著者

Robert Jean-Noël

出版者

国文学研究資料館

雑誌

国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:03877280)

巻号頁・発行日

no.26, pp.1-15, 2003-03-01

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When it comes to the important question of religion and language in Buddhism, the importance of the Japanese language is wont to be underestimated. By comparison with medieval Chinese or Tibetan, Japanese obviously cannot boast of the same feats in translating the Buddhist Scriptures. Even in the case of Mongolian or Manchu, that former scholars tended to neglect, both these languages produced translations of the Buddhist Canon (albeit a partial one for the latter), which are to be taken, although they are secondary translations, as a landmark in the cultural history of East Asia.Japanese is prima facie different; there was no organized translations of the Canon in that language before modern times, and, in that respect, it would be closer to the situation of Siam or Cambodia. But there was indeed a field in which Japanese monk-scholars engaged in an enterprise that could be deemed akin to the achievements of their Tibetan counterparts, and that was the Japanese poetry (waka) on Buddhist themes, that I will here cover by the general term of “exegetical” poetry or shakkyou kaei.We may for our purpose propose here a broad division of those poems in two, namely those that make use of Chinese Buddhist vocabulary tel quel, and those that endeavor to rely exclusively on ‘pure’ Japanese poetical language.Taking the example of two corpuses of Buddhist waka poems on the theme of the Lotus Sutra by Jien and Sonen, I will consider three points:a) How the scholastic and religious vocabulary of Buddhism has been translated in original Japanese idioms.b) How the poetical expression of the Lotus tenets enhanced and developed the doctrinal interpretation.c) In what way this interpretation or exegesis fits into a precise pattern of religious practice. I hope, through these points, to make a step towards assessing this poetical genre as a full-fledged category of religious literature.