Speaker 1: Jean-Noël Robert (Professor Emeritus, Collège de France)
Date and Time: Friday, October 9th, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM (Paris)
Title: “Poetry, Politics, Hermeneutics in Japanese Buddhist Poems: Jien’s Naniwa Century (1219)”
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Speaker 2: Edward Kamens (Sumitomo Professor Emeritus, Yale University)
Date and Time: Friday, October 9th, from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM (Paris)
Title: “The Buddhist Poetry of Fujiwara no Tadamichi”
Location: Inalco, Maison de la Recherche, Auditorium Dumézil (2 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris)
Abstract:
“Poetry, Politics, Hermeneutics in Japanese Buddhist Poems: Jien’s Naniwa Century (1219)”
Despite the Buddha’s own ancient warning against putting his teachings into verse (chandas), a warning endlessly repeated in the Sino-Japanese world that sought to keep religious figures away from the “unreasonable pronouncements” (狂言綺語) of poetry, Japanese poets developed and cultivated, over nearly a millennium, a distinct subgenre of classical poetry, waka , which can be translated simply as “poems about Buddhism” (釋教歌), or, thanks to the ambiguity of the first character, as “hermeneutical poems.” The key figure in the formation of this genre was Jien (慈圓, 1155-1225), a prolific poet and patriarch of the powerful Tendai school. From an illustrious family and close to Emperor Go-Toba, he was at the heart of the political turmoil that engulfed Japan at the end of the 12th century. His involvement in the events of his time led him to record in his Modest Views (愚管抄), written in Japanese, his conception of Japanese history as a dialectic between the path of the sovereign and the path of Dharma. One of his later poetic collections, the Centuries of Naniwa (難波百首), is an offering of one hundred poems to Shitennōji Temple (四天王寺) in Osaka Bay, founded in the 7th century by Prince Shōtoku (聖徳), himself considered a model of the sovereign uniting the two paths. The poems in the collection, imbued with Amidist piety, are meant to be placed alternately under each of the two truths: vulgar or phenomenal truth (俗諦) and absolute truth (真諦), one of the central tenets of the Tendai school. They simultaneously echo the ideas on history presented in Modest Views . This century should therefore be read in three dimensions: a pious offering to the Amidist temple, a description of how Buddhist Law is embedded in worldly politics, and a dialectical synthesis of the two truths in the name of a higher understanding, which is the third truth, or Middle Way. Based on an excellent annotated edition of this text published a few years ago in Japan, we will attempt to uncover this threefold relationship as an example of the reflective richness of classical Japanese Buddhist poetry.
“The Buddhist Poetry of Fujiwara no Tadamichi”
During the brief reign of the young Emperor Konoe (1139-1155), the nobleman and Regent Fujiwara no Tadamichi (藤原忠通, 1097-1164) composed a sequence of Japanese poems (waka) on selected passages from each of the 28 chapters of the Lotus Sutra as a means of sharing the scripture’s teachings with the young sovereign. Tadamichi was not the first male or female Japanese poet to do so, but he was the first to include short explanatory notes, in prose, about the quotations from the Sutra and their relationship to his poems. This illustrated presentation will explore the precedents and contexts for this devotional and didactic project, along with considerations of Tadamichi’s Buddhist-themed poems in literary Sinitic (kanshi) and some later waka poems in a similar vein composed by the short-lived Emperor Konoe himself, among others.
Speaker:
Jean-Noël Robert is Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France, where he held the Chair of Philology of Japanese Civilization from 2011 to 2022, and at the Religious Studies section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He has notably studied the history of doctrines of the Tendai school of Buddhism. Through his research on the development of Japanese Buddhist poetry, he has broadened his field to encompass all linguistic relations between Classical Chinese and Japanese as mediated by Buddhist thought. His research has led him, using the Sino-Japanese model, to develop the concept of “hieroglossia,” which aims to describe the evolution of cultural and linguistic areas where the role played by the religious factor through translation is paramount.
Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies, Yale University. His major publications include The Three Treasures: A Revised and Illustrated Study and Translation of Minamoto no Tamenori’s Sanbōe (2023); Waka and Things , Waka as Things (2017); Utamakura, Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry (2007); and The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisai’in Senshi and Hosshin wakashū (1991) as well as articles and essays on The Tale of Genji , Buddhist poetry, calligraphy albums (tekagami) and intermediality in Japanese culture.
