The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess by Edward Kamens

Author:Edward Kamens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

In the reading of Hosshin wakashū carried out here I have gone to some length to emphasize its cyclical character, to show what effects are achieved by the poet and impressed upon the reader as the cycle turns from topic-text to topic-text, as its composer moves among a set of recurring attitudes and reverts to recurring diction, to underlying themes and motifs that are brought to the surface as those texts and the responses they prompt may dictate. We must recognize, however, that the ways these poems are most likely to have been read in the past would not have called as much attention to such characteristics as they have been given here. Medieval readers, whose reading was invariably shaped by the chokusenshū editors, were much more likely to encounter but one or two of the poems at a time, most often classed with others like them as responses to scriptural topic-texts (in some cases, the same or related texts), and therefore read them as examples of a genre, “Shakkyōka”—as representatives of one poet’s exercise in that genre to be compared and associated with others apparently like it. Removed from its cyclical context and placed in a generic one, a single poem from Hosshin wakashū, or two or three, juxtaposed with other “Buddhist poems,” inevitably would produce a very different set of impressions: each poem would become a freestanding record (among similar records) of its particular author’s singular encounter with an isolated scriptural text, and any gesture to other poems that the single poem might appear to make would have to be seen as a gesture to other poems in the whole waka corpus, or in the Shakkyōka genre, rather than to other poems within the organic entity in which it was originally conceived. A reading of Hosshin wakashū as a cycle, however, suggests that its poems make both kinds of gestures, as well as gestures to the poems within that cycle itself.

As reading contexts were shifted and rearranged through time, the potential range of ways of reading poems like those in Hosshin wakashū multiplied, but the range of readings likely to be practiced was diminished. To be sure, the reading of such poems in their anthologized contexts may have been largely responsible for preserving knowledge of the texts that originally incorporated them, and perhaps insured the preservation of those texts themselves, in later copies. But it also meant that encounters with those poems in their whole original frames would be greatly outnumbered by encounters in the new frames that the anthologies gave them. The rare reader who made his or her way through the entire cycle would thereby reenact the whole series of encounters between scriptural texts and waka texts recorded there, but the reader who was presented with just one of those encounters would know it perhaps only as a representative selection of that larger and more complex series of encounters, or simply as an isolated encounter associable with the similar encounters of other earlier and later poets, enacted intermittently through time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.