 1814 (Bunka 11). This

64
Oranda zokuwa おらんだ俗話, in Shiba Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 3, pp. 122–123.
65
“Many [emblems] clarify [their message] through images.” (ōku wa gazu wo motte satosashimu
多くハ画図を以て暁さしむ). In other words, not all ‘emblems’ do so. Ibid., p. 122.
66
“Isoho monogatari iwaku” 伊曽保物語曰 (ca. 1811 [Bunka 8]). Private collection. See Naruse
Fujio 成瀬不二雄, Shiba Kōkan: shōgai to gagyō (sakuhin hen) 司馬江漢：生涯と画業 (作品篇) (Yasaka
Shobō, 1995), p. 303, no. 258. The kakemono 掛物 quotes Isoho monogatari 3.31, “A bird preaching
to man” (tori, hito ni kyōke wo suru koto).
67
Waga Nihon no hito, kyūri wo konomazu わが日本の人、究理を好まず. Shunparō hikki, in Shiba
Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 2, p. 38.
 A Forgotten Aesop 47

was a manuscript that he carefully prepared for a return to the commercial print
market.
In an undated letter, probably written somewhere between late 1812 and early
1814, and presumably addressed to one of his favorite correspondents, Yamaryō
(var. Yamane) Shume (var. Kazuma) 山領主馬 (aka Toshimasa 利昌, 1756–1823),
Kōkan discusses his publication plans for the manuscript of what would be-
come his Kunmō gakaishū 訓蒙画解集 (A Primer Explained with Pictures). This
work is an illustrated collection of moral tales, many of them involving animals,
in which Kōkan provides a broad array of didactic messages. In his letter, Kōkan
hints at one of the salient features of his manuscript: that all tales are given in
two versions, one in Sinitic, and one in Japanese. Basically, of such doubling in
A Primer Explained with Pictures there exist two varieties. In one type of doubling,
as hinted in the letter, the Japanese (or ‘kana’ ) version recaps the kanbun text; oc-
casionally, Kōkan will add an explicit moral in Japanese. In a variant of this,
Kōkan’s Japanese text is rather a commentary on, or at times even a reflection
inspired by, the Sinitic text. For example, in reaction to the Sinitic “In Huainanzi
it says: In the forest one should not sell brushwood; on the lake one should not
vend fish. These are places where there is enough already,” the Japanese text fan-
tasizes about a more active Japanese policy for international trade: “For our Jap-
anese rice there are no routes to other countries. If we loaded it onto big ships
and sold it to China, India, and Holland, we could make a fortune. The things we
would bring back from those countries would be sugar, drugs, and the rest, all
things absent in our own country. Japanese rice is the best in the world.”68
In the undated letter Kōkan makes suitable use of this trove of didacticism
that he was putting together. Assuming the addressee was indeed Yamaryō
Shume, the letter was on its way to the Saga domain in Kyushu, while Kōkan had
just returned to Edo from a trip to Kyoto. The distance between these two
points on the map justified some praise of letter writing.
後漢書蔡邕ノ伝 相見無期唯是書疏可以当面 国程路を隔て逢フ事かたし。
只書状を見れハ、対面したるこころぞする。
此様なる事を六十七十集メ、下に画をなし傍ラ国字ヲ以解し、訓蒙画解集と
名、初ニ自序以テし写シ申候て上度候。後々ハ京へ遣、板行ニもなるべし。
In Cai Yong’s biography in The Book of the Later Han [it says]: To see each other, there
is no given moment. Only with a letter can one see face to face. It is difficult to meet when
long roads lie between. Only a letter gives the feeling that one is meeting face to
face.69
Of this type of thing [adage] I have collected sixty or seventy; beneath them I
have drawn pictures, and to the side I have explained them in our country’s own

68
Kunmō gakaishū 訓蒙画解集 12, in Shiba Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 2, pp. 182, 301.
69
This is an abbreviated version of Kunmō gakaishū 41. Cai Yong (132–192) was a talented
scholar and advisor to the emperor under the Later Han dynasty.
48 Smits

script [kana; that is, in Japanese]. I have named this A Primer Explained with
Pictures (Kunmō gakaishū ). At the beginning I have copied out my own preface.
In the near future I will send it to the capital [Kyoto] and must have it printed.70
Indeed, the existing manuscript of this didactic tale collection, with its preface
dated 1814, is a clean copy ready to be sent off to a publisher.71 Why Kōkan in
the end never published his manuscript we do not know, but Kōkan died in
1818, and Kunmō gakaishū, his last book manuscript readied for the printer’s,
would not be published during his lifetime. Possibly, when Kōkan finished his
preface, he decided he was not yet done, pressed on, and created yet more fables
once his preface was written. In the end, Kōkan would collect 117 fables in his
A Primer Explained with Pictures. Many of them were culled and adapted from an-
cient Chinese sources, for example twenty-six among them from the sixth-century
Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of Refined Literature), and another six from the Huainanzi
淮南子 (second century BCE). In addition, Kōkan wrote quite a number of new
fables himself. Five tales he took from Aesop’s fables. Among them was the
fable that three decades later would appeal so much to Tamenaga Shunsui as well
(Figure 5):
[Sinitic] A wolf ate a man and got a bone stuck in his throat. He could no longer
drink or eat. It so happened that there was a crane who crossed the wolf ’s path.
The wolf called out to him and said, “There is a bone stuck in my throat. You,
with your long beak, get it out for me!” The crane, cowed into obedience, pro-
ceeded to remove the bone. Upon which the wolf said, “I haven’t had anything
to eat for seven days. I’m starved. So, I guess I’ll eat you.”
[Japanese] A wolf had a bone stuck in his throat and could not eat for seven days.
At that time, a crane came along. With your long beak get this bone out, he said.
The crane was afraid and got the bone out. The wolf said, First I’ll have to eat
you. This is what we call repaying kindness with contempt.72
Importantly, all Kōkan’s moral tales come with an illustration. The reason is
clear: this manuscript was to be a Japanese emblem book, and without images,
the rhetorical force of the emblems would not be palpable. In his preface to
A Primer Explained with Pictures, Kōkan frames his didactic ploy in the context of
what he regards as the overwhelming scientific superiority of Europe. He re-
turns to what is by then a worn trope of his, namely that people in Japan are
stuck in an out-of-date and largely irrelevant understanding of the world and its

70
Kanzaki Jun’ichi 神崎順一, “Shiba Kōkan Kunmō gakaishū wo meguru jihitsu shokan ni tsuite:
Tenri toshokan shozō Nichi-Ō kōshō shiryō (5)” 司馬江漢『訓蒙画家集』をめぐる自筆書簡に
ついて：天理図書館所蔵日欧交渉資料 (五), Biburia (Biblia) ビブリア 112 (1999), pp. 2–46, esp.
pp. 34, 40. Kanzaki transcribes the text of the letter. Shume was a samurai of the Nabeshima 鍋島
clan of the Saga domain, Kyushu, whom Kōkan seems to have befriended when both lived in
Edo.
71
Kōkan’s manuscript is in the possession of the National Diet Library (call no.: WA21-23).
72
Kunmō gakaishū 106 ( fu 14), in Shiba Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 2, pp. 283, 327.
 A Forgotten Aesop 49

Figure 5. The wolf and the crane. Illustration

by Shiba Kōkan 司馬江漢, in his Kunmō gakaishū
訓蒙画解集 (no. 106), MS dated Bunka 11/1814.
(National Diet Library).
https://doi.org/10.11501/2532348

place in the universe, and that they are held back by their reluctance to engage
with European learning. Then he comes to the point:
In the language of that country they talk about zinnebeeld ( Jp. shinnebēru), which
use analogy (tatoe) as a form of instruction; it is the same as the admonitions on
virtue by wise men. For this reason, I now [have collected] here several tens of
stories left to us by people from the past and I have unobtrusively added several
stories at the end. Underneath I have made drawings and next to them I have
explained them in Japanese (lit. “in kana”). As title I have chosen A Primer,
Explained with Pictures.73 Thinking that it might open the eyes of uninformed
youth, I mention it here.74

73
Kōkan himself glosses 訓蒙 as “kunmō,” not “kinmō.”
74
Kunmō gakaishū, “Preface,” in Shiba Kōkan zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 2, p. 170.
50 Smits

For Kōkan, the Dutch language not merely provided access to the sciences;
rather, it connected science to deeper insights. In that sense, Aesopian fables
were part and parcel of a Western knowledge system.

Conclusion
Aesop’s fables were not completely forgotten in Japan between the mid-
seventeenth century and the dawn of the Meiji era. However, it was especially in
relation to a more sustained early modern interest in Europe that, after the late
eighteenth century, the story of Aesop and his fables took on a new life as a
form of image-centered literature capable of hinting that there was more of
value to Europe than the hard sciences.
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 51–66
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

From “Pointing Straight to

the Human Mind” to “Pointing Round
to the Human Mind”
Yoshizawa Katsuhiro
Translated by Jeffrey KNOTT

Introduction: Surpassing Language to “Point Straight to the Human

Mind”
Today the Zen school is thought of as having been founded, in China, through
the efforts of Bodhidharma. Later generations of Zen practitioners, however,
going back far beyond the First Patriarch Bodhidharma, sought the sect’s deeper
origins in the Buddha himself. According to a legend found in various texts,1 at
the end of his life the Buddha, giving up on teaching by means of words, pre-
sented his disciples instead with the sight of a single flower taken to hand. None
of them could understand what this signified, but there was one, Mahākāśyapa,
who alone understood and smiled subtly. This “subtle smile at the plucked
flower” (nenge-mishō 拈華微笑) was taken to be the origin of Zen. Its essence was
in “mind-to-mind transmission” (ishin-denshin 以心伝心)—transmission beyond
the bounds of words—and in “non-elevation of writing” (furyū-monji 不立文字)—
the refusal to invest any text with ultimate authority. The foundational teachings
of Bodhidharma in turn were encapsulated in the Buddhist slogan “pointing
straight to the human mind, one sees its nature and becomes a Buddha” (jikishi
ninshin, kenshō jōbutsu 直指人心, 見性成仏), meaning essentially that, through a di-
rect demonstration of the human mind’s identity with the Buddha’s Mind, one
comes to see one’s own buddha-nature, realizing thereby that one is, already, a
buddha oneself.
Stories resembling the above can be found in several different sutras. For in-
stance, in the Ru bu’er famen ben 入不二法門品 (“Grasping the Teaching of
Non-Duality”) chapter of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sutra (Ch. Weimo-jing 維摩経, Jp.

1
Cf., for example, case 6 in Wumenguan 無門関. Regarding the origins of this legend, see Ishii
Shūdō 石井修道, “Nenge-mishō no hanashi no seiritsu wo megutte” 拈華微笑の話の成立をめぐっ
て, in Sanron kyōgaku to bukkyō sho-shisō: Hirai Shun’ei-hakase koki kinen ronshū 三論教学と仏教諸
思想：平井俊栄博士古稀記念論集 (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 2000), pp. 411-430.

51
52 Yoshizawa

Yuima-kyō ) we find a story like the following. Vimalakīrti asked thirty-one bodhi-
sattvas in what exactly the teaching of non-duality (Skt. advayā, Ch. bu’er famen
不二法門, Jp. funi hōmon) consisted. All of them, however, went on to explain
what non-duality was in different ways, saying that the teaching of non-duality
signified awakening and confusion, or subjectivity and objectivity, or the I and
the You, and so on. Last of all the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī explained that: “It is, to
my understanding, in all aspects of the Law, the principle of leaving behind all
language and speech, all demonstration and interpretation, all manner of teach-
ing dialogues. This is what it means to grasp the teaching of non-duality.”2
Thereupon he asked Vimalakīrti for his understanding of the teaching of
non-duality. In response, however, Vimalakīrti was only silent, speaking not a
word. To this Mañjuśrī said, with words of praise, “Very good! Very good! In-
deed there is no writing or language for it. This, truly, is what it means to grasp
the teaching of non-duality.”3
Or again, we find stories like the following.4 On a certain occasion, Emperor Wu
武 of the Liang 梁 dynasty asked Fu Dashi 傅大士 (Jp. Fu-daishi; also Shanhui
Dashi 善慧大士, Jp. Zen’e-daishi) to give a lecture on the Diamond Sutra. In re-
sponse, Fu Dashi sat himself upon the high seat, and proceeded to shake its desk
violently, after which, without saying anything, he again descended. Emperor Wu of
Liang, being well-versed himself in Buddhist studies, had fully expected to receive
a detailed explanation of the Diamond Sutra down to individual words and verses,
yet Fu Dashi had simply descended silently, without expounding upon one single
character. In the event Lord Zhi 志公, who was at the Emperor’s side, said, “Does
Your Majesty perhaps understand . . . ?” “Not at all,” was Emperor Wu’s reply. To
this, Lord Zhi said, “[Fu] Dashi just completed a sermon on the Diamond Sutra.”
Afterwards, there thus developed in Chinese Chan a practice of communicat-
ing the essence of “non-elevation of writing” through slogans like wuyan wushuo
無言無説 (“without language or speech”) or wushuo wushi 無説無示 (“without
speech or demonstration”)—in other words, through the “action” of “each mo-
ment, each situation” (yiji yijing 一機一境, Jp. ikki ikkyō).
This can be seen from answers given to the representative question: “What
was the purpose of Bodhidharma coming from the West (i.e. from India to
China)?”—this being equivalent to asking, “What is Chan?” In documents of
Chan school history, there are over 200 examples of this question being posed,
but the answers given by Chan monks of the Tang period are not all the same.

In the original text: 文殊師利曰：如我意者, 於一切法無言無説, 無示無識, 離諸問答, 是為入不

2

二法門. In Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大蔵経, eds. Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 et al. (Tokyo:
Taishō Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924-1932), vol. 14, p. 551c.
3
In the original text: 善哉! 善哉! 乃至無有文字, 語言, 是真入不二法門. Ibid., vol. 14, p. 551c.
4
See, for example, case 67 in Biyan lu 碧巌録, ibid., vol. 48, p. 197a. In the original text: 挙.
梁武帝請傅大士講金剛経. 大士便於座上. 揮案一下. 便下座. 武帝愕然. 誌公問. 陛下還会麼. 帝云.
不会. 誌公云. 大士講経竟.
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 53

One monk gave nothing in reply, merely exhibiting in his hand a fly-whisk made
to stand on end.5 Another plunged a hand into the breast of his robe, drawing
out again a fist, which he opened in display.6
These are ways of responding by means of action, without using language.
Even among answers recorded as given in words, however, we find things like:
“the cypress tree in the garden”,7 “Plant an apple tree at the bottom of a well!”,8
“Ask the round pillar out there!”,9 “I’ll answer when the stone turtle speaks”,10
“The mountains are cold, the waters chill”,11 “Every three years there is a leap
year”,12 “If there was any purpose in coming from the West, then cut my head
off ”,13 “blue mountains, green waters”,14 “Chang’an is in the East, Luoyang in
the West”,15 and so on in the same vein.

Using Language to “Point Round to the Human Mind”

There are plentiful examples of Chan formation (sekke 接化) being conducted
along such lines, either by abstaining from all use of language, or by using lan-
guage in a deliberately odd way to convey the sense that understanding is not
obtainable from the surface of words alone. At the same time, the fundamental
Chan principle of “non-elevation of writing” has also regularly been given expres-
sion by making use of that very writing. An exemplary masterpiece on these lines

5
Linji lu 臨済録, ibid., vol. 47, p. 496c. In the original text: 上堂, 僧問：“如何是仏法大意 ?”
師竪起払子, 僧便喝, 師便打.
6
Jingde chuandeng lu 景徳伝燈録, vol. 11, ibid., vol. 51, p. 284b. In the original text: “問, 如何是
西来意. 師以手入懐出拳展開与之” (香厳智閑禅師章).
7
Wumenguan, ibid., vol. 48, p. 297c. In the original text: 趙州因僧問. 如何是祖師西来意. 州云.
庭前柏樹子.
8
Jingde chuandeng lu, vol. 11, ibid., vol. 51, p. 285c. In the original text: 霊雲志勤禅師章, “問,
如何是西来意. 師曰, 井底種林檎.”
9
Jingde chuandeng lu, vol. 14, ibid., vol. 51, p. 384a. In the original text: “問. 如何是祖師西来意.
師曰. 問取露柱看” (石頭希遷大師章).
10
Jingde chuandeng lu, vol. 17, ibid., vol. 51, p. 337c. In the original text: 問如何是祖師西来意. 師曰.
待石烏亀解語即向汝道.
11
Wudeng huiyuan 五燈会元, vol. 14, in Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō 新纂大日本続蔵経, eds.
Kawamura Kōshō 河村孝照 et al. (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1975-89), vol. 80, p. 287c. In the
original text: 舒州四面山津禅師 僧問. 如何是仏. 師曰. 王字不著点. 曰. 学人不会. 師曰. 点. 問.
如何是祖師西来意. 師曰. 山寒水冷. 師有挂杖頌曰. 四面一条杖. 当機験龍象. 頭角稍低昂. 電光臨
背上.
12
Wudeng huiyuan, vol. 15, ibid., vol. 80, p. 318a. In the original text: 天睦山慧満禅師章, “問,
如何是祖師西来意. 師曰, 三年逢一閏.”
13
Ibid., vol. 80, p. 319c. In the original text: 磁州桃園山㬢朗禅師 僧問. 如何是祖師西来意.
師曰. 西来若有意. 斬下老僧頭. 曰. 為甚却如此. 師曰. 不見道. 為法喪軀.
14
Ibid., vol. 80, p. 323a. In the original text: 韶州南華宝慈済禅師 僧問. 如何是祖師西来意.
師曰. 青山緑水. 曰. 未来時還有意也無. 師曰. 高者高. 低者低.
15
Wudeng huiyuan, vol. 16, ibid., vol. 80, p. 331b. In the original text: 僧問. 如何是祖師西来意.
師曰. 長安東. 洛陽西. 問. 如何是仏. 師曰. 福州橄欖両頭尖. 問. 仏未出世時如何. 師曰. 隈巌傍壑.
曰. 出世後如何. 師曰. 前山後山.
54 Yoshizawa

is the Zongjing lu 宗鏡録 (Jp. Sugyōroku; 961). Produced by the monk Yongming
Yanshou 永明延寿 (Jp. Eimei Enju; 904–976), this work undertook to excerpt
important passages from the records of Chan masters’ sayings and the Buddhist
sutras, and by then comparing side-by-side with one another the interpretations
of the various schools, attempted to achieve thereby some final synthesis from
all of them, under the single formulation “Chan is the Sect of the Buddha’s
Mind.” Essentially the Zongjing lu was a masterwork of Chan philosophy, the
overarching theme of its massive hundred-volume span being the one question
“What is the Buddha’s Mind?”16 A story found within this Zongjing lu explains the
transmission of the Law from Bodhidharma to the Second Chan Patriarch
Huike 慧可 (Jp. Eka) in the following way (vol. 43, beginning):
When Bodhidharma came from India, it was with the sole purpose of conveying
the “One Mind” (yixin 一心, Jp. isshin). The Second Patriarch was told by
Bodhidharma to “go find and then bring back the thing called Mind.” Time and
again he sought to find what this Mind might be, until he had the realization
that Mind, ultimately, was not something possible to find by seeking. Instantly
then the realization came to him that the one and only, the perfect and the flawless
True Mind was fully omnipresent in the dharmadhātu “realm of the Law” (fajie
法界, Jp. hokkai). As a result, he received Bodhidharma’s recognition, and thus
it is that Chan—the teaching of the One Mind—has been transmitted even to
the present day.17
In the Tang period, Chan dialogues such as these were recorded mainly in what
were called yulu 語録 (Jp. goroku, “records of sayings”), a genre of texts that pre-
served the words and deeds of individual Chan monks. Over time, several of the
episodes in such works gradually took on an independent life of their own, be-
ing treated, for example, in religious sermons and the like as testimonials of
achieving awakening. Eventually, these came to be known collectively as “cases”
or gong’an 公案 (Jp. kōan)—in its origin a technical term from the field of law, sig-
nifying the record of a given legal question and its attendant judgment. By the
Song period in China, Chan masters were using gong’an in the formation of dis-
ciples. This era saw the publication of the Biyan lu 碧巌録 (Jp. Hekiganroku),
which collected 100 representative cases from the larger gong’an corpus.18 Among
the gong’an there collected are the two cases examined just above, the story of the
“subtle smile at the plucked flower” and that of “Fu Dashi lecturing on the
sutras.” The Biyan lu has a three-layered structure. The first consists of the “core
cases” (benze 本則, Jp. honsoku) themselves, those gong’an excerpted from the

16
Regarding the Zongjing lu 宗鏡録, see Yanagi Mikiyasu 柳幹康, Eimei Enju to Sugyōroku no
kenkyū: isshin ni yoru Chūgoku bukkyō no saihen 永明延寿と『宗鏡録』の研究：一心による中国仏教
の再編 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 2014).
17
In the original text: 夫初祖西来. 唯伝一心之法. 二祖求縁慮不安之心不得. 即知唯一真心円成
周遍. 当下言思道断. 達磨印可. In Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (op. cit.), vol. 48, p. 667a.
18
According to the preface by Fuzhao 普照, in 1128.
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 55

dialogues of older masters. On top of these was a layer of poetry, a treatment of

each and every one of these hundred core cases in the Sinophone Buddhist
verse-style known as song 頌 (Jp. ju), appended by the monk Xuedou Chongxian
雪竇重顕 (Jp. Secchō Jūken; 980–1052). This is the work Xuedou songgu 雪竇頌古
(Jp. Secchō juko).19 Together with their song-verses, these hundred cases were in
turn used by the monk Yuanwu Keqin 圜悟克勤 (Jp. Engo Kokugon; 1063–1135)
as subjects for his preaching and lecturing throughout the land. The title Biyan lu
refers to the amalgamated work that resulted from yet further addition of con-
tent from Yuanwu’s own preaching, which took three literary forms: summary
introductions known as chuishi 垂示 (Jp. suiji), short commentary annotations
known as zhuyu 著語 (Jp. jakugo), and passages of general commentary known as
pingchang 評唱 (Jp. hyōshō). The summary chuishi preceded each of the separate
cases, while zhuyu consisted of short commentary on individual words and pas-
sages within not only the core cases themselves but also their accompanying
verses. Many of these annotations, moreover, employed phrases and vocabulary
taken from the (Chinese) colloquial. Finally the pingchang supplied Yuanwu’s anal-
yses, again both on cases and their verses.
Yuanwu’s act of recording his lectures in such a way, however, attracted criti-
cism from another monk of the same sect, Fojian Huiqin 仏鑑慧懃 (Jp. Bukkan
Egon; 1059–1117). This latter wrote a letter to Yuanwu, registering his criticism
that such a manner of teaching was bound to lead students into error.20 On an-
other occasion Fojian Huiqin is to have said: “The meaning of Bodhidharma
coming from the West lay in the principle that by ‘pointing straight to the human
mind, one sees its nature and becomes a Buddha.’ In spite of this, today a great
number of teachers seem to operate on the principle that by ‘pointing round to the
human mind, one speaks its nature and becomes a Buddha’ (Jp. kyokushi ninshin,
sesshō jōbutsu 曲指人心, 説性成仏).”21 This latter phrase was intended as a criticism
of those who believed in using writing for the explanation of Chan. Inspired by
Fojian Huiqin’s critique, Yuanwu’s own disciple Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (Jp.
Daie Sōkō; 1089–1163) actually had the master woodblocks used to print the
Biyan lu text destroyed by fire. According to a postface to the Biyan lu by Xugu
Xiling 虚谷希陵 (Jp. Kyokoku Keryō; 1247–1322), it seems that at the time, there
were those who tended to borrow phrases learned from the Biyan lu when it
came to describing their own experiences, and Dahui had sent the book to the
fire in order to extirpate this lamentable habit of, as he put it, “venerating lan-
guage above all, trying to become masters of speech.”22

19
In Tiansheng 天聖 4/1026, edited by disciple Yuanchen 遠塵, with a preface at the work’s
beginning added by Tanyu 曇玉.
20
See the letter from Huiqin to Yuanwu (仏鑑懃和尚与仏果勤和尚書) in Zimen jingxun 緇門警訓.
Text in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (op. cit.), vol. 48, p. 1085c.
21
See Dahui wuku 大慧武庫, ibid., vol. 47, p. 956c.
22
Ibid., vol. 48, p. 224c.
56 Yoshizawa

Notwithstanding, the Biyan lu, its separately extant fragments strung together,
came eventually to be republished (1300). A preface to this republished edition
of Biyan lu, by one Sanjiao Laoren 三教老人 (Jp. Sankyō Rōjin), contains the fol-
lowing anecdote: “Somebody once asked, ‘Yuanwu made the Biyan lu, but his
own disciple Dahui had it destroyed by fire. Which of them was right?’ To which
it was replied, ‘Both of them were.’”23 Chan was thus a movement fraught with
something of a paradox, championing “pointing straight to the human mind”
on the one hand even as it practiced “pointing round to the human mind” on the
other. As it entered the Song period, Chan would even make use of previous
ages’ literary works, for explaining information at least adjacent to the inexplica-
bility at its core. This sort of Chan came at length to be brought to Japan. Zen,
as such, was also a movement seeking to discover how to express, in language,
what it was beyond language to express.

“Mind-Pointing” in Medieval Japanese Zen

In the Seizan yawa 西山夜話 of Musō Soseki 夢窓疎石 (1275–1351), one finds
the following exchange. A certain monk had asked, “If writing and language are
an impediment for the student, why is it that from ancient times our founding
teachers have made so much use of writing and language, in works like daigo 代語
(substitute words), betsugo 別語 (alternative words), nenko 拈古 (kōan commen-
tary), and juko 頌古 ( ju-style verses on kōan)?” In answer to this, Musō Soseki said,
“Masters of the sect have made various explanations by means of words, and
different masters have said different things. Yet all of these are nothing but the
feint of “Calling Little Yu” (Xiao Yu 小玉, Jp. Shō Gyoku). If a truly gifted
student is able to grasp that the core of the sect’s teachings lie beyond words,
then the teachers’ writings and language will pose no impediment.”24 Here refer-
ence is made to the series of events from Yuanwu’s composition of Biyan lu, to
Fojian Huiqin’s criticism of that text, Dahui’s burning of it, and its eventual re-
publication.
The feint of “Calling Little Yu” alludes to a passage from a love poem once
presented for the consideration of Yuanwu by his teacher, Wuzu Fayan 五祖法演
(Jp. Goso Hōen): “Vain from the beginning were her frequent calls for “Little
Yu”; she wanted only that her beau might thereby know her voice.”25 The mean-
ing is this: the noble daughter of deeply sheltered upbringing often calls out
within her mansion for her maidservant “Little Yu! Oh Little Yu!”—only not,
however, because she needs anything in particular from the servant, but rather

23
Ibid., vol. 48, p. 139a.
24
In the original text: 僧又問云. 文字言句若於学者為害. 何故古来尊宿各有代語別語拈古頌古
而行于世耶. 師曰. 明眼宗師東語西話以接学者. 所示雖異皆是呼小玉之手段也. 若有吾家種草言外
領旨. 則宗師言句何害之有乎. Ibid., vol. 80, p. 495b.
25
In the original text: 頻呼小玉元無事只要檀郎認得声. Ibid., vol. 47, p. 768a.
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 57

because she wants the young man in her thoughts to notice her voice, as he walks
past her mansion in the outer street. Writing and language are not, in other
words, goals to be achieved in themselves, but serve rather as mere expedients
for other goals’ indication.
Both Biyan lu and Zongjing lu were brought to Japan, and both frequently fea-
tured as subjects of lecturing and preaching. Having been imported to Japan,
this type of “literary Zen” (wenzi chan 文字禅, Jp. monji-zen)—a type that put
interpretations of kōan into various literary styles, and produced Zen-school
texts—underwent further independent development locally. There appeared an
expansive body of Zen literary works, penned in a complex and recondite rhe-
torical style that not only drew upon Zen record texts, starting with the Biyan lu,
but also drew upon non-Buddhist Chinese classics, particularly on Chinese po-
etry, mixing into these moreover the kind of (Chinese) vernacular phases and
vocabulary that appeared so frequently in Zen records. This was the Five-Moun-
tains literature,26 a “literary Zen”, and a paradigmatic example of “pointing
round to the human mind.”
Among the various achievements of these Muromachi-period Zen monks,
there is one particularly worthy of notice (Figure 1). This is the appearance of
the work Hyōnen-zu 瓢鮎図 (“Gourd and Catfish”; completed before 1415).
Painted by the monk Josetsu 如雪 (dates unknown) under orders from the Mu-
romachi shogun Ashikaga Yoshimochi 足利義持 (1386–1428), it represented
the paint-form rendering of the new kōan: “Can a slippery gourd capture a wet
catfish?” On the topic of this new kōan, thirty-one Five-Mountains Zen
monks, led by Daigaku Shūsū 大岳周崇 (1345–1423), expressed their interpre-
tations in the form of Chinese poems, which were then inscribed into the
painting itself.27 In the world of art history this Hyōnen-zu has long received
attention as a pioneering work of Japanese ink-painting, but the thirty-one
Chinese poems inscribed within the painting have gathered decidedly less in-
terest. If, however, one examines each of these Chinese poems carefully along-
side the painting, it becomes clear that what the work represents is a new form
of Zen expression. The man depicted in the painting’s lower center, trying to
capture the catfish, as well as the catfish itself, gliding at ease through the wa-
ter, are both drawn almost as caricatures. Finally, in the painting’s background
a traditional sansui 山水 (lit. “mountains-and-waters”) motif is depicted, though

26
Literature composed by monks in Zen temples belonging to the Five-Mountains system. For
more on the Five-Mountains system, see Martin Colcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen
Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 1996). For more on
Five-Mountains literature, see Tamamura Takeji 玉村竹二, Gozan bungaku 五山文学 (Tokyo:
Shibundō, 1955); also Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the
Zen Monasteries (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, University of Michigan Center
For Japanese Studies, 1992).
27
For details, see Yoshizawa Katsuhiro 芳澤勝弘, “Hyōnen-zu” no nazo: kokuhō saidoku hyōtan
namazu wo megutte 「瓢鮎図」の謎：国宝再読ひょうたんなまずをめぐって (Tokyo: Wedge, 2012).
58 Yoshizawa

Figure 1. Hyōnen-zu 瓢鮎図 (“Gourd and Catfish”).

Painting by the monk Josetsu 如雪. Completed by 1415.
Lower half: In a visualized kōan 公案, a man attempts to
catch a catfish by means of a hollowed-out gourd. Up-
per half: Chinese poems treating the pictured kōan by
thirty-one monks. (Myōshin-ji Temple, Taizō-in).

using a “water-and-sky in single color” (suiten isshoku 水天一色) palette such that
no clear line divides the water from the sky above. The third poem in the series, by
Unrin Myōchū 雲林妙冲 (dates unknown) runs as follows:
一瓢因甚 欲捺鮎魚 江湖水闊 道術有餘
Why now with a single gourd
Would you hope to catch the catfish?
Broad the waters of river and lake,
Yet no less the Way and its workings!
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 59

The third and fourth verses of the quatrain refer to a passage in the Zhuangzi 荘子
that runs: 魚相忘於江湖 人相忘於道術 (“The fish forgets that it lives in rivers
and lakes; man forgets that he lives in the Way and its workings”).28 Accordingly
the poem’s meaning is something like:
Why now would you disturb what sits at rest, and with a gourd try to catch the
catfish? For just as the fish is surrounded unconscious by the water’s broad ex-
panse, no less is man himself swimming deep in the limitless Way (Dao 道)!”
It is worth noting what this expresses: that the sansui scenery—the “river and
lake” (gōko 江湖)—depicted here in the background is, in and of itself, none
other than the “Mind” at Zen’s very core. Such a collaboration between image
and language being used to express the truth of the Way (Dō 道, Ch. Dao) or of
“Thusness” (Nyo 如, Ch. Ru, orig. from Skt. Tathatā) had probably never been
known in China. This manner in which the man and catfish, cast thus as carica-
tures, are able to express the question “Can one grasp the Buddha’s Mind with
the Mind’s own cognitive functions?” thus represents a new genre of “kōan in
painting”—one invented by Muromachi-period Zen monks. In Chinese history,
the most that might be found by this date consisted in what are called “Chan
(awakening-)occasion paintings” (Chan ji-hua 禅機画, Jp. Zen ki-ga) that depicted,
almost as illustrations, the story of a particular gong’an, or perhaps also in works
like the “Ten Bulls” painting series (Shiniu tu 十牛図, Jp. Jūgyū-zu). This “Ten
Bulls” series depicted the ten steps to awakening with a separate picture and
poem for each, throughout which the bull represented the “true self ” while the
cowherd represented the self seeking that true self.
Unfortunately, however, expressive experiments with “kōan in painting” like
the “Gourd and Catfish” would not continue to be produced thereafter. One
reason for this probably lies in the fact that painter-monks of the Zen sect grew
now ever more specialized, with the various different painting skills no longer
united in single artists.

“Mind-Pointing” in Early-modern Japanese Zen

With the advent of the Edo period, and the emergence of a society in which
understanding of writing extended even to the common people, Japanese Zen
underwent fundamental changes. It was in such a period that the figure of
Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴 (1685–1768) came to the fore. During the Muromachi
period, the constituency for interest in Zen had tended to consist of the Emperor,
the nobility, or the shogun and other members of the warrior class—people, in
short, of the upper classes who had received a high level of education. With the
change in era, however, there were now new potential targets for spreading the
message of Zen on a far wider scale.

28
See Sōji 荘子, ed. Kanaya Osamu 金谷治 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971), vol. 1, p. 205.
60 Yoshizawa

Figure 2. The Bodhisattva Kannon 観音,

assuming here the form of a woman in
ancient Chinese dress, sits before a writ-
ing desk with a standing screen behind
her, painted and inscribed. Painting by
Hakuin 白隠. (Private collection).

Figure 2a. Detail of inscription on screen

painting in Figure 2 (upper background).

As the famous poem had it, “What kind of thing, what meaning does it have, this
word called “Mind”? The sound of the wind in the pines, painted on paper with
ink.”29 Hakuin’s achievement lay in the innovative ways he used to communicate
this “sound of the wind in the pines, painted on paper with ink,” and not by means
of writing alone, but through its use in tandem with the technē of painting. His
marriage of the pictorial with the verbal succeeded, it can be said, in bringing the
expedient means of “pointing round” (kyokushi) to new unreached heights.
One name by which Zen has been known is that of the Buddha’s Mind sect—
i.e., the sect that preaches the Buddha’s Mind, the awakened Mind. The question
“What is the Mind?” is also the consistent theme of Hakuin’s Zen paintings.
And while indeed the fundamental position of Zen denies the possibility of fully
capturing in expressions of any sort definitive truths like “The Mind is . . . ,” it
remains the case that Hakuin succeeds in sketching out, aided by words and pic-
tures both, something like the Mind’s own pattern. As one such example, let us
examine a painting by Hakuin of Kannon 観音 (Figure 2).

29
心とはいかなるものを言うならん墨絵に描きし松風の音.
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 61

Figure 3a. (Left) Transcription of inscription visible on

screen in background, Figure 2. Here the characters are ar-
ranged as they appear on the painting-within-a-painting, the
final three being deliberately scattered. (Prepared by author).

Figure 3b. (Right) Transcription of inscription visible on

screen in background, Figure 2. For comparison, the same
transcription as in Figure 3a, without the scattering of final
characters. (Prepared by author).

The woman in the painting’s center is a form assumed by the Bodhisattva

Kannon. The imagery used has its roots in China, and the woman wears the
robes of an ancient Chinese noblewoman. Seated in a chair, the Bodhisattva
Kannon is facing a writing desk. Three volumes of sutra text sit atop the desk,
while another is being held in Kannon’s hand. Behind Kannon stands a paneled
screen, which has been painted with a sansui motif, and which is also inscribed,
in thin ink, with a Chinese poem.
The twenty characters of the poem’s full length have been arranged across the
painted screen in the manner indicated by Figure 3a. The meaning of the poem
itself is something like the following: “Sometimes the Bodhisattva Kannon
appears in the form of a court minister. At others he appears in the form of a
woman. A question for you, then: when he appears in no form at all, where exactly
does it hide, Kannon’s full body?” From inside his own picture, Hakuin is posing
those of us viewing it from the outside this question: Where, exactly, is Kannon in
all his fullness hiding?
The inscribed poem draws upon the following passage from the Lotus Sutra:
応以宰官身得度者 即現宰官身而為説法
応以婦女身得度者 即現婦女身而為説法30
Should one there be whom a court minister’s guise could help awaken,
For him [Kannon] will become even court minister to preach the Law;
Should one there be whom a woman’s own guise could help awaken,
For him [Kannon] will become even a woman to preach the Law.

30
For text see: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (op. cit.), vol. 9, p. 57b.
62 Yoshizawa

But what about the way the poem is inscribed? A careful comparison of the
inscription as painted (Figure 2a) with the poem’s transcription in Figure 3a will
show that those characters marked red in the latter do not follow the rest of the
poem, but have instead been scattered and placed at a distance. What prompted
Hakuin to write them this way? In particular, the two characters meaning “full
body” (zenshin 全身) have been placed considerably apart from the rest. If written
the usual way, the poem would have appeared as in Figure 3b, with the character
“hide” 藏 and the other two after it following in the same line, but here instead
all three characters—藏 (“hide”) and 全身 (“full body”)—have been scattered
and placed in extremely unnatural locations. Yet it is not by chance that they
ended up written like this. Rather, by inscribing them in such a deliberately scat-
tered manner, Hakuin is trying to direct our attention to the meaning of the sansui
scenery itself. He is trying, in other words, to show us: Look carefully at the
screen’s sansui motif—it is there, in the midst of this “scenery true to life,” precisely
there that in all its fullness the full body of the Bodhisattva Kannon appears.
What, after all, are sansui paintings? A great number of sansui motifs have been
drawn in Zen-derived art over the years, yet what exactly do they signify? For
sansui is no mere representation of scenery—it indicates the place where the her-
mit goes to live. Moreover, though the motif does, quite literally, refer to the
mountains and waters it encompasses, this realm it refers to can also be desig-
nated by the word gōko 江湖 (“rivers and lakes”). The origin of this usage goes
back ultimately to the Zhuangzi, where the term appears in this passage:
The fish forgets that it lives in rivers and lakes;
Man forgets that he lives in the Way and its workings
The fish lives in the waters of rivers and lakes, yet he still forgets that water’s very
existence. In the same spirit, man himself is fully sunk in the world of the Way
(the Truth) without ever being conscious of it. The rivers and lakes, in other
words, are a metaphor for this Truth, which always surrounds us though we can-
not see it.
About sansui paintings, the leading Japanese literary critic of the 20th century,
Kobayashi Hideo 小林秀雄 (1902–1983) had the following to say:
The key thing to understand is this: nothing much would ever have happened
with [the ink painters] if they had not believed, firmly, that sansui is not some-
thing existing trivially in the world outside, but resides rather within the heart of
man. For beyond their skills with the brush, they also had the benefits of that
sight endowed by training in Zen. And there exists, completely unnamable yet
present unchangeably, a certain something utterly surrounding us. So intimately
does it surround that it brushes our skin, pulses with our lifeblood, and decid-
edly it is not a mere question of so-and-so mountain glimpsed far off, or so-
and-so river watched through the distance.
What sansui paintings do is make visible the existence of these greater things sur-
rounding us. The sansui scene Hakuin has drawn here points likewise to such
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 63

Figure 4. Jūōzu 十王図 (“Ten Kings”). From a painting series

depicting the Ten Judges of the Underworld. Here pictured
is Emma 閻魔, seated before a writing desk, with a painted
screen behind him—a visual composition mirrored by
Hakuin’s painting in Figure 2. (Eigen-ji Temple)

“greater things.” For it is none other than Kannon himself that appears in the
background sansui, he whose ultimate form is beyond all shape.
There is also another feature that makes this painting unique. Kannon here is
shown sitting busily at a writing desk, yet no other portrayals of Kannon in such
an attitude are known, making it original to Hakuin himself. In summary, the two
distinguishing characteristics of this painting are that Kannon (in female form)
is facing a writing desk, and that behind her stands a screen, bearing a painting
in the sansui style.
There does, however, exist a work with precisely the same visual composition,
in the “Ten Kings” (Jūō-zu 十王図) series of paintings (Figure 4). Being judges
for the underworld, all ten of these kings, starting with Emma 閻魔 himself, are
portrayed as siting at their writing desks. On the writing desk in front of each lie
documents for use in trials, and behind each of them stands a screen, which
always displays a sansui painting. Yet what, indeed, is the significance of Hakuin’s
64 Yoshizawa

Figure 5. Junrei rakugaki zu 巡礼落書図 (“Pilgrim’s Graffiti”). Paint-

ing by Hakuin. Right: Two pilgrims cooperate to leave graffiti on a
temple frame. Left: An inscription whose beginning hibiku taki-tsu-se
ひゝく瀧つせ associates the scene with Seiganto-ji Temple 青岸渡寺
at Mt. Nachi 那智, first stop on a famous pilgrimage route threading
thirty-three shrines devoted to Kannon. (Private collection).

painting of Kannon having used the same visual composition as the “Ten
Kings” paintings? What it expresses, even in the Kannon painting here, is that
both Kannon and Emma are emanations equally of the universal One Mind.
There is another painting by Hakuin entitled “Pilgrim’s Graffiti” (Junrei rakugaki
zu 巡礼落書図), wherein he uses quite a different way of expressing the questions:
Where is Kannon? And where is Kannon’s essence? (Figure 5).
We see in the painting that there are two pilgrims. With one man crouched on
all fours, the other man stands on his back, trying to write something or other on
a hanging temple frame. The scene is that of a pair of pilgrims traveling together,
and here indeed working together, to leave their graffiti at some temple along
their way. The words already written out read: 此堂にらく書きんぜい畏入り候—
“In this Hall graffiti is forbidden, and so with great humility it is . . . .” (i.e. that
I offer up my words).
We see that the inscription on Hakuin’s painting contains the phrase hibiku
taki-tsu-se ひびく瀧つせ (“the waterfall resounding”). While not immediately ap-
parent to the modern viewer, this quotes the final verse of the poem associated31

31
In full: 補陀洛や岸うつ波は三熊野の那智のお山にひびく滝つせ.
 From “Pointing Straight” to “Pointing Round” 65

with Seiganto-ji Temple 青岸渡寺 at Mt. Nachi 那智, the first stop on the famous
West-Country circuit of thirty-three Kannon shrines. Separately the Nachi
Great Shrine 那智大社, one of Kumano’s 熊野 three principal shrine mountains,
had a long and ancient history as a holy place in Kumano devotional. The god-
head worshipped at the Nachi Great Shrine was none other than the Nachi Wa-
terfall ifself, but due to Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, a temple (Seiganto-ji) was
also built on the spot, whose enshrined image was that of the Bodhisattva
Kanze’on 観世音 (Kannon). Seen from a Buddhist perspective, the godhead of
the Nachi Waterfall was simply a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Kannon in
any case.
Hibiku taki-tsu-se—to people in the past, for whom pilgrimages to holy places
associated with Kannon were a popular practice, hearing the short phrase alone
would have sufficed to recognize it as a line from the poem for Mt. Nachi’s
Seiganto-ji, first stop on the famous pilgrimage route that wound its way through
thirty-three locations held holy to Kannon. The location of the two pilgrims’
graffiti is therefore Seiganto-ji Temple.
At first glance, this picture reminds one of that famous image by the surrealist
painter René Magritte (1898–1967), wherein under a picture of a pipe it is writ-
ten: “This is not a pipe.”32 Likewise, a graffiti that reads “In this Hall graffiti is
forbidden” bears some resemblance to the paradox of self-reference associated in
the West with the phrase “A man from Crete said ‘All Cretans are liars.’ ” The pil-
grims writing graffiti to the effect of “graffiti forbidden here” thus find themselves
in “the world wherein self-reference becomes self-denial.” In terms of the
Hyōnen-zu painting, too, the actions of the pilgrims correspond to those of the
man trying to catch the catfish in his gourd.
The paradoxicality into which they have fallen, however, is obvious only be-
cause we ourselves view this scene from outside of the picture. Escaping the
two-dimensional flatness of the painting, we view it from a world of three di-
mensions—we see it, namely, from a higher dimensional level. And if we are
able, beyond mere appreciation, to understand also the meaning of the inscrip-
tional hibiku taki-tsu-se? To understand the meaning, in other words, of the asso-
ciated temple poem it alludes to?—The sound of the waves as they break on the shore
of the island of Mt. Fudaraku, that holy place in the South Sea where Kannon the Bodhisattva
appears—now it echoes through the valleys and mountains of Kumano, in Mt. Nachi’s waterfall
resounding. For this, without doubt, is the true body of the Bodhisattva Kannon!—If we
can understand this, then we notice: as regards this painting, we stand in the
same dimension as the Bodhisattva Kannon himself, looking down at the pic-
ture’s two pilgrims with his same merciful eyes. This, too, would be a new kind
of “pointing round to the human mind” that had developed in Japan.

32
For original image, see: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/magritte-and-contemporary-
art-treachery-images
66 Yoshizawa

While we as humans live as a point of fact within a world of only three dimen-
sions, the world of the Bodhisattva Kannon sits in a higher dimension above this
one. Trapped as we are in a three-dimensional world, for us the world of that
dimension beyond is impossible to visualize. However, through the ingenuity
here of Hakuin’s Zen painting technique, as displayed in this picture, we are
made aware of a certain breach leading up to that further-dimensional world. If
the plane, therefore, within which the two pilgrims find themselves is in fact a
world of virtual three-dimensionality, then we who view the picture from out-
side must find ourselves somewhere higher, somewhere, so to speak, in a virtual
fourth-dimensional world.

Zen, precisely because of its “non-elevation of writing”—precisely because, in

other words, it refused to invest any text with ultimate authority—was not a
school that could afford to remain silent. The matter was not one for simple res-
olution by some decisive “single muteness” (ichimoku 一黙). There was no choice
but to explain, again, and yet again.
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 67–84
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

The kōan in Japanese Society

at the Beginning of the Early Modern
Period: Kana hōgo and kanna-zen
Didier Davin

Introduction
The teaching of the Japanese Rinzai school is, in its principles, relatively sim-
ple: the practitioner focuses on a kōan 公案, grasps its real meaning—that is, the
one beyond the trivial meaning of the words—and then receives another kōan
on which he focuses in turn, this process being repeated until there is attainment
of complete awakening. The fundamental difference between the Japanese
Rinzai school and the other Chan or Sŏn branches, in China and Korea, is that
in Japan a series of kōan is seen as necessary to reach awakening, while in China
and Korea going through one gong’an is considered the equivalent of awakening
itself. Leaving aside this difference—despite its importance—such use of kōan by
the Japanese Rinzai school is based on a practice originating in the Song dynasty,
that of kanhua-chan 看話禅 (Jp. kanna-zen). From its introduction to Japan at the
beginning of the 13th century and up to the present era, this kanna-zen—though
in fact only one mode of kōan Zen and not (as often imagined) its totality—has
been the Rinzai school’s very core, as indeed it is for the vast majority of all Chan
or Sŏn practice in the world today.1
During the Edo period, from its very beginning, the teaching of Zen was
spread to Japanese society at large, notably through texts written in vernacular
Japanese that explained the principles of the Zen school easily and comprehen-
sibly. Yet herein lies what can be seen as a paradox: how is it that such a school,
whose stated teachings preach above all the need to go beyond words’ mere
meaning, can produce texts like kana hōgo 仮名法語, specifically designed to be
easily understood? Certainly one of the most common answers to this question
would be that there are different levels to the presentation the school makes of
itself: a profounder one, leading to awakening, suitable for monks or lay practi-
tioners, and a more superficial one—the one seen in kana hōgo—that explains
only the teaching’s main principles. In a sense, this answer would be correct, but

1
From this point of view, the modern Japanese Sōtō school, which rejects kanna-zen, consti-
tutes an exception.

67
68 Davin

it only sidesteps the problem. With the practice of kanna-zen being at the very core
of Rinzai school teaching, even in a superficial explanation of the school’s main
principles, the subject seems a difficult one to avoid. In this paper, we will consider
several issues raised by this question and examine how this problem appears in
kana hōgo at the beginning of the Edo period.

1. The Origins and Diversity of kana hoˉgo

From its introduction at the end of the 13th century, up until the end of the
medieval period, around the end of the 16th century, contacts between the Japa-
nese Zen school and Japan’s laypeople were rare and took place almost exclu-
sively among the higher classes of society. Moreover, during this period, rather
than the school’s teaching of a new form of Buddhism, more often what was
valued was the newest knowledge in literature, philosophy, science, etc., that its
monks brought back from the continent. Beyond such renewed erudition in
classical Chinese literature, particularly in poetry, some monks were used as dip-
lomats, accountants, administrators, and so on. In other words, during the medi-
eval period, to be useful—and therefore patronized—it was almost sufficient for
the monks, and for the school as a whole, to be able to compose Chinese poetry
and explain recent literary texts or new intellectual currents. It would be a mild
exaggeration, yet not so far from the truth, to say that, from the point of view of
lay society, it was on the basis of its cultural contributions, rather than its religious
ones, that the Zen school was integrated into the larger cultural and religious
landscape.
However, this does not mean that the teachings of the Zen school were com-
pletely unknown to laypeople, and several examples show how monks explained
the school’s doctrine in a comprehensible way. One of the most famous texts
produced for this purpose is undoubtedly the Record of Dialogues in a Dream
(Muchū mondōshū 夢中問答集), which records the questions of Ashikaga Tadayoshi
足利直義 (1306–1352) and the answers of Musō Soseki 夢窓疎石 (1275–1351).2
Musō explains the teaching of Zen as well as Buddhism in general from a Zen
monk’s perspective. In addition to being what can be considered one of the mas-
terpieces of Japanese Zen literature, the Muchū mondōshū has two particularities that
should be highlighted. The first is that the text is in Japanese, which was far from
the norm at the time, particularly in the Sinocentric milieu of Five Mountains
culture. The second is that it was published, and this during the lifetime of its
author. This second point is very uncommon, with only one other known exam-
ple, but the pattern of a Zen monk explaining the teaching of his school for a
layperson, and doing this through a text in vernacular Japanese (often in the form

2
For an English translation of this text, see Thomas Yuho Kirchner, Dialogues in a Dream: The
Life and Zen Teaching of Musō Soseki (Kyoto: Tenryū-ji Institute for Philosophy and Religion,
2010).
 The kōan in Japanese Society 69

of a letter), while not frequent, can be seen several times over the course of the
medieval period. Needless to say, the recipients of such teachings were all, at least
without any known exceptions, from the higher classes of society.
For the most part, the texts thus produced are very close to what is called, in
the Chinese Chan school, “instructions on the Law” (fayu 法語): that is to say a
text, generally short, in which a master summarizes his teachings or a part thereof.
For example, among the records of the sayings of the famous Song-period Chan
master Yuanwu Keqin 円悟克勤 (1063–1135), there exists a large section, divided
in three parts, devoted to all the fayu written by the master on various occasions.
One of these, found in Records of Yuanwu’s Sayings (Yuanwu foguo chanshi yulu 円悟
仏果禅師語録) with the title “To the librarian [Shao]long” (示隆知蔵), is addressed
to his disciple and successor Huqiu Shaolong 虎丘紹隆 (1077–1136).3 In Japan,
this fayu is one of the most renowned extant calligraphic texts produced by the
Chan or Zen school, which are often used in the tea ceremony, and known as
bokuseki 墨跡. The fayu addressed to Huqiu Shaolong with calligraphy by Yuanwu
is now in Japan, and has a long history. It is said to have been discovered floating
in a paulownia-wood canister and is for that reason called “flowing Yuanwu”
(nagare Engo 流れ円悟). Because such “instructions on the Law” were made to be
given to a disciple, either lay or monastic, it is not surprising that they constitute
a large part of extant calligraphic works by Chan monks.
If the Muchū mondōshū can be considered separately, the texts produced by Jap-
anese Zen monks for laypeople are very close, in their purpose as well as in their
form, to the “instructions on the Law” of their Chinese counterparts, and were
thus quite naturally also called fayu, which became hōgo in Japanese pronuncia-
tion. As we will see, most of these hōgo were published after the medieval period,
making it imprudent to speak about what they were like in their original versions,
but there exists an exception that allows us to affirm that the genre was already
present earlier. The Gettan kana hōgo 月菴仮名法語 was a compilation of “in-
structions on the Law” by Gettan Sōkō 月菴宗光 (1326–1389; also pronouced
Getsuan), addressed to twenty-four people, men and women, secular and reli-
gious. Such a structure is not in itself so rare; what makes this text special is the
fact that it was published—in 1402 (Ōei 応永 9). The title itself used already a
formulation that will be repeated frequently—“kana hōgo”—and thus the expres-
sion can be dated to at least this time. The fact that these “instructions on the
Law” are in kana, or to put it more simply, in Japanese, is obviously a Japanese
specificity, but in its principle one can call it faithful to its Chinese models. Chinese
fayu were designed to explain things as clearly as possible, and to that end they used
a language understandable to their recipients. When a Japanese monk wanted to
explain the Law to a Japanese speaker, he did it—as was only natural—in Japanese.

3
Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大蔵経, eds. Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 et al. (Tokyo: Taishō
Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–1932), vol. 47, p. 776c.
70 Davin

Other instructions texts addressed to religious disciples might be written in clas-

sical Chinese, but the Japanese language was a very understandable choice for
laypeople.
Kana hōgo constitute thus a corpus of texts whose production began around
the 14th century, and continued until the end of the Edo period. Many of them
explain Zen teachings, but not all of them, and before examining the question
of the kanna-zen found in kana hōgo, a presentation and delineation of the corpus
we are considering is necessary.

Different Types of kana hoˉgo

In modern Japanese, the term kana hōgo can refer to a wide spectrum of Bud-
dhist texts, from various schools, written in vernacular Japanese, and the Zen
school produced only a part of this corpus. Moreover, the definition of what can
be called a Buddhist text is far from being clear, and an examination of the char-
acteristics of all the various texts today considered to be kana hōgo would easily be
enough for a whole article on its own. Depending on what is meant by kana (a text
fully written in Japanese from the beginning? a Japanese reading—yomi-kudashi
読み下し—of a text written in classical Chinese? etc.), and of course depending on
what is meant by hōgo (the Japanese reading of fayu? any text concerning Buddhist
teaching? a sermon addressed specifically to laypeople? etc.), the number of texts
potentially considered kana hōgo will be quite different. The oldest kana hōgo is said
to be the Ichimai kishōmon 一枚起請文 by Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) during the
Kamakura period, but many other texts considered kana hōgo were also produced
during the same period.4 One collection of Japanese classical literature, the Nihon
koten bungaku taikei edited by Iwanami, includes a volume titled “Collection of kana
hōgo.”5 Herein are compiled texts from various schools such as Tendai, Jōdo,
Shingon, Kegon, etc., with the Rinzai school being only one among others.
Furthermore, the term kana hōgo sometimes designated texts that used literary
style—mostly narrative and poetry—to present Buddhist teachings. These are,
to give only examples related to Zen teachings, texts such as the Boroboro no sōshi
ぼろぼろの草子,6 the Nezumi no sōshi 鼠のさうし, the Ikkyū gaikotsu 一休骸骨,7

See Sanae Kensei 早苗憲生, “Hōsa bunko-bon Shōichi kana hōgo no kenkyū (1): honmon hen”
4

蓬左文庫本『聖一仮名法語』の研究（一）本文篇, Zenbunka kenkyūjo kiyō 禅文化研究所紀要 6

(1974), pp. 265–294.
5
Kana hōgo-shū 仮名法語集, vol. 83 of Nihon koten bungaku taikei 日本古典文学大系 (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1964).
6
See Koida Tomoko 恋田知子, “Boroboro no sōshi kō” 『ぼろぼろの草子』考, Chūsei bungaku
中世文学 49 (2004), pp. 99–109.
7
Despite the mention of a specific Zen monk, Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純, this text is a literary kana
hōgo. All specialists agree that it is not a text by Ikkyū. See Koida Tomoko, “Gaikotsu no monogatari-
zōshi: Genchū sōda-ga saikō” 骸骨の物語草子: 『幻中草打画』再考, in Zen kara mita Nihon chūsei no
bunka to shakai 禅からみた日本中世の文化と社会, ed. Amano Fumio 天野文雄 (Tokyo: Perikansha,
2016), pp. 98–114.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 71

etc.8 Thus, the term kana hōgo can refer to many different kinds of texts, and for
this reason, rather than trying to propose here a precise definition, we will limit
ourselves to indicating the scope of our inquiry, as well as the reasons for this
limitation.
In the first, and perhaps most important specification, we will deal only with
kana hōgo from the two Zen schools, and of these two, mainly from the Rinzai
school. Among this group, moreover, we will not consider literary kana hōgo,
concentrating our inquiry instead solely on texts presenting the teachings of spe-
cific—and explicitly named—Zen monks, a group of texts that for the sake of
convenience we will call accordingly “Zen-monk kana hōgo.”
These “Zen-monk kana hōgo” can be divided into three large groups, according
to the eras of the monks whose teachings they are said to represent. As we will
see below, the mention by name of a monk does not necessarily mean that the
given text is reliably attributable to him (i.e. directly written by him or a transcrip-
tion from his oral teachings, sermons, or dialogues), and there are several cases
of texts being, without a doubt, impossible to associate with the monk whose
teachings they supposedly present. This question set aside, the corpus of kana hōgo
can be divided into: (1) those texts produced (i.e. written and established as texts
that circulated in print or manuscript) during the medieval period; (2) those texts
attributable to medieval-period monks but compiled later (by, for example, edit-
ing letters that had not circulated as texts previously); and (3) those texts actually
produced during the Edo period. Below we will consider concrete examples in
each category. We will limit ourselves to texts that were published, leaving out of
our scope those texts that circulated only as manuscripts.

(a) Medieval-period kana hōgo

Kana hōgo are often associated with the Edo period, and it is in fact mainly
during this period that most of them were produced and published, though a
few are older. The most famous is certainly the Muchū mondōshū, by Musō Soseki,
published during the lifetime of the monk in 1342. The question of whether or
not this text can be called a kana hōgo is worth discussion, but as it is a transcription
of a dialogue between a Zen monk explaining to a layperson (Ashikaga Tadayoshi,
as we saw above) the principles of Buddhism and Zen in vernacular Japanese, we
will consider it to be such. Another example is the Gettan kana hōgo that recorded
the teaching of Gettan Sōkō, and which was published as a so-called gozan-ban
五山版 (“Five-Mountains Edition”) in 1402.

(b) Medieval-period kana hōgo Published Post-Medievally

Looking at the beginning of the Edo period, the most numerous type of

8
See Koida Tomoko, “Kana hōgo no kyōju to bungei” 仮名法語の享受と文芸, in Chūsei no
zuihitsu: seiritsu, tenkai to buntai 中世の随筆: 成立・展開と文体, ed. Araki Hiroshi 荒木浩, vol. 10 of
Chūsei bungaku to rinsetsu shogaku 中世文学と隣接諸学 (Tokyo: Chikurinsha, 2004), pp. 435–455.
72 Davin

Zen-monk kana hōgo are, by far, those texts compiling materials from the medie-
val period (often from letters). Their dating and the details of their production
are difficult to determine,9 and above all, the reliability of their attributions needs
to be carefully examined. Several kana hōgo are, indeed, clearly not documents of
the teaching of the monk they pretend to be from. For example, all the kana hōgo
attributed to Ikkyū, without a single exception, starting with the Ikkyū kana hōgo
一休仮名法語, are acknowledged by specialists to be pseudepigraphical. This
does not mean that they should be rejected—on the contrary, they remain im-
portant texts, as much for their contents as for the significant influence they had.
Nonetheless, they should be considered in a context apart from Ikkyū himself,
from his thought, or even from his era.10

(c) Kana hōgo by Edo-period Monks

Lastly, there are the kana hōgo produced during the Edo period, in the same era
as the given monk himself, or soon after his passing. In these cases, naturally, the
content is more likely to reflect the teaching of the monk accurately, though also
to echo various contemporary preoccupations. The clearest example of this is
certainly the Ha-kirishitan 破吉利支丹 by Suzuki Shōsan 鈴木正三 (1579–1655),
an attack against Christians from the standpoint of Zen. This is, of course, a
very particular example, but looking closely at other kana hōgo, one can see that
their teachings, and the ways they are presented, are also largely reflective of
their age, and in this way different on several points from what can be seen in
medieval-period kana hōgo.

2. The Place of Kanna-zen in Zen-monk kana hoˉgo

As can be seen, the chronological origins of a given kana hōgo are not easy to
grasp, and a text attributed to a medieval-period monk may in fact have been
written during the Edo period. Even if its material is ultimately authentic, the
possibility that such a text has been somehow modified, or recompiled in a way
that changes substantially the purpose of the composition’s original context,
cannot be excluded. For these reasons, especially when studying the beginning
of the Edo period, the kana hōgo corpus must be treated with caution, and the
different contexts of production need to be examined with care in order to

9
For example, the Daiō kokushi hōgo 大応国師法語 was first published during the Edo period,
but a manuscript of the text discovered in the Reiun-in 霊雲院 of Tōfuku-ji Temple 東福寺 is
thought to have been produced at the end of the medieval period. See Sanae Kensei, “Zenshū
kana hōgo-shū no kenkyū (shiryō hen): Reiun-in-bon Daiō kokushi hōgo kaidai, honkoku” 禅宗仮名
法語集の研究（資料編）: 霊雲院本『大応国師法語』解題・翻刻, Zenbunka kenkyūjo kiyō 禅文化
研究所紀要 13 (1980), pp. 173–200.
10
For a study of the several kana hōgo attributed to Ikkyū, see Iizuka Hironobu 飯塚大展, “Ikkyū
ni giserareru kana hōgo ni tsuite” (1) 一休に擬せられる仮名法語について（一）, Komazawa
daigaku bukkyō bungaku kenkyū 駒澤大学仏教文学研究 1 (1998), pp. 185–212.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 73

understand the characteristics of each individual text. Yet, for the common
reader of the early modern period, all of these texts were seen as authentic
teachings by Zen monks, and it was mainly through them that the image of
Zen teaching would spread throughout Japanese society. In other words, even
if the individual examination of each kana hōgo text constitutes a necessary
task, consideration strictly of the teachings they contain, regardless of other
characteristics—authenticity, period of production, etc.—remains, from a certain
perspective, a valid approach. Very roughly speaking, such an approach allows us
to take the viewpoint of a reader at the time, and thereby to gain a glimpse of
how the teaching of Zen was perceived during the Edo period.
The expression kanna-zen 看話禅 (Ch. kanhua-chan) describes a method that
consists of concentrating on (lit. “looking at”, kan 看) an offered watō 話頭 (Ch.
huatou)—the latter term being synonymous with kōan (Ch. gong’an).11 This
approach was finalized by Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163) in the Song
period and became the basis of almost all forms of Chan in China, Korea, Vietnam,
and Japan. While this is somewhat simplifying things, one can say that, from the
end of the 12th century, kanhua-chan was no less than the very core of Chan
teaching everywhere the school had spread. For this reason, looking at the way
kanna-zen is explained in Japanese kana hōgo is far from being the examination of a
minor point of detail: rather it is a way to see how accessible the fundamental basis
of Zen teaching was, during this very period when the Zen school, like most
Buddhist schools in Japan, began being expounded to social classes previously
almost ignored. In a word, we are looking at the core teaching of Zen in the core
Buddhist medium of the time.

A Few Examples
Among other important evolutions that radically changed the face of Japanese
society, the spectacular progress of printing technology at the beginning of the
17th century played a fundamental role in the tendency, within the world of Jap-
anese Buddhism, to spread the teachings of one’s school to a much wider audi-
ence. Many books introduced—in various ways and at various levels—the doc-
trines of the several sects, ranging from sūtra commentaries to beginners’ texts,
and including, naturally, Zen-monk kana hōgo. A complete examination of the
place of kanna-zen in all kana hōgo would exceed the scope of this article, but we
will look at a few representative texts.

11
In the English-speaking academic world, huatou is generally understood to mean something
like “head of speech,” being most often translated by expressions such as “key phrase,” “critical
phrase,” or “key word.” To resolve the question would need a more thorough examination, but
here we follow the position of most Japanese specialists, considering the term to be fully synon-
ymous with gong’an. The character 頭 should be understood not as “head of ” but rather as a par-
ticle expressing “the whole,” as in the word mantou 饅頭, which is of course not the head of a
bun, but rather the bun in its totality.
74 Davin

Figure 1. Opening of the Bassui kana hōgo 抜隊仮名法語 (National Institute of Japanese Lit-
erature). https://doi.org/10.20730/200013619

(a) The Bassui hoˉgo

The Bassui hōgo 抜隊法語 (Figure 1) begins with the following:
If you want to escape the suffering of the cycle of birth and death, you must
know directly the way to Buddhahood. The way to Buddhahood consists in
realizing the [nature of] your own mind. The [nature of] your own mind is un-
changed, from the time before your own parents were born, from the time be-
fore your body itself even existed, and down to the present day. Because it is
thus the fundamental nature of all beings, it is what is called the “original face.”
輪廻の苦を免れんと思はゝ、直に成仏の道を知るべし。成仏の道とは、自心
をさとる是なり。自心と云ふは、父母もいまた生まれず、わが身もいまだな
かりしさきよりして、今に至るまで移り変ることなくして、一切衆生の本性
なる故に、是を本来の面目と云へり。12

12
Zenmon hōgoshū 禅門法語集, eds. Yamada Kōdō 山田孝道 et al. (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1996),
vol. 1, p. 43.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 75

In other words, for the one who wants to escape from the cycle of rebirth,
which is the very purpose of Buddhism, the attainment of the Zen awakening is
necessary. To attain this awakening, one has to realize the true nature of one’s
own mind. That is to say, to understand that this mind is already, and was always,
awakened. The reference to the time “before your own parents were born” is a
clear reference to the famous kōan, “your original face before the birth of your
ふ ぼ みしょう

parents” (父母未生以前の本来面目), yet more than just an allusion, the passage is

also a clear explanation of it.
Later in the text, one can read:
If this is the way you wish to be [i.e. awakened], you have to consider this: “A
monk asked Zhaozhou, ‘What is the meaning of the Patriarch coming from the
West?’ [Zhaozhou] answered: ‘the cypress tree in the front garden.’”
若しかくの如くならんとき、是を挙て見るべし、僧趙州に問う。如何是祖師
西来意。答曰庭前柏樹子。13

The one who wishes to be delivered from the cycle of eternal rebirth must focus
on a kōan until arriving at awakening. Thus, from the reader’s point of view,
the path to deliverance runs through the practice of the kōan, or kanna-zen.
The Bassui kana hōgo was printed in 1643, which makes it one of the earlier
Zen-monk kana hōgo printed in the Edo period. According to the Catalog of Zen
Texts (Zenseki mokuroku 禅籍目録) edited by Komazawa University,14 it was
published also in 1649, 1727, and at yet another point during the course of the
Edo period (year unknown). The number of copies still surviving today allows
us to deduce that the text had a good circulation and therefore a large number
of readers.

(b) The Daitō-kokushi kana hoˉgo

In 1645, two years after the first publication of the Bassui hōgo, the Daitō-kokushi
kana hōgo 大灯国師仮名法語 (Figure 2) was published. Here Daitō kokushi
(“National Master Daitō”) refers to Shūhō Myōchō 宗峰妙超 (1292–1337), the
founder of Daitoku-ji 大徳寺 Temple, but the Daitō kokushi kana hōgo also con-
tains a kana hōgo of Tettō Gikō 徹翁義亨 (1295–1369). In this text, one can find
a letter titled: “Addressed to the Empress of the retired emperor Hagiwara”
(Hagiwara hōō no kisaki ni shimesu 萩原法皇の后に示す). Hagiwara refers here to
the Emperor Hanazono 花園 (1297–1348; r. 1308–1318), who was himself
close to Daitō. The letter starts as follows:
All the brethren engaged in practicing the way of Zen, while they still have a
beginner’s mind, should practice only the sitting meditation. For this sitting
meditation, having first assumed the full lotus position, or the half-lotus position,
open your eyes only halfway, and look to the original face, to the time before

13
Ibid., p. 47.
14
Now accessible online: https://zenseki.komazawa-u.ac.jp/
76 Davin

Figure 2. Daitō kokushi kana hōgo. Inner title: Daitokuji no kaizan Daitō kokushi no hōgo 大徳寺
開山大灯国師法語. (Nagoya University, Okaya Bunko). https://doi.org/10.20730/100260708

your own parents were born. By “the time before your own parents were born”
is meant: look to the time before even earth and sky were separated, before even
the “I” had received any human form.
ともがら
凡そ参禅学道の倫、初心の時は、坐禅を専にすべし。夫れ坐禅とは、或は結
跏趺坐、或は半跏趺坐にして、眼を半目に開きて、父母未生以前の本来の面
目を看よ。父母未生以前と云ふは、父母未だ生せず、天地も未だ分かれず、
我も未だ人の形を受けざる以前を見よ。15

Here too, in a text aimed at a lay practitioner, the practice of kanna-zen is pre-
sented as the way to awakening, even for a beginner. Later in the text one can read:
This “original face” had at the beginning no appellation. Since long ago it has
been called “the original face,” or “the master,” or “the Buddha nature,” or
again “the true Buddha.” It is just as when someone is born, he has no name,
but afterwards acquires various names over time. Likewise the subjects of a
thousand and seven hundred kōan may be a thousand and seven hundred in
number, but they all of them serve to make the same “original face” be seen.
15
Zenmon hōgoshū, vol. 2, p. 512.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 77

彼の本来の面目は、元名字なきなり。本来の面目とも、或は主人公とも、或
は仏性とも、或は真仏とも、こなたより名けたり。譬えは人生まれたる時、
名は無けれども、以後色々の名を付るが如し。一千七百則の公案とて、話頭
の数千七百あれども、皆彼の本来の面目を見せしめん為なり。16

To see his true self, the self that was always awakened—that is, to reach the Bud-
dhist awakening—one must use the kōan, or to come at it from the opposite point
of view, all kōan have the same goal: allowing the practitioner to see this “original
face.” If Daitō develops this point at some length it is because, for him, this is
the one and only approach, which even a layperson has to follow—as clearly
stated in the text.
Bodhidharma has explained that if you cannot see your nature (kenshō), even the
recitation of the Buddha’s name [for rebirth in the Pure Land of Amitābha] and
the reading of sūtras, or indeed your keeping to the precepts—all these acts are
in vain. If you cannot see your nature, you must find a friend of virtue [a mas-
ter], and come to understand the basic principles of [the cycle of] life and death.
If you cannot see your nature, even should you read to their end the sūtras of
all twelve parts [of the Buddhist canon], you would not be able to escape the
cycle of birth and death, and would still endure suffering in the Three Worlds.
若し見性せずんば、念仏誦経して戒体を持つとも閑事なりと達磨大師説き給
うなり。見性せざる人は、善知識に逢ひ奉りて、生死の根本を明むべし。見
性せずんば、縦ひ、十二部経を読み得りと雖も、又生死輪廻を免れずして、
三界に苦を受くべし。17

As we can see, for the Daitō kokushi kana hōgo, as was the case for the Bassui
hōgo, the practice of kanna-zen is the one and only path to salvation offered to the
practitioner. Any other Buddhist approaches, such as would have been consid-
ered easier and for that reason more appropriate for the laypeople, are rejected
without any ambiguity.

(c) The Ikkyuˉ kana hoˉgo

The Bassui hōgo and Daitō’s letter to the empress are two examples of kana hōgo
that invite—at the very beginning of the text—the practitioner to focus on kōan,
and by this, they allow us to see clearly the preeminent place of kanna-zen in their
presentations of Zen teaching. The Ikkyū kana hōgo, another widely-read text in
the kana hōgo corpus,18 does not start directly with an exhortation to practice on
a kōan, but instead with an explanation about the necessary motivations for en-
tering upon the way of the Buddha, and about the fundamental structure of the
mind, kokoro 心.

16
Ibid., p. 513.
17
Ibid., p. 515.
18
It was published no fewer than nine times in the premodern period, the first of these being
in a year unknown during the first half of the 17th century. See Zenseki mokuroku 禅籍目録,
p. 8 (note 14 above).
78 Davin

First of all, what I mean by “disposition of the mind” is to be without any neg-
ligence of the Law from dawn to dusk. If you but understand that, from antiq-
uity to the present day, all this floating world is like unto a dream, then your
mind will no longer stop to linger over anything.
先ず御こゝろもちと申すは、朝夕仏法に御油断なき事にて候。古へ今にいた
り、浮世のあり様、夢のごとくにさへ思召され候へは、なに事も御こゝろの
とまる事御座候まじく候。19

Waking up from a dream is a common metaphor within Buddhism as a whole,

and descriptions of awakening as understanding the vacuity of this world are an
explanation that is far from being specific to Zen teachings. Indeed, mentions of
sūtras, such as the Lotus Sūtra and the Heart Sūtra, are made in the Ikkyū kana hōgo
to explain the need for reaching awakening, and the text’s first part can be seen
as an introduction to Buddhism, rather than to Zen specifically. But when it
comes to practice, it is practice on kōan, the kanna-zen, that is prescribed:
In your practice, their words are vain who say you can dispense with [the prac-
tice of] doubt regarding the old cases and stories [i.e. the kōan]. As a consolation
for idle hours, I have taken some of [the kōan] that monks of the past have col-
lected and roughly rewritten them for you here in kana [i.e. Japanese].
御工夫にも、古則話頭、御不審はなれ候よし仰せられ候、無に候。むかしの御僧
たちあつめ給ふなぞへを、あらあらかなにて御なぐさみにしるしまゐらせ候。20

Following this a series of kōan are explained, the first of them being that of
“your original face before the birth of your parents.”
As mentioned above, this text is, almost undoubtedly, not from Ikkyū’s hand, and
an analysis of its doctrinal basis remains yet to be done, but what must be noticed
here is the fact that the solution offered to the practitioner is, again, the kanna-zen.
We can see, in the three examples above, that in texts presented as being, and—
in all likelihood—also in fact received by readers as being, introductions to the
teachings of the Zen school, the main (not to say the only) practice presented as valid
was that of concentrating on kōan, i.e. that of kanna-zen. The examples above were
chosen because of the clarity with which they expressed this superiority of kanna-zen.
But such a superiority, or more precisely such an exclusivity, can be found in almost
all the Zen-monk kana hōgo produced during the first half of the Edo period.
To a modern reader, and perhaps even more so to a Western one, the signifi-
cance of such evidence may seem trivial, unworthy of any particular attention:
what wonder is there, after all, in Zen texts explicating Zen teaching? What else
should they preach? But what appears an obvious point is not, in fact, as straight-
forward as it might seem.

19
Zenmon hōgoshū, vol. 1, p. 213.
20
Ibid., p. 219.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 79

3. The Alternatives
Thus, to briefly summarize the situation, when the Zen school started to
spread widely throughout Japanese society, around the beginning of the 17th
century, most of the texts available to the average reader would have made the
claim that the school’s teachings, and therefore the path to salvation, were based
on a practice using kōan, namely kanna-zen. To appreciate the uniqueness of this
situation, we need to make some comparisons. In premodern times the Chan
school spread to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Here, however, we will not examine
the case of Vietnam for lack of competence, nor take up the case of Korea,
where Buddhism was, at this time, in far too weak of a position to provide a
relevant point of comparison.

(a) In China
Admittedly, in China too, kanhua-chan was the doctrinal basis for the practice of
the Chan school, which it still is today. This does not mean, however, that it was
the only recognized path to salvation. Indeed, after the end of the Song period,
the global tendency in Chinese Buddhism was instead to unify the several
schools, or at least those schools then still active. The Chan school, notably, came
gradually to integrate even the recitation of the name of the Buddha Amitābha
into its practices. This inclusion was not universally accepted, and its history re-
mains somewhat confused,21 yet one can say that, in the end, reciting the name
of the Buddha Amitābha to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land became an accept-
able alternative to the practice of kanhua-chan alone.
The global idea behind this attitude is that all the teachings of the Buddha lead
ultimately to the same awakening,22 and that if some believers were able to ob-
tain awakening through difficult practices like the use of gong’an, for those who
lacked such capacity an easier practice, even one based on the sūtras—far from
an obvious option given Chan teachings—came to be seen at first as tolerable,
then as acceptable, and in the end as normal. Therefore, even if the practice of
kanhua-chan persisted, it was not thought of as granting access to salvation exclu-
sively.
Beyond all this, the status of Chan teachings and their influence within Chi-
nese society decreased substantially after the rise of the neo-Confucianism of
Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). Consequently—such institutional setbacks having
only further weakened Chan’s already less doctrinally demanding character—
a contemporary Chinese layperson who undertook to question a Chan monk
about the teachings of his school might well be answered any number of ways,

21
See Noguchi Zenkei 野口善敬, Gendai zenshū-shi kenkyū 元代禅宗史研究 (Kyoto: Zenbunka
Kenkyūjo, 2005).
22
The conceptions of the monk Yongming Yanshou 永明延寿 (904–975) played a fundamental
role in this process. See Yanagi Mikiyasu 柳幹康, Eimei Enju to Sugyōroku 永明延寿と『宗鏡録』
(Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 2015).
80 Davin

kanhua-chan being only one of them. The insistence upon practices focused ex-
clusively around kōan as the teaching of the Zen school is thus a Japanese pecu-
liarity. Or, to put it more precisely, this presentation to a lay public of kanna-zen
as the main—and often only—path to obtaining awakening was an approach
uniquely characteristic not only of the Japanese school of Zen, but also of that
school’s ways of interacting with lay society.

(b) Sōtō and Esotericism

The doctrinal contents of kana hōgo allow us to see also an important evolution
within Japanese Zen itself. It is certainly true that at the time Chan teachings
were being introduced to Japan, the practice of kanna-zen was common in China,
and therefore naturally became the basis of Zen in Japan. However, this does
not mean that all the teachings of the Japanese school of Zen were limited to it.
To understand why the almost hegemonic place of kanna-zen in the kana hōgo
corpus is a phenomenon worthy of notice, let us briefly review those practices
within the various Zen teachings of Japan that were not kanna-zen, and how
these were represented within kana hōgo.
First, there is the case of the Sōtō sect, and more particularly that of Dōgen.
As is well-known, soon after the passing of its founder, the Sōtō school turned
away from Dōgen in its teachings, such that throughout the first half of the pre-
modern period, up to the “movement for restoring the school’s ancient lineage”
(shūtō fukko undō 宗統復古運動), while Dōgen was respected, in terms of doc-
trine he was almost ignored. To say that the teachings of the Sōtō and Rinzai
sects were the same during the medieval period would be going much too far,
but kanna-zen’s place at the core of medieval Sōtō teaching is something hard to
dispute. We should note, however, that there is a kana hōgo attributed to Dōgen,
the Eihei kana hōgo 永平仮名法語.23 Its content, being clearly Rinzai-oriented,
shows without ambiguity that the text does not come from Dōgen.24 At the same
time, broadly speaking, we can say that for the average reader in the first half of
the Edo period, the teachings of Dōgen were almost unknown. Equally un-
known were the doctrinal principles of the Sōtō school as we know it today,
which holds rather (to simplify things) that sitting meditation is in itself an awak-
ening, and that thus there is no need to obtain, through the practice of kanna-zen,
awakening as the Rinzai branch understands it.
Recent studies25 have shown that during the Kamakura period, what is called
the Shōichi 聖一 branch was so important that it would not be an exaggeration

23
Zenmon hōgoshū, vol. 2, pp. 377–408.
24
See Sakurai Hideo 桜井秀雄, “Kyōke ni okeru sezokuka no mondai: Eihei kaizan no na wo
kanshita gisho wo megutte” 教化における世俗化の問題: 永平開山の名を冠した偽書をめぐって,
Kyōke kenkyū 教化研究 14 (1971), pp. 13–18.
25
See Sueki Fumihiko 末木文美士, “Chūsei zenseki sōkan to chūsei zenkenkyū no shomondai”
『中世禅籍叢刊』と中世禅研究の諸問題, in Chūsei zen e no shinshikaku 中世禅への新視角, eds.
Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎 et al. (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 2019), pp. 7–30.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 81

to call it then the mainstream of Japanese Zen. This branch’s founder, Enni 円
爾 (1202–1280), went to China and received the transmission of the Law from
the famous monk Wuzhun Shifan 無準師範 (1178–1249), but his teachings also
incorporated a large amount of esoteric Buddhism. The relationship between
esoteric Buddhism and Zen is a problem far beyond the frame of the Shōichi
branch alone, and it would be impossible to understand early Japanese Zen with-
out taking it in account. However, in the later age during which the Zen school
was to spread throughout Japanese society, from the doctrinal point of view, any
such esoteric aspect had long been almost completely absent.
From the standpoint adopted in this paper, that of an average reader in the
first half of the Edo period, neither the Zen of Dōgen that claimed the ineffi-
cacy of kanna-zen, nor the hybrid practice of an esoteric-oriented Zen, would
have appeared in any kana hōgo. There is, however, in the history of Japanese Zen
a third alternative, one that could in fact be found in early-modern kana hōgo.

(c) Musō Soseki

If the esoteric-oriented Shōichi branch was influential at the beginning of Jap-
anese Zen history, one can say that the subsequent period was marked by what
is often called the Five Mountains branch, or Gozan-ha 五山派. This appellation
itself raises several problems, the fact that it was not, doctrinally speaking, a ho-
mogeneous group being only one among many. For our average reader of the
Edo-period, the most representative monk was without a doubt Musō Soseki.
We have already mentioned here his most famous text, the Muchū mondōshū, pub-
lished several times during the Edo period,26 within which it is explained how he
combined Zen practice, or in other words kanna-zen, with the other teachings of
Buddhism. The thought of Musō is complex, and we will not try to summarize
it here27; the point that interests us in this article is his acceptance of other ap-
proaches for the attainment of awakening. This appears of course in the Muchū
mondōshū, but also in kana hōgo attributed to him. Among these is the Nijūsan
mondō 二十三問答,28 a kana hōgo composed of twenty-three dialogues, each of
which consists in fact of a single question and its answer. The questions are
about issues such as “The necessity of raising the mind towards the Way” (dōshin
okosu beki koto 道心おこすべき事, dialogue #1), “The origin of good and evil”
( yoshiashi no minamoto no koto よしあしの源の事, in #4), “The desire for the Pure
Land” ( jōdo wo negau koto 浄土をねかふ事, in #12), but also others like “The
absence of mind itself is being a Buddha” (kokoro no naki wo hotoke ni suru koto
心のなきを仏にする事, in #21). The text is one whose authenticity should

26
More than eight times in all, according to the Zenseki mokuroku.
27
We have not yet had the opportunity to read it, but let us note here the recently published
work of Molly Valor, Not Seeing Snow: Musō Soseki and Medieval Japanese Zen, Brill’s Japanese Studies
Library, vol. 64 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
28
Zenmon hōgoshū, vol. 1, pp. 15–40.
82 Davin

be questioned, yet nonetheless, it can be observed here that neither the questions
nor the answers presume kanna-zen to be the only valid approach. Indeed, the
final dialogue bears the superscription “These are not anyone’s personal sayings,
but are all of them found in the sūtras” (watakushi no kotoba ni arazu mina kyōmon
naru koto 私のことばにあらす皆経文なる事, in #23). The text of its question is
as follows:
Question: “These various things I hear you say, are they all the teachings of the
Buddha? Or have you added in anything personal? Becoming a Buddha requires
difficult and painful asceticism, as well as the accumulation of merit—that is
how one becomes a Buddha. All this talk about us being Buddhas already, easily
and without any raising of the mind, or about there being no Buddha outside
the mind—it seems very suspicious. Are these things really in the sūtras?
問ふて曰く、かやうにさまざま承るは、仏のをしへのまゝにて候や。又私の
ことをばそへられ候や。仏になるは難行苦行し、功徳をつみかさねてこそ仏
とはなるべきに、やすく何の心もおこさず、わが身仏に候、心の外に仏なし
なとゝばかりは、不審に覚え候、確かに経文にて候や。29

The question seems quite natural, and despite its apparent simplicity it reflects
one of the main critiques made of the Zen school by other Buddhist sects: how
can Zen pretend to be a path to Buddhist awakening if it does not rely on the
teachings of the Buddha? The answer, for the Musō of the Nijūsan mondō, is
quite clear:
All that I have said is, entirely and without doubt, the text of the sūtras and the
treatises. If you suspect it all of being only one man’s personal sayings, I ought
to write out the sūtras and treatises for you in the original! I wrote them in kana
[i.e. Japanese] to soften them, to make them as easy to understand as possible
for your ears.
かやうに申すは、悉く慥なり、経論の文どもにて候。私の言かと御疑ひ候はゝ、
本の如くに経論の文をかきて参らすべし。いかにも耳ちかく心得やはらぎて
仮名にかきなしたるにて候。30

The position expressed here is notably different from the one seen in the pre-
ceding kana hōgo we quoted above. Here, the practice of kanna-zen is not explic-
itly recommended. True, it can be deduced, for example from explanations
about the necessity of not seeking the Buddha outside, which is a way of saying
that the practitioner himself is already awakened. In addition, to realize that
one’s own mind is equal to that of the Buddha requires, for the Zen school, the
practice of the kōan. Yet these are deductions, and not easily made by someone
unfamiliar with the teachings of the school, or with how far apart these injunctions
are from those of the preceding examples. Moreover, other kinds of Buddhist

29
Ibid., p. 38.
30
Ibid., p. 40.
 The kōan in Japanese Society 83

practice are not rejected, with even the recitation of the Buddha’s name being
considered a perfectly acceptable alternative. Thus, the Nijūsan mondō, like other
kana hōgo attributed to Musō, present an important counterpoint to the other
tendency so often encountered. The text prevents us from claiming too categor-
ically that all Zen-monk kana hōgo were conveying fundamentally the same mes-
sage. The kanna-zen was, surely enough, widely considered to be the core of Zen
teachings, but there remain some nuances, and important ones, that need to be
added.

Conclusion
It goes without saying that this article is only an introduction to some of the
questions raised by a first reading of what we have called the Zen-monk kana
hōgo. The importance of kanna-zen in the way Zen teachings were spread to lay
society has, we hope, been sufficiently demonstrated by the few examples given
above. But of course this is not enough for a full understanding of all the differ-
ent issues such questions involve. As we have noted, a more complete examina-
tion of the characteristics of various types of kana hōgo remains to be done.
Among other tasks, a classification from the point of view of the doctrinal con-
tents of each seems to be an essential step. For now, however, let us simply say
a few words about two of the questions implied by the above considerations.
The first question is that of the origin of this situation. If, as we have said, the
insistence on kanna-zen in books read by common laypeople was something
unique to Japan, where did this come from? The answer, we believe, is to be
sought in the doctrinal history of the Rinzai branch, and in the way that Japanese
Zen came to evolve, particularly at the end of the Muromachi period. In a nut-
shell, the emergence of the Daitō branch—which claimed that Zen teachings
could not tolerate other practices, and that the Zen approach (in concrete terms,
kanna-zen) must be the only one pursued31—ended up modifying progressively yet
radically the landscape of the Rinzai branch. Because, moreover, the temples of
Daitoku-ji and Myōshin-ji acquired a great influence during the Edo period, the
very period that saw this spread of kana hōgo, a very large part—though not all—
of the Zen monks in Japan were affiliated with the Daitō branch. Someone asking
a monk or reading a kana hōgo would encounter with a high probability the answer
that the only way to practice was that of kanna-zen.
The second question raised is that concerning the implications of such a situ-
ation. This question is a very difficult one, and we will not try to answer it here,
but the fact that for a large part of society the teachings of Zen were considered
through the lens of kanna-zen had, certainly, many consequences. Though it

31
See Didier Davin, “Datsu Kamakura Zen?: Junsuizen to Daitō-ha nitsuite no ichi kōsatsu”
脱鎌倉禅？: 純粋禅と大燈派についての一考察, in Chūsei zen e no shinshikaku, eds. Abe Yasurō et al.
(Rinsen Shoten, 2019), pp. 459-478.
84 Davin

would be naïve to think that thanks to kana hōgo, all Japanese people knew about
the fundamental principles of the Zen school, it is nonetheless undeniable that,
in some milieus, Zen conceptions were in fact received. Understanding all the
ways in which they influenced literary theories, aesthetic discourses, etc., remains a
task for the future. For a long time, the relationship between “Zen” and “Japanese
culture” has been a monolithic and polemical topic, often centering around Suzuki
Daisetsu 鈴木大拙. The idea that this relationship was an invention of the 20th
century, in the context of nationalism, has become now a common one. How-
ever, looking more closely at these Edo-period texts should lead us to adopt a
different point of view. The wide diffusion that kanna-zen achieved through kana
hōgo implies different types of receptions—likely including also some misunder-
standings and unexpected connections—that deserve, we believe, to be exam-
ined more carefully.
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 85–89
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

The March of Dancing Skeletons:

Zen Vernacular-sermon Picture Scrolls
and Their Development
Koida Tomoko

Translated by Jeffrey Knott

T oday, the iconography of skeleton or skull motifs enjoys a broad popular-

ity, found everywhere from T-shirts and rings to characters appearing in
Japanese anime. That the charm of such motifs is one felt by people
across different eras is clear from Edo-period ukiyo-e, where one finds frequent
examples of skeleton pictures rendered with realistic detail, as in the Sōma no
furu-dairi 相馬の古内裏 of Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳, or the Hajō hakkotsu
zazen-zu 波上白骨座禅図 of Maruyama Ōkyo 円山応挙. And while skeletons
have always been symbols of death, impermanence, or even evil, there is also no
shortage of pictures showing skeletons up and about, moving in the manner of
the living, with something of a comical or humorous air. Yet when, and how, did
such skeleton imagery, in its many guises from the loveable to the heroic, first
come into usage?
Stories featuring skeletons have existed in significant numbers from ancient
times. In the early Heian-period Buddhist tale collection Nihon ryōiki 日本霊異記,
for example, one story has a skull taking vengeance upon the man who had killed
him. Yet for all its universal character, found beyond Japan in narratives from
every corner of the world, by and large it is a motif whose dominant elements
are negative. In Japanese texts, skeletons of a more cheerful aspect begin to ap-
pear only with the advent of the Muromachi period. One such example is found
in a work of otogi-zōshi (a Muromachi-period tale genre) bearing the title Genchū
sōda-ga 幻中草打画.
In this work we find depicted a lively dinner party populated entirely by skele-
tons, whom we see beating drums, playing the flute, and dancing with abandon.
The scene occurs within the story-in-a-story of Genchū sōda-ga, the narrative
frame of which involves a travelling monk who falls asleep one day inside a tem-
ple, only to dream of long conversation with the skeleton of a woman who has
come out of her grave to meet him. The conversation narrates the woman’s life,
portrayed throughout by accompanying pictures as the life of a skeleton—all
86 Koida

characters being drawn as skeletons—from her embraces with her husband, to

that husband’s death, to his removal to the cremation fields, to the woman’s own
taking of religious vows and, at last, to the subsequent Buddhist dialogues she
pursues. It is a playful visual expression of the principle of shōji ichinyo 生死一如
(“life and death, one and the same”)—the idea that beneath the skin, human be-
ings are all nothing but skeletons, showing no difference between male and female,
indeed no difference between life and death. The sense of the Zen phrase used
in the title, genchū sōda (“amid illusion, hit with grass [i.e. to make one wake up]”),
is that the skeleton dream-figures of the text enlighten the reader about reality’s
own true “emptiness” (kū 空). From this, as well as from the substance of the
Buddhist dialogue in the work’s latter half, the picture scroll appears to be a ver-
nacular sermon, designed to convey the teachings of the Zen school.
One of the four known extant textual witnesses of the Genchū sōda-ga allows it to
be dated as far back as the Muromachi period: a valuable medieval picture-scroll
manuscript (now in codex form) surviving in the collections of Kakuman-ji
Temple 鶴満寺 in Osaka. This is the text previously introduced by Okami Masao
岡見正雄, bearing a transcribed colophon dated to Kōryaku 康暦 2 (1380).1 The
work also appears in Kanmon nikki 看聞日記, the diary of imperial prince
Go-sukō-in Sadafusa 後崇光院貞成 (1372–1456), under a “Catalog of Various
Tales” (sho-monogatari mokuroku 諸物語目録) found in a verso-side entry dated to
Ōei 応永 27 (1420)—a corroborating indication that the work existed at least by
the early Muromachi period, and was read then among the nobility.
At a later period, this work was split in half and adapted, gaining an association
with the name of the famous Rinzai monk Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純 (1394–1481).
The two resulting works were published, respectively, under the titles Ikkyū gaikotsu
一休骸骨 (Ikkyū and the Skeleton) (Figure 1) and Ikkyū mizukagami 一休水鏡
(Ikkyū’s Water Mirror). In these versions, however, the emphasis was less on the
teachings of Zen, and more on the abundant comic potential of the skeleton
figures themselves.
These anthropomorphized skeletons seem to have charmed people, and
helped along by the popularity of Ikkyū, the texts became popular enough to see
several printings over the course of the Edo period. Yet even as such reception
though printed books with illustrations steadily increased, new copies of picture
scrolls continued to be produced as late as the Bakumatsu period, as in the case
of the picture-scroll manuscript of Ikkyū gaikotsu, copied in Kōka 弘化 4 (1847),
that survives in the Ryūkoku University Library. Probably this continued long
life in picture-scroll format is accounted for by the underlying Buddhist dialogue-
text having taken as its subject something as fantastic, and as given to striking
visuals, as an animated human skeleton.
In addition to the text’s artistic presentation of skeleton pictures, another aspect

1
See Okami Masao, “ ‘Genchū sōdaga’ honkoku”『幻中草打画』翻刻, ed. Nakamura Yukihiko
hakase kanreki kinen ronbunshū kankōkai 中村幸彦博士還暦記念論文集刊行会, in Kinsei bungaku:
sakka to sakuhin 近世文学：作家と作品 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1973).
 The March of Dancing Skeletons 87

Figure 1. Scene of a skeleton banquet. From Ikkyū gaikotsu 一休骸骨, Pub. Edo period.
(Imanishi Yūichirō 今西祐一郎, Private Collection).
https://doi.org/10.20730/100249806

of the Genchū sōda-ga worth noting is the depiction of a Buddhist dialogue

between two nuns that occurs in the work’s latter half, valuable as a reflection of
actual discourse among contemporary Zen-sect nuns. This, considered alongside
the work’s fulsome use of both Muromachi-period didactic verse sermons and
terminology taken from Zen goroku 語録 texts, has led the Genchū sōda-ga to be
classified as a hōgo-emaki 法語絵巻 (a genre of vernacular-sermon picture scrolls),
and one designed, moreover, for a female readership. Later in the Edo period, this
female Buddhist dialogue was not only adapted, becoming the work Ikkyū
mizukagami, but also had an influence itself on the kana-zōshi work Ninin bikuni
二人比丘尼 (Figure 2), penned by the Sōtō monk Suzuki Shōsan 鈴木正三
(1579–1655).
In Ninin bikuni, the wife of Suda Yahei 須田弥兵衛, after the death of a certain
beautiful widow, goes every seven days to see with her own eyes how the widow’s
body, left exposed in the fields, decomposes to become gradually nothing but
white bones. This leads to her enlightenment on the principle of impermanence,
and to herself becoming a nun, one who eventually, as the story portrays it,
achieves rebirth in paradise as the fruit of her devotions. Setting aside its clear
88 Koida

Figure 2. Scene of a woman in dialogue with a skeleton. From Ninin bikuni 二人比丘尼 [“Two
Nuns”], Pub. early Edo period. (National Institute of Japanese Literature).
https://doi.org/10.20730/200004107

relationship to Su Dongpo’s 蘇東坡 (1036–1101) poem on decomposition, Nine

Phases ( Jiuxiang shi 九相詩, J. Kusō shi), Ninin bikuni also betrays the influence of
Genchū sōda-ga, not only in its structuring concept—coming to enlightenment
about impermanence though dialogue with a skeleton—but also in its own
opening’s direct allusion to that of the earlier work. A similar process can often
be seen at work in kana-zōshi of the early Edo period, with several texts being
based on such Muromachi vernacular-sermon picture scrolls, whose content
they selectively modified and adapted, in a very concrete manifestation of con-
temporary “interactions of knowledge” (chi no kōtsū 知の交通).
To turn, then, the question around: what was it about the Muromachi era that
felt a need for such skeleton story-illustrations? In the background to their
production there are various influences that might be adduced, in particular
Song-period skeleton illustrations from China, and the popularity of those
otogi-zōshi works now called iruimono 異類物 (“non-human” pieces)—stories cen-
tered on anthropomorphized flora and fauna. These story illustrations were of
course an expedient, used to expound Zen’s difficult teachings in ways people
could more readily understand. Nonetheless skeletons, simply through their
 The March of Dancing Skeletons 89

association with such pictures, came to acquire a new image among people.
And so it is to the skeletons of these story illustrations, first appearing in the
Muromachi period, that we trace the roots of the modern, more humorous,
more loveable skeleton type, which continues to dance on in our own day and
age.
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 91–112
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

Language and Representation with

ōgi and uchiwa Fans: Considering
“Applied Knowledge”
in the Early Modern Period
Suzuki Ken’ichi

Translated by Jeffrey Knott

1. Introduction
The arrival of spring is heralded by the aroma of the plum blossom, or perhaps
by the call of the warbler, or the wind that melts the ice. The river Asukagawa
serves as symbol for the transience of things. Thus it is that elements of the nat-
ural world, and when enshrined as stock “poem-pillows” (utamakura) also many
place-names, are found to bear particular standardized meanings. In some cases,
such a phenomenon can also be observed with regards to items of human man-
ufacture. Let mention of a certain class of item come to recall associations with
some concrete event in particular—with repetition of the association, over time
it finds itself a fixed feature on mental maps of “knowledge” shared by large
numbers of people. In this paper I will explore the nature of this process
through the example of two kinds of traditional Japanese fan: the accordion-
folding ōgi 扇 fan, and the flat, round-shaped uchiwa 団扇 fan.
First, I will summarize in brief the general understanding as regards ōgi and uchiwa
fans. The ōgi is a type of fan original to Japan, one developed during the Heian
period. At the end of the Heian period it spread to China, where in the Song era the
zhedieshan 摺畳扇 (or tangshan 唐扇) appeared. There are two kinds of ōgi fan, the hi-ōgi
檜扇 (“cypress-fan”) made with slats of wood, and the kōmori-ōgi 蝙蝠扇 (“bat-fan”;
also kawahori-ōgi ) made with paper. By the early modern period, it had spread in use
to the population at large, giving rise to travelling peddlers of ōgi fans and their
backing paper.
In contrast, the uchiwa fan can be traced back to ancient China, where indeed
the very character for “fan” designated one of the uchiwa type. What today we
would call an uchiwa is also described in the Han-dynasty “Poem on a Bamboo
Fan” (Zhushan-shi 竹扇詩) by Ban Gu 班固 (32–82). The uchiwa type further
spread to the Korean peninsula, where it was known as a “pine-fan” (songseon 松扇).

91
92 Suzuki

It arrived in Japan, however, from mainland China. In the early modern period,
a variation known as the “Edo uchiwa” became popular, and some people even
made their living as uchiwa-peddlers.
Such an account can also be found in Katei kidan 過庭紀談 (pub. Tenpō 天保
5/1834) by Hara Sōkei 原雙桂 (1718–1767):
凡ソ扇ト云ヒ、扇子ト云ハ、皆団扇ノコトナリ。今本邦ニテ扇ト云モノハ、
本邦ニテ造リ始メシモノニテ、中国ニハ元来無キモノナリ。中国ヘハ宋ノ時
始メテ本邦ヨリ渡リシト云フ、明ノ永楽以後ハ本邦ヨリ渡リシコト、毎度タ
シカニ見ユ。本邦ニテ今云フ扇ノコトハ、アノ方ニテ摺畳扇トモ、帖扇ト
モ、撒扇トモ云。団扇ハアノ方ニ古来ヨリ有リシ物ニテ、箑トモ、便面トモ
云フハ、皆団扇ノコトナリ。
As a rule, when it comes to fans, the word sensu 扇子 always refers to the uchiwa
type. What today in Japan we call an ōgi was first made in this country, and did not
originally exist in China. It is said to have first crossed over from Japan to China
during the Song period, and from the Yongle 永楽 era [1403–24] of the Ming pe-
riod onwards, we certainly see it crossing over from Japan again and again. What
we now call ōgi here in Japan, is over there called zhedieshan 摺畳扇 or tieshan 帖扇
or sashan 撒扇. Uchiwa, on the other hand, have been present over there since an-
cient times, so that words such as sha 箑 or bianmian 便面 all refer to uchiwa.1
Furthermore, in the “Clothing and Other Handheld Items” (fuku gangu 服玩具)
section found in vol. 26 of the encyclopedic Wakan sansai zue 和漢三才図会 (preface
pub. date: Shōtoku 正徳 2/1712) the image under the entry for ōgi shows a kōmori-
ōgi (Figure 1), with hi-ōgi and uchiwa appearing under separate entries (Figure 2).
What both ōgi and uchiwa can be said to have in common is the property of ar-
tificially producing a small space of coolness, and thereby manifesting a bit of
the natural world in the midst of daily life. This property moreover shares some-
thing fundamental in common with what I have argued2 is a certain “nature-
in-daily life” function, uniquely characteristic of the early modern period, to be
found in items such as insect cages (mushiko 虫籠), firefly baskets (hotaru kago 蛍籠),
flower vases (kabin 花瓶), and goldfish bowls (kingyo-bachi 金魚鉢).
What, then, is the difference between these two types of fan? If forced to
compare, the ōgi would likely be found the more elegant, and the uchiwa the more
commonplace of the two. One might also note the ōgi fan’s broader range of us-
age, brandished now to cries of “appare” (“Bravo!”), serving now as tray to pass
someone an item, and so on. By folding in various ways, ōgi can also change their
shape. But this is a matter I will return to in the conclusion.

2. Various Artistic Expansions

Before heading into the main argument, however, let us look at two examples
1
Text in Katei kidan, Ōō hitsugo, Kagai manroku 過庭紀談・嚶々筆語・花街漫録, dai 1-ki, vol. 5
of Nihon zuihitsu taisei 日本随筆大成 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1975), p. 30.
2
Suzuki Ken’ichi 鈴木健一, Edo shiika no kūkan 江戸詩歌の空間 (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 1998).
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 93

Figure 1. The ōgi 扇. Illustration from Figure 2. Ibid. Two types of fan, side-by-
Wakan sansai zue 和漢三才図会, comp. side: (L) uchiwa 團扇 and (R) hi-ōgi 檜扇.
Terashima Ryōan 寺島良安, vol. 26, pub. https://doi.org/10.20730/200018257
Shōtoku 2/1712. (National Institute of
Japanese Literature, Ukai Bunko).
https://doi.org/10.20730/200018257

of literary works that make mention of ōgi and uchiwa both.

First, a seven-character quatrain by Ishikawa Jōzan 石川丈山 (1583–1672) on
the topic of “Mt. Fuji” 富士山:
仙客来遊雲外巓 Sage guests come to visit on peaks beyond the clouds;
神龍棲老洞中淵 Blue dragons dwell and grow old in pools within the caves;
雲如紈素煙如柄 Clouds spread a sheet of silk, smoke stands for a handle;
白扇倒懸東海天 A white fan hung upside-down, skies of the East Sea.
 — Ishikawa Jōzan 石川丈山, Fushōshū 覆醤集 (pub. Kanbun 寛文 11/1671)3

3
Facsimile edition: Shishū Nihon kanshi 詩集日本漢詩, eds. Fujikawa Hideo 富士川英郎 et al.
(Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 1985), vol. 1, p. 9.
94 Suzuki

Here the first (“opening” ki 起) and second (“developing” shō 承) verses depict
a mystery-laden natural world, while the third (“turning” ten 転) and fourth
(“concluding” ketsu 結) verses compare that scene to everyday objects like the ōgi
and uchiwa fans. The “handle” of the “turning” verse indicates the uchiwa, while
the mountain-shape resemblance of the “concluding” verse suggests the ōgi.
Some have seen in this a contradiction,4 but it is equally possible to view it as
simply a witty way of describing Mt. Fuji that made free use of properties found
in commonplace objects, such as ōgi and uchiwa fans.
I will also quote the haibun 俳文 piece “In Praise of the Nara uchiwa” (Nara
uchiwa san 奈良団扇賛), by Yokoi Yayū 横井也有 (1702–1783), in full:
青によしならの帝の御時、いかなる叡慮にあづかりてか、此地の名産とはな
れりけむ。世はたゞ其道の芸くはしからば、多能はなくてもあらまし。かれ
よ、かしこくも風を生ずる外は、たえて無能にして、一曲一かなでの間にも
あはざれば、腰にたゝまれて公界にへつらふねぢけ心もなし。たゞ木の端と
思ひすてたる雲水の生涯ならむ。さるは桐の箱の家をも求ず。ひさごがもと
の夕すゞみ、昼ねの枕に宿直して、人の心に秋風たてば、また来る夏をたの
むとも見えず。物置の片隅に紙屑籠と相住して、鼠の足にけがさるれども、
地紙をまくられて野ざらしとなる扇にはまさりなむ。我汝に心をゆるす。汝
我に馴れて、はだか身の寝姿を、あなかしこ、人にかたる事なかれ。
Nara, glad of verdant earth!—it was in the reign of that Emperor also so
named, it seems, that by some royal wisdom [the uchiwa] became a local spe-
cialty. In this world, know the art of your own trade through and through, and
even a jack of very few trades gets by fine enough. That’s an uchiwa for you—for
the wind that it makes all gratitude duly granted, its lack of talent otherwise is
absolute, yet if not quite suitable for song or dance, it also doesn’t go out folded
up at the waist, with a penchant for public flattery. People despise it as a mere
slip of wood, with all the lifespan of a drifting cloud or water flowing by. But it
never demands a housing case of fine paulownia! It cools you at night by the
gourd-flowers, and stands pillow-vigil for your daytime nap. Yet even when peo-
ple’s interest chills with autumn, it places not a single hope in the summer to
come. It bunks in the back corner of the shelf with the wastebasket, and suffers
the filth of treading rats. Yet for all that, it’s better than the ōgi, with its backing
paper all peeled up, so painfully exposed. I open my heart to you, and you grow
close to me, even naked and asleep . . . but no more!—it is not something to tell
others about.
— Yokoi Yayū 横井也有, Uzura-goromo 鶉衣, vol. 1 (pub. Tenmei 天明 7/1787)5
Contrasting the ōgi-fan’s air of luxury with the down-to-earth Nara uchiwa, he
characterizes the former as waka-like and refined, the latter as haikai-like and
common, expressing for the latter the greater affinity.

4
Suzuki Ken’ichi, “Ishikawa Jōzan no Fuji-san shi wo yomu” 石川丈山の富士山詩を読む,
Tōkaidō 53-tsugi wo yomu 東海道五十三次を読む (Tokyo: Miyai Shoten, forthcoming).
5
Text in Uzura-goromo 鶉衣, ed. Horikiri Minoru 堀切実, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2011),
p. 21.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 95

3. The oˉgi as Representing Japanese (wa) Literary “Knowledge”: Three

Cases
[A] The Tale of Genji, “Evening Faces” Chapter: A Maidservant Offers a Perfumed
ōgi-Fan
The fantastical love story that develops between Hikaru Genji and Yūgao—lit.
“Evening Faces,” named after the yūgao 夕顔 flower (moonflower)—begins in
the following way:
A pretty little girl in long, unlined yellow trousers of raw silk came out
through a sliding door that seemed too good for the surroundings. Beckoning
to the man [sent by Genji to pluck a moonflower, unknowingly, from her mistress’
gate], she handed him a heavily scented white fan.
“Put it on this. It isn’t much of a fan, but then it isn’t much of a flower either.”
Koremitsu, coming out of the gate [next door], passed it on [from the other
man] to Genji.
—The Tale of Genji, “Evening Faces” (Yūgao 夕顔)6
The appearance in this scene of the ōgi-fan is a literary fact of quite considerable fame.
For widespread recognition of the ōgi-fan as a token signifying Hikaru Genji
and Yūgao’s love affair, however, the literary “knowledge” necessary to that rec-
ognition had to first widely circulate. Towards this end of broader circulation—
and creative application—there was need for a variety of channels beyond read-
ing the above original text alone. There was need also for commentaries and
digests, for manuals of haikai poetic associations—tsukeaisho 付合書 after the
technical term for such associations, tsukeai 付合—and other written genres, as
well as for treatments in painting and other forms of art. With repetition of this
circulation and application, moreover, such literary “knowledge” gained in ge-
neric breadth, spanning a range of registers from the popular to the refined, a
phenomenon particularly noticeable in poetry and ukiyo-e. Nor was this a one-way
movement, going first from circulation to application later, for creative application
of literary “knowledge” was itself an aid to the latter’s circulation, leading to a
bi-directional dynamic in which both efforts mutually would reinforce each other.
To name a number of such circulation channels concretely, outside all printing
and hand-copying of the original text, for commentaries, it goes without saying
that Kitamura Kigin’s 北村季吟 (1624–1705) Kogetsushō 湖月抄 (pub. Enpō 延宝
1/1673) circulated particularly extensively. Among digests there was the Osana
Genji おさな源氏 (pub. Kanbun 6/1666) of Hinaya Ryūho 雛屋立圃 (1595–1669),
wherein the above scene, for example, is succinctly explained: “[Genji] was pre-
sented with a white, perfumed fan with a flower resting on it.”7

6
The Tale of Genji, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 58.
7
白きあふぎのこがしたるに花ををきて参らせたり. Facsimile edition: Osana Genji, Genji monogatari
taii おさな源氏・源氏物語大意, vol. 10 of Genji monogatari shiryō eiin shūsei 源氏物語資料影印集成,
ed. Nakano Kōichi 中野幸一 (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1990), p. 29.
96 Suzuki

As for tsukeaisho, we find in the collection Haikai ruisenshū 俳諧類船集 (preface

pub. date: Enpō 5/1677)8 record of an association between “ōgi-fan” and
“plucked yūgao”—in this case referring to the “evening faces” flower, and not
Hikaru Genji’s lady whose name is taken from it. Among the educational genre
of teikinmono 庭訓物 texts, the Onna teikin Go-sho bunko 女庭訓御所文庫 (pub.
Meiwa 明和 4/1767) contains a diagram titled “Chart of Genji Perfumes” (Genji-kō
no zu 源氏香乃図), within which an ōgi-fan is pictured with a yūgao flower upon it.
One can also find the same visual composition in any of the series of illustrated
Genji texts (introduced by Prof. Komachiya Teruhiko 小町谷照彦9) whose pic-
tures are said to be by Keisai Eisen 渓斎英泉 (1790–1848): Genji monogatari 54-jō
ezukushi 源氏物語五十四帖絵尽 (pub. Bunka 文化 9/1812), Gunka hyakunin isshu
waka-en 群花百人一首和歌薗 (pub. Tenpō 7/1836), Shūgyoku hyakunin isshu Ogura
shiori 秀玉百人一首小倉栞 (pub. Tenpō 7/1836), or Genji monogatari ezukushi taiishō
源氏物語絵尽大意抄 (pub. Tenpō 8/1837; Figure 3). By contrast, in the section
on “Lady Yūgao” (Yūgao no ue 夕顔上) in Kurosawa Okinamaro’s 黒沢翁満
(1795–1859) work Genji hyakunin isshu 源氏百人一首 (pub. Tenpō 10/1839), her
pose is instead that of using an ōgi-fan to hide her face (Figure 4). Through all
these various conduits, the close relationship between Yūgao’s love story and the
ōgi-fan came to be one that more and more people recognized.
Yet how was this link put to use in application? In poetry (Japanese and Chinese)
we see the following:
夕顔
(1) 風のうへに咲くかとみえて涼しきは扇にのせしゆふがほのはな
Topic: Evening Faces
Out of the wind it almost seems to blossom—Ah, the coolness
Served up in the fan-borne face of an evening flower!
 —Matsunaga Teitoku 松永貞徳 (1571–1653),
 Shōyūshū 逍遊集 (pub. Enpō 5/1677)
源氏物語の夕貌巻のさまをかきたるに
(2) 夕がほの露かけそめしことのはぞつひにあふぎのつまとなりぬる
Topic: Writing on the Tale of Genji  ’s “Evening Faces” Chapter
The evening flower’s words, that once did drop like dew-stains catching on the leaf—
At last alighting, married, be it but to the edge of a fan.
 —Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長 (1730–1801), Suzunoya-shū 鈴屋集
 (pub. Kansei 寛政 10/1798)

8
Facsimile edition: Haikai ruisenshū 俳諧類舩集, vol. 1 of Kinsei Bungei Sōkan 近世文藝叢刊
(Osaka: Han’an Noma Kōshin-Sensei Kakō Kinenkai, 1969), p. 400.
9
Komachiya Teruhiko 小町谷照彦, E to arasuji de yomu Genji monogatari: Keisai Eisen Genji monogatari
ezukushi taiishō 絵とあらすじで読む源氏物語：渓斎英泉『源氏物語絵尽大意抄』(Tokyo: Shintensha,
2007).
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 97

Figure 3. Yūgao 夕顔, depicted holding an

ōgi-fan bearing the eponymous “evening faces”
(yūgao) flower. Illustration from Genji monogatari
ezukushi taiishō 源氏物語絵尽大意抄, illus. attr.
Keisai Eisen 渓斎英泉, pub. Tenpō 8/1837. (Na-
tional Institute of Japanese Literature, Hatsukari
Bunko). https://doi.org/10.20730/200003499

(3) 瓠花深巷見嬋娟 Through a gourd-flower deep in the alleys I met a

maiden fair;
一扇相思両世縁 A single fan, love mutual, the bond between two lives.

香燼芳空根不断 Smoked with perfume, though scent be vain, the root

itself breaks not;
又抽柔蔓故纏綿 But putting forth another vine soft, tighter it winds
ever still.
98 Suzuki

Figure 4. Lady Yūgao 夕顔上, here portrayed

using a fan to hide her face. Illustration from
Genji hyakunin isshu 源氏百人一首, Kurosawa
Okinamaro 黒沢翁満, pub. Tenpō 10/1839. (Nara
Women’s University Academic Information
Center). https://doi.org/10.20730/100241606

 —Ema Saikō 江馬細香 (1787–1861), “On Reading the Genji ”

(Gengo wo yomu 読源語)10
(4) 黄昏や扇をのする白ぼたん
The hour of dusk—when the fan is the one borne, by a white peony.
—Sonome 園女 (1664–1726), Soga monogatari 曽我物語
 (pub. Kyōhō 享保 15/1730)

10
Composed in Bunsei 文政 12/1829. Text in Shōmu ikō 湘夢遺稿, vol. 2 (pub. Meiji 4/1871).
Facsimile edition: Shishū Nihon kanshi (op. cit.), vol. 15, p. 162. Annotated edition: Ema Saikō shishū:
‘Shōmu ikō’ (ge) 江馬細香詩集『湘夢遺稿』下, ed. Kado Reiko 門玲子 (Kyūko Shoin, 1992),
pp. 257–258. See also Breeze through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō, tr. Hiroaki Sato (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 117, 215–216.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 99

夕皃
(5) 夕がほの花に扇をあてぬるはたそかれ時の垣のぞきかな
Topic: Evening Faces
Why did Yūgao have her fan there exactly where the flowers were?
Could it be that at twilight, she was having a hedge-peek herself ?
 —Ishida Mitoku 石田未得 (1587?–1669), Gogin wagashū 吾吟我集
 (pub. c. Keian 慶安 2/1649?)
白扇子にかきつけ侍ける
(6) しのびてもそれとやしろきさしあふぎこれ見つらめとゆふがほの花
Topic: Written on a White Fan
Furtive as you please, obvious as daylight a white fan held out like that;
How could Koremitsu—of course he would see her “evening flower.”
 —Nakarai Bokuyō 半井卜養 (1607–1678), Bokuyō kyōka shūi 卜養狂歌拾遺
 (pub. Kanbun 9/1669)
And these are but a sample of the various works produced.11
The examples begin with two pieces of waka, the second of which contains a
play on words around the homonyms “wife” (tsuma 妻) and “edge” (tsuma 褄) for
a double-entendre difficult to translate (reproduced here in part with “married,
be it but to the edge of a fan”). The third example, a poem in Chinese, draws
more broadly upon the story of the Tale of Genji. The “single fan” is a sign of
the marital bond, and even if that “perfume” proves to “be vain,” still “the root
itself breaks not,” and yet “another vine” will be “put[ ] forth,” all of which is to
convey that though Yūgao herself quickly dies, Hikaru Genji will later care for
her orphaned child Tamakazura 玉鬘 (partially homophonous with kazura
“vine”)—and in time feel romantically for her as well. The shorter fourth poem,
in contrast, is a haikai-sequence hokku 発句 (“starting verse” of a linked-verse
sequence), in which the yūgao flower has become a white peony. The fifth and
sixth poems are both kyōka 狂歌, the latter of which contains an additional pun
relevant to the story, playing on the phrase kore mitsurame, which means both lit-
erally “he [=Hikaru Genji’s servant Koremitsu] must have seen it [=Yūgao’s
flower],” while also containing concealed that servant’s own name: kore mitsu(rame).
To summarize in more generic terms, the “refined” (ga 雅) register of the first
three examples—traditional waka and a poem in Chinese—is thus matched by
the more “common” (zoku 俗) register of the latter three—haikai and kyōka, sig-
naling the literary breadth of the link’s reception.

11
Suzuki Ken’ichi, “Edo shiika ni okeru ‘Yūgao’ no maki sesshu” 江戸詩歌における「夕顔」
巻摂取, in Genji monogatari to sono kyōju kenkyū to shiryō 源氏物語とその享受研究と資料, ed. Murasaki
Shikibu Gakkai 紫式部学会 (Tokyo: Musashino Shoin, 2005).
100 Suzuki

This breadth extends even beyond the written word. In the field of painting,
Suzuki Harunobu’s 鈴木春信 (1725?–1770) ukiyo-e rendering of the scene is
well-known, and in the collections of Tokyo National Museum there survives
an Edo-period kimono treating the motif: an ornate karaori 唐織 robe bearing
the images of Lady Yūgao and her fan.12 Even in the fictional Hyakka-chō mitate
honzō: fudetsu mushikoe no toridori 百化帖準擬本草：笔津虫音禽 (pub. Kansei
10/1798), a kibyōshi work by Santō Kyōden 山東京伝 (1761–1816) with illustra-
tions by Kitao Shigemasa 北尾重政 (1739–1820), one can find a phrase like the
following: “Hi-ōgi fans go with the yūgao flowers over on Fifth Avenue.”13 As
such examples make clear, reception of the original association, as found in
other forms of art and different styles of writing, was as varied as it was broad.

[B] The Tale of the Heike, “The Death of Atsumori”: Kumagai Naozane Taunts
Atsumori with an ōgi
Found in volume 9 of The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari 平家物語), the mo-
ment in the “The Death of Atsumori” episode where Kumagai Naozane 熊谷直実
taunts his enemy, Taira no Atsumori 平敦盛, to halt his seaward flight and instead
turn and fight him—“[Naozane] beckoned to [Atsumori] with his fan. . . .The
warrior came back”14—is a justly famous literary scene of ōgi usage.
Alongside readings of the passage itself, through visual arts like painting and
various other such channels, the single action of Naozane taunting Atsumori
with an ōgi-fan came to be accepted as symbolizing the “Death of Atsumori”
scene as a whole. Based on that common understanding it was taken up as
material, as much in poetic allusions as in the playful punning of humor collec-
tions.
In painting, among the oldest treatments of the scene, as introduced by Prof.
Kitamura Masayuki 北村昌幸,15 are (1) the late-Muromachi illustrated scroll
Ko-Atsumori emaki 小敦盛絵巻 in the Waseda University Library,16 and (2) the
early modern-period Tosa-school 土佐派 folding screen Ichinotani kassen-zu
byōbu 一の谷合戦図屏風 at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.17 Both works are agreed

12
Known under the title: 赤緑茶段青海波扇夕顔模様唐織. See Genji no ishō 源氏の意匠, eds.
Akiyama Ken 秋山虔 et al. (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1998), p. 116.
13
檜扇は五条あたりの夕顔の花に類し.
14
The Tale of the Heike, tr. Helen McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988),
p. 316.
15
Kitamura Masayuki 北村昌幸, “Heike monogatari no teisho” 『平家物語』の汀渚, in Hamabe no
bungakushi 浜辺の文学史, ed. Suzuki Ken’ichi (Miyai Shoten, 2017).
16
Ko-Atsumori emaki 小敦盛絵巻, 2 rolls (Waseda University Library). Images made publically
available: https://www.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/chi04/chi04_02084/index.html. Also.
360°, 3D images available: https://www.waseda.jp/library/news/2016/08/31/1890/.
17
Ichinotani kassen-zu byōbu 一の谷合戦図屏風, pair of screens, 6 panels each (Tokyo Fuji Art
Museum). Images made publically available: https://www.fujibi.or.jp/our-collection/profile-of-
works.html?work_id=3559.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 101

Figure 5. Right, background: Kumagai Naozane 熊谷直実 raises an ōgi-fan

in challenge. Illustration from Genpei seisuiki zue 源平盛衰記図会, Akisato Ritō
秋里籬島, pub. Kansei 6/1794, vol. 5, “Kumagai Atsumori wo utsu narabi ni
Heike no kindachi uchi-jini” 熊谷討敦盛并平家公達討死. (National Institute
of Japanese Literature). https://doi.org/10.20730/200016986

in depicting Naozane on the shore, a fan in one hand, and Atsumori on horse-
back in the midst of the surf. The same is the case with the corresponding sec-
tion in volume 5 (“Kumagai Atsumori wo utsu narabi ni Heike no kindachi
uchi-jini” 熊谷討敦盛并平家公達討死) of the Genpei seisuiki zue 源平盛衰記図会
(pub. Kansei 6/1794), by Akisato Ritō 秋里籬島, with illustrations by Nishimura
Chūwa 西村中和 and Oku Sadaakira 奥貞章 (?–1813) (Figure 5). In ukiyo-e,
there exist at least three treatments of the scene, in works by Suzuki Harunobu,
Utagawa Sadahide 歌川貞秀 (1807–1879), and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 月岡芳年
(1839–1892), among which Yoshitoshi’s stands out in particular, for its boldness in
visual composition. From an early-modern standpoint, works such as Ko-Atsumori
emaki and Ichinotani kassen-zu byōbu are examples of literary “knowledge” as cir-
culated, while the Genpei seisuiki zue, or paintings in the ukiyo-e genre, constitute
examples of knowledge applied. Yet as discussed above, applications of “knowl-
edge” also themselves circulate, and ultimately feed back into the new wave of
applications to follow.
102 Suzuki

Let us look now at a late early-modern humor collection, the Fukukitaru 富久

喜多留 (preface pub. date: Bunka 11/1814) by Tachikawa Ginba 立川銀馬,
where under a section on puns ( jiguchi 地口), he recounts a case of word-play
involving the Genpei War being used to hawk soba noodles. Here I quote only
the first half, underlining the puns:
摂津の国一の谷は、いにしへ、元暦の頃、源平戦場の跡とて、平家の公達、
無官の大夫敦盛の墓とて、何人が建てけん、五輪の石碑残れり。今はその前
並木の方に、海の面を見晴らしたる所に、蕎麦を商ふ者ありて、往来の旅人
を日の丸の扇にて呼びかけ、「そばのあつもり、あがらんか、あんばひ義経」
といふ。地口好きの江戸もの、これを聞きて喜び、「代銭いかほど」といへ
ば、「あつもり十六才の時」といふ。
In Ichinotani in Settsu one finds a five-step stone pagoda, built by who knows
who, some say in memory of the ancient battlefield there from the Genpei War
in the Genryaku 元暦 era [1184–85], some say as a grave for the fallen lords of
the Taira clan, or for the Rankless Official Atsumori. Nowadays, by the line of
trees fronting that marker, at a spot with a good view on the sea, there is a man
who sells soba noodles. As people pass by, this fellow beckons them with a
rising-sun fan, shouting, “Atsumori soba! Come and get it! Specially cooked
Yoshitsune-style!” People from Edo—great lovers of such puns—are just de-
lighted to hear this, and when they ask how much it costs, the man replies,
“When Atsumori was only sixteen . . .”
As we can see from this, the ōgi was itself a token used to recall the scene, even
when that purpose was as fodder for humor.
For examples in poetry, from the collection Haifū yanagidaru 誹風柳多留 we
have the senryū 川柳: “With the very fan that taunted, Kumagai now catches his
falling hair” (maneida ōgi Kumagai wa ke-uke ni shi).18 And from a Bakumatsu-period
kanshi collection we have the following by Arai Gyōmin 荒井堯民, in his Honchō
jinbutsu hyakuei 本朝人物百咏 (preface pub. date: Ansei 安政 2/1855):
淡粧公子是平家 Lightly made-up, a lord’s son, he was of the Taira clan;
単騎加鞭馳海涯 A lone rider, wielding the whip, he galloped into the surf.
開扇喚帰猛勇士 The fan opened, calling him back, that of the brave warrior;
可憐風力散春花 Mourn, have pity, when tempest’s might scatters the flow-
ers of spring!
 —Arai Gyōmin 荒井堯民, “Taira no Atsumori” 平敦盛
Here the warrior Naozane is represented by “tempest’s might,” and Atsumori
himself by “flowers of spring.” By putting the fan at its expressive center, how-
ever, the poem acts nonetheless to further that token’s development in reception
of the Naozane/Atsumori episode as literary “knowledge.”

18
招だ扇熊谷は毛請にし. Haifū yanagidaru 誹風柳多留, vol. 97 (preface pub. date: Bunsei
10/1827). Text in Haifū yanagidaru zenshū 誹風柳多留全集, ed. Okada Hajime 岡田甫
(Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1976–1984), vol. 7, p. 282.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 103

[C] The Tale of the Heike, “Nasu no Yoichi”: Wherein Yoichi Shoots the Target
on an ōgi-Fan
There is one more scene in The Tale of the Heike for which a fan serves as an
important token. The episode in question:
. . . there emerged from the cabin an elegant beautiful lady eighteen or nineteen
years old, attired in a red divided skirt and five willow-combination white robes
with green linings. She produced a pole surmounted by a red fan with a golden
sun design, wedged it between the prow and the planking, and beckoned, facing
the land. . . .
. . . [Yoichi] closed his eyes in silent prayer. “Hail, Great Bodhisattva Hachiman
and ye gods of my province of Nikkō, Utsu-no-miya and Nasu Yuzen! Vouch-
safe that I may hit the center of that fan. . . .” When he opened his eyes, the
wind seemed somewhat gentler, and the fan looked easier to hit.
 —The Tale of the Heike, vol. 11, “Nasu no Yoichi” (那須与一)19
This is the scene where (the Minamoto warrior) Nasu no Yoichi shoots and hits
the target on an ōgi-fan.
Beyond reading the original text, recognition of the fan as a token signifying
the “Nasu no Yoichi” episode was spread through a variety of channels, in-
cluding commentaries and haikai tsukeaisho, as well as other forms of art like
painting. Based on this shared understanding, it became material for writing
poetry, in Chinese and in Japanese.
For commentaries, Nonomiya Sadamoto 野宮定基 (1669–1711) in his Heike
monogatari kōshō 平家物語考証 (vol. 11) had this to say on the scene: “A ‘bat-fan’
with vermillion coloring added. This corresponds to the red of the rising sun.
Nonetheless, depicting an image of the sun rising was doubtless not their pur-
pose.”20 Haikai ruisenshū also draws a connection between the “ōgi-fan” and the
“boats of the Taira clan” (Heike no fune 平家の舟).21
There are many visual representations of the scene as well. In addition to an
illustration from the Heike monogatari text published in Meireki 明暦 2/1656
(Figure 6), there is another in the Ehon kojidan 絵本故事談 (pub. Shōtoku
4/1714) illustrated by Tachibana Morikuni 橘守国 (1679–1748), and also a picture
in the Genpei seisuiki zue. Among ukiyo-e paintings there exists a mitate presentation
of the scene by Suzuki Harunobu.
How does the scene fare in poetry? The Bakumatsu-period collection Yamato
nishiki やまとにしき by Takahashi Zanmu 高橋残夢 (1775–1851) contains the
following verse:
射たりけむ扇のまとにかける日のかげのまばゆき業にも有かな

19
The Tale of the Heike (op. cit.), pp. 366, 368.
20
Text in Heike monogatari hyōchū, Heike monogatari kōshō 平家物語標註・平家物語考証, Nihon
bungaku kochūshaku taisei, Heike monogatari kochūshaku taisei 日本文学古註釈大成・平家物語古註釈
大成 (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1978), p. 680.
21
Haikai ruisenshū (op. cit.), p. 400.
104 Suzuki

Figure 6. After (L) Nasu no Yoichi’s shot, (R) the fan tumbles into the waves.
Illustration from Heike monogatari 平家物語, vol. 11, “Nasu no Yoichi no koto”
なすの与一の事, pub. Meireki 2/1656. (National Institute of Japanese Litera-
ture). https://doi.org/10.11501/2567341

The truly-shot fan-target marked by the sun—how blinding-bright

The shadow that was cast by the glory of that deed!
 —Takahashi Zanmu 高橋残夢, Yamato nishiki やまとにしき
 (preface pub. date: Kaei 嘉永 2/1849)
The poem seeks to commemorate Yoichi’s feat, praising his skill as something
that shines, indeed with the light of that very sun painted to be the fan’s target.
Likewise in his Honchō jinbutsu hyakuei, Arai Gyōmin writes:
軍船官女遥如華 On the war-boat, court maidservant, far off a blossom she
seemed.
辱敵計謀却相差 Enemy mocking, their plans and ploys turned now them-
selves to hinder,
一箭鳴弦飄扇的 A single shot the bowstring shrieked, and the fan’s target
tumbled;
源家勇士武人花 Minamoto in clan the hero, flower among men of war.
 —Arai Gyōmin, “Nasu no Munetaka” 那須宗高
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 105

I end this section in quoting a famous passage from the Nihon gaishi 日本外史
(orig. preface date: Bunsei 文政 10/1827) of Rai Sanyō 頼山陽 (1781–1832),
which can be said to have contributed to the episode’s circulation as a work of
history, and to its literary application by expressing that same history in such ex-
quisite language:
敵以一舟載美姫、 挿扇于竿、 植之舳、 去陸五十歩、麾而請射。（中略）宗高
一発断扇轂、扇翻而堕。
The enemy bore a comely maiden midships and she, setting atop a rod a fan
full-splayed, planted this now in the bow, and with the ship fifty paces offshore,
issued a challenge to shoot it. . . . Munetaka rent the fan’s very hub with a single
shot, and the fan tumbled and fell.22

[D] Other Representations Connected to ōgi

Above, examining one case from the Tale of Genji, and two cases from The Tale
of the Heike, we saw the ōgi-fan functioning as token within Japanese literary
works of the highest rank, observing many examples also of it being circulated
and creatively put to use as an item of Japanese (wa) literary “knowledge.”
From these, it can be concluded that the ōgi-fan has in general a character of
elevated refinement. As an aside, I briefly note below two further examples of
ōgi thus functioning as a literary token.
First, in the work Shingaku hayazomegusa 心学早染艸 (pub. Kansei 2/1790), by
Santō Kyōden with illustrations by Kitao Masayoshi 北尾政美, there is a scene por-
traying a battle between the proverbial “good side” (zendama 善玉) and “bad side”
(akudama 悪玉), wherein it is figures on the “bad side” who are seen brandishing the
ōgi-fan, with the purpose of rousing evil thoughts. This iconography of the “bad
side” wielding the ōgi was moreover passed down afterwards as something of a
stock portrayal.23
Another example is a pictorial representation featuring Taira no Kiyomori
平清盛 using the ōgi-fan to beckon the very sunset to stop, for construction pur-
poses related to Itsukushima Shrine 厳島神社—an image which begins to appear
more frequently from the later early-modern period onward.

[E] The ōgi-Fan in Early-Modern Life

As discussed above, the basis upon which all representations of literary
“knowledge” linked to the ōgi-fan rested was the universal quotidian use of that
object in early-modern domestic environments.
Already early on in the early modern period, with this haikai—

22
Text in Rai Sanyō 頼山陽, Kōkoku Nihon gaishi 校刻日本外史 (preface pub. date: Tenpō
15/1844), vol. 3.
23
Sekihara Aya 関原彩, “Shingaku hayazomegusa zendama/akudama no eikyō: Kansei kara
Bunka/Bunsei made”『心学早染草』善玉悪玉の影響：寛政から文化・文政まで, Gakushūin
daigaku Kokugo kokubun gakkaishi 学習院大学国語国文学会誌 58 (2015).
106 Suzuki

涼しさも末ひろごりの扇かな
Coolness—another thing that unfolds round and outwards, just like its fan.
 —Matsunaga Teitoku, Enoko shū 犬子集 (pub. Kan’ei 寛永 10/1633)
being the earliest example, the ōgi-fan begins to feature as a very frequent subject
of early-modern poetry, both in Japanese and in Chinese. Combining eclectically
as it did the more vulgar aspects of a presence always close to hand, together
with its own more refined and elegant aspects, the fan was thus not merely a simple
class of object, but a cultural entity unto itself.

4. The uchiwa as Representing Chinese (kan) Literary “Knowledge”: Two

Cases
Next, I want to expand this examination to consider also the uchiwa-fan. I have
not been able to discover for the uchiwa any examples of associated Japanese lit-
erary “knowledge” like those found with the ōgi-fan. What stands out instead are
Chinese literary associations, of which the story of Lady Ban’s autumn fan can
serve as a paradigmatic case. We begin by reviewing its details.

[A] Lady Ban’s Autumn Fan

In the Former Han period, during the reign of Emperor Cheng 成帝 (51–7
B.C.), a female poet known as Ban Jieyu 班婕妤 (c. 48–c. 6 B.C.) ( Jp. Han Shōyo)
composed the poem “Yuange xing” 怨歌行 (Song of Regret), later collected in
volume 27 of the Wen xuan 文選:
新裂斉紈素 鮮潔如霜雪
裁成合歓扇 団団似明月
出入君懐袖 動揺微風発
常恐秋節至 涼飆奪炎熱
棄損篋笥中 恩情中道絶24
If newly sheared, silk from the land of Qi
Is purest fresh, no less than frost or the snow.
Cut it to fit the pair-matched sides of a fan,
And round as round, it mirrors the full-bright moon.
Always in and out of my lord’s own garments’ arms,
It moves and sways to send up the slightest breeze.
Yet ever it fears, when days of autumn arrive,
Should the chill gales steal off all its heat and warmth,
Abandonment, in some box to lie away,
With tender love’s cord at midpoint for all time snapped.
Above all, she expresses here her fear of losing the emperor’s favor, comparing
it to a fan being cast away into some box with the arrival of autumn. This truly

24
Text in Monzen 文選 (pub. Kan’ei 2/1625), vol. 27. Annotated edition: Monzen shihen 文選詩篇,
eds. Kawai Kōzō 川合康三 et al. (Iwanami Shoten, 2018), vol. 4, pp. 370–373.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 107

famous story came to be widely recognized, not only through readings of the
original text, but also through various other channels such as haikai tsukeaisho.
Based on this shared understanding, it became material for writing poetry in
Chinese and Japanese, or even prose gesaku 戯作.
Already in this poem from the kanshi collection Chūka jakuboku shishō 中華若木
詩抄—
巧製斉紈宮様新 Expert cut, the silk of Qi renews the palace prospect;

高堂六月主恩頻 Tall towers in the Sixth Month, my lord’s kindnesses fre-

quent.
一朝秋至寵還断 Then one morning autumn comes, and his favor stops
cold;
恨在西風不在人 Still my anger is with the west wind, and not with the man
himself.
—Saiin 西胤 (1358–1422), “Autumn Fan” (Shūsen 秋扇)25
we see reception of the trope, here moreover with a new interpretation, attrib-
uting the lady’s loss of the emperor’s love to the appearance of a new beauty.
Entering the early modern period, the association between “ōgi -fan” and
“Lady Ban” (Hanjo) is recorded in the Haikai ruisenshū. To take a specific exam-
ple in haikai poetry:
秋とならん契宇治茶の後むかし
をけるあふぎのしばしおなさけ
In autumn things fade, yesterday’s fresh-cut promise today’s Uji tea: Seasons Past—
As of a fan cast aside, kindness, just for a while!
 —Sōin 宗因 (1605–1682), Sōin dokugin koi haikai hyakuin 宗因独吟恋俳諧百韻,
 “Hana de sōrō” 花で候26
Here the connection is used to convey: “Being like a fan cast aside in autumn
myself, give me at least a little while’s kindness!”27 There are also poems such as —
つくづくと絵を見る秋の扇哉
How much more closely one looks over the painting of an autumn fan!
— Shōshun 小春, Arano 阿羅野 (preface pub. date: Genroku 元禄 2/1689)
among many others, attesting to the frequency with which cases of this autumn
fan concept are encountered.

25
Text in 中華若木詩抄 Chūka jakuboku shishō (pub. Kan’ei 10/1633), vol. 1. Annotated edition:
Chūka jakuboku shishō, Yunoyama renkushō 中華若木詩抄・湯山聯句鈔, vol. 53 of Shin Nihon koten
bungaku taikei 新日本古典文学大系 (Iwanami Shoten, 1995), pp. 4–5.
26
For text see: Fukasawa Shinji 深沢眞二 and Fukasawa Noriko 深沢了子, “Sōin dokugin koi
haikai hyakuin ‘Hana de sōrō’ no maki chūshaku” 宗因独吟恋俳諧百韻「花で候」巻注釈, Kamigata
bungei kenkyū 上方文藝研究 15 (2018).
27
This interpretation follows the commentary in Fukasawa and Fukasawa 2018 (v. s.).
108 Suzuki

A picture under the title “Lady Ban’s Fan” (Hanjo no ōgi はん女の扇) is in-
cluded in Kyōbun takara-awase no ki 狂文宝合記 (pub. Tenmei 3/1783). The fan as
depicted there, however, is clearly an ōgi, betraying an interpretation in Japanese
terms. Indeed, quite likely in the story’s haikai reception as well, it was not the
uchiwa being envisioned, but again the ōgi—a reflection, in a sense, of just how
far the story itself had been “Japanified.”

[B] “Little Fan Swats Firefly”

To better understand such representations of uchiwa-borne Chinese literary
“knowledge,” let us look at one more example, this time one considerably less
famous than Lady Ban’s fan in autumn. We will consider the development of the
poetic tag “Little Fan Swats Firefly” (Ch. xiaoshan pu ying 小扇撲蛍). (Having
already discussed this case in depth elsewhere,28 here I will limit myself to the
argument’s main points).
We begin with a quatrain-stanza “Palace Poem” (Ch. gongci 宮詞) by Wang Jian
王建 (847–918), anthologized in Santishi 三体詩 ( Jp. Santaishi or Santeishi):
銀燭秋光冷画屏 Silver candle, autumn light, cold against the painted screens;

軽羅小扇撲流蛍 Lightly silk-paned, her little fan swats a passing firefly.

玉階夜色涼如水 Stairs of cut jade, night’s tableau, like the water’s touch icy-
chill;
臥看牽牛織女星 Lying she looks at Cowherd above, and at Weaver, always
waiting.29
The explanation here for the little fan’s firefly-swatting would seem to lie in the
palace maiden taking out on the firefly her own anger at failing to gain the
emperor’s favor (the interpretation of the commentary Santaishi Soin shō 三体詩
素隠抄30). As a poetic tag, recognition of “Little Fan Swats Firefly” gradually
expanded, not only through readings of this original text, but also thus
through vernacular commentaries (shōmono 抄物), or though collections of
verse in Chinese such as Lianzhu shige 聯珠詩格 and Shiren yuxie 詩人玉屑,
among a number of other channels. By the middle of the early modern period, in
non-court-style waka the tag saw itself reframed to fit a type of scene far closer to
actual life in Japan: the popular pastime of “firefly hunting.” Such reframing is
an excellent example of what this article means by “application” of literary
“knowledge.”

28
Suzuki Ken’ichi, Kinsei tōshō kadan no kenkyū 近世堂上歌壇の研究 (Kyūko Shoin, 1996),
pp. 211–215.
29
Text in Zōchū Tōken zekku santaishihō 増註唐賢絶句三体詩法 (pub. Meireki 3/1657), part 1
( jō) of vol. 1.
30
Facsimile edition: Santaishi Soin shō 三体詩素隠抄, 2 vols., ed. Nakada Norio 中田祝夫 (Tokyo:
Benseisha, 1977).
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 109

To illustrate I quote below waka by the poets Ozawa Roan 小沢蘆庵 (1723–1801),
Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊 (1733–1806), and Kamo no Suetaka 賀茂季鷹 (1754–1841):
小扇撲蛍
うなゐらがきそふ扇を打ちやめてあがるほたるを悔しとぞみる
Topic: Little Fan Swats Firefly
All the children, trying to outswat each other, stopped and held their fans—
Watching now with bitterness as the firefly escaped.
 —Ozawa Roan 小沢蘆庵, Rokujō eisō 六帖詠草 (pub. Bunka 8/1811)31
蛍
うなゐ子がまねく扇にはかられて空ゆく蛍袖にとまれり
Topic: Fireflies
The child had him—persuaded down with her fan—so thoroughly tricked,
The sky-going firefly parked himself right on her sleeve.
 —Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊, Kanden eisō 閑田詠草 (pub. Bunsei 1/1818)
たをや女の扇もて蛍をおふ所
少女子が扇の風に靡きつゝなか〳〵高く行くほたるかな
Topic: Maiden Chasing Firefly with an ōgi-Fan
The little maiden with her fan sends up a wind that quite entices,
Yet how remarkably high the firefly steers his course!
 —Kamo no Suetaka 賀茂季鷹, Unkin’ō kashū 雲錦翁家集
 (pub. Tenpō 2/1831)
Here we have examined two cases of Chinese literary “knowledge,” this time
revolving instead around the uchiwa-fan. To put the matter differently, as regards
Japanese literary “knowledge” the uchiwa seems not to possess any function. In
such a light, compared to the ōgi-fan, the uchiwa can be characterized more clearly
as low and “vulgar.”
By artistic practices of the medieval period, stereotype painting-topics of Chi-
nese (kan) association were to be painted on uchiwa-shaped fan-paper. In this
sense too, the uchiwa is, culturally-speaking, “Chinese.” This Chinese character in
turn connects the uchiwa to the sphere of kyō (i.e. as of kyōka, or “mad” poetry).
This then leads back again to the “vulgar” realm, the world to which it seems,
ultimately, the uchiwa firmly belongs.

[C] The Acceptance of Chinese Elements within Elements Japanese

The everyday familiarity providing the necessary basis for such a reception of

31
Poem 477. Annotated edition: Rokujō eisō 六帖詠草, ed. Suzuki Jun 鈴木淳, in vol. 70 of
Waka bungaku taikei 和歌文学大系 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 2013), p. 99.
110 Suzuki

the uchiwa along Chinese lines was derived, without doubt, from the place of the
uchiwa fan in quotidian usage. In summertime scenes of enjoying a moment’s
cool, the figures depicted are shown holding uchiwa in their hands. The image of
the fan-seller in Suzuki Harunobu’s “Kasamori O-sen to uchiwa-uri” 笠森お仙と
団扇売り, for instance, is particularly well-known. Poems such as the following—
涼しさを進上申すあふぎかな
Ah, for the fan, so humbly does it offer up the gift of coolness!
—Ryūho 立圃, Sora-tsubute 空つぶて (pub. Keian 2/1649)
寝て居ても団扇のうごく親心
Sleeping or awake, the fan never fails to move—a parent’s love.
—Haifū yanagidaru 誹風柳多留32
うちは
をりをりにあふぐも夢のうちはかな身に来る風も知らぬうたたね
Topic: uchiwa-fan
From time to time, looking up the fan finds me in dreamland again—
Its breeze hitting the body like a sudden gust of nap.
 —Ōkuma Kotomichi 大隈言道 (1798–1868),
 Sōkeishū 草径集 (pub. Bunkyū 文久 4/1864)
also give evidence of this.
This is not to say, however, that cases of uchiwa alluding to “knowledge” of a
“Japanese” pedigree are entirely lacking. Let us note a few such examples.
First, there is the case of the battle-uchiwa used in the wars of medieval Japan.
One particularly famous episode involving such a fan took place at the Battle of
Kawanakajima 川中島, where Takeda Shingen 武田信玄 (1521–1573) used his
battle-fan to stop the blade of Uesugi Kenshin 上杉謙信 (1530–1578). This scene
was among those included in the collection Ehon kojidan, illustrated by Tachibana
Morikuni. As Nihon gaishi records it, “[Kenshin] raised his sword and struck.
Shingen, with no time to draw his own sword, blocked this using the signal fan
(kisen 麾扇) he had been holding. The fan broke.”33 Nonetheless, such battle-use
uchiwa should probably be distinguished from the uchiwa used in everyday life.
Also, in novels of the early modern period, the uchiwa was famously what the
God of Poverty (Binbōgami 貧乏神) held in his hand. Being a god of the winds,
perhaps the uchiwa was for stirring up the air. Figure 7 is an illustration from
Ihara Saikaku’s 井原西鶴 (1642–1693) Nippon eitaigura 日本永代蔵 (pub. Jōkyō 貞
享 5/1688), chapter 1 of volume 4, captioned “Tray from the Gods as a Sign of
Prayer” (inoru shirushi no kami no oshiki 祈る印の神の折敷).

32
Haifū yanagidaru, vol. 1 (pub. Meiwa 2/1765). Text in Haifū yanagidaru zenshū (op. cit.), vol. 1, p. 18.
33
挙刀撃之信玄不暇抜刀以所持麾扇扞之扇折. Kōkoku Nihon gaishi (op. cit.), vol. 11.
 Language and Representation with ōgi and uchiwa 111

Figure 7. Upper Left: The God of Poverty holds an uchiwa in the right hand.
Illustration from Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴, Nippon eitaigura 日本永代蔵, pub.
Jōkyō 5/1688, ch. 1 of vol. 4, “Inoru shirushi no kami no oshiki” 祈る印の神
の折敷. (National Institute of Japanese Literature, Kōjō Isao Bunko). https:
//doi.org/10.20730/200015843

All the same, such connections between the uchiwa-fan and the God of Poverty
or Tengu Demons are admittedly somewhat insubstantial as story-frames when
compared to other examples like Yūgao’s ōgi, or the ōgi used by Naozane to taunt
Atsumori, or the ōgi bullseye of Nasu no Yoichi, or Lady Ban seeing herself in
the discarded fan of autumn.

5. Conclusion
As I explained at the beginning, not limited to an aesthetics of nature and
named landscapes alone, unique literary resonances could also attach themselves
to specific categories of object. Through the structure inherent to such literary
“knowledge,” moreover, as these resonances circulated and spread in society,
they became available for creative application.
By the early modern period, the conduits for such a process had attained a daz-
zling variety. Through the triumph of print culture, for example, not only could
such “knowledge” be circulated more easily and widely than ever before, it was
112 Suzuki

also simply encountered more frequently. And with the rise also of a mass culture,
one can observe a broadening in the traditional dyad-values of “refinement” (ga)
and “vulgarity” (zoku). In contrast, ages up through the medieval period knew
only a limited circulation based on manuscripts, and conduits for knowledge
were far less dazzling in their variety. The refined and the vulgar, too, were as
concepts more narrowly defined.
In this article, I have explored such phenomena through a concrete focus on
specific objects: ōgi and uchiwa fans. Here at the end, I want to consider the issue
more broadly from the standpoint of Sino-Japanese comparison.
As we have seen, despite the ōgi’s Japanese origins, and the contrastingly greater au-
thority we expect the uchiwa to derive from its origins in China, we find that while
resonances with Japanese literary “knowledge” exist for the ōgi, for the uchiwa such
associations are rare. As a result, within Japan it is the ōgi that enjoys the greater air of
refinement and luxury. The uchiwa, in contrast, is the more vulgar and commonplace.
Yet what is responsible for causing this inversion of the usual hierarchy?
To begin with, the ōgi is found actually used in works like the Tale of Genji, acquir-
ing thus a connection of historical depth to courtly aesthetics. And indeed, some
reason for the inversion may lie merely in this: that before the uchiwa had a chance
to make inroads aesthetically, the beauty of the ōgi had already taken root as a fixed
idea.
It is also the case that as a matter of sheer functionality, the ōgi outdid the uchiwa.
Not limited to mere unfolding and fanning, the ōgi also had a number of potential
uses when folded up. The impression of freedom this gave, it is not unreasonable
to imagine, might well have contributed to its association with the beautiful.34
One might also see it this way: Alongside the traditional Japanese habit of im-
puting greater value to productions of Chinese origin, there has also existed
among Japanese people a contrary impulse, attaching as much value to things
from Japan as from China—if not indeed greater value—precisely because of
their Japanese origin, attempting thereby to feel their own country superior.35
Perhaps it is for this that people came to say that, compared to the uchiwa, the ōgi
had the greater grace.
The reasons are in any case surely multiple, with no single one standing out.
Because it is more than possible, moreover, to discover ample grace in the uchiwa
as well, no clear-cut decisive difference between the two exists to be found. In-
deed, especially as the people of early modern Japan steadily incorporated both
types of fans into their everyday lives, the border between the two itself lost clarity.
As something, then, that characterizes the ōgi and the uchiwa both, one might
say that the sense of an item for creating coolness in summer has ultimately pre-
vailed all around.

34
I am indebted to Prof. Matthias Hayek for this suggestion.
35
Suzuki Ken’ichi, Edo shiika-shi no kōzō 江戸詩歌史の構想 (Iwanami Shoten, 2004), pp. 9–29.
 Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture 3 (March 2020) 113–125
© 2020 National Institute of Japanese Literature

Medieval Buddhism and Music:

Musical Notation and the Recordability
of the Voice
Inose Chihiro

Translated by Jeffrey Knott

Music, which in the very moment of its making must vanish, is ultimately a
poignant pursuit. The singing voices of people in ancient times, and the sounds of
their instruments, are themselves forever beyond our ability to hear. In the latter
12th century, retired emperor Go-Shirakawa-in 後白河院 (1127–1192; r. 1155–
1158), himself a passionate devotee of the musical art known as imayō 今様, left
the following famous saying in his collection of imayō musical lore, the Ryōjin
hishō kudenshū 梁塵秘抄口伝集:
こゑわざの悲しきことは、我が身隠れぬるのち、とどまることのなきなり。1
Tragic are the works of the voice, for after the body itself perishes, nothing of
them remains behind.
He laments here that after he himself has passed away “the works of the
voice”—in this particular instance the sounds and melodies of imayō—will not
be able to survive. Yet in fact there were those working actively, and in the same
period, to pass on this intangible inheritance of music to later generations,
through various methods such as musical notation, or the written records of oral
teachings known as kuden 口伝.
In this article, I examine the attempts made by such figures to thus record and
express the human voice, with a particular focus on the Buddhist chanting genre

1
For text see: Kagurauta, Saibara, Ryōjin hishō, Kanginshū 神楽歌・催馬楽・梁塵秘抄・閑吟集,
vol. 42 of Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū 新編日本古典文学全集 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2000),
p. 380.

Note: In quotations from original sources here and below, where voicing marks and punctuation
marks were lacking in the cited text, I have undertaken to supply them.

113
114 Inose

known as shōmyō 声明 and its notation in writing, tracing the course of these ef-
forts from the latter 12th to the early 14th century.2

1. Collections of the Voice: Fujiwara no Moronaga

The first of these figures to examine for his achievements in making such writ-
ten records of the intangible voice is Fujiwara no Moronaga 藤原師長 (1138–
1192). As explained below, Moronaga is credited for his attempts to preserve the
human voice and the sound of instruments in the form of musical notation.3
太政大臣師長、琵琶の譜にて作らむとてありしほどに、のちには習ひて、大
曲の様はみなうたはれにき。4
When the Chancellor Moronaga would make transcripts [of imayō] in biwa-
notation, people later followed these, and the great songs (taikyoku 大曲) could
be sung in all their fullness.
—Ryōjin hishō kudenshū
妙音院殿はかゝるいみじき御跡をうけ給はらせ給ひて、しかも又孝博候ひけ
れば、道の御ふそくはなかりけれども、なを諸道の奥をあまねくさぐり、ひ
ろくもとめさせ給ふ。絃管のたぐひは申すにをよばず、うち物・音曲・催馬
楽・風俗・らうゑい・ざうげい・声明などまでも、ながれ〳〵家々の説をつ
くしもとめさせ給ふ。5
Lord Myōon-in 妙音院 [=Moronaga] was heir to these august [biwa] traditions.
And because [his teacher] was [Fujiwara no] Takahiro 孝博, he was in that art
without defect. Yet he also explored various other arts broadly and deeply, seeking
instruction far and wide. To say nothing of music on string or wind instru-
ments, he made exhaustive study of many traditions and lineages concerning, for
example, instruments of percussion, ongyoku 音曲 song, saibara 催馬楽 song,
fuzoku 風俗 song, rōei [朗詠] chanting, zōgei [雑芸] song, shōmyō 声明 chanting, and
so on.
—Bunkidan 文机談, vol. 2
Moronaga is known as the author of the biwa-notation collection Sango yōroku
三五要録 (12 vols., with also a supplemental volume—sometimes counted as the
13th—of notation for fuzoku 風俗 songs), as well as of the Jinchi yōroku 仁智要録

2
This article draws heavily on the following research of Shimizu Masumi 清水眞澄, who has
already considered the question of the Lotus Sutra hymns, noted connections with the Kanazawa
Bunko-bon 金沢文庫本 manuscript, and so on. See Shimizu Masumi, “Hōe to ka’ei: Minamoto
no Tsunenobu kara Fujiwara no Toshinari e” 法会と歌詠：源経信から藤原俊成へ, in Sei naru
koe: waka ni hisomu chikara 聖なる声：和歌にひそむ力 (Tokyo: Miyai Shoten, 2011).
3
Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎, Seija no suisan: chūsei no koe to woko naru mono 聖者の推参：中世の声と
ヲコなるもの (Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2001), pp. 14–16. Okimoto Yukiko 沖本幸子, Imayō
no jidai 今様の時代 (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2006), pp. 189–193.
4
Kagurauta, Saibara, Ryōjin hishō, Kanginshū (op. cit.), p. 380.
5
For text see: Bunkidan: zenchūshaku 文机談：全注釈, ed. Iwasa Miyoko 岩佐美代子 (Tokyo:
Kasama Shoin, 2007), p. 114.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 115

Figure 1. A comparison of notation systems. While in

(left) hakase-notation 博士譜 the fuzoku-song lyric “nari
takashi” ナリタカシ is centered with interlinear notation,
in (right) biwa-notation 琵琶譜 the lyric itself is interlinear
and instead the notation is centered. (Prepared by author).

(12 vols.), a collection of musical notation for the sō 箏. Yet the research of re-
cent years has shown that various examples of musical notation found in texts
like Bunkidan 文机談 were also scored by Moronaga originally.
Moronaga’s scoring method made use of biwa-notation (biwa-fu 琵琶譜). At the
time, the two main systems of notation used to record the voice were biwa-
notation and what is called “academic” or hakase-notation (hakase-fu 博士譜, after
hakase, or “academician”). The biwa system was based on a set of specialized
characters for indicating notation, with these being centered in the line while the
music’s lyrics themselves were written to their left and right. Each character in
this set pointed to a specific arpeggio, and given a sequence of such characters,
taking in succession the highest note of each arpeggio thus indicated would pro-
duce the underlying melody. In contrast to this, in the case of hakase-notation, as
seen in Figure 1, the lyrics themselves were centered, with instead the notation
being written to either side. Here the notation consisted of lines, whose starting
points and angles served to indicate the melody. One feature of the hakase sys-
tem is that embellishing these notational lines with oscillations or other curves
allowed them to additionally express pitch-changes of a more subtle nature. As
a general rule, biwa-notation was used in scores prepared by the nobility, while
hakase-notation was used in scores prepared by monks, though this was not always
the case.
A list of the various scores Moronaga transcribed into biwa-notation would
include the following:
116 Inose

saibara 催馬楽 Sango yōroku 三五要録 (biwa scores),

Jinchi yōroku 仁智要録 (sō scores)
fuzoku 風俗 Sango yōroku, supplemental volume (also as vol. 13)
waka 和歌 (kami-uta 神歌) Koma-kyoku nado no fu 高麗曲等譜6
imayō 今様 Sho-chōshi hon kakiawase no fu 諸調子品撥合譜7
shōmyō 声明 Shōmyō-fu 声明譜8
In this grouping, waka signifies something like the following:
神歌
ヤ アラタマノ トシタチカヘル アシタヨリ
ヤ アシタヨリ マタルルモノハ ウグヰスノコヱ
Song to the Gods (kami-uta)
Oh! When rough gem-renewed / yet again the year turns round, /
from the break of dawn—
Oh! From the break of dawn / one waits, in longing already, /
for the warbler’s song.
This is based on Monk Sosei’s 素性法師 poem, found in the imperial anthology
Shūi wakashū 拾遺和歌集 as:
あらたまの年たちかへるあしたより待たるるものは鶯の声9
When rough gem-renewed
yet again the year turns round,
from the break of dawn
one waits, in longing already,
for the warbler’s song.
In this context, however, it was not as waka that it was included in Moronaga’s col-
lection, but rather as kami-uta, or “song to the gods.” Accordingly, kami-uta being as
a rule composed of an even number of verses, the poem has been modified from
its original waka structure in five verses to produce a structure of six. In other
words, by repeating the third verse ashita yori (“from the break of dawn”), the

6
Koma-kyoku nado no fu 高麗曲等譜 (Imperial Household Archives), MS 伏-978. From the col-
ophon: 文永七年 [1270] 十一月三十日書写之／同十二月十二日付拍子写点畢／此本孝頼所献孝時
自筆也／但杢神歌者妙音院太政大臣 [=Fujiwara no Moronaga] 自／筆也、依為最秘物為不及外／
見不交他筆自書写之.
7
Sho-chōshi hon kakiawase no fu 諸調子品撥合譜 (Imperial Household Archives), MS 伏-1083.
8
Shōmyō-fu 声明譜 (Imperial Household Archives), MS 伏-980. From the colophon: 建暦元年
[1211] 四月十二日書写了／右京権大夫藤原光俊／一校了. In other words, the manuscript was
copied out by someone unidentified in Kenryaku 建暦 1/1211, then later collated by Hamuro
Mitsutoshi 葉室光俊 (1203–1276). Fujiwara no Moronaga’s original authorship of the text is in-
ferred solely on the basis of an outer title (gedai 外題) inscribed directly on a front cover itself of
later date, which reads: “Shōmyō-fu (by Myōon-in)” 声明譜〈妙音院御作〉. Nonetheless, the attri-
bution is a reasonable one, and not inconsistent with Moronaga’s other work as a whole.
9
Shūi wakashū 拾遺和歌集, vol. 7 of Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 新日本古典文学大系 (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1990), poem 5.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 117

whole has been reformatted to fit a six-verse rhythm. Coming next in the list
above, the imayō pieces in biwa-notation are a discovery of recent years, and consist
of three ashigara 足柄 pieces identified as “great songs” (taikyoku 大曲)—the most
secret and venerated rank of song—and one imayō piece identified as being of the
mono-no-yō 物様 genre.10
Having thus briefly summarized biwa-notation scores by Moronaga in other
genres, below I turn to consider his collection the Shōmyō-fu 声明譜 in greater
depth. Starting with a group of pieces in the bai 唄 genre, the Shōmyō-fu com-
prises biwa-notation scores across ten genres all told, several pieces within which
betray later additions by Saionji Sanekane 西園寺実兼 (1249–1322). The collec-
tion’s scores are atypical for pieces of biwa-notation in various ways, e.g. with some
lyrics being recorded in Chinese characters, but in this article I want to highlight
three of its songs in particular. The first of these is what can be called a “hymn
to Mañjuśrī” 文殊讃,11 having the following lyrics:
文殊讃
セ

文殊菩薩出ツ化清凉ウ神通力応現他方ウ
キムモウ

身座金毛師子徴放珠光
衆ウ生イ仰ウ待宝蓋絶名香ウ
我今発願虔誠イ帰命不求冨貴不恋栄イ花
願当来世イ生 浄土法王家
願当来世イ生 浄土法王家12
Hymn to Mañjuśrī
Mañjuśrī comes forth, pure, his godly power answers the call;
Riding gold-coated lion, jewel-radiant, he casts his glow.
Living souls his canopy attend, with incenses sublime.
Now I pray, sincere on life, to seek not wealth, to love not fame—
Longing for future birth in the Pure Land, in Dharma-King’s home,
Longing for future birth in the Pure Land, in Dharma-King’s home.
The poem itself is said to be the work of Bai Juyi 白居易. According to Kien’s
喜淵 (b. 1254) work Ongyoku sōjō shidai 音曲相承次第,13 having earlier been brought

10
See Inose Chihiro 猪瀬千尋, “Shinshutsu imayō biwa-fu ashigara san-shu mononoyō isshu:
Seki no kami, Taki no mizu, Koiseba, oyobi Gongen ni tsuite” 新出今様琵琶譜 足柄三首 物様一首：
「関神」「瀧水」「恋者」および「権現」について, Kokugo to kokubungaku 国語と国文学 96-10 (2019).
11
For research on such hymns to Mañjuśrī, see the following: Nakata Yūjirō 中田勇次郎,
Tokushi sōkō 讀詞叢考 (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1998; 1st ed. 1949); Kawaguchi Hisao 川口久雄,
“Tonkō henbun ni okeru shōfu to ongyoku e no tenkai: Nihon bungaku to no kakawari ni oite”
敦煌変文における唱符と音曲への展開：日本文学とのかかわりにおいて, Chūgoku koten kenkyū
中国古典研究 13 (1965).
12
Shōmyō-fu (op. cit.).
13
Text from Hōgi (1): Shōmyō hyōbyaku ruijū 法儀 1：声明表白類聚, in Zoku Tendai-shū zensho
続天台宗全書 (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1996).
118 Inose

over from Wutai Mountain 五台山 in China by the Tendai 天台 monk Kaien
快円, the poem was transmitted in the year Kyūan 久安 4/1148 to Gyōunbō
Rairyū 堯雲房頼隆. The line-breaks in the above excerpt, it is worth noting,
follow punctuation marks given in the manuscript, yet these are not the breaks
one would expect from the poem’s actual rhyme scheme.14 This indicates that,
despite being based upon a Chinese poem, it was ultimately as a piece of shōmyō
chant that it was performed.
The second song involves what is called a “firewood hymn” (takigi-san 薪讃):
法華経讃歎〈光明皇后作／風香調〉
法華経ヲ ワガエシコトハ
タキギコリ ナツミミヅクミ
ツカヱテゾエシ
ツカヱテゾエシ15

Hymn on the Lotus Sutra (by Empress Kōmyō 光明, in fugōchō 風香調 key)
The Lotus Sutra / I came to receive only /
by cutting firewood, / by gathering herbs and water—
only by serving I received,
only by serving I received.
The genre of “firewood hymns” or “firewood verses” (takigi-ku 薪句) repre-
sented by this poem were chanted primarily in the course of a Hokke hakkō 法華
八講—a performance of the canonical “Eight Lectures of the Lotus [Sutra].”
These “Eight Lectures” events involved holding, over four days, a series of eight
meetings for lectures on the Lotus Sutra’s eight volumes (comprising twenty-eight
chapters). Of particular importance was the “fifth-volume day” on which the
lecture sequence reached the “Devadatta” chapter ( Jp. Daibadatta-bon 提婆達多
品), contained within the sutra’s fifth volume. It was on this day that such “fire-
wood” hymns and verses were chanted, as commemorations of the story told in
that chapter, of how in a previous life Śākyamuni had served Devadatta’s own
previous incarnation, the seer Asita (Ashi-sen 阿私仙), performing various menial
tasks for the sage, among them the gathering of firewood. As a poem, the above
verse is included in the imperial anthology Shūi wakashū, yet through credited
there to Gyōki 行基 (668–749), a tradition attributing its authorship to Empress
Kōmyō 光明 (701–760) gained widespread currency in the medieval period, as can
be seen in the excerpt from Moronaga’s Shōmyō-fu above.16 Here too, a five-verse

14
Cf. Nakata 1998 (note 11 above).
15
Shōmyō-fu (op. cit.).
16
E.g., in Sanbō-e 三宝絵, “This poem is said by some to have been composed by Empress
Kōmyō, while others say it was transmitted by Gyōki Bodhisattva 行基菩薩.” See Sanbō-e,
Chūkōsen 三宝絵・注好選, vol. 31 of Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 新日本古典文学大系 (Iwanami
Shoten, 1997), p. 130.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 119

waka poem has been given a six-verse structure through repetition, this time of
the original fifth and final verse. Similar to the case of Chinese poetry above, its
shape as assumed here is not that of a waka poem, but rather that of a shōmyō
chant.
Thus could the borrowed lyrics of waka and Chinese poetry be repurposed,
through musical performance, to function as paeans to Buddhism. In the third
example to be considered, the following ge 偈 verse, music is used to demon-
strate the Buddhistic merits of music itself.
簫笛琴箜篌 琵琶鐃銅 [ ]
如是衆妙音 尽持以供養17
Reed-pipe and flute, the kin then and harp, /
the biwa, the gong, and the cym[bal]:
Thus shall myriad marvels of sound /
all serve as offerings sacred.
This ge versicle is based on the ge of the “Expedients” (Skt. upāya) chapter ( Jp.
Hōben-bon 方便品) in the Lotus Sutra that runs: 簫笛琴箜篌 琵琶鐃銅鈸 如是衆
妙音 尽持以供養. The reed-pipe (shō 簫, Ch. xiao) and the flute are wind instru-
ments, while the kin 琴 (Ch. qin), the harp (kugo 箜篌, Ch. konghou), and the biwa
are string instruments, and the gong (nyō 鐃, Ch. nao) and cymbal (dōbatsu 銅鈸,
Ch. tongbo) instruments of percussion. In other words, all the musical instru-
ments used to make instrumental music can, the ge shows, become sources
themselves of Buddhistic merit. Moreover, as a verse arguing the merits of musical
hōraku 法楽 offerings, this ge would have broad ripple effects, its influence span-
ning across many different fields of art.18
As we have seen above, therefore, whether in the domains of Chinese poetry,
waka, or string and wind music—three central elements in the tapestry of court
culture—there were, within each genre, works for which hymnal shōmyō chants
on Buddhism both existed, and were later also scored by Moronaga using musi-
cal notation. As to the ultimate reason for his attempts using biwa-notation to
record all these various pieces, the explanation may lie in some uniqueness of
their melodies, or it may lie, alternatively, in the frequent chanting of these shōmyō
at many scenes of Buddhist ceremonial.

2. I nheriting and Rearranging the Voice: Saionji Sanekane and Enjubō

Kien
In the previous section I examined Moronaga’s attempts to record voice in
musical notation, with a particular focus on scores for the genre of shōmyō chant.

17
Shōmyō-fu (op. cit.).
18
Cf. Inose Chihiro, Chūsei ōken no ongaku to girei 中世王権の音楽と儀礼 (Kasama Shoin, 2018),
Ch. 13.
120 Inose

Here I will consider how notation was used to record the voice in periods after
Moronaga, focusing on two individuals: Saionji Sanekane and Kien.
Consideration of Saionji Sanekane begins with reference to the post-Moronaga
inheritance of biwa musical expertise itself. The three major schools of biwa lore
that inherited Moronaga’s own biwa lineage were (1) that of the imperial house-
hold, (2) that of the Saionji clan, and (3) the Nishi school (Nishi-ryū 西流) of the
Fujiwara clan. Among these it was the Saionji clan that continued the practice
begun by Moronaga himself of ceremonially transmitting certain “secret” songs
(hikyoku 秘曲). Moronaga, who had made his dwelling at Myōon-in Temple
妙音院, had a great hall constructed there and installed therein an image of
Myōonten 妙音天 (Benzaiten 弁財天), using that same room as the setting for
transmissions of those secret songs. Following suit, the Saionji clan erected their
own Myōon Hall at the mansion in Kitayama 北山 where they themselves re-
sided, thereby inheriting the practice of conducting such ceremonies before an
image of Myōonten.
Among his clan, Saionji Sanekane worked more than any other towards the
prosperity of his house, attempting rearrangements of music and the produc-
tion of manuals of ceremony. There are several musical scores that were either
supplemented by him, or which he himself had composed anew. Of these, the
Sango chūroku 三五中録 deserves attention as a score collection Sanekane copied
out personally.19 Though originally a collection of musical notation by Fuijwara
no Takatoki 藤原孝時, from the Fujiwara Nishi school mentioned above,
throughout Sanekane’s copying of the Sango chūroku, he made notational addi-
tions of his own. The following song is one of those thought to belong among
such added material:
琵琶平調〈笛盤渉調〉
敬礼諸仏及法宝 菩薩独覚声聞衆
次礼妙音并諸天 悉可至誠慇重敬20

biwa in hyōjō 平調 key (flute in banshikichō 盤渉調 key)

Honor and reverence for all buddhas and the Law’s treasure,
To bodhisattvas, lone buddhas, and disciple buddhas;
Honor too for Myōon[ten] and all the many devas,
Worthy all of showing heartfelt esteem and piled honors
A ge-verse based on the Most Victorious Kings Sutra (Saishōō-kyō 最勝王経), it is
also the concluding generalized paean to the ceremonial manual Myōon kōshiki
妙音講式. As mentioned, the Saionji clan had constructed a Myōon Hall at the
Kitayama mansion where they themselves lived. In that Myōon Hall, a Myōonten

19
Sango chūroku 三五中録 (Imperial Household Archives), MS 伏-2009.
20
Ibid.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 121

veneration was held the 18th of every month in commemoration of Moronaga’s

death anniversary, as a manual for which the Myōon kōshiki had been composed.
From this it can be understood that Sanekane also made use of biwa-notation to
record the music of ceremonies important to his clan.
Here I will move on to discuss the figure of Kien, who was a monk of the
Ōhara 大原 branch of the Tendai sect. In the late 12th century, the monk Ryōnin
良忍 (1073–1132) established the school of chant known as Ōhara shōmyō 大原
声明, or Gyozan 魚山 shōmyō. After failing for a period, the school was revived in
the Kamakura era by the monk Sōkai 宗快. Kien was the student of this Sōkai.
He moreover, partly with the purpose of increasing exchanges with monks at
Mt. Kōya, was active in copying and producing large numbers of shōmyō texts.
Regarding Kien’s own origins, the late 14th-century text Shōketsusho 声決書 by the
monk Jikyō 慈鏡 records him as being “the child of Lord Kitayama” (Kitayama-dono
[no] on-ko 北山殿御子). This “Lord Kitayama” has been identified with Saionji
Kinsuke 西園寺公相 (1223–1267), which if accurate would make Sanekane
and Kien brothers by different mothers. The following kada 伽陀-verse is one
of Sanekane’s additions to the Shōmyō-fu text discussed in the article’s previous
section:
七言〈円珠房声明作之〉
願我生生見諸仏 仏世世恒聞法花
恒修不退菩薩行 疾証無上大菩提21
seven-character meter (composed as shōmyō by Enjubō 円珠房 [=Kien])
Life after life may I meet all the many buddhas,
In buddhic world after world ever hear the Law’s flower;
Practice ever without fail the bodhisattva’s way,
With quickness to realize the great awakening supreme.
As one can see, this ge, a verse read on occasions of “ten-kind offerings” ( jisshu
kuyō 十種供養) for the Lotus Sutra, had been adapted for shōmyō chant by Kien
himself. In other words, after Kien (=Enjubō) had composed the music,
Sanekane must have gone back and set it into biwa-notation.
Another aspect of Kien’s activity can be seen in his Gokuraku shōka 極楽
声歌. In this work, Kien extracted all sung passages from Shōshinbō Shingen’s
勝深房真源 ceremonial manual Junji ōjō kōshiki 順次往生講式 (manual for a “Sub-
sequent Rebirth in the Pure Land” ceremony), and scored them using hakase-
notation. The songs found in the Junji ōjō kōshiki had essentially taken shōka 唱歌-
chanted versions of saibara pieces and supplied them with lyrics on Buddhist
themes. Regarding the fate of these songs, in Fujiwara no Takamichi’s 藤原孝道
work of music lore Chikoku hishō 知国秘鈔 (late 13th century), we read:

21
Shōmyō-fu (op. cit.).
122 Inose

なかごろ、山崎に浄土谷に、たうとき聖人をはしけり。名は勝□聖人（真
源）と申ける人、やうこつなき道心者の笛吹、すべて管絃あいしすき人にを
はしけり。順次往生講試とて、七段の試に、楽の唱歌に法文をつくり、催馬
楽ことくなどをつくりをき給へる。このごろもする人やあるらむ、ちかごろ
までは、天王寺住僧なども、その唱歌しけるとかや。いまはいとする人な
し。22
In the not-too-distant past, in Yamazaki 山崎, in Jōdo-dani 浄土谷, there lived
a venerable sage. Called Shō[   ] the Sage 勝□聖人 [=Shingen], he was a great
adept at the art of the flute, and a lover of string and wind music of all kinds.
In a work called Junji ōjō kōshiki, in a seven-stage ceremony, he made Buddhist
lyrics for shōka-chant versions of [court] music, producing pieces like saibara
songs. Is there anyone today who does such things? Until even recently one
heard rumors that monks around Tennō-ji Temple 天王寺 were also doing such
shōka chanting. Now, however, there is no one who does.
It was a genre that had, as we see, faded already by the early 13th century.
Scoring these songs with hakase-notation, and recording them in his Gokuraku
shōka, in other words, was Kien’s attempt at retrieving their music from just such
an oblivion.

3. Development of the Voice: The Shōmyō-ji Religious Documents

Thus it is that the sounds captured in biwa-notation by Moronaga would come
to be reutilized, in the latter part of the 13th century, in a number of different
ways. Representing part of this legacy, one of the larger accumulations of
late-Kamakura musical-notation materials is to be found within the Shōmyō-ji
Temple 称名寺 archives of “religious documents” (shōgyō 聖教), currently stored
at Kanazawa Bunko 金沢文庫. Among the Shōmyō-ji religious documents are
various shōmyō chanting texts, a collection centered on manuscripts personally
used by Kenna 剱阿, the second abbot of Shōmyō-ji Temple.
Kenna is notable for his industry as a copyist, his output in complete works
alone consisting of the following:
Sango yōroku gaku mokuroku 三五要録楽目録 (location unknown)
Inritsu zasshō 韻律雑抄 (location unknown)
Ongaku kongen shō 音楽根源抄 (Tenri Central Library)
Kangen ongi 管絃音義 (ibid.)
Bugaku yōroku 舞楽要録 (Sonkeikaku Bunko)
Onritsu gōkyoku shō 音律合曲抄 (ibid.)
Inritsu kanjin shū 韻律肝心集 (Imperial Household Archives)
Eclectic as a group, the documents span both exoteric and esoteric traditions,
and with the inclusion of texts like Sango yōroku gaku mokuroku—a work of

22
For text see: Fushiminomiya kyūzō gakusho shūsei 伏見宮旧蔵楽書集成, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Toshoryō
Sōkan, 1998), p. 116.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 123

Moronaga’s own selection—they demonstrate that music catalogues compiled

by court nobles were sometimes copied by monks.
This following document, too—copied by a monk belonging to Shōmyō-ji
Temple, though not Kenna—is particularly valuable for considering the relation-
ship between secular and sacred music:
倍〈秘〉又薪楽云々、（中略）
法華経ヲ ワガエシコトハ タキギコリ ナツミミヅクミ ツカヘテゾエシ
ツカヘテゾエシ
To the tune of bai[ro] 倍[臚] (secret), also a song used in “firewood” music
(takigi-gaku 薪楽) . . .
The Lotus Sutra / I came to receive only / by cutting firewood, /
by gathering herbs and water— / only by serving I received, /
only by serving I received.
—“Secret of secrets” (hichūhi 秘中秘), Shōmyō-ji Religious Documents
(Lotus hymns/“firewood verses”)23
This is the hymnal verse on the Lotus Sutra we saw in our discussion of the
Shōmyō-fu above. Here, as in the Shōmyō-fu, the originally final verse tsukaete zo eshi
has been repeated, showing that this was sung not as a five-verse waka poem, but
as a six-verse shōmyō chant. Of interest is the superscription “bai[ro] 倍 [臚]
(secret)”, which indicates that the string- and wind-music mode of bairo 倍臚
could be used for the chanting of hymns to the Lotus Sutra such as this one. The
bairo, a string- and wind-music piece in the hyōjō 平調 key,24 was also included in
various collections of scores like the Sango yōroku. However, the melody of the
bairo as indicated in these, and the melody found for it in the Shōmyō-fu collection
we discussed in this article’s first section, do not in fact match one another.
On this subject, the comment found in Saien’s 宰円 work Dangi hōshin shō 弾偽
褒真抄 (Kenji 建治 1/1275) is perfectly correct: “Also, it is said that within the
traditions of the Rengai 蓮界 school, there are “firewood”-verses that have been
adapted to the bairo tune. This too requires further study.” One must conclude
that a new Lotus Sutra hymnal piece had been created, based on the music of the
bairo mode.
The following document is also one of particular interest, not least with respect
to its visual imagery:

23
Text from Kanazawa bunko shiryō zensho 金沢文庫資料全書 (Yokohama: Kanazawa-kenritsu
Kanazawa Bunko), vol. 7, p. 179.
24
Bairo 陪臚 was originally a piece of dance music (bugaku 舞楽), but in the medieval period
came largely to be performed as a string- and wind-music piece. Cf. in the court diary Gyokuyō
玉葉 the example of the “small [string and wind] music gathering” (ko gyo-yū 小御遊) in the entry
for Angen 安元 2/1176.2.14; or in the diary Sanemi-kyō ki 実躬卿記, the example of Amida ven-
erations (Amida-kō 阿弥陀講) in the entry of Kengen 建元 1/1302.3.8.
124 Inose

Figure 2. Myōon Benzaiten as a woman Figure 3. Wang Zhaojun playing the biwa
playing the biwa. Seiryū Myōon Benzaiten gazō on horseback. Ō Shōkun zu 王昭君図,
青龍妙音弁財天画像 (Demachi Myōondō Kusumi Morikage 久隈守景, 17c. (Tokyo
Temple 出町妙音堂). National Museum).
https://webarchives.tnm.jp/imgsearch/
show/C0042808

曩莫三曼多没駄喃 蘇羅蘇婆帝曳 娑婆歌

此歌名馬上船中曲
– “Hymn to Myōonten” 妙音天讃, Shōmyō-ji Religious Documents25
This is a phonetic realization in Chinese characters of a Sanskrit hymnal versi-
cle to Myōonten, read out in Japanese as: nōmaku-sanmanda-bodanan sorasobatei-ei
sowaka (ultimately reflecting Skt. nāmah. samanta-buddhānām. , Sarasvatī aim. , svāhā). The
sequence sorasobatei-ei 蘇羅蘇婆帝曳 renders the name of the goddess Sarasvatī,
in other words Myōonten 妙音天/Benzaiten 弁才天. Here, however, I want to
focus on the annotation beneath, which would translate as:

25
Text from Kanazawa bunko shiryō zensho, vol. 8, p. 177.
 Medieval Buddhism and Music 125

The title of this piece is: “Song on Horseback aboard a Boat” (bajō senchū kyoku
馬上船中曲).

Given a lack of parallel examples, this title likely represents a miscopying of

馬上胡中曲 (bajō kochū kyoku). Meaning “Song on Horseback in Barbarian
Lands,” it would be a song sung on horseback by Wang Zhaojun 王昭君, while
being sent on her way from Han China to the barbarian country—by tradition
the first song ever composed for the biwa.26
This, then, would represent a convergence of the image of Myōonten with
that of Wang Zhaojun. And indeed, while Myōonten can be found depicted in
the Boddhisatva manner, she can also be found depicted much along the lines of
modern images of Benzaiten, in the guise of a woman strumming her biwa. As is
clear from the above side-by-side comparison between images of (Figure 2) a
two-armed female Myōonten and (Figure 3) Wang Zhaojun, by the time of the
Kamakura period, at least on an iconographic level, the two had already become
linked.

Conclusion
In the latter 12th century, what Fujiwara no Moronaga did with biwa-notation was
to make the formlessness of the voice recordable. In his work we also recognize
the music-mediated expression of court music and court poetry’s intrinsically
Buddhist character. With the beginning of the Kamakura period, Moronaga’s biwa
music was inherited by the Saionji clan, among whom Saionji Sanekane also made
use of biwa-notation, to record the voice of court ceremonial after Moronaga’s
time. Later Kien—likely Sanekane’s brother by a different mother—used
hakase-notation for both the composition of new music and for the recension of
ceremonial then in danger of being lost. After various such attempts to record
the voice in writing, we find in the Shōmyō-ji collection of religious documents
something like the pinnacle these developments eventually reached.
In addition to their function in capturing the fleeting formlessness of the
voice, however, biwa-notation and hakase-notation should also be seen as a con-
duit for knowledge: shuttling back and forth, between the sacred and the secular,
as they sought to convey forth music. Moreover, even as ceremonial and imagery
were conveyed by means of such a conduit, they came also to be shaped by it
themselves.

26
See, e.g., Yamamoto Toshio 山本敏雄, “Ō Shōkun setsuwa to biwa” 王昭君説話と琵琶, Aichi
kyōiku daigaku kenkyū hōkoku: jinbun, shakai-ka 愛知教育大学研究報告：人文・社会科 53 (2004).

Note: This article represents research results obtained with the support of an Early-Career
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, for the project “The Establishment and Exercise of ‘Music-
Ceremonial Lore’ in Medieval Japanese Literature” (Chūsei bungaku ni okeru “ongaku girei
gaku” no kōchiku to jissen 中世文学における「音楽儀礼学」の構築と実践).
 Contributors
Jean-Noël Robert ジャン＝ノエル・ロベール
Professor at the Collège de France
Areas of Research: Medieval Japanese Buddhism and literature
Major Publications:
◆ La Centurie du Lotus : poèmes de Jien (1155–1225) sur le Sûtra du Lotus (Paris:
Collège de France, 2008).
◆ La hiéroglossie japonaise. Vol. 225 in Leçons Inaugurales du Collège de France (Paris:
Collège de France/Fayard, 2012).

Ivo Smits イフォ・スミッツ

Professor at Leiden University
Areas of Research: Arts and cultures of Japan
Major Publications:
◆ “Genji’s Gardens: Negotiating Nature at the Heian Court” in Oxford Studies in
Philosophy and Literature: Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Oxford University
Press, 2019).
◆ “La dynamique sino-japonaise (wakan) à l’époque Heian”, Médiévales 72
(2017).

Yoshizawa Katsuhiro 芳澤勝弘

Professor at Hanazono University
Areas of Research: Japanese Zen Buddhism
Major Publications:
◆ Hyōnen-zu no nazo: kokuhō saidoku hyōtan namazu wo megutte「瓢鮎図」の謎―
国宝再読ひょうたんなまずをめぐって (Tokyo: Wedge, 2012).
◆ Hakuin: Zenga no sekai 白隠—禅画の世界 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2005).

Didier Davin ディディエ・ダヴァン

Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature
Areas of Research: Medieval Japanese Buddhism and literature
Major Publications:
◆ Mumonkan no shusse sugoroku 『無門関』の出世双六 (Tokyo: Heibonsha,
2020).
◆ “Muromachi jidai no zensō to Rinzai-roku” 室町時代の禅僧と『臨済録』 ,
in Rinzai-roku kenkyū no genzai『臨済録』研究の現在 (Kyoto: Zenbunka
Kenkyūjo, 2017), pp. 471–494.

Koida Tomoko 恋田知子

Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature
 Research topics: Medieval Japanese literature
Major Publications:
◆ Hotoke to onna no Muromachi: monogatari sōshi ron 仏と女の室町―物語草子論
(Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 2008).
◆ Ikai e izanau onna: emaki, Nara ehon wo himotoku 異界へいざなう女: 絵巻・奈
良絵本をひもとく (Heibonsha, 2017).

Suzuki Ken’ichi 鈴木健一

Professor at Gakushuin University
Areas of Research: Early modern Japanese literature
Major Publications:
◆ Edo kotengaku no ron 江戸古典学の論 (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2011).
◆ Koten chūshaku nyūmon: rekishi to gihō 古典注釈入門―歴史と技法 (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 2014).

Inose Chihiro 猪瀬千尋

Research Fellow at Nagoya University
Areas of Research: Medieval Japanese literature
Major Publications:
◆ Chūsei ōken no ongaku to girei 中世王権の音楽と儀礼 (Kasama Shoin, 2018).
◆ “Bunji 2-nen Ōhara gokō to Heike monogatari” 文治二年大原御幸と平家物語,
Chūsei bungaku 中世文学 61 (2015).

Translator
Jeffrey Knott ジェフリー・ノット
Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature
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abstract.

❂ All articles will be peer-reviewed.

❂ Articles must be no longer than 12,000 words, and can contain no more
than five images.

❂ Issues of permission and related fees for all images to be used in an article
must be dealt with by the submitter beforehand.

❂ Submit articles to the following address: journal@nijl.ac.jp. Attach both a

Word version and a pdf version of the article.

❂ The submission deadline for the fourth issue is May 30th, 2020. This fourth
issue is scheduled to be published in September 2020.