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Revealing the central place of Buddhist philosophy in medieval Japanese artistic practices, this text illuminates the significance of each section of the treatise within the context of waka and renga poetics, and the role of Buddhism in the contemporary understanding of cultural practices such as poetry.
A Guide to Oriental Classics
These papers explore the debate over new directions in Japanese studies.
Matsuo Basho was the greatest of the Japanese haiku poets, whose genius elevated the haiku to an art form of intense spiritual beauty. This, one of the most revered classics of Japanese literature, is a diary of Basho's journey to the northern interior of Japan.
Examining inscriptions on landscape paintings and related documents, this book explores the views of the "two jewels" of Japanese Zen literature, Gido Shushin (1325-1388) and Zekkai Chushin (1336-1405), and their students. These monks played important roles as advisors to the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408) and Yoshimochi (1386-1428), as well as to major figures in various michi or Ways of linked verse, the No theatre, ink painting, rock gardens, and other arts. By applying images of mountain retreats to their busy urban lives in the capital, these Five Mountain Zen monks provoke reconsiderations of the relation between secular and sacred and nature and culture.
"Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.
This is the first monograph-length study in English of Kamo no Chōmei, one of the most important literary figures of medieval Japan. Drawing upon a wide range of writings in a variety of genres from the Heian and Kamakura periods, Pandey focuses on the terms kyōgen kigo (wild words and fancy phrases), shoji soku nehan (samsara is nirvana), hōben (expedient means), and suki (single-minded devotion to an art). She shows how these terms deployed by writers in an attempt to reconcile literary and artistic activities with a commitment to Buddhism. By locating Chōmei within this broad context, the book offers an original reading of his texts, while at the same time casting a light upon intelle...
The reader experiences world history as the authors lived it and gains rare insight into the lives and personalities of some of the world's most important writers, thinkers, athletes and artists.
'Kokin Wakashū' (Collection of Early and Modern Japanese Poetry) is one of the world's earliest and most important poetic anthologies. It consists of over 1,000 poems, almost all of which were probably written between the last half of the eighth century and 905, the approximate date of the work's compilation. This is the first full-scale study in English of Kokinshū (as it is usually called), the anthology that fixed the basic style of Japanese poetry, and in so doing defined the aesthetics of an entire literary tradition. Kokinshū cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of Chinese poetry and its influence on Japanese writers, Heian aesthetics ideals, the aims of the anthology's poet...
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