Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading 9004420398, 9789004420397

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Literary Sinitic and East Asia

Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis Edited by Ross King (University of British Columbia) David Lurie (Columbia University) Marion Eggert (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinc

Literary Sinitic and East Asia A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading By

Kin Bunkyō Edited by

Ross King Translated by

Ross King Marjorie Burge Si Nae Park Alexey Lushchenko Mina Hattori

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: The first page of fascicle 1 of an undated Korean version of the Myobŏp yŏnhwa kyŏng 妙法蓮華經 or Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Dharma, printed at Taehŭngsa 大興寺 Monastery in South Chŏlla Province. The kugyŏl reading marks and Korean vernacular glosses suggest the work is from the 16th century or earlier. Courtesy of the Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg (inventory no. 33.215:39, 12). This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). KANBUN TO HIGASHI AJIA: KUNDOKU NO BUNKAKEN by KIN Bunkyō © 2010 by KIN Bunkyō First published in 2010 by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. This English language edition published by arrangement with Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kin, Bunkyō, author. | King, Ross, 1961- editor, translator. Title: Literary Sinitic and East Asia : a cultural sphere of vernacular reading / by Kin Bunkyō ; edited by  Ross King ; translated by Ross King, Marjorie Burge, Si Nae Park, Alexey Lushchenko, Mina Hattori. Other titles: Kanbun to Higashi Ajia. English Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Language, writing and literary culture in the sinographic  cosmopolis, 2589-8787 ; volume 3 | First published in Japanese as Kanbun to Higashi Ajia: kundoku no  bunkaken in 2010 by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042389 (print) | LCCN 2020042390 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004420397 (hardback ;  acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004437302 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese literature—East Asia—History and criticism. | Chinese characters—East Asia—  History. | Kanbun (Japanese prose literature)—History and criticism. | Kundoku. Classification: LCC PL3038 .K5613 2021 (print) | LCC PL3038 (ebook) | DDC 895.109/954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042389 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042390 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2589-8787 ISBN 978-90-04-42039-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43730-2 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Editor’s Preface: Vernacular Reading in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond ix Author’s Preface to the English Edition xli Acknowledgements xliii List of Figures xliv Acronyms and Abbreviations xlvi Introduction 1 1 Buying Tickets at the Station 1 2 A Ticket Gate 2 3 Sinographic Expressions in East Asia 3 4 “Vernacular Reading”: The Kundoku Phenomenon in the Sinographic Cultural Sphere 5 1 Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku “Vernacular Reading” in Japan 8 1 What Is kundoku? 8 1.1 The Only Instance of kundoku in the World 8 1.2 Cosmopolitan lingua francas of the World: Latin, Arabic, Literary Sinitic 9 1.3 Sino-Japanese on Readings (go-on, kan-on, tō-on) and Vernacular kun Readings 12 1.4 What Is the “kun” in kun Readings? 13 2 Kundoku and Chinese Translations of Buddhist Sutras 16 2.1 The Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese Languages 16 2.2 “此云” in the Nihon shoki 17 2.3 How Buddhist Sutras Were Translated into Chinese 19 2.4 Awareness of Difference between Sanskrit and Chinese 21 2.5 “Rearranged Text” (廻文) and the Beginnings of kundoku 23 2.6 The Close Relationship between Japanese kundoku and Literary Sinitic Sutra Translations 25 2.7 Why Is It Possible to Translate Buddhist Sutras? Three Brothers Who Invented Scripts 25 2.8 Kundoku and Precision in Translation 28 3 The Ideological Context of kundoku 29 3.1 From the Debate about the Common Ancestry of Sanskrit and Chinese to the Theory of Sanskrit and Japanese Being Identical 29 3.2 The Theory of honji suijaku and kundoku 30

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The Initial Stage of kundoku: From the Early Nara to the Mid-Heian Periods 32 4.1 Reading and Writing: kundoku before the Use of Notations 32 4.2 Sinographic Numerals Indicating Reading Order: Word-Order Notations 36 4.3 Origin of Word-Order Markings (I): Numerals in dharani 39 4.4 Origin of Word-Order Markings (II): Text in Sections and kundoku 41 4.5 Kundoku Using Signs of Various Kinds 43 4.6 Okurigana and okototen 50 4.7 Origins of okototen 51 Kundoku in the Period of Maturity: From the Mid-Heian to Insei Periods (ca. 10th to 12th Centuries ce) 54 5.1 How to Read okototen: The Example of the Baishi wenji 白氏文集 [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] 54 5.2 Independence of the kundoku Style and Its Secret Transmission 58 New Developments in Kundoku: From the Kamakura to Early Modern Periods 59 6.1 Decline of okototen and a New System of kundoku 59 6.2 A New Way of Thinking about kundoku: Aspirations for “Direct Reading” 60 6.3 Monks Studying Abroad and the Rise in Literary Sinitic Proficiency 63 6.4 The Neo-Confucian Worldview and kundoku 65 6.5 Kundoku in the Edo Period 67 6.6 Debates about the Abolition of kundoku: Tōgai 東涯 and Sorai 徂徠  69 6.7 The Issaiten 一斎点 and the Limits of the Debate about the Abolition of kundoku 71 Kundoku since the Meiji Period 75 7.1 Using kundoku to Study English 75 7.2 Liang Qichao’s Method of Reverse kundoku 78 7.3 Debate about “Direct Reading” Redux 81

2 Vernacular Reading in East Asia 85 1 Hundok on the Korean Peninsula 85 1.1 Literary Sinitic and ŏnhae Practice in Today’s Republic of Korea 85 1.2 Ŏnhae Exegeses Using han’gŭl and Sinographs 87 1.3 Vernacular Reading in Korea: The Thousand Character Classic 89

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1.4 Hundok with Word-Order Markings during the Chosŏn Dynasty 90 1.5 Hundok Written with Simplified Sinographs: Common Features with kana 93 1.6 From Korean hundok to ŏnhae Hybrid Exegeses 96 1.7 Calls to Abolish hundok in Korea and kundoku in Japan 98 1.8 Korean Diplomatic Missions to Japan and Their Views of Japanese kundoku 100 1.9 Hundok before the Koryŏ Dynasty: The Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra 101 1.10 The Humane King Sūtra in Korea and Japan 104 Hundok in Silla and Kokunten in Japan 106 2.1 Sŏl Ch’ong, Silla’s hundok Entrepreneur, and Japan 106 2.2 Interactions with Ōmi no Mifune 108 2.3 Use of Buddhist Texts from Silla to Revise the Buddhist Canon in Japan 109 2.4 Beginnings of Vernacular Reading in Japan and Silla 112 2.5 The kunten Markings in the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl and Stylus Glosses in Korea 117 Ideological Background of hundok on the Korean Peninsula 119 3.1 Silla Monk Pilgrims Who Translated Sutras from Sanskrit 119 3.2 Silla Monk Hyech’o: Pilgrim and Translator of Sutras from the Sanskrit 121 3.3 Hyech’o’s Writing Style: Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India 122 3.4 Language Ideology in the Biography of Kyunyŏ 125 3.5 Concept of the Nation on the Korean Peninsula: Korea Is the Real China! 131 3.6 From “Zhendan” 震旦 (Cīnaṣṭhāna) to “Chindan” 震檀  134 3.7 Opening of Chosŏn and the Sino-Korean Mixed-Script Style 136 3.8 Re-importation of Vernacular hun-Reading Practice from Japan 137 3.9 And Yet hundok Survived 140 Vernacular Reading Phenomena on the Periphery of China 141 4.1 How Khitans Read Poetry 141 4.2 Khitan Attitudes toward Language and State 144 4.3 The Khitan Script 145 4.4 Gaochang and Uighur Vernacular Reading Practice 146 4.5 The Uighurs and Koryŏ 149 4.6 Vernacular Reading Phenomena in Vietnam 151 Vernacular Reading Phenomena in China 155 5.1 Vernacular Translations of the Records of the Three Kingdoms 155 5.2 Chinese History and Changes in the Chinese Language 158

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5.3 Zhijie 直解: Colloquial Translations of Literary Sinitic 161 5.4 Literary Sinitic Studies by Foreign Ethnic Groups 163 3 Writing in Literary Sinitic: The Diverse World of Literary Sinitic in East Asia 164 1 The World of Poetry in East Asia 164 1.1 Sinitic Poetry in East Asia 164 1.2 Ho Chi Minh’s Sinitic Poetry 167 1.3 Korean hyangga and the Japanese Man’yō Songs 169 1.4 Waka, haiku, and sijo 171 1.5 Poetry in the Khitan Language 174 2 The Diversity of Literary Sinitic 176 2.1 Chinese Literary Sinitic and Buddhist Literary Sinitic 176 2.2 Types of Variant Literary Sinitic 179 2.3 Common Traits between Japanese Variant Literary Sinitic and Korean Variant Literary Sinitic: The Style of Japanese senmyō Imperial Edicts and Silla kyo Royal Decrees 193 2.4 A Piece of Humorous Writing in Korean idu-mun 199 2.5 Variant Literary Sinitic during the Mongolian Empire 201 2.6 Haner yanyu 漢児言語: Variant Literary Sinitic as a Spoken Language 204 2.7 Letter-Writing: Japanese sōrōbun Epistolary Writing and Chinese Epistolary Style 205 2.8 Spread of “Practical Writing” 208 2.9 Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Vernacular Writing and sōrōbun 209 2.10 Variant Literary Sinitic Registers across East Asia 211 4 Concluding Thoughts: The East Asian Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere 213 1 A Diverse Range of Ways to Pronounce Sinographs 213 2 A Diverse Range of Ways to Read Literary Sinitic 214 3 A Diverse Range of Literary Sinitic Inscriptional Styles 215 4 Literary Sinitic Inscriptional Style and Social Class 216 5 The East Asian Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere 217 5 Epilogue 219 Bibliography 221 Index of Named Individuals 228 Index of Texts Cited 231 Index of Terms 241

Editor’s Preface

Vernacular Reading in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond 1

The Origins of Our Translation and Its Title

This book was conceived during the spring term of academic year 2010–2011 when I taught my graduate seminar on “Questions of Language, Writing, and Linguistic Thought in the History of the ‘Chinese Character Cultural Sphere 漢字文化圈’: Japan and Korea in the Sinographic Cosmopolis.” The original Japanese version of the book, Kin Bunkyō (2010), had only recently been published, and fit perfectly with the subject matter of the course. Moreover, it dovetailed nicely with the multi-year Korean Studies Laboratory Grant funded by the Academy of Korean Studies that I was in the process of applying for (and subsequently received), under the title “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: Comparative Aspects of the History of Language, Writing and Literary Culture in Japan and Korea.”1 Thus, spring 2011 seemed an ideal moment to work with a small group of graduate students to produce draft translations of each chapter of Professor Kin’s book. In hindsight, this was a foolhardy undertaking: the contents of the book are quite technical and complex, demanding deep expertise in East Asian intellectual and religious history; the early history of Buddhism and written language in China, Japan and Korea; East Asian historical linguistics; the history of reading and writing across the sinographic sphere; Sinitic poetry and its reception throughout the same region; etc. Thus, Professor Kin was entirely justified in his initially skeptical reaction to my proposal to proceed with an English translation of the book, and the inherent difficulty of the book goes a long way toward explaining why it has taken ten years to complete. All translations require translators to make difficult decisions about word choice and terminology, but this project has been especially challenging because of the relative dearth of English-language publications treating these 1 Needless to say, the seminar and Korean Studies Laboratory Grant were inspired by the seminal works of Sheldon Pollock on questions of “cosmopolitan and vernacular” and his call for more comparative work on and theorization of processes of vernacularization around the world (see Pollock 1998, 2000 and 2006). King (forthcoming) is a collection of essays engaging critically with Pollock’s ideas from the perspective of the Sinographic Cosmopolis.

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phenomena in a broadly comparative way, and because of the concomitant lack of a well-established and agreed upon terminology.2 Professor Kin’s book was published with the Japanese title Kanbun to higashi Ajia: Kundoku no bunkaken, one possible translation of which would be “Classical Chinese and East Asia: The Cultural Sphere of Reading by Gloss.” That is, J. kanbun 漢文 is frequently translated as “Classical Chinese,” J. kundoku 訓讀 was notably rendered as “reading by gloss” in David Lurie’s important book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (2011), published shortly after the appearance of Professor Kin’s book in Japanese, and Professor Kin himself in a section in Chapter 1 (“The only instance of kundoku in the world”) imputes a certain uniqueness to premodern East Asia and the various kundoku-type reading techniques that arose there; hence “The Cultural Sphere of Reading by Gloss …” with the definite article implying singularity and uniqueness. But we have chosen to give the title a number of slightly different twists in English and have opted instead for “Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading.” The reasons are as follows. First of all, “Literary Sinitic.” Rationales for the term “Literary Sinitic” in preference to “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese” can be found in Mair (1994 and 2004), where the reasons given are primarily linguistic and philological. That is, Mair uses “Sinitic” as a precise and politically neutral rendering of hanyu 漢語 to refer to a family of languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Minnan, etc.). “Literary” and “Vernacular” can then modify “Sinitic” to designate two poles along a rather broad spectrum of different registers of written Sinitic, all of which have been significantly divorced from any form of spoken Sinitic since at least Han dynasty times (if not since the very inception of Chinese writing itself) and none of which are particularly well suited to writing spoken varieties of Sinitic to this day. But more to the point now in the twenty-first century, at a time when China has re-emerged as a major world power and when a particularly strong and at times arrogant and even virulent ethno-nationalist sentiment has arisen alongside it, the term “Chinese” as an umbrella for any of the different languages of China today or for the different registers of the written language historically—let alone for texts composed in sinographs outside of “China” proper or for use in non-Sinitic languages—is decidedly too modern (and thus anachronistic for much of the historical period covered in this book), too politically charged, and too imprecise.3 The greatest intellectual threat fac-

2 But see Whitman et al. (2010) for a bold attempt at proposing an “international vocabulary” for research in this field. 3 With thanks to Victor Mair (p.c.) for discussion on this section.

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ing students of East Asia today is no longer eurocentrism (though it is still an intractable problem), but sinocentrism. Thus, we use “Literary Sinitic” to refer to what is called kanbun in Japanese, hanmun in Korean, and hán văn in Vietnamese, and to what in modern Mandarin Chinese is typically called wenyan(wen) 文言(文).4 But if we are to eschew the label “Classical Chinese” for its imprecision and modern-day and anachronistic ethno-nationalist coloring, what of “Chinese characters?” Here we prefer the term “sinograph(s)” to render Mandarin hanzi, Japanese kanji, Korean hancha, and Vietnamese Hán tự 漢字 (or chữ Hán 𡨸漢5), again to avoid “Chinese” and the unfortunate sinocentrism that terms like “Chinese characters” and “Classical Chinese” encourage in a context where Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese used these for more than a millennium (and where increasing numbers of international students from the People’s Republic of China are swelling the enrollments in university courses in East Asian Studies). But we also occasionally use just kanji and kanbun when the context is clear in a book that was originally written for readers of Japanese. For similar reasons, we also use “Sinitic poetry” rather than “Chinese poetry” for J. kanshi 漢詩 (following Fraleigh 2016). It can be objected that the term “Sinitic” indexes “China” just as much as the term “Chinese” does, and etymologically speaking, this is true. Our point is not to deny the centrality of China, Chinese civilization or Chinese writing in the development of literacy, writing and literature in the regions encompassed by the Sinographic Cosmopolis.6 But the term “Sinitic” does nonetheless take us all at least one cautious step back from the unfortunate imprecision of “Chinese.” It can also be objected that many of the texts composed in what we are calling “Literary Sinitic” are less than “literary” or bellelettristic and/or are infused with vernacular elements (whether Sinitic or otherwise), but here the point is that the authors of texts written in what is variously called wenyan(wen), hanmun, kanbun or hán văn were nonetheless striving to write in Literary Sinitic. And anybody, whether a speaker of a variety of Vernacular Sinitic or not, was capable of writing substandard Literary Sinitic. “Literary Sinitic” comes with all the imprecision of these equivalents in Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and 4 For a useful discussion of the history of the term hanmun and other designations for sinographs and Literary Sinitic in pre-twentieth century Korea, see Wells (2011: 19–32). 5 See Phan (2013: 1) for these terms. Ding (2015: 60) cites another Vietnamese term for sinographs, chữ nho 𡨸儒, which he translates as “scholar’s characters.” A more literal rendition would be “Ruist characters.” 6 See King (2015) for a defense of the term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” as well as further discussion of related terminological issues. King and Laffin (2020) also discuss these questions with reference to additional recent scholarship not cited here.

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Vietnamese, but we need a blanket term for the entire region that avoids the term “Chinese.”7 Now let us turn to the term kundoku and problems with its translation. Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the term—both in much modern Japanese research about the phenomenon and in most of the research in non-Japanese languages that carry over the term intact from Japanese as a kind of technical term—is its lack of precision. That is, when researchers, Japanese or otherwise, write about “kundoku,” it is not always clear whether they are talking about text- or sentence-level (kanbun) kundoku, or about word- or character- (sinographic) level kun’yomi: “kundoku” typically does duty for both of these across a wide swath of research. A more linguistically fine-tuned approach to kundoku-type reading practices, therefore, would need to answer a number of questions, starting with: Is the practice restricted to individual graphs or words, or does it apply to longer texts? Are written glosses involved, and if so, what kinds? Is a knowledge of the source language required, and if so, on what levels and to what extent? Do these reading practices involve translation? Etc.8 An additional problem with using the term “kundoku” untranslated is that it rather unjustly privileges Japanese as somehow the unique or originary case for these sorts of reading practices, a conceit that Kin Bunkyō’s book dispels once and for all. With these caveats in mind, then, let us turn to the question of how to render “kundoku” in English. Lurie (2011: 5) describes kundoku-type reading practices as “reading by gloss,” and Whitman (2011: 1) similarly uses “glossing” “… in a somewhat extended sense to refer to a process where a text in one language is prepared (annotated, marked) to be read in another” (Whitman 2011: 1). Kin Bunkyō himself adopts a very liberal attitude as to what counts as kundoku, but in any case we render “kundoku 訓讀 ~ hundok 訓讀 ~ xundu 訓讀” as “vernacular reading” (albeit with the same attendant lack of precision as “kundoku”), preferring (as it were) a “vernacular reading” of 訓讀 as “vernacular (訓) reading (讀).” As precedents for this usage, we can cite the translations of the papers by Kobayashi Yoshinori and Nam Pung-hyun (Nam P’unghyŏn) delivered at the special panel “Hanmun~kugyŏl = kambun~kunten: Pointing, reading, and appropriation of language in Korea and Japan, 9th–14th cc.” at the 2007 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and translated by John Whitman and Ross King, respectively (see Kobayashi 2007 and 7 See Wixted (2018) for spirited complaints about the term “Literary Sinitic” and a rehearsal of his ongoing advocacy of the term “Sino-Japanese” to refer to kanbun and “Sino-Korean” to refer to hanmun. His discussion of medieval Latinity is stimulating, but unpersuasive. 8 With thanks to Sven Osterkamp for assistance with this paragraph.

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Nam 2007); the term as used in the title of Whitman et al. (2010); and most recently, Peter Kornicki (2018), who uses the term throughout his seminal book. “Reading by gloss” strikes us as more cumbersome than “vernacular reading,” and faces the added problem that it is entirely possible to engage in kundokutype vernacular reading practices without the aid of explicit written glosses or markings. Finally, the question of the uniqueness of East Asian vernacular reading techniques in the history of world writing. To Professor Kin’s eternal credit, his book shatters the all-too-common conceit among many speakers and scholars of Japanese that kundoku is and always has been somehow unique to Japan. Instead, Professor Kin not only demonstrates a wide range of vernacular reading phenomena attested in earlier periods of Korean (building on the pioneering work of Nam P’unghyŏn and Kobayashi Yoshinori, among others) and Old Uighur (based on the equally pioneering publications of Shōgaito Masahiro), but also stretches the notion of “vernacular reading/kundoku” to include Khitan and Vietnamese, as well as textual genres like zhijie 直解 (“direct explications”) of Chinese classics into more vernacularized or colloquialized forms of written Sinitic. In the process, he also folds into his embrace the vexed question of “variant Literary Sinitic” to show just how elastic the notions of “Literary Sinitic,” “vernacular reading,” and indeed, vernacular inscription, could be in the sinographic sphere. But when Professor Kin writes in Chapter 1 that “Except for the case of reading Literary Sinitic via kundoku in Japan, there are no examples, at least in today’s world, of reading a foreign language text by adding marks to change word order and thereby convert the text into one’s native language,” his qualifications of “at least in today’s world” and “by adding marks” are important ones, and readers are left potentially with the impression that vernacular reading— even if confined today to Japan—was nonetheless a phenomenon unique to the sinographic sphere. Moreover, readers are left to ponder whether vernacular reading was possible without adding marks. But there are indeed parallel vernacular and/or glossed reading phenomena attested elsewhere in the world: King (2007) and Whitman (2011) reference some of the glossed reading techniques from medieval Europe,9 and there are fascinating parallels from multiple languages of the ancient Middle East. Thus, our English-language sub-title reads, “A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading  …” rather than

9 See, for example, Robinson (1973) for examples of word-order glossing in Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England, and more recently Blom (2017), for a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on glossing practices in medieval Western Europe.

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“The Cultural Sphere …” so as to encourage thinking about other such cultural spheres in world history. 2

Ancient Middle Eastern Parallels to East Asian Vernacular Reading Phenomena

Although Professor Kin must have been well aware of the ancient Middle Eastern parallels to kundoku, he makes no mention of them in his book. To have done so would no doubt have complicated the work even further, but the typological and terminological parallels between ancient Middle Eastern vernacular reading phenomena and those in the sinographic sphere deserve closer attention, if for no other reason perhaps than to help us sharpen our appreciation of the similarities and differences between the two. As an additional attempt at clarifying the gamut of attested cases of vernacular reading techniques around the world along with some of the terminology that has been proposed to describe it, the pages below summarize some of the key research to date on kundoku-type phenomena in the (mostly ancient) Middle East, although I cannot pretend to any authoritative expertise in this area. 2.1 Allography, Garshuni, and Garshunography One of the first terms one encounters in the scholarly literature about vernacular reading and cases where a “foreign” writing system is used to write a vernacular is “allography,” built on Greek allo- “other” plus graphé “representation by means of lines; drawing; writing.” French scholar Chatonnet (2015: 16) defines “allographie” as “cases where a language with its own writing system is written down deliberately—and in precise and limited contexts—using another writing system borrowed from a different tradition.”10 Mengozzi (2010: 297) notes that the term “Garshuni,” used originally to refer to Arabic texts written in Syriac script, has also been used to label cases whereby the East-Syriac script was used to write languages like Armenian, Kurdish, Malayalam, Persian, or Turkish, and Kiraz (2014: 65) goes so far as to propose that all such cases where “a community makes a deliberate choice” to write in another script different from their own be designated as “garshunography” rather than “allography,” which latter term he deems inappropriate because of its established linguistic usage to designate (ortho)graphic variation. At any rate, “allography” is clearly 10 The original reads: “les cas où une langue qui dispose de sa propre écriture est notée intentionnellement—et dans des contextes précis et limités—dans un autre système graphique, emprunté à une tradition différente.”

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not relevant to East Asian vernacular reading practices, because while different East Asian linguistic communities may have deliberately chosen to deploy sinographs and Literary Sinitic, they nonetheless had no “choice,” because they had no indigenous writing system prior to contact with sinography. Chinese writing was the only game in town, as it were, at least for Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese in ancient times. 2.2 Alloglottography An etymologically similar term to “allography” is “alloglottography,” defined by Coulmas (1996: 8) as “the practice of using one language in writing and another in reading, known from situations of restricted literacy.” On the very next page, Coulmas refers to Japanese kundoku kanbun (“Chinese texts read in the kundoku method”) as an example of alloglottography, but this is not entirely congruent with the original use of the term. The term “alloglottography” was coined by Ilya Gershevitch (1979) in his famous paper on the use of Elamite in Achaemenid chanceries, where he showed on the basis of a detailed analysis of the great inscription of Darius on Mount Behistun that Achaemenid Elamite was a medium for transmitting texts that were conceived and dictated in Old Iranian languages, to be read out and understood as Old Iranian texts. In a restatement of the phenomenon, Rubio (2007: 33) defines alloglottography as “… writing a text in a language different from the language in which it is intended to be read …,” and writes with respect to Darius: “This means that the Great King uttered the words in Old Persian, but the scribes wrote them down in Elamite and read them back to him (as the inscription says) in Old Persian” (ibid.: 39). In a footnote to his original article, Gershevitch describes how he also entertained using the terms “xenography,” “disglottography,” or “dysglottography” for the same phenomenon, but goes on to clarify that “the essence of what I mean is not that an alien (‘xeno’) ‘graphy’ is used, but that an alien ‘glotta’ is used for the ‘graphy’ of one’s own ‘glotta.’” In their recent discussion of Sumerograms and Akkadograms in Hittite and the terminology used to describe them, Kudrinski and Yakubovich (2016: 56) bemoan the “highly poetic style” of Gershevitch’s original exposition and his failure to offer up a more formal definition of alloglottography, preferring instead the definition in Langslow (2002: 44–45): “the use of one language (L1) to represent an utterance in another language (L2) […] in such a way that the original utterance in L2 can be accurately and unambiguously recovered from the document in L1.”11 Under such a 11

Shaked (2003: 121) makes a similar observation about the Aramaic version of the Behistun inscription, the Arsham documents, and some recently discovered documents on leather

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f­ ormal definition, Japanese kanbun kundoku would indeed qualify as a form of alloglottography, but the question remains as to what formal devices, say, the Achaemenid scribes used to make possible the unambiguous recovery of Old Persian from the written Elamite text. 2.3 From Ideography to Logography to Heterography and Heterograms Just as the notion of “ideogram” and “ideography” has come in for sustained criticism in discussions of Chinese writing in recent decades (see Unger 1990 and 2004 for discussion and relevant bibliography), the same terms have been used in the scholarly literature on cuneiform writing in ancient Mesopotamia, but have come under scrutiny since at least Gelb (1963: 35), who criticized the use of “ideogram” in that field. Kudrinski and Yakubovich (2016: 54) argue strongly for the use of “logogram” in cuneiform studies, and note that this term is now “ubiquitous in contemporary Hittitological literature.” But as a cover term for the various types of logogram found in ancient Middle Eastern writing systems, they suggest “heterogram.” And if those of us working in the sinographic sphere were to follow the example of our colleagues in cuneiform studies, we should probably be referring to “Chinese characters” not as “sinographs” but as “sino-grams,” a term in fact used by Haruta Seirō, a Japanese specialist in Middle Iranian languages (see Haruta 2006). How, then, can we define “heterogram?” Kiraz (2014: 68) gives the following definition: “A heterogram is a word (or morpheme) that is spelled exactly as it would be spelled in its source language, but is intended to be read in the target language … (This is not to be confused with alloglottography where the entire text is written in one language but read in another.)” Putting to one side the phonographic and alphabetic bias of Kiraz’s appeal to “spelling,” which is clearly not relevant to sinographs, under such a definition “heterography” would be the unaltered use of graphic representations of morphemes or words from language A to write words or morphemes in language B. This still begs the question of how such heterograms are to be read or vocalized in language B, but in any case the term “heterography” as used in ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform studies and Middle Iranian studies is quite different from the definition given in Coulmas (1996: 202): “a differentiation in spelling which distinguishes different meanings of homophonous words or phrase.” Examples from fourth-century Afghanistan: “The type of writing involved here is one in which a text written in one language so closely follows the style and sequence of words of a source text in a different language as to make it theoretically possible to transfer the text from the one language to the other according to fixed and rigid rules.” This is precisely the case with East Asian vernacular reading techniques like those in ancient Korea and Japan.

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of this Coulmasian heterography as the antonym of homograph(y) would be the differentiation (“different writing” = hetero-graphy) of English right, rite, write, and wright (Kiraz 2014: 68), whereas examples from English approximating kundoku-type heterography would be the different readings of “2” in “20 = twenty,” “20ies = twenties,” “2 = two” and “2nd = second” or of “X” in “Xmas = Christmas and “Xing = crossing” (from Busse 2013: 92).12 2.4 Ancient Middle Eastern Parallels with East Asia Parallels between ancient Middle Eastern heterography and Japanese vernacular reading practices were noted already more than 150 years ago by French Orientalist and Japanologist Léon de Rosny (1837–1914). In a letter to Assyriologist Julius Oppert (1825–1905) published in Revue Orientale, Léon de Rosny (1864: 269) pointed out two parallels between “Anarian” (Sumerian) cuneiform and the use of Chinese writing in Japan: “the polyphony of certain signs” and the use of “phonetic complements alongside certain ideograms for recall of the corresponding word in the spoken language.” For Rosny (ibid.: 271), the fact that both Anarian cuneiform and Japanese writing are “a mixture of ideographic signs and phonetic signs” and that ideographic signs, whether in Assyrian or Japanese, “express neither a letter nor any sound, but an idea— an abstraction created by the sound by which this idea is rendered in thus and such language,” counted as a “remarkable coincidence.” “But,” explains Rosny, after a survey of sumerograms and sinographs for “heart,” “hand,” and “surveyed field,” “nothing in these signs brought to mind how one said the words “heart,” “hand,” and “surveyed field” in China or Babylon”—hence the need to develop phonetic complements. He goes on to point out that this feature of “Chinese ideographic writing” had led to the point where “the Japanese, the Cochinchinese [Vietnamese], Koreans, Cantonese, and Fujianese were able to adopt it “without having to renounce their national language.”13 12

13

“Approximating” because whereas Kiraz couches his discussion in terms of a source language vs. target language, with numerals it is not necessarily clear what the source language would be. In this regard, examples like “e.g.” = “for example,” “i.e.” for “that is” or “&” for “and” are more apt, given the tie to a source language (Latin). In fact, the ampersand actually has two readings (“A & B” and “&c.”), where we see both a vernacular (English) and cosmopolitan reading (Latin), respectively, analogous to Japanese kun vs. on readings. With thanks to Sven Osterkamp and Scott Wells. Twelve years later, Rosny (1876) revisits the “astonishing analogy” between Japanese and cuneiform writing in more detail, addressing (among other questions): “ideographic writing adopted by peoples speaking different languages” (cf. op.cit., 168, where he opines, “These two systems of writing therefore have realized, to a certain extent, for the civilizations at the heart of which they were employed, a sort of universal writing.”); “Can an ideographic sign be read in multiple ways in the same language?” (he answers in the

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It should come as no surprise that some of the first twentieth-century scholars to pick up again on these similarities were Japanese. An early case in point is Kōno (1980), and Japanese scholars of writing in the ancient Middle East still hark back to this paper and the parallels noted there. Kōno wrote: We [Japanese] not only use two different kinds of scripts [Chinese kanji logograms and Japanese kana syllabograms] side by side, but also read kanji in an extremely complex way using not only their on [Chinese(-like)] values but also their kun [Japanese] values. This practice is similar to that of the Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform, which was borrowed from Sumerians. Such a practice thus seems too old-looking for the second half of the twentieth century, and its complexity is unparalleled today. We struggle with this complexity day by day, but this struggle provides us with golden opportunities for contemplating the essence of writing. Quoted from Ikeda 2007: 1

Haruta (2006: 172) specifically refers to “heterographic writing systems” as “kun-reading systems,” while Ikeda (2007) and Ikeda (2013) both make explicit comparisons between Japanese kundoku and early Akkadian cuneiform.14 Based on his comparison, Ikeda (2007: 9) outlines the following typology of what he calls “kunogenesis”: Monographic and monosyllabic (e.g. for the syllable /tu/ as in “ta2”); Monographic and polysyllabic (e.g. for the syllables /zero/ as in “0x”); Polygraphic and monosyllabic (e.g. for the syllables /ten/ as in “10der”); Polygraphic and polysyllabic (e.g. for the syllables /forti/ as in “40fy”).

14

affirmative on the basis of Japanese, and urges his colleagues in cuneiform studies to open their minds to this possibility in their languages); “Phonetic writing drawn from ideographic signs” (in which he cites the example of Man’yōgana in Japanese); “Simultaneous deployment of ideographic and syllabic signs” (discussing phonetic complements); and “Purely alphabetic writing” (where he chides students of cuneiform for lacking the ability to imagine the intermingling of different kinds of written sign in one and the same writing system and urges them to attend to the Japanese case for comparative purposes). Though here we should note that what is being talked about is more word-level kun’yomi than text-level (kanbun) kundoku. For their part, experts on languages that use cuneiform point out that too little in the way of extended texts has been found to address the extent to which text-level (kanbun) kundoku-type vernacular reading technologies might have existed in the ancient Near East.

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Ikeda (2007: n. 15) goes on to note that “partial kun … can also be segmental, but segmental kunogenesis has been excluded from the discussion, because it is attested neither in early Japanese nor in early Akkadian.” This is an unfortunate omission, because as Professor Kin’s discussion of Silla hyangga and hyangch’al orthography in the book translated here shows, Old Korean had precisely this kind of segmental kun readings. Another observer was certainly Russian linguist Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff. In his reminiscences of an exchange of ideas with Diakonoff about his (then) forthcoming paper on alloglottography, Ilya Gershevitch (1982: 99) cites a letter from Diakonoff in which the latter writes: “However, the Aramaic-Iranian system is not unique in grammatological history, cf. Akkadian with its Sumerograms and Akkadograms, or Korean and Japanese with their Chinese pictographic spellings.”15 Two years later, Miguel Civil, in his study of “bilingualism in logographically written languages” with a focus on Sumerian in Ebla, begins his article with a foray into Old Japanese so as to emphasize the point that “the language in which a text is written is not necessarily the language in which the same text is read” (1984: 75–76). Unfortunately, he muddles language and script and his example is the Man’yōshū, where there can be no doubt that the poems are in Japanese, and that the language of writing and reading were the same.16 In any case, the parallels between Japanese kundoku (albeit focusing primarily on word-level kun’yomi) and ancient Middle Eastern heterography have been remarked upon in passing for some years now, but remain insufficiently studied. 2.5 Aramaic mfāraš, Middle Persian uzvārišn 2.5.1 Aramaic mfāraš The oldest descriptions of how ancient Middle Eastern alloglottography or vernacular reading might have worked in practice are both fascinating and instructive for the student of vernacular reading practices in the sinographic sphere. The oldest such records pertain to Achaemenid times and a stash of letters in Aramaic, some on papyrus and some on leather, that survives from the correspondence of an Achaemenid prince called Aršāma concerning his landholdings in Egypt. As de Blois describes it, “These include one letter from a person with a Persian name to Aršāma, and several from Aršāma to various persons in Egypt, some of whom had Persian, some Egyptian names.

15 16

The same wording surfaces in Russian in Diakonoff (1986: 5). With thanks to Sven Osterkamp, who notes that the “diacritics” or kunten marks that Civil references are not found in the Man’yōshū or its time of compilation.

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The question inevitably arises why two Persians, one of them a member of the royal family, the other an official of the Persian administration in Egypt, should communicate with one another not in their own native tongue, nor even in a language spoken in Egypt, but in Aramaic. The only plausible answer is that the sender dictated his message in Persian, a scribe translated it ad hoc and wrote it down into Aramaic, and that a second scribe retranslated it ex tempore into Persian …” (de Blois 2007: 1194). This notion of an Achaemenid scribe reading off in Persian (or some other language) a text written in Aramaic was famously imagined by Polotsky (1932: 273), who suggested that Achaemenid chancery practices were predicated on the twinned assumptions of a) monolingualism in writing practice and b) multilingualism of the scribe. The texts produced were translated directly “vom Blatt weg” (“off the sheet; impromptu”) in the language of the addressee. Sundermann (1985: 105) elaborates that this form of ex tempore translation of the Aramaic text into Persian was referred to in Aramaic as mpāraš [sic], a term meaning something like “interpret.” Moreover, “‘[R]eading’ for the otherwise illiterate Persian aristocrats consisted of consulting their literate servants, as the Old Persian word pati-psa- for ‘read’ suggests; according to I. Gershevitch, this must have meant ‘ask for the return of, and re-citing, words previously spoken and/or heard.’” Greenfield (2008: 707–708) provides more details on the practice and related terms: … the document was dictated by the king or by an official to the scribe, who then wrote the text in Aramaic; the addressee’s scribe read the letter in the recipient’s native tongue. It is clear, from various internal indications, that the sepīru “scribe” combined in his function the tasks of both secretary and translator. Although most recipients would be Persian, the missive might be received by a Lydian, a Greek, a Choresmian or a resident of Gandhara. The use of many Old Persian terms in these texts facilitated their being understood. This mode of reading is what is meant by the term mĕphārash in Ezra 4.18, the equivalent of Iranian uzvārišn. The reading of these texts aloud is referred to in Ezra 4.18, Esther 6.1 and Darius, Behistun 70. Let us pursue now this last reference to Ezra 4.18. The King James Bible reads, “The letter which ye sent unto us hath been plainly read before me” while the New International Version reads, “The letter you sent us has been read and translated in my presence.”17 Numerous other English translations exist. The 17

Cited from https://biblehub.com/ezra/4-18.htm. Accessed August 15, 2018.

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context is a series of petitions to different Achaemenid kings from Jewish and Samaritan leaders in Palestine, and the replies of the kings; the language and style are similar to the Aršāma letters found in Egypt. “One of these is a letter from Artaxerxes I to the Samaritan, beginning (after the greeting) with the words (Ezra 4.18) ‘the letter which you sent to us was read before me mfāraš.’ The meaning of mfāraš was long forgotten (the Septuagint, for example, leaves it without translation), but it has plausibly been argued (Schaeder 1930: 1–14; Polotsky 1932), that it means ‘interpreted, translated’ or more precisely ‘translated ex tempore’” (de Blois 2007: 1195). With respect to this word mfāraš, F.F. Bruce (1950: 52) writes that it “was actually employed as a technical term in the diplomatic service of the Persian Empire to denote the procedure when an official read an Aramaic document straight off in the vernacular language of the particular province concerned.” 2.5.2 Middle Persian uzvārišn The system of mfāraš seen above was called uzvārišn in Pahlavi, and a description of it survives in Arabic by An-Nadim in his Fihrist (10th century ce), where he quotes the following account by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ (8th century ce): They also have an alphabet, called zuvārišn [sic],18 which they can write with the letters together or separated—there are some 1000 words—for the purpose of distinguishing words with more than one meaning [in Pahlavi script]. For example, if one wants to write [Persian] gōšt—which in Arabic is lahm [“meat”]—, then one writes bsrʾ [actually bslyʾ = Aramaic bisrā], but reads it gōšt…. If one wants to write [Persian] nān— which in Arabic is khubz (“bread”)—, then one writes [Aramaic] lahmā, but reads nān …; and so on in all cases, except for cases when a substitute is not necessary: then they write like they speak.19 An-Nadim’s account is unclear as to whether uzvārišn referred to the individual heterograms or to the practice of heterography itself, but Skalmowski (2004: 295) goes on to explain that uzvārišn almost certainly means “explanation/ interpretation” and adds: “An important argument for accepting this meaning is the fact that the term uzvārišn was used by Zoroastrians in post-Sasanian times as an equivalent of Arabic tafsīr ‘commentary’…” In this context, the ancient 18 More precisely, “zwārašn,” i.e., zwʾršn for uzwārišn. See Durkin-Meisterernst (2004). 19 My translation of the German version from Schaeder (1930: 4), as cited in Skalmowski (2004: 289), and adapted with help from Durkin-Meisterernst (2004).

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Korean practice of sŏktok kugyŏl 釋讀口訣, or “interpretive kugyŏl,” comes to mind, reminding us of the ways in which reading, translation, exegesis, and commentary can be conflated in premodern reading practices.20 Modern-day scholars have sometimes referred to these Aramaeograms in Middle Persian as “masks.” Here is a description from de Blois (2007: 1195): … the quasi-Aramaic graphemes are masks for Middle Persian words, which are interspersed with phonetically (or pseudo-phonetically) spelt Persian words and with purely Persian grammatical elements attached to the quasi-Aramaic words. Thus, the Sasanian royal title “king of kings” is written mlk’n mlk’. Although this clearly involves the Aramaic word malkā [king] the phrase is not Aramaic. Instead, it stands for Middle Persian šāh-ān šāh; mlk’ is merely an “ideogram” for šāh, while –N is a “phonetic” spelling of the Persian plural suffix ān. As Haruta (2013: 781) notes, scholars today typically transliterate heterograms like these with CAPS (a convention I have followed with sinographs in the translation of Professor Kin’s book). Another account, from Skjaervø (1996: 517–520): They still wrote Aramaic words, however, but these became mere symbols (sometimes called “Semitic masks”) for the corresponding Iranian words … Thus they would write mlk’ for Parth., MPers. šāh, Sogd. əxšēwanē “king.” These Semitic “masks” were until recently called “ideograms,” but today heterogram or Aramaogram is the more common term. 2.6 The Parallels What, then, are the parallels between cuneiform or Middle Persian heterography and East Asian vernacular reading? To give but a simple example, the Sumerian sign LUGAL was used to designate “king” in Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite texts (Kudrinski and Yakubovich 2016: 53). A parallel would be the use of the sinograph 山, used to write Mandarin shān “mountain,” to represent yama in Japanese and :moeh :묗 in earlier stages of Korean. As Gershevitch (1982: 100) notes (albeit using the term “ideography” rather than “logography”—a number of the cuneiform scholars use this term uncritically

20 Cf. also David Lurie’s comments on the way in which Japanese kundoku and medieval European gloss reading of Latin texts suggest a “collapse of reading and translation” (Lurie 2011: 360).

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and appear beholden to the “ideographic myth”21), “… an ideographic system does not, in principle, represent any particular language … in principle a short text written in Sumerian ideographic signs could also be read in Akkadian (or Eblaite), and sometimes was, as again transpires from phonetic complements.” Or (1982: 107): “Hence different scribes, looking at one and the same text, read it out some in Persian, some in Egyptian, some in Greek, some in Lydian, and so forth.” This parallels, grosso modo, the situation with texts written in Literary Sinitic in East Asia, which could be read out in (or through) Japanese, Korean, or Uighur, etc., using a variety of vernacular reading practices. 2.7 The Differences One of the greatest differences between the ancient Middle East and the sinographic sphere—at least insofar as ancient Korea and Japan are concerned— concerns the sociolinguistic environment in which writing arose. Most accounts of heterography in the ancient Middle East are predicated on the assumptions that multiple languages were in contact and furthermore that multiple writing systems of heterogeneous origins were in use. Thus, scholars of ancient Mesopotamia and Middle Persian frequently appeal to language contact and language shift models to explain changes in scribal practices. For example, Kudrinski and Yakubovich (2016: 58) write of “the mismatch between the shift from language A to language B in oral communication and the preservation of A in writing in the same community, which is accompanied by the imperfect learning of the written variety of A by the speakers of B.” For them, both alloglottography and heterographic spellings “imply the ongoing or completed native language shift in a particular epigraphic community,” but “the former predates the language shift in writing, whereas the second must follow it” (ibid.). But the optimism of Yakubovich (2008: 205) about the prospects of contact linguistics for providing solutions to questions of the development of alloglottography and heterography in the ancient Middle East do not carry over to ancient Japan and Korea, where sinography—writing in “sinograms”— was the only form of writing ever known in the region in the earliest period. Moreover, although we can certainly imagine some form of multilingualism in ancient times on the Korean Peninsula, it was nothing remotely as robust as the multilingualism of the ancient Middle East, and certainly bilingualism in any local peninsular language with any form of spoken Sinitic would have been extremely limited, both in terms of population and in terms of duration.

21

See Unger (2004) for an exposé of the “ideographic myth” and the widespread belief that sinographs carry pure, language-less meaning.

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And even by then the gulf between spoken Sinitic and written/Literary Sinitic was significant. Another difference concerns vernacular readings (“kun” readings) vs. indigenized or domesticated autochthono-xenic readings (to coin a monstrous term—i.e., readings of logograms corresponding to Sino-Japanese “on” readings of sinographs in Japanese). That is, whereas scholars of Akkadian, Hittite, and Middle Persian have been consumed with unraveling the secrets of heterography in their region and revealing the ways in which these were used to “mask” local/vernacular (as opposed to, say, original Sumerian or Aramaic) words and morphemes, and whereas even Japanese experts in the languages of the ancient Middle East have similarly focused on the parallels between Japanese kundoku (or at least word-level kun’yomi) and Middle Eastern heterography, few scholars seem to dwell on the processes by which heterograms, or even entire repertoires of them, are domesticated as loanwords, giving rise in the sinographic sphere to Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Uighur, and Sino-Vietnamese systems of Sino-Xenic vocalizations for sinographs. So when a scholar of Middle Iranian transcribes Aramaeograms in caps, the assumption today seems to be that the heterograms were all read in, say, vernacular Pahlavi. When we do the same with a Literary Sinitic text from ancient Japan equipped with reading glosses, we sometimes do not know whether Japanese readers at the time would have read the sinographs in a Sino-Japanese pronunciation or in the vernacular, but we do know that both options were available. In the case of Middle Persian, a debate has raged for some decades as to whether the Aramaic elements in the texts are genuine loanwords and part of the lexicon, a position held by Lentz (1975) and Skalmowski (2004), but rejected already in Salemann (1895) and Schaeder (1930). The problem is that there is a pointed lack of Aramaic loanwords in New Persian, a direct descendant of Middle Persian, as well as in the Armenian, Syrian, and Greek sources dependent on Middle Persian. Additionally, in cases where parallel versions of the same passage or text exist in both heterographic and “phonetic” writing, the latter sorts of texts show no Aramaisms.22 The only vaguely similar case I have seen of development of a kind of “on” (Aramaeo-Persian?) reading is that of modern-day Zoroastrians in India,

22 See Durkin-Meisterernst (2004), citing Humbach (1973: 121). Durkin-Meisterernst also cites the case of the Sogdian “Tale of the Pearl-borer” (from Henning [1945]), “of which two copies exist, one in Sogdian script, with the usual sprinkling of heterograms, and one in Manichean script without any,” as demonstrating the entirely graphic nature of the heterograms.

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who “came to be convinced that both the Middle Persian and the Aramaic morphemes in Pahlavi religious texts were to be phonetically pronounced” some thousand years after the texts were written (Yakubovich 2008: 206). In essence, in a case like this where the heterograms are alphabetically (or at least abjadically or consonantally) rendered, this is a kind of reading pronunciation on steroids and still quite different from the Sino-Xenic systems that arose in East Asia on the basis of Middle Chinese and which, paradoxically, may have helped anchor and solidify the vernaculars against assimilation to Chinese (see Itō 2013 and 2014 for argumentation along these lines). Ikeda and Yamada (2017: 162) outline other, more technical, differences between ancient Middle Eastern heterography and Japanese kundoku: “First, Akkadian phonograms are generally polyphonic, while Japanese phonograms are not. Second, in the Japanese text, you could easily tell the difference between the logograms and the phonograms … Moreover, phonograms cannot be used as logograms, and vice versa. In the Akkadian writing system, on the other hand, most characters can be used both as a logogram and as a phonogram. Finally, phonetic complements are obligatory in today’s Japanese orthography, while they are optional in Akkadian. However, these particular traits of the Japanese writing system did not exist in its early stage, that is, in the eighth century ce.” Much the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, about ancient Korean kugyŏl. 3

From Heterography to Heterolexia?

The terms “heterogram” and “heterography,” while versatile and useful enough, seemingly for both ancient Middle Eastern and sinographic contexts, are nonetheless not perfect. Kudrinski and Yakubovich present strong arguments for “heterogram” over other terms used in the past for cuneiform studies, but as Skjaervø (1995: 302–303) has noted, confusion or lack of clarity around the origin and function of heterograms in Iranian texts as opposed to their function in Aramaic texts is a perennial problem, and I would add that this needs to be guarded against when studying other languages and scripts too. Kudrinski and Yakubovich (2016: 55) offer up a reformatted definition of “heterogram” as follows: … a sign or combination of signs that reproduce in writing a segment of A as a part of a text composed in B where A and B are two distinct languages and one can reasonably assume that the segment in question did not exist in the spoken language B.

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But here we see another confusion—that between language and script, and in any case, we also run up against the problem seen above of assumptions of multilingualism, language contact, and multiple scribal traditions that do not pertain to the ancient sinographic sphere. Kudrinski and Yakubovich themselves concede that “Unfortunately, the practice of writing Hittite without resorting to Sumero- and Akkadograms appears to be non-existent” (another difference from, say, Heian period Japanese, where Japanese could be written without recourse to sinographs, though the hiragana and katakana syllabograms derive from man’yōgana and thus ultimately from sinographs, and texts were rarely, if ever, 100% in syllabograms), making it difficult to find parallel test cases. But when they claim in defense of the term “heterogram” that its etymology “does not impose a reference to the way one reads specific texts” (2016: 55), this seems to me to capture the essence of our terminological conundrum. Because philologists and scholars of writing and its history have been so consumed with writing and writing systems, all our terms are weighted toward -grams, -graphs, and –graphies. With all this graphological heavy lifting we risk losing sight of the act of reading and of the many and varied ways to read in complex logographic writing systems. In the case of “sinograms” in East Asia (even in the case of Sinitic languages themselves), the more interesting question is always, “how were they read?” At the risk of clogging up our terminological repertoire further, I would suggest something like “heterolexia” (by analogy with “dyslexia,” even though etymologically this word is unorthodox) as a counterpoint to “heterography” and as a partial synonym for “vernacular reading.” 4

Editorial Conventions

4.1 Romanization For Japanese, we use Revised Hepburn. The object particle を is rendered everywhere as o, except in examples from Old Japanese written in man’yōgana, which follow the transcription conventions in Frellesvig and Whitman (2008). For Korean, McCune-Reischauer is used, with the proviso that Middle Korean examples use “ă” for the “arae a” vowel and transcribe syllable-final “-s” rather than follow later Korean neutralizations. For both Japanese and Korean examples, Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean words are rendered in caps. For Chinese, pinyin is used, but we have omitted indications of tone in most instances. This is partly for expedience and to avoid an overly linguisticky feel in a book already laden with special symbols and scripts, but we also note that in the case

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of proper names and citations, it is standard practice in Chinese Studies and on the OCLC WorldCat these days to omit the tones. And in the case of Sinitic poems written by Chinese poets, the point is not to give an accurate guide to the pronunciation in Chinese (for most of the poems cited, modern Mandarin is anachronistic in any case), but to make a work otherwise targeted at students of Japan and Korea (and even Vietnam) more congenial for colleagues and students in Chinese Studies. 4.2 Citations Like most Japanese works of this nature, Professor Kin’s original book does not give page numbers for citations. Wherever possible, we have endeavoured to provide these. 4.3 Sinographs and Footnotes Following the conventions in Handel (2019), sinographs are rendered in PMingLiU (Proportional Ming Light Unicode) when the context is Chinese, in MS Mincho when the context is Japanese, and in Batang when the context is Korean. In contexts that span more than one civilization, PMingLiU is used. The editor has operated with the assumption that, all things being equal, readers need access to both sinographs and the originals of literary texts cited and translated; this we have provided in the footnotes. Thus, unless otherwise noted, all of the footnotes in the translation have been supplied or enhanced by the editor. 5

And Finally, about the Author: Kin Bunkyō a.k.a. Kim Mun’gyŏng

Professor Kin Bunkyō 金文京 is a second-generation zainichi Korean and thus also goes by the name Kim Mun’gyŏng, which he Romanizes as Kim Moonkyong. Born in 1952, Professor Kin attended Keiō University for his undergraduate training and earned his BA there in Chinese Literature in 1974. In April of the same year he matriculated in the graduate program in Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University, leaving the Ph.D. program in 1979. His first professorial appointment came in 1981 at Keiō University, where he served as Assistant Professor until 1994, when he relocated to Kyoto University, achieving Full Professor status there in 2000 in the Institute for Research in Humanities. After retiring from Kyoto University in 2015, Professor Kin served as Professor in the Department of Japanese Literature at Tsurumi University in Yokohama for four years before returning as Professor emeritus to Kyoto

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University. Along the way, he has also held Visiting Professorships at National Taiwan University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Beijing Language and Culture University. Professor Kin is a world-renowned scholar in the field of Chinese literature; with his rare erudition in all three of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literary traditions, he is uniquely qualified to write on the history of vernacular reading in the sinographic sphere. His research contributions since the 1970s have touched many different fields, including: Cantonese folk lyrics (Inaba, Kin, and Watanabe 1995); translations into Japanese and studies of Jin Yong’s highly popular martial arts fiction (Jin Yong 1999; Kin 2010d); studies of Classical Chinese fiction (Kin 2002c); annotated editions of medieval Korea’s two most popular manuals of spoken Chinese that Professor Kin has led with an international team of scholars (Kin et al. 2002 on the Nogŏltae 老乞大 and Kin 2013a; a second volume on Interpreter Pak 朴通事 is forthcoming); in-depth studies of one of the masterworks of Chinese vernacular fiction, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Kin 1993; 2005a [translated into Korean in 2011d and Chinese in 2014]; 2011f; 2012c; 2013b); studies of Sinitic poetry (Kin 2012a on Li Bai 李白, Kin 2012b on Du Fu 杜甫, and Kin 2015d on Fukuzawa Yukichi); a fascinating study and co-translation with Korean scholar Chin Chaegyo of Japanese monk Daiten’s 大典 (1719–1801) Heigūroku 萍遇錄, based on the “brush conversations” that Daiten held with his Chosŏn counterparts at the time of the Korean Embassy of Communication to Japan of 1763 (Kin and Chin 2013); his research on Japanese historian of Korea Fujitsuka Chikashi 藤塚鄰 (1879–1948) and his fascination with Chosŏn scholar and polymath Kim Chŏnghŭi 金正喜 (1786–1856) (Kin 2015a; 2015b); Taiwanese modernist literature (Kin 1989); studies of Dunhuang bianwen narratives (Kin 1995; 1997; 2008); Chinese book history and traditional bibliography (Kin 1998a); practical questions of education in Literary Sinitic and sinographs in Japan and Korea (Kin 2011c); Buddhist literature and the translation of the Buddhist canon into Chinese (Kin 2010a; 2011b; 2013c; 2013d; 2014c); the image of the shanren 山人 in East Asian literature (Kin 2002a; 2012b; 2015c); and essays on comparative aspects of writing and literary culture in the sinographic sphere (Kin 1988; 1994a; 2002b; 2010b; 2010c; 2011a; 2011e; 2014b), among other topics. But as the partial but nonetheless extensive listing of Professor Kin’s publications at the end of this preface shows, Professor Kin’s greatest love has been Chinese drama, and Yuan dynasty drama in particular. One of his very first publications was a long article on Yuan dynasty playwright Bai Renfu 白仁甫 (1226–1306) (Kin 1976), after which he published articles on topics like the character Zhang Biegu 張撇古 in Yuan dramas (Kin 2004a) and images of women

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in Yuan drama (Kin 2004b), and monograph-length studies of specific plays like Fan zhang Jishu 范張鶏黍 (Kin 2014d). In Kin (2014e and 2014f), he examines evidence from the written records of Korean embassies to both China and Japan about Chinese drama, and Kin (2011g) is an extended comparative analysis of Japanese Nō and Beijing Opera. More than any other work, Professor Kin has dedicated more than two decades to Dong Jieyuan’s Xixiangji zhugongdiao, beginning with his monograph in 1998 (Kin 1998b), and extending to the articles on style and linguistic artistry in the play in Kin (2010e) and Kin (2011h), and his lone publication in English on the elapse of time and seasons in the play (Kin 2005b, 2006, in two different versions and venues). His article on the illustrations in the Hongzhi edition of the Xixiangji (Kin 2014g) continues his longstanding interest in the broader theme of the Story of the Western Wing. In addition to these solo-authored projects on Yuan dynasty (and later) Chinese drama, Professor Kin has also worked tirelessly with Japanese and Chinese colleagues to uncover, edit, and publish numerous Yuan plays— especially rare editions held in Japan. Akamatsu, Inoue, and Kin (2007) and Akamatsu, Kin, and Komatsu (2011) are one representative series; Li and Kin (2004) is an in-depth study and annotated edition of Handan meng ji 邯鄲夢 記; Kin and Takahashi (2009) is a study of four rare plays held by Keiō Gijuku Library; and in a similar vein, the series of rare Chinese drama texts held in Japanese collections and edited by Huang, Qiao, and Kin has published some eighteen volumes since its inception in 2006. In sum, Professor Kin, through his research expertise in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and his deep experience with a wide variety of sinographic texts infused with “vernacular” elements (be they Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), is the ideal scholar to have undertaken a book like this. The enormity of his topic and the erudition it requires can be judged from the more recent volume edited by Nakamura Shunsaku on virtually the same topic (Nakamura 2014), which required an authorial team of twenty-one scholars to cover much the same ground. I sincerely hope our translation will spur more interest in and galvanize more comparative research on vernacular reading phenomena in East Asia and beyond. And I also hope this preface will encourage more colleagues to explore the many other contributions of Professor Kin, which deserve so richly to be appreciated more widely outside of East Asia. Ross King Vancouver, British Columbia

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Frellesvig, Bjarke, and John Whitman (eds.). 2008. Proto-Japanese: Issues and Prospects. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co. Gelb, Ignace J. 1963. A Study of Writing (revised ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gershevitch, Ilya. 1979. “The alloglottography of Old Persian.” Transactions of the Philological Society 77, no. 1: 114–190 Gershevitch, Ilya. 1982. “Diakonoff on Writing, with an Appendix by Darius.” In Societies and Languages of the Ancient Near East: Studies in Honour of I. M. Diakonoff, edited by J. N. Postgate. Warminster, 99–109. Warminster: England: Aris & Phillips Ltd. Greenfield, J. C. 2008. “Aramaic in the Achaemienian Empire.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, volume 2: The Median and Achaemeanian Periods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, 698–713. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handel, Zev. 2019. Sinography: How the Chinese Script has been Adapted to Write Other Languages. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Haruta, Seiro. 1992. “Formation of Verbal logograms (Aramaeograms) in Parthian.” Orient 28: 17–36. Haruta Seiro. 2006. “Sekai no kun’yomi hyōki” [Heterographic Writing Systems in the World]. Tōkai daigaku kiyō (bungakubu) 86: 19(172)–43(196). Haruta, Seiro. 2013. “Aramaic, Parthian, and Middle Persian.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, edited by D. T. Potts, 779–794. New York: Oxford University Press. Henning, Walter Bruno. 1945. “Sogdian Tales.” BSOAS 11: 465–487. Henning, Walter Bruno. 1958. “Mitteliranisch.” In B. Spuler (ed.), Iranistik. 1. Linguistik, edited by B. Spuler, 20–130. Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1, 4. Leiden: Brill. Humbach, Helmut. 1969. Die aramäische Inschrift von Taxila. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literature, Geistes- und sozialwisseschaftliche Klasse 1. Wiesbaden. Humbach, Helmut. 1973. “Beobachtungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte des Awesta.” Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 31 (1973): 109–122. Ikeda, Jun. 2007. “Early Japanese and Early Akkadian writing systems: A contrastive survey of ‘Kunogenesis.’” Paper presented at the conference, “Origins of Early Writing Systems,” Peking University, Beijing, October 6. Ikeda, Jun. 2013. “Japanese Logosyllabic Writing: A Comparison with Cuneiform Writing.” Paper presented at the conference, “Cultures and Societies in the Middle Euphrates and Habur Areas in the Second Millennium BC,” University of Tsukuba, Japan, December 5–7. Ikeda, Jun, and Yamada, Shigeo. 2017. “The World’s Oldest Writing in Mesopotamia and the Japanese writing system.” In Ancient West Asian Civilization: Geoenvironment and Society in the Pre-Islamic Middle East, edited by Akira Tsuneki, Shigeo Yamada, and Ken-ichiro Hisada, 157–163. Singapore: Springer.

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Itō Hideto. 2013. “Chōsen hantō ni okeru gengo sesshoku: Chūgokuatsu e no taisho to shite no taikō Chūgokuka” [Language Contact on the Korean Peninsula: Counter-Sinicization as a Countermeasure against Pressure from China]. Gogaku kenkyūjo ronshū 18: 55–93. Itō Hideto. 2014. “Kan-Kan gengo sesshokushi shotan: Taikō Chūgokuka no kanten kara” [A Preliminary Study of the History of Korean-Chinese Language Contact: from the Perspective of Counter-Sinicization]. Paper delivered at the conference, “Hundok/kundoku and Vernacularization,” The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, July 2. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1988. “Kanji bunkaken no kundoku genshō” [Phenomenon of Vernacular Reading in the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere]. In Wakan hikaku bungaku kenkyū no shomondai, edited by Wakan hikaku bungakkai, 175–204. Wakan hikaku bungaku sōsho 8. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010. Kanbun to higashi Ajia: kundoku no bunkaken [Literary Sinitic and East Asia: a cultural sphere of vernacular reading]. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. King, Ross. 2007. “Korean kugyŏl Writing and the Problem of Vernacularization in the Sinitic Sphere.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, March 23. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching Diglossia: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15, no. 1: 1–19. King, Ross (ed.). Forthcoming. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen: Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Leiden: Brill. King, Ross and Christina Laffin. 2020. “Editor’s Preface: Saitō Mareshi, the ‘Literary Sinitic Context,’ and Literary Modernity in the Former Sinographic Cosmopolis.” In Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature, by Saitō Mareshi (edited by Ross King and Christina Laffin and translated by Sean Bussell, Matthieu Felt, Alexey Lushchenko, Caleb Park, Si Nae Park, and Scott Wells), vii–xxx. Leiden: Brill. Kiraz, George A. 2014. “Garshunography: Terminology and some Formal Properties of Writing One Language in the Script of Another.” In Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World, edited by Den Heijer, Johannes, Andrea Schmidt and Tamara Pataridze, 65–73. Louvain/Paris: Peeters. Klíma, Otakar. 1968. “Avesta. Ancient Persian Inscriptions. Middle Persian Literature.” In History of Iranian Literature, edited by Jan Rypka, 1–68. Dördrecht, Holland: D. Reidel. Kobayashi, Yoshinori 小林芳規. 2007. “Tracing the Spread of Kakuhitsu Glossing of Chinese Texts in East Asia.” Translated by John Whitman. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, IL, March 23.

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Wells, W. Scott. 2011. “From Center to Periphery: The Demotion of Literary Sinitic and the Beginnings of hanmunkwa—Korea, 1876–1910.” MA thesis, The University of British Columbia. Whitman, John. 2011. “The Ubiquity of the Gloss.” Scripta 3: 1–27. Whitman, John, Miyoung Oh, Jinho Park, Valerio Luigi Alberizzi, Masayuki Tsukimoto, Teiji Kosukegawa, and Tomokazu Takada. 2010. “Toward an International Vocabulary for Research on Vernacular Readings of Chinese Texts (漢文訓讀 Hanwen Xundu).” Scripta 2: 61–83. Wixted, John Timothy. 2013. Review of Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, David B. Lurie, Monumenta Nipponica. 68, no. 1: 89–94. Wixted, John Timothy. 2018. “‘Literary Sinitic’ and ‘Latin’ as Transregional Languages: With Implications for Terminology Regarding ‘Kanbun.’” Sino-Platonic Papers 276: 1–14. Yakubovich, Ilya. 2008. Review of Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, edited by Seth L. Sanders. Journal of Indo-European Studies 36, no. 1–2: 203–211.



Works Cited (II): Partial Listing of Works by Kin Bunkyō

Akamatsu Norihiko 赤松紀彦, Inoue Taizan 井上泰山, and Kin Bunkyō. 2007. Genkan zatsugeki no kenkyū. Sandatsusaku 三奪槊 Kieifu 氣英布 Saishokumu 西蜀夢 Tantōkai [Studies in Yuan-Period Drama Texts. Sanduoshuo, Qi Ying Bu, Xishu Meng, Dandao Hui]. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Akamatsu Norihiko 赤松紀彦, Kin Bunkyō, and Komatsu Ken. 2011. Genkan zatsugeki no kenkyū 2. Hen’yarō 貶夜郎, Kaishisui 介子推 [Studies in Yuan-Period Drama Texts. Bian Yelang, Jie Zhitui]. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Huang Shizhong 黃仕忠, Qiao Xiuyan 喬秀岩, Kin Bunkyō, et al. (editors). 2006–. Riben suocang xijian Zhongguo xiqu wenxian congkan [Compendium of Rare Chinese Drama Texts Held in Japan]. 18 vols. Guilin: Guangxi Chifan Daxue Chubanshe. Inaba Akiko 稻葉明子, Kin Bunkyō, and Watanabe Kōji 渡辺浩司, compilers. 1995. Mokugyosho mokuroku 木魚書目錄: Kanton sesshō bungaku kenkyū: [The Muyushu Mulu: A Study of Cantonese Folk Lyrics Books]. Tōkyō: Kōbun Shuppan. Jin Yong 金庸. 1999. Shachō eiyūden [Eagle-Shooting Heroes]. 5 vols. Translated by Okazaki Yumi 岡崎由美 and Kin Bunkyō. Tōkyō: Tokuma Shoten. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1976. “Haku Jinpo 白仁甫 no bungaku” [Literature of Bai Renfu ]. Chūgoku bungakuhō 26: 1–43. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1980. “Shōsetsu ‘Ri Wa Den’ 李娃傳 no gekika: ‘Kyokukō chi’ 曲江池 to ‘Shūju ki’ 繡襦記” [The Dramatization of the Novella “Li Wa zhuan:” “Qujiang Pond” and “The Embroidered Jacket”]. Chūgoku bungakuhō 32: 74–115. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1988. “Kanji bunkaken no kundoku genshō” [The Phenomenon of Vernacular Reading in the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere]. In

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Wakan hikaku bungaku kenkyū no shomondai, edited by Wakan hikaku bungakkai, 175–204. Wakan hikaku bungaku sōsho 8. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1989. “Taiwan gendaiha bungaku no kishu Wang Wenxing o yomu” [Reading the Standard-Bearer of Taiwanese Modernist Literature, Wang Wenxing]. Geibun kenkyū 54: 236–265. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1993. Sangokushi no sekai [The World of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms]. Tōkyō: Tōhō Shoten. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1994a. “Kanji bunkaken no moji to seikatsu” [Script and Daily Life in the Sinographic Sphere]. Shigaku 63, no. 3: 73(293)–79(299). Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1994b. “Kōkōroku 孝行録 to Nijūshi Kō 二十四 孝 sairon” [Reconsideration of the Xiaoxing lu and the Ershisi xiao]. Geibun kenkyū 65: 269–328. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1995. “‘Ō Shōkun Henbun 王昭君變文 kō” [Study of the “Wang Zhaojun Bianwen”]. Chūgoku bungakuhō 50: 81–96. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1997. “Chūgoku minkan bungaku to shinwa densetsu kenkyū: Tonkōbon ‘Zenkan Ryūke Taishiden (hen) 前漢劉家太子伝(変)’ o rei to shite” [Chinese Popular Literature and Mythological Studies: The Case of Dunhuang “Qian Han Liu Jia Tai-zi zhuan (bian)”]. Shigaku 66, no. 4: 119–135. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1998a. “Chūgoku mokurokugakushijō ni okeru Shibu no igi: Rikuchō ki mokuroku no saikentō” [Significance of the Shibu 子部 in the History of Chinese Bibliography: A Reconsideration of the Six Dynasties Catalogues]. Shidō bunko ronshū 33: 171–206. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1998b. Tō kaigen seishōki shokyūchō kenkyū [Study of Dong Jieyuan’s Xixiangji zhugongdiao]. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1999. “Nijūshi kō ni tsuite” [Concerning the Twenty- Four Paragons of Filial Piety]. Tokushima daigaku kokugo kokubungaku 12: 1–8. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2002a. “Mindai Banreki nenkan no sanjin 山人 no katsudō” [Activities of the Shanren in the Wanli Era of the Ming]. Tōyōshi kenkyū 61, no. 2: 257–277. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2002b. “Higashi Ajia ni okeru taishi junan setsuwa to ōken shinwa” [Tales of Crown Prince Hardships in East Asia and Myths of Kingship]. Jinbun gakuhō 86: 213–223. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2002c. “Wanming xiaoshuo, leishu zuojia Tō Shibaku 邓志漠 shengping chutan” [Preliminary Study of the Life of Deng Zhimo: A Late Ming Author of Fiction and Encyclopedias]. In Mingdai xiaoshuo mianmianguan: Mingdai xiaoshuo guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji [Aspects of Ming Fiction: Proceedings of an International Academic Conference on Ming Dynasty Fiction], edited by Kow Mei-Kao 辜美高 and Huang Lin 黄霖, 318–329. Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe.

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Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2004a. “Genkyoku chū no Chō Bekko 張撇古 ni tsuite” [Character Zhang Biegu in Yuan Dramas]. Geibun kenkyū 87: 162–184. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2004b. “Genkyoku no joseizō” [Image of Women in Yuan Drama]. Chūgoku 21 20: 69–86. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2005a. Sangokushi no sekai: Gokan sangoku jidai [World of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The Three Kingdoms Period of the Late Han]. Tōkyō: Kōdansha. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2005b. “Elapse of Time and Seasons in Dong Jieyuan Xixiangji.” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 63: 1–27. See also Kin (2006). Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2006. “Elapse of time and seasons in Dongjieyuan Xixiangji.” In Love, hatred, and other passions: questions and themes on emotions in Chinese civilization, edited by Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida, 229–240. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2008. “Tonkō henbun no buntai” [Literary Style in Dunhuang Bianwen Transformation Texts]. Tōhō gakuhō 72: 243–265. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010a. “Butten kan’yaku no kundoku oyobi bukkyō bungaku ni ataeta eikyō” [Kundoku in Chinese Translations of Buddhist Sutras and its Influence on Buddhist Literature]. Bukkyō bungaku 34: 175–182. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010b. “17 segi huban Han-Il kan ŭi mugi milsu sagŏn e taehaesŏ” [Concerning a Case of Arms Smuggling between Korea and Japan in the Late 17th Century]. Kojŏn kwa haesŏk 8: 249–273. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010c. “Kanbun bunkaken no teishō” [In Defense of the Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere]. In Kanbun bunkaken no setsuwa sekai [World of Setsuwa in the Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere], edited by Komine Kazuaki 小峯 和明, 12–26. Chūsei bungaku to Rinsetsu shogaku, vol. I. Tōkyō: Chikurinsha. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010d. “Jin Yong no bukyō shōsetsu to tōdai Chūgoku shakaishugi bunka” [Martial Arts Fiction of Jin Yong and the Culture of Contemporary Chinese Socialism]. In Chūgoku shakaishugi no kenkyū [Research on Chinese Socialism], edited by Yoshikawa Yoshihiro, 245–263. Kyoto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2010e. “Dong Jieyuan Xixiangji zhugongdiao no kōsei to gengo hyōgen ni tsuite” [Some Remarks Concerning the Composition, Style and Language of Dong Jieyuan’s Xixiangji zhugongdiao]. Tōhō gakuhō 85: 339–362. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011a. “Gengo shigen to shite no kanji · kanbun” [Sinographs and Literary Sinitic as Linguistic Resource]. Bungaku 12, no. 3: 39–51. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011b. “Kan-Nichi no kanbun kundoku (shakudoku) to kan’yaku butten oyobi sono gengokan to sekaikan” [Worldviews and Language Ideologies of Japanese and Korean Vernacular Reading Practices and Literary Sinitic Translations of the Buddhist Canon]. Inmun kwahak 94: 19–38.

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Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011c. “Nik-Kan kanji・kanbun kyōiku no hikaku” [Comparison of Japanese and Korean Education in Sinographs and Literary Sinitic]. Kanji kanbun kyōiku 53: 9–16. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011d. Samgukchi ŭi segye: yŏksa ŭi imyŏn ŭl poda [World of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The Inside Historical Story]. Translated by Song Wanbŏm, Sin Hyŏnsŭng, and Chŏn Sŏnggon. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011e. “Xihu zai ZhongRiHan: Lütan fengjing zhuanyi zai dongya wenxue zhong de yiyi” [West Lake in China, Japan, and Korea: A Brief Discussion of the Landscape Transfer and its Significance in East Asian Literature]. In Dongya wenhua yixiang zhi xingsu 東亞文化意象之形塑 [Shaping of Imagery in East Asian Culture], edited by Shi Shouqian 石守謙 and Liao Zhaoheng 廖肇亨, 141–166. Taipei: Yunchen Wenhua. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011f. “Mindai Sanguozhi yanyi tekisuto no tokuchō: Chūgoku Kokka Toshokan zō nishu no Tō Hin’in-bon Sanguozhi zhuan o rei to shite” [Characteristic Features of the Ming Dynasty Text of the Sanguozhi yanyi: Based on the Example of Two Tang Binyin 湯賓尹 Editions Held by the National Library of China]. In Higashi Ajia shoshigaku e no shōtai [Invitation to East Asian Codicology], vol. 2, edited by Ōsawa Akihiro 大澤顕浩, 81–96. Tōkyō: Tōhō Shoten. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011g. Nō to kyōgeki: Nit-Chūhikaku engekiron [Nō and Beijing Opera: Comparative Sino-Japanese Drama]. Kizugawa-shi: Kokusai Kōtō Kenkyūjo. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2011h. “Shilun Dong Jieyuan Xixiangji zhugongdiao zhi yuyan yishu fengge” [Concerning the Nature of the Linguistic Artistry of Dong Jieyuan’s Xixiangji zhugongdiao]. Guoji hanxue yanjiu tongxun 3: 91–107. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2012a. Ri Haku: Hyōhaku no shijin sono yume to genjitsu [Li Bai: The Dreams and Reality of a Wandering Poet]. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2012b. “Sanjin 山人 to shite to no To Ho 杜甫” [Du Fu as a shanren]. Chūgoku bungakuhō 83: 141–159. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2012c. “Shinhakken no Chōsen dōkatsuji-bon Sanguozhi tongsu yanyi ni tsuite” [Concerning a Newly Discovered Korean Copper Movable Type Edition of the Sanguozhi tongsu yanyi]. In Hayashida Shinnosuke 林 田慎 之助 hakushi sanju kinen: Sangokushi ronshū [Commemorative Volume in Honor of Dr. Hayashida Shinnosuke’s Eightieth Birthday: A Collection of Theses on the Sanguozhi], edited by Sangokushi gakkai, 369–386. Tōkyō: Kyūko shoin. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2012d. Mito kōmon man’yū kō [Study of “漫遊” in Mito kōmon]. Tōkyō: Kōdansha.

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Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2013a. “Kōrai jidai kango kyōkasho Pak T’ongsa no seiritsu nendai ni tsuite” [Concerning the Dating of the Completion of the Koryŏ-era Textbook of Spoken Chinese, Pak T’ongsa]. Geibun (Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Bungakubu) 105: 63–75. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2013b. “Samgukchi wa tongasia ŭi kukche kwan’gye” [The Sanguozhi and East Asian International Relations]. In Samgukchi Tongi chŏn ŭi segye [World of the Sanguozhi, “Dongyi zhuan”], edited by Kwŏn Inhan and Kim Kyŏngho, 251–264. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2013c. “Nanbeichao weijing Fameijin jing 法 沒盡經 suojian Śākya pai sansheng zhi Zhongguo zhi shuo shitan” [Essay on the Claim Found in the Northern and Southern Dynasties Apocryphal Sutra, Fameijin jing, that Śākyamuni Sent Three Sages to China]. In Wenxue jingdian de chuanbo yu quanshi [Spread and Interpretation of Literary Classics], edited by Lin Meiyi and Cai Yingjun, 183–202. Taipei: Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2013d. “Towards Comparative Research on ‘Written Prayers’ (Yuanwen/ Ganmon) in China and Japan.” Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture 105: 3–14. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014a. Sanguozhi de shijie: Hou Han, Sanguo shidai [World of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The Three Kingdoms Period of the Late Han]. Translated by He Xiaoyi 何晓毅 and Liang Lei 梁蕾. Guilin: Guangxi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014b. “Higashi Ajia no Mito Kōmon: Nitchūchō no tabisuru hīrō no nazo o toku” [Mito Kōmon in East Asia: Unraveling the Mystery of a Traveling Hero in China, Japan and Korea]. Tagen bunka 3: 1–20. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014c. “Pyŏnhwa Pisamunch’ŏn sinang ŭi Ilbon esŏ ŭi suyong kwa tosi chŏnsŏl” [Acceptance of the Legends of Vaiśravaṇa in Japan and the Urban Myth]. Pulgyo hakpo 67: 118–137. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014d. Genkan zatsugeki no kenkyū 3. Hanchō keisho 范張鶏黍 [Studies in Yuan-Period Drama Texts. Fan zhang jishu]. Tōkyō: Kyūko Shoin. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014e. “Chōsen enkōshi ga mita Shinchō no engeki: Higashi Ajia no shiten kara” [Qing Dynasty Drama as Seen by Chosŏn Embassies to China: From the Perspective of East Asia]. In Shinchō kyūtei engeki bunka no kenkyū [Study of the Culture of Court Theatre during the Qing Dynasty], edited by Isobe Akira, 595–612. Tōkyō: Bensei Shuppan. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014f. “Chaoxian yanxingshi yu tongxinshi suojian Zhongguo he Riben de huju” [Chinese and Japanese Drama as Seen by Korean Embassies to China and Japan]. In Yŏnhaengsa wa t’ongsinsa: yŏnhaeng, t’ongsin sahaeng e kwanhan han-chung-il samguk ŭi kukche wŏk’ŭshop [Chosŏn Embassies

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to China and Japan: A Tri-national China-Japan-Korea Workshop on Embassies to China and Japan], edited by Chŏng Kwang and Fujimoto Yukio, 223–256, 436–464, 603–622 (in Chinese, Japanese and Korean). Seoul: Pangmunsa. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2014g. “Hongzhi-ben Xixiangji no sashie ni tsuite” [Concerning the Illustrations in the Hongzhi Edition of the Xixiangji]. In Chūgoku koten bungaku to sōga bunka [Chinese Classical Literature and the Culture of Illustration], edited by Takimoto Hiroyuki 瀧本弘之 and Ōtsuka Hidetaka 大塚 秀高, 103–114. Tōkyō: Bensei Shuppan. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2015a. Fujitsuka Chikashi hakushi ihin tenjikai mokuroku, kaidai [Introductory Essay on and Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Nachlass of Dr. Fujitsuka Chikashi]. Kyoto: Kyōdai Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2015b. “18 · 19 seiki Chōsen enkōshi no Shin-Chō ni okeru kōryū: Fujitsuka Chikashi 藤塚鄰 hakase ihin no shōkai o tsūjite” [Qing-Chosŏn Intercourse of Chosŏn Embassies to China in the 18th and 19th Centuries: Through an Introduction to the Nachlass of Dr. Fujitsuka Chikashi]. Nihon chūgoku gakkai 67: 180–191. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2015c. “Shanren kao: Dongya jinshi zhishifenzi de lingyi xingtai” [Study of the shanren: Another Type of Modern East Asian Intellectual]. Zhongguo wenxue xuebao 6: 65–78. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 2015d. “Kanshi kara mita Fukuzawa Yukichi no jinseikan” [Fukuzawa Yukichi’s View of Life, Based on his Sinitic Poetry]. Fukuzawa nenkan 42: 63–82. Kin Bunkyō and Chin Chaegyo (translators). 2013. 18 segi Ilbon chisigin Chosŏn ŭl yŏtpoda: P’yŏng’urok [An 18th-Century Japanese Intellectual’s Glimpses of Korea: The Heigūroku]. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu. Kin Bunkyō, Gen Yukiko 玄幸子, Satō Haruhiko 佐藤晴彦, and Chŏng Kwang 鄭光. 2002. Rōkitsudai 老乞大: Chōsen chūsei no Chūgokugo kaiwa dokuhon [Nogŏltae: A Chinese Language Conversation Chrestomathy from Medieval Korea]. Tōkyō: Heibonsha. Kin Bunkyō and Hamada Maya 濱田麻矢. 2001. “Nihon bōmei go no Ko Ransei 胡蘭成: Yasuda Yojūrō 保田與重郎 to no kankei o chūshin ni” [Hu Lancheng after he Fled to Japan: With a Focus on his Relationship with Yasuda Yojūrō]. Mimei 19: 87–105. Kin Bunkyō and Takahashi Satoshi 高橋智. 2009. Keiō gijuku toshokan zō “Shirō tanbo tō yonshu 四郎探母等四種:” Genten to kaidai [Copy of Yang Silang Visits his Mother: Four Plays Held by Keiō Gijuku Library: Original Text and Bibliographic Essay]. [Sendai-shi]: Tokubetsu suishin kenkyū shinchō kyūtei engeki bunka no kenkyūhan. Li Xiao 李曉 and Kin Bunkyō. 2004. Handan meng ji 邯鄲夢記 jiaozhu [Annotated Edition of Handan meng ji]. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe.

Author’s Preface to the English Edition Some see our world today as an era of globalization while others view it as an age of the clash of civilizations. Whatever the case, the world is definitely getting smaller, and it is a fact that frictions are increasing as diverse peoples from different regions and nations come into contact with each other. Needless to say, such a situation calls for more and better mutual understanding between cultures. At a time when the rapid development of computerized media has made it possible for information to circle the globe instantaneously, mutual understanding between ordinary human beings simply cannot keep up. Instead, information reigns supreme, divorced from understanding, while frictions and contradictions multiply. Western civilization has led modernity all across the globe. Be it science and technology, democracy, or capitalism, all were born in and spread from the West. It is no exaggeration to say that modernization has meant Westernization, and yet the region outside the West that has learned from and internalized Western civilization the most assiduously has been Japan and the other nations of East Asia. As a result, people in East Asia tend to boast a rather rich knowledge of Western culture and history, but it seems doubtful that Westerners know about East Asia to the same extent that East Asians know about the West. As the region most distant from Europe, East Asia had few opportunities for interaction with Europe prior to the Middle Ages. But as one of the world’s oldest cultural spheres, and under the influence of China at its center, this region cultivated a unique translocal culture with features quite distinctive from those of either the Christian or Islamic cultural spheres. For one, no single representative religion like Christianity or Islam dominated in this region, and instead Buddhism, Confucianism, China’s Daoism, and Japan’s Shinto all coexisted side by side. China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam have frequently been referred to as the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere, and this is because instead of sharing a common representative religion, they made common use of sinographs (Chinese characters), the representative form of writing used over many centuries in the region. As the only ideographic or logographic writing system remaining in active use in the modern world, sinographs are quite different from phonographic writing systems like the Roman alphabet or Arabic script. As one concrete example, the same sinographs are vocalized quite differently depending on the time period and place. As a result, techniques for reading texts written in sinographs—i.e., Literary Sinitic—also varied across different regions. Unlike Latin, the lingua franca of Europe in the past, and unlike English, the

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lingua franca in the present, Literary Sinitic had absolutely no function as a spoken language, and instead communication was carried out in writing via “brush conversations,” a method without precedent in other parts of the world. Moreover, in regions on the periphery of China, autochthonous phonographic writing systems like Japanese kana, Korean han’gŭl and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm were deployed alongside sinographs, and the resulting multiplicity of coexisting and intertwined writing systems was likewise unprecedented, lending further peculiarity and complexity to the profile of the East Asian cultural sphere. On the basis of the unique features of this East Asian Sinographic Cultural Sphere, this book devotes special attention to the history of the techniques of “vernacular reading” that were used in Korea in the past, and that are still used to this very day in Japan, to read texts written in sinographs and/or in Literary Sinitic. In doing so, it attempts to contextualize and explain the differences between these various techniques with reference to the language ideologies of each region and the worldviews and ideas of the nation that informed them. Because at present both North Korea and Vietnam have abolished the use of sinographs, and even South Korea hardly uses them anymore, the Sinographic Cultural Sphere has all but unraveled and disappeared. Besides, under the influence of rapid Westernization people have largely forgotten by now the history of the former Sinographic Cultural Sphere. It was circumstances like these that suggested to me the need to revisit this history and dig deeper into it. But the contents of this book are by no means easy to follow, even for readers hailing from East Asia. Thus, when Professor King first proposed an English-language translation of the book, I confess I had some doubts as to whether the contents could be made accessible to an Anglophone readership. I assumed that the specialized terminology and complicated symbols used throughout the book would render any English translation extremely difficult; indeed, I half suspected that the project would eventually be abandoned. Thus, I was truly surprised to receive an email from Professor King some years later informing me that the translation was complete. But it also occurred to me that if the contents of this book could be made known to some extent to an Anglophone readership, this might make a modest contribution to addressing the task facing us all today of intercultural understanding. No prospect could make me happier as the author than this. But whatever influence this English-language edition may have, equal credit must surely go to Professor King and his team of translators, and I thank them for their efforts. Kin Bunkyō March 1, 2017, Kyoto

Acknowledgements First and foremost, the editor and translators wish to thank Professor Kin Bunkyō for his kind permission to translate and publish his book, and especially for his gracious assistance with all manner of details related to the project, ranging from questions of terminology and translation to providing the files for the figures and illustrations. I also wish to acknowledge the hard work of the UBC graduate students in Asian Studies who produced the initial translations of each of the chapters: Alexey Lushchenko (Chapter 1), Mina Hattori (Chapter 2), and Si Nae Park (Chapter 3). Marjorie Burge joined the team of translators much later in the process, just as she was finishing her Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California-Berkeley. Her eagle eye, editorial acumen, and expertise in matters concerning ancient Korean and Japanese philology saved us from many embarrassments and her interventions were so substantial as to warrant inclusion as a co-translator of the volume. Daniel Kane rendered invaluable editorial assistance at all stages as well, and Patricia Radder and Irene Jager at Brill have been models of patience and understanding. Several colleagues were especially helpful with feedback on earlier drafts of the translation: Alexander Vovin, Rick McBride, John Phan, John Whitman, David Lurie, James Lewis, Hyoshin Kim, Sven Osterkamp, Si Nae Park, and Nick Hall. And the following students also contributed in numerous ways to improving the translation: Scott Wells, Leo-Thomas Brylowski, Daniel Jacinto, and Miaoling Xue. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge that this work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grants funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2101) and (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103).

Figures 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Ticket Gate in Four Languages, Gion-shijō Station on the Keihan Electric Railway Line 2 Kharoṣṭhī script 28 Mokkan with passage from Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe,… discovered in Tagajō City, Miyagi prefecture 34 Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家立成雑書要略 (J. Toka rissei zassho yōryaku) [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] (Shōsōin 正倉院 collection ms., 8th c.) 35 Nara period manuscript copy of Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略 疏刊定記 (J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra] 38 Inversion marks in the Ming-era play, Huanlaomo 還牢末 47 Inversion marks in the title to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ms. poem, “學書” 48 Key to the Myōgyōten 明經点 style of okototen glosses 51 Tone marks in the Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms] 53 “Xinyuefu” 新樂府 [New Yuefu], opening section of fascicle 3 of the Baishi wenji 白氏文集 (Kyoto National Museum) 55 Key for the okototen in the Baishi wenji 白氏文集 56 An example of the “wild geese (inversion) mark” (kariganeten 雁金点) seen in a manuscript copy dated 1526 of the Rongo shikkai/Lunyu jijie 論語集解 by He Yan 何晏 (195–249 CE). The first inversion mark can be seen in line 3 beneath the second “不” 61 Kunten glossing in a Meiji-period English textbook 76 The first page of Liang Qichao’s Hewen handufa 和文漢讀法 [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese] 79 A page from the Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解 [Vernacular Exegesis of the Analects] 87 Korean kugyŏl glosses (hundok marks) in a 16th-c. copy of the Nŭngŏm kyŏng 楞嚴經 [Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 91 A page from the Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae 楞嚴經諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 96 Excerpt from the Kuyŏk Inwang kyŏng 舊譯仁王經 [Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra] with Korean kugyŏl glosses 102 Excerpt from the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl 華嚴文義要決 [Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra] 113 Okoto-ten Key for the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl 華嚴文義要決 115

Figures 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Key for Korean Pointillographic Stylus Glosses (kakp’il chŏmt’o 角筆点吐) 118 Excerpt with Vernacular Glosses from the Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴敎分記圓通鈔 [Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra] 129 Label for the Korean soju beverage Jinro 眞露 140 An example of Khitan small script 145 A Vietnamese edition of the Three Character Classic (C. Sanzi jing, V. Tam Tự Kinh 三字經) 153 Excerpt from Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s “Koshigoejō” 腰越状 [Letter from Koshigoe] 183 Stele erected in first year of Yōrō (717) at Chōmyōji Temple in Ōtsu city, Shiga prefecture 185 The Imsin Year Oath Stone of Silla (either 552 or 612 ce) 187 “Horyūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] Image Mandorla Inscription” from the Main Hall of Hōryū-ji Temple 192 Imperial edict announcing the ascension of Emperor Monmu (683–707) to the throne—the oldest extant example of senmyō style 196 Examples of chenzi 襯字 “filler words” in an aria from a Chinese zaju “variety play” 198 A page from Guan Yunshi’s 貫雲石 Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解 [Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety] 202

Acronyms and Abbreviations ACC accusative ADV adverbial C. Chinese CONC concessive COND conditional CONJ conjunctive COP copula CWS Chosŏn wangjo sillok (Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty) DECL declarative DISP dispositive EXCL exclamatory FUT future GEN genitive GER gerund HON honorific J. Japanese K. Korean LOC locative MOD modifier NEG negative NOM nominative PART particle PL plural Q interrogative SJ Sino-Japanese Skt. Sanskrit TOP topic V. Vietnamese

Introduction 1

Buying Tickets at the Station

Let us consider boarding a train at a Japanese train station. First, one deposits money into a ticket-vending machine to buy a ticket. At once—usually in a woman’s voice nowadays—the announcement “Issuing ticket now” flows from the ticket machine. One can witness this scene daily at any of the stations in Japan’s large cities. And yet, something is strange. The word for a machine selling tickets is a kenbaiki 券売機 (“ticket-vending machine”), and because it issues passenger tickets its operation is called hakken 発券 (“issuing-ticket”). At first glance this seems reasonable enough, but after thinking carefully one notices that if a machine selling passenger tickets is called kenbaiki, then issuing a ticket ought to be kenpatsu 券発 (“ticket-issue”). In this case we can clearly see two different patterns: 1) object (券 “ticket”) + verb (売 “sell”) and 2) verb (発 “sell”) + object (券 “ticket”). Since Japanese verbs usually follow their objects, kenbai 券売 follows Japanese word order. In contrast, there are numerous words with {verb + object} structure in the Japanese language, such as hakken 発券 (issuing a ticket), dokusho 読書 (reading a book), and tozan 登山 (climbing a mountain). These follow the typical word order of the Chinese language. Why are there so many of these Chinese expressions in Japanese? It goes without saying that this is because sinographs (J. kanji 漢字) originated in China, and a large amount of Chinese, written in these characters, was incorporated into the Japanese language. Moreover, while kenbai 券売 follows Japanese order, the fact that the object particle “を” (o) and the verbal ending “る” (ru) in 券を売る (ken o uru, to sell a ticket) can be omitted, to result simply in kenbai 券売, is due to the influence of the Chinese language, which does not require verbal inflection or particles. Therefore, it is better to say that kenbai 券売 is a Chinese-like expression reflecting Japanese word order. Further, the pronunciations of sinographs like “券” (ken), “売” (bai), “発” (hatsu), etc., are originally derived from Chinese. In considering all this, one realizes the extent to which the Chinese language has influenced Japanese.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_002

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Introduction

A Ticket Gate

After buying a ticket, the traveler heads toward a ticket gate. Nowadays, more and more signs are put up at stations and elsewhere that, in addition to Japanese and English, include Chinese and Korean. Usually one can see Chinese 检票口 ( jiǎnpiàokǒu) and Korean 개찰구 (kaech’algu) written at ticket gates (Fig. 1). The “检” in 检票口 is a modern-day simplified form of the sinograph “檢,” which has been simplified differently in Japan, as “検.” In Chinese, a ticket gate is called 检票口 because it is a “checking 検 (査) train tickets (車) 票 gate 口.” Korean kaech’algu 개찰구 written out in sinographs becomes 改札口, the same as its Japanese equivalent; the only difference here is that the three sinographs are read out according to Korean pronunciation, as kae 改, ch’al 札, and -gu 口. In Japan, the first two characters “改札” are read according to the characters’ on 音, or Sino-Japanese reading, as “kaisatsu,” while “口” is read according to its kun 訓, or vernacular, reading as “kuchi” (the on reading would be “kō” or “ku”), while in Korean the whole word is read out in its Sino-Korean reading, because modern Korean reading practices no longer use vernacular (K. hun 訓) readings of sinographs (though these did exist in the past). This would be the equivalent of reading the word as “kaisatsukō” in Japanese.

Figure 1

Ticket Gate in Four Languages, Gion-shijō Station on the Keihan Electric Railway Line

Introduction

3

Incidentally, one might think that since “a window (口) for checking (改) tickets (札)” is turned into the Chinese-like expression 改札口 with {verb + object} word order, it should be understood by a Chinese person, but this is not so. What confuses Chinese readers is primarily the character “改.” The Japanese verb “改める” (aratameru) usually means “to renew something old,” but in the case of “札を改める” ( fuda o aratameru, “to check tickets”) it has the meaning of “to check, to inspect” and can also be written as “検める” (aratameru). That is, although the Japanese word “aratameru” has among its meanings that of “to check,” the sinograph “改” does not originally have this meaning in Chinese. In this case, the Japanese meaning of “to check” has become mixed into the meaning of the sinograph “改” through a shared kun reading with 検. Moreover, it is difficult for Chinese readers to understand that “札” means “ticket”; thus, even though the whole word is written with “Chinese” characters, it is an incomprehensible expression for readers of Chinese who do not know Japanese. Incidentally, in Korean, “改” and “札” do not have meanings similar to the Japanese ones, either; nevertheless, 改札口 is used because a large number of Japanese words were incorporated into the Korean language during the first half of the twentieth century. Even in this context, however, the Japanese word “kaisatsuguchi” did not enter into Korean intact, but was adapted from the sinographs used to write it via their Sino-Korean readings, resulting in kaech’algu 개찰구.

3

Sinographic Expressions in East Asia

Thus, the situation with sinographic expressions is truly complicated. This is by no means just a problem between Japan and China, since there are similar cases in neighboring Korea. For example, partly due to the recent popularity of Korean dramas in Japan, Korean food has become trendy. Particularly popular are vacuum-packed boxes of Korean dried seaweed (which differs from the Japanese variety in that it is coated in sesame oil and sprinkled with salt), on which is written in Korean 건냉소에 보관요 (kŏnnaengso e pogwanyo). If we convert this into sinographs, it becomes 乾冷所에 保管要 (“must be stored in a dry, cool place”). The “에” (e) here corresponds to the Japanese particle “ni” (a locative, which in this context can be translated as “in”). Since Korean word order and grammar is very similar to that of Japanese, the expression above is easy for Japanese speakers to understand, as it is simply the Japanese expression “乾冷所に保管を要す” (kanreisho ni hokan o yōsu), shortened by omitting the object particle “を” (o) and verbalizer “す” (su).

4

Introduction

However, exactly like the example of kenbai 券売 (“ticket-vending”) discussed above, pogwanyo 保管要 (“store-must”) is written in Korean word order, since in Chinese it would have to be in the order 要保管 (“must store”). Expressions such as 要

於 乾冷所

保管

must in dry-cool-place store “must be stored in a dry, cool place,” which can be glossed into Japanese as 乾冷所

に於いて 保管する

kanreisho ni oite dry-cool-place in

hokansuru store-do

を

要す

o ACC

yōsu require-do

should be understandable to Chinese readers. In short, the writing on these boxes of seaweed is a sinographic expression following Korean word order, but because nowadays sinographs are only rarely used in Korea, it is written out phonetically in han’gŭl. In terms of the Japanese language, this would be similar to writing the whole expression in kana as かんれいしょにほかんよう (kanreisho ni hokan’yō). Undoubtedly, even Japanese people would not understand it written out in this way. The word “kanreisho” 乾冷所 is not used in either Japan or China, but can nevertheless be readily understood by people from either country when written in sinographs. So what about Vietnam, another country that once used sinographs? Unlike Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese is a language that is relatively close in its structure to Chinese, but it nonetheless has similar problems with sinographs. Vietnamese word order is {verb + object} like Chinese, but unlike Chinese, noun modifiers are placed after nouns. For example, “Vietnam” written in sinographs is 越南 (“Viet [Yue] south”; Viet. Việtnam, C. Yuènán, J. Etsunan, K. Wŏllam); however it does not mean “south of the Viet,” but rather “Viet of the south; southern Viet.” Because of this, the following phenomenon occurs. In Vietnamese, “library” is “thư viện,” written in sinographs as 書院 (“book building”). The word for “museum” is “viện bảo tảng,” written in sinographs as 院寶蔵 (“building treasure storage”). The compound viện bảo tảng 院寶蔵 follows Vietnamese word order, with the modifier bảo tảng 寶蔵 (“treasure storage”) placed after viện 院 (“building”), whereas in Chinese or Japanese the order would be 寶蔵院 (“treasure storage building”). On the other hand, thư viện 書院 follows Chinese word order, with the modifier thư 書 (“book”) preceding the modified viện 院 (“building”). Thus, as far as the modifier-modified

Introduction

5

relationship is concerned, Vietnamese is a language that uses some sinographic expressions that follow Vietnamese word order and others that follow Chinese word order. Words such as 圖書館 (“library”) and 博物館 (“museum”) are the same across Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and differ only in terms of their pronunciation (for example, 圖書館 [“library”] is “toshokan” in Japanese,“túshūguǎn” in modern Mandarin, and “tosŏgwan” in Korean). Why is it that only in Vietnam the words 書院 and 寶蔵院 are used, with the character “院” (originally meaning “courtyard” or “enclosed complex”) at the end like the name of some sort of temple? Originally there were no such things as libraries and museums in East Asia, and these words were created in modern Japan as equivalents for the English words “library” and “museum.” These words are also used in China and Korea, but they did not enter Vietnam, a country that was not influenced directly by Japanese-made sinographic expressions of this kind. The word “書院” was used mainly to refer to a private school in China, and in Vietnam it was probably adopted to refer to a “library” due to its similar function as a place with books. The word “院寶蔵,” with its meaning of a place for storing treasures, was translated independently in Vietnam. Since “寶蔵” is a word originally related to Buddhism, the Vietnamese word for “museum” could also be a loanword from the Buddhist lexicon. Since 1945, Vietnam has completely abolished sinographs and only uses an alphabet called chũ quốc ngữ (written in sinographs, this becomes 字國語, i.e., “graphs of the national language”). Because of this change, it is not immediately clear that about sixty percent of Vietnamese vocabulary is actually made up of words originating in sinographs. 4

“Vernacular Reading”: The Kundoku Phenomenon in the Sinographic Cultural Sphere

The countries discussed above—China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, as well as North Korea—make up a so-called “Sinographic Cultural Sphere” (J. kanji bunkaken 漢字文化圏) in which sinographs have historically been used. As can be understood just from these examples, the use of sinographs in the Sinographic Cultural Sphere is extremely complicated. Vietnam and North Korea have completely abolished them, and South Korea no longer uses them for the most part. Instead, in Vietnam an alphabet called chũ quốc ngữ is used, while both Koreas use han’gŭl. Although sinographs are not used in either Korean or Vietnamese, words originating in sinographs still account for a high percentage of the vocabulary of both these languages.

6

Introduction

At present, the countries that still use sinographs are Japan and China. In Japan, Japanese forms of simplified sinographs are used in combination with the kana syllabaries, whereas in China, of course, only sinographs are used, with simplified forms used in mainland China, and traditional complex forms still in use in Taiwan. In addition, although the readings for sinographs in each language derive historically from ancient Chinese pronunciations (the on [“phonetic”] readings), they differ in modern Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese, having undergone separate processes of change in each language; in addition, Japanese uses vernacular kun (“gloss”) readings. Furthermore, as seen in the example of “aratameru” 改める above, there are subtle differences in the meanings of sinographs in each country. The biggest difference is found in vocabulary and sentences made from sinographs joined together, and there are many kinds of variation due to differences in time and place. In extreme cases, something might be written entirely in sinographs, and yet be completely incomprehensible to a Chinese person. Nowadays there is a sort of “sinograph boom” underway in Japan, with characters at the center of lively debates, and numerous books being published on the topic. Most of them, however, either discuss only sinographs as used in the Japanese language or, at the most, limit their discussion to the relationship with the homeland of sinographs, China. However, in order to understand questions about sinographs more comprehensively, it is necessary to know how they have been used throughout the entire East Asian Sinographic Cultural Sphere. Current Japanese interest in sinographs tends to be skewed towards questions of the meaning, form, and etymology of individual characters, but it is obvious that in the overwhelming majority of cases sinographs express meaning not singly, but as sequences of two or more graphs. There are extremely diverse patterns for constructing vocabulary and sentences by combining sinographs, and these patterns are influenced in complex ways not only by differences of a linguistic nature, but also by the historical, cultural, and social factors of each country and region. This book is an attempt to consider a number of problems concerning sinographs and their historical background throughout the entire East Asian Sinographic Cultural Sphere. To that end, the keyword of this study is the Japanese expression kundoku 訓読, which we can translate as “reading by vernacular gloss” or simply “vernacular reading.” There are probably many people, Japanese and otherwise, who think that kundoku is a uniquely Japanese method of reading ancient kanbun 漢文 (K. hanmun; Literary Sinitic or Classical Chinese texts) by adding inversion glosses (kaeriten) and okurigana reading glosses, but similar methods were once in use in Korea and all over East Asia. Come to think of it, the kundoku principle of

Introduction

7

reading Literary Sinitic by inversion to Japanese word order and by the addition of nominal particles and verbal inflexion is also at work in the examples given at the beginning of this Introduction, such as in kenbaiki 券売機 (“ticketvending machine”) and hakken 発券 (“issuing a ticket”). Similar sinographic expressions based on the kundoku “vernacular reading” principle, as we have already seen, can be found not only in Japan, but also in Korea, Vietnam, and even China, where these graphs originated. In addition, sinographic expressions based on “reading by gloss” vernacular reading principles are closely connected with expressions in each country’s national language based in vernacular scripts like kana and han’gŭl. From this perspective, if we look at the diverse writing systems of all the various places in the Sinographic Cultural Sphere, it is possible to see how people from each region used sinographs to express themselves, how they nurtured their own cultures in the process, and what kinds of commonalities and differences there were in their adaptations of sinographic writing. To summarize the contents of this book, in Chapter 1, I argue that the socalled Chinese translation of the Buddhist canon—that is, the process of translating Sanskrit Buddhist sutras into Literary Sinitic—was the impetus that inspired the creation of vernacular reading techniques for Literary Sinitic. Then, after providing an outline of the history of kundoku in Japan and explaining the reading of things like okototen ヲコト点 grammatical glosses through example sentences, I consider the thinking and worldview that formed the context for Japanese kundoku. In Chapter 2, I explain vernacular reading on the Korean Peninsula, where it developed earlier than in Japan, and examine its possible influence on Japan. At the same time, by way of comparison with the Japanese case, I briefly introduce the thinking and worldview behind Korean hundok 訓讀, while also presenting evidence for vernacular reading practices in other regions of East Asia. In Chapter 3, I examine texts written using Literary Sinitic by people in various places in East Asia, focusing especially on the problem of so-called “nonstandard,” “anomalous,” or “variant” Literary Sinitic (J. hentai kanbun 変体漢 文), which deviates from standard or orthodox Literary Sinitic, and discuss its background and its relationship with the latter. In the concluding chapter, based on the previous discussions, I argue that it is necessary to take into account all the styles of writing using sinographs and their mutual relationships in order to understand the overall past culture of East Asia linked with the present, and I propose the revised concept of a “Literary Sinitic Textual Cultural Sphere” (C. hanwen wenhuaquan, J. kanbun bunkaken, K. hanmun munhwagwŏn 漢文文化圈) to replace “Sinographic Cultural Sphere.”

Chapter 1

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku “Vernacular Reading” in Japan 1

What Is kundoku?

1.1 The Only Instance of kundoku in the World For many Japanese today, the word “kundoku” usually evokes the method of reading Literary Sinitic texts that they learned in Japanese language class in school. For example, in the case of the following lines from the beginning of the Analects of Confucius, 子曰、學而時習之、不亦説乎。有朋自遠方来、不亦樂乎。

one adds kaeriten (inversion marks) and okurigana as follows:1 子曰ク、 學ビテ 而時ニ習ウレ 之ヲ、 不ズ 亦タ説シ 乎。 -ku -bite ni -uBACK o -zu -ta -shi レ 二 一 有リテ 朋自リ 遠方 来タル、 不ニズ 亦タ 樂シ一 乎。 -riteBACK -ri² ¹ -taru ²-zu -ta -shi¹ and performs “vernacular reading” (that is, kundoku) as follows: 子

曰く、

學びて

時に

SHI iwaku, manabite toki ni 説ばしからずや。

朋

yorokobashikarazu ya. Tomo

これを 習う、

また

kore o narau, mata ありて 遠方より

arite

来る、 また

ENPŌ yori kuru, mata

樂しからずや。

tanoshikarazu ya. “The Master said, ‘Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?’ ”2 1 Editor’s note: in converting what was originally a vertical text read from top to bottom and from right to left, into dextrohorizontal format, glosses placed to the right of the line are rendered in subscript and word order glosses placed to the left of the line have been rendered in superscript. 2 English translation from James Legge. Cited from the Chinese Text Project site: http://ctext .org/analects/xue-er (last accessed 10 December 2018). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_003

9

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

Kundoku, in short, is a method of translating a text originally in Literary Sinitic (that is, in a foreign language), into Japanese using a specific system. Special “back marks” or “inversion glosses” (kaeriten) are used to change Chinese word order into Japanese word order; nominal particles and verbal inflection not found in the Chinese original are indicated with okurigana; and the sinographs themselves are turned into Japanese words with “學” (S[ino-]J[apanese] gaku) glossed as “mana-bu” (to study), “時” (SJ ji) as “toki” (time, when), and “朋” (SJ hō) as “tomo” (friend). Present-day Chinese people, naturally, read the above passage in modern Chinese pronunciation, as follows: 子曰、 學而時習之、

不亦説乎。 有朋自遠方来、

不亦樂乎。

Zǐ yuē, xué ér shí xí zhī, bù yì yuè hū. Yǒu péng zì yuǎn fāng lái, bù yì lè hū.3 Similarly, ancient Chinese would have read it in ancient Chinese pronunciation. When Japanese speakers read in a foreign language, such as English or modern Chinese, they may have a slight Japanese accent, but they basically read in the same way as the speakers of the target language. Except for the case of reading Literary Sinitic via kundoku in Japan, there are no examples, at least in today’s world, of reading a foreign language text by adding marks to change word order and thereby convert the text into one’s native language. How did such a peculiar reading method come into being in the first place? 1.2 Cosmopolitan lingua francas of the World: Latin, Arabic, Literary Sinitic Nowadays, English is becoming the lingua franca of the world, but in the premodern period each sphere sharing a religion and/or culture had its own cosmopolitan lingua franca. These premodern cosmopolitan languages were also sacred languages used for recording the great canonical texts that symbolized each religion and culture. Latin, of the Christian cultural sphere, Arabic in the Islamic cultural sphere, and Literary Sinitic in East Asia are representative examples of such sacred languages, with the Bible written in Latin, the Qur’an in Arabic, and the Analects and other Confucian classics in Literary Sinitic. For this reason, Literary Sinitic has been called the Latin of East Asia; however, there are fundamental differences between Literary Sinitic and Latin or Arabic. First, Latin and Arabic are closely tied to a single religion—Christianity and Islam, respectively—while Literary Sinitic was used not only in Confucian texts, but also in the canonical texts of several religions, including Buddhism 3 Here and following, Mandarin Chinese pronunciation is given in pinyin, though in most cases we omit the tone marks.

10

Chapter 1

and Daoism. Unlike the Christian and Islamic cultural spheres, one cannot represent East Asia as a “single religion-based” cultural sphere—for example, as either a Confucian or Buddhist cultural sphere. This is why the term “Sinographic Cultural Sphere” is used. Second, Latin and classical Arabic are written languages of sacred texts, but they also functioned simultaneously as spoken languages. Even now, it is possible to have a conversation in Latin or classical Arabic. As for Literary Sinitic, it was created from the start as a written language separate from the spoken language; having a conversation in Literary Sinitic, although technically possible, would still be extremely difficult even for Chinese people. Moreover, the pronunciation systems for sinographs, although originating historically in ancient Chinese pronunciation, are different in various Chinese topolects (C. fangyan 方言, for example, Cantonese and Fujianese), Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese; as a result, Literary Sinitic, heard in the pronunciations of these different regions, would be mutually incomprehensible. For these reasons, since ancient times, when people from different parts of East Asia met, they communicated by writing in Literary Sinitic, not by speaking. For example, when Korean envoys came to Japan in the Edo period (1603– 1868), they brought interpreters, but important conversations were conducted by means of “brush conversations” (C. bitan, J. hitsudan, K. p’iltam 筆談) in Literary Sinitic. This is a singular phenomenon without parallel in the other cultural spheres of the world. Third, most languages of Europe—the Christian cultural sphere—such as English, French, German, Italian, and others, all belong, together with Latin, to the same Indo-European language family. The Chinese language, the basis of Literary Sinitic, belongs to a language family different from and unrelated to most of the languages of the peoples living close to China. Chinese is a socalled “isolating language,” in which one syllable typically expresses one meaning (for this reason, sinographs are based on the principle of one graph, one pronunciation, one meaning); there is little or no inflection, and meaning is expressed mainly by word order. Languages similar to Chinese in the region are limited more or less to Tibetan, which is from the same Sino-Tibetan language family, and Vietnamese, an isolating language from a different family. Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Uighur, and other languages of the regions to the east, north, and west of China are all polysyllabic languages that form sentences using particles equivalent to the Japanese postpositions te, ni, o, wa, etc. These are so-called agglutinating languages, different from Chinese in terms of both grammar and word order. For example, if we contrast Chinese with Japanese, we notice that Chinese words are typically monosyllabic, and

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

11

that difference in meaning depends on word order, whereas in Japanese, particles like “は” (wa) and “を” (o), which indicate grammatical function, are attached to polysyllabic words, and verbs are inflected: 我

愛

你.

Wǒ ài nǐ. I love you 私

は

あなた を

Watakushi wa anata o I TOP you ACC “I love you.” 你

愛

愛す。

AIsu. love-do

我.

Nǐ ài wǒ. You love me あなた

は

私

を

愛す。

Anata wa watakushi o AIsu. you TOP me ACC love-do “You love me.” Thus, Chinese—a typologically different language from a different family— was extremely difficult to study for people in areas neighboring China, such as Japan and Korea, who eagerly studied Chinese culture from ancient times. In particular, the tones attached to each character were difficult to learn for people whose native languages had no tones, and so tones are indeed omitted in Korean and Japanese pronunciations of sinographs. For the study of Chinese culture, however, conversational ability was not necessarily required, and it was sufficient to learn the written language Literary Sinitic. Saichō 最澄 (767–822), the founder of the Tendai sect of Japanese Buddhism, took the interpreter-monk Gishin 義真 (781–833) with him when he accompanied a Japanese embassy to the Tang (618–907) court in order to study in China. Saichō was probably not very good at Chinese conversation. But during a stay of about one year, he diligently collected texts written in Literary Sinitic and then returned to Japan. This was a typical pattern for the study of Chinese culture in East Asia. Kundoku, the practice of vernacular reading— that is, of reading Literary Sinitic by translating it into one’s native language— was born in the context of the peculiar language situation of East Asia.

12

Chapter 1

Sino-Japanese on Readings (go-on, kan-on, tō-on) and Vernacular kun Readings Kundoku consists of two stages: a level of reading individual sinographs according to their Japanese meanings, and a level of reading an entire sentence by changing the word order in accordance with Japanese grammar. I will first explain the reading of sinographs. There are two kinds of Japanese readings for sinographs: Sino-Japanese on 音 (K. ŭm) readings and vernacular Japanese kun 訓 (K. hun) readings. In the Analects example above, “學” (gaku), “時” ( ji), “朋” (hō) are Sino-Japanese on readings, i.e., ancient Chinese readings with a Japanese accent. In modern Mandarin Chinese, these are “學” (xué), “時” (shí), “朋” (péng). Some of these are similar to the Sino-Japanese on readings, while others are not. This is because in Japan, on readings were corrupted in accordance with the phonology of Japanese, while in China, pronunciations have changed over a long period of time. However, both sets of readings go back to ancient Chinese pronunciations. Furthermore, there are sinographs with only one Sino-Japanese on reading, such as “學” (gaku), “時” ( ji), and “朋” (hō), and many characters with double on readings. For example, “人” (“person”) is read nin in “人間” (ningen, “human being”) and jin in “人口” ( jinkō, “population”); “間” (gen) can also be read kan, as in 間接 (kansetsu, “indirect”); and “口” (kō) is also read ku, as in “口調” (kuchō, “tone of voice”). These examples have different synonymous on readings used in different cases, and thus they differ from a sinograph like “樂” which has two Sino-Japanese on readings, raku (“pleasant”) and gaku (“music”), used for two different meanings, as in “樂天” (rakuten, “optimism”) and “音樂” (ongaku, “music”). Readings like nin 人, gen 間, and ku 口 are called go-on 呉音 (“Wu readings”), and readings like jin 人, kan 間, and kō 口 are called kan-on 漢音 (“Han readings”). The differences between go-on and kan-on reflect historical and regional differences in the original Chinese. When Japan first adopted sinographs in the fourth to sixth centuries, China was split into the Northern and Southern dynasties, and the pronunciation of the Wu region (modern-day Jiangsu province) in the south, geographically closest to Japan, was the first to enter Japan via the Korean Peninsula. This set of readings is called go-on in Japanese, and many words related to Buddhism, which was also introduced to Japan at that time, are still read according to go-on. In the seventh century, however, Tang formed a unified empire and the cultural center shifted to the Tang capital Chang’an (modern-day Xi’an). Japanese who went on missions to Tang China learned the new pronunciations of Chang’an; these became kan-on. In a similar fashion, the modern-day Japanese words koppu and kappu are essentially the same: first, in the Edo period the Dutch word “kop” became the 1.3

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

13

Japanese koppu and then from the Meiji period (1868–1912) the English “cup” became kappu. That is, the variation between koppu and kappu is the result of these words entering the Japanese language in different time periods from different countries. The dialectal difference between northern and southern Chinese dialects, comparable to the difference between genetically related Dutch and English, is the reason for the differences between go-on and kanon. In addition, there are also examples of sinograph readings that entered from China in an even later period, such as “子” (su) in “椅子” (isu, “chair”) and “扇子” (sensu, “fan”), or the readings an for 行 and don for 灯, in the compound “行灯” (andon, “paper-covered lamp stand”). These readings, called tō-on 唐音 (“Tang readings”), are limited to a very small set of words. Thus, the origins of all Sino-Japanese on readings—go-on, kan-on, and tō-on—are to be found in historical Chinese pronunciations, while vernacular kun readings are the native Japanese readings of sinographs, such as “人” (hito, “person”), “間” (aida, “interval”), and “口” (kuchi “mouth”). In short, vernacular kun readings are essentially a kind of translation. For example, in the case of studying English—or any language other than Chinese—it is impossible to ignore the English pronunciation of a word and read the word directly as Japanese. That is, it would be impossible to read the English word “book” directly as Japanese hon. Why did such vernacular kun readings originate only in the process of studying sinographs? 1.4 What Is the “kun” in kun Readings? The answer to the question above probably lies in the fact that, as “ideograms” (J. hyōi moji 表意文字), sinographs are not directly linked with pronunciation. Of course, this does not mean that there are no phonetic elements: the “同” common to the characters “同” (“same”), “洞” (“hollow”), “胴” (“trunk”), and “銅” (“copper”) is an indicator that they are all pronounced dō in Sino-Japanese (sinographs such as these, which comprise a semantic and a phonetic element, are called keiseiji 形声字, “pictophonetic graphs,” in Japanese). And yet there are also cases when such pictophonetic keiseiji sinographs with the same phonetic element have different pronunciations, such as “格” (kaku) and “洛” (raku), or “被” (hi) and “破” (ha). In any case, the memorization of the readings of sinographs is no easy task. In these circumstances, for Japanese readers for whom it is not necessary to speak Chinese and it suffices simply to understand the meaning of a given sinograph, they would rather just read it as Japanese. Of course, the major shift toward the idea of reading sinographs in Japanese did not occur merely for this simple reason. There were various other intermediating factors at play in the period when sinographs were introduced to Japan. One of the clues for investigation is the word “kun” itself. Why is it that both the

14

Chapter 1

glossing of sinographs in Japanese and the reading of Literary Sinitic according to Japanese word order are called “kun”? The word kun 訓 means “to teach via commentary” and refers in particular to the annotations used for teaching the Confucian Classics. There is also a compound “訓詁” (C. xungu, J. kunko, K. hun’go), in which kun 訓 refers to explaining difficult sinographs in easier, plainer words and ko 詁 refers to the elucidation of ancient words using more current language. In addition, ko 詁 includes the notation of pronunciations for hard-to-decipher sinographs. The explanation and exegesis of Confucian texts, consisting primarily of kunko, flourished during the Han period (206 bce–220 ce), when Confucianism became the state religion in China, and was known as xunguxue 訓詁學 (J. kunkogaku, K. hun’gohak, i.e., exegetics). This xunguxue became the basis for a subsequent tradition of commentarial scholarship. For example, in Han-period annotations for the passage from the Analects discussed above, peng 朋 is explained as tongmen yue peng 同門曰朋 (“同門 are called 朋”), i.e., “fellow disciples of a master are called peng.” That is, the vague word peng 朋 is explained in concrete, easily understood terms as “fellow disciples of a master”; this sort of annotation corresponds, as it were, to the kun component of kunko. A twelfth-century commentary of the same text by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) explains “説” as “yue/shuo yue tong 説悦同” (“説 is the same as 悦”). In ancient times “説” and “悦” were used interchangeably, and “説” could mean either “speak” or “rejoice.” Later, however, their usage diverged. This annotation specifies that in this passage “説” means “悦” (“rejoice”) and not “説” (“speak; explain”); therefore this annotation corresponds to the ko of kunko, in that it explains an old word with a new one. There are also a few kunko commentaries that mention word order. The Tang-period commentator Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648) added a note explaining a previous annotation in greater detail (this type of multi-layered annotation is known as shu 疏 [J. so, K. so]), to the following passage in the “Great Announcement” (Dagao 大誥) chapter of the Shang shu 尚書 [Book of Documents]: 猷大誥爾多邦, 越爾御事

I make a great announcement to you, [the princes of] the many states, and to you, the managers of my affairs.4

4 English translation by James Legge. Cited from the Chinese Text Project site: http://ctext.org/ shang-shu/great-announcement (last accessed 10 December 2018).

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Kong notes that “猷” (“plan”) is the same as “道” (“say”), and that the sequence “猷大” is equivalent to “大猷.” He continues: 古人之語多倒,

猶詩称中谷, old-person-GEN-word-many-invert, like-Poetry-call-mid-valley, 谷中也

valley-mid-cop “People of old frequently inverted their words, like in the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) when it says ‘mid-valley,’ which means ‘in the valley.’” Ancient Japanese called vernacular Japanese readings of characters “kun” because, having borrowed the kunko method from China, they probably considered vernacular Japanese readings of sinographs to be just another type of annotation. If kunko were glosses in current, plain language, then for Japanese readers this meant nothing other than glossing in Japanese. Of course, there is still a large gap between xunguxue (kunko scholarship, i.e., exegetics), which appends explanations in Chinese to Chinese texts, and the appending of vernacular kun glosses in a foreign (non-Chinese) language (here, Japanese) to those same texts, but both cases entail navigating the distance between difficult and simple, past and present. In other words, the concept of kun itself remained unchanged, but in Japan, kun glosses were in Japanese. Still, the fact that Japanese readers called their vernacular glosses “kun” indicates that they viewed both Chinese kunko and Japanese vernacular kun readings as fundamentally one and the same concept. In a time period when the notion of a “state” was still unclear and the knowledge of language structure undeveloped, there was probably no clear awareness of Chinese and Japanese as being mutually foreign languages from different language families. Moreover, the pronunciations of sinographs were different from one region to the next across the vast expanses of China. It is not unreasonable that the ancient Japanese and the ancient peoples of the Korean Peninsula may have conceived of their own languages as being on the same level as Chinese topolects. There is supporting evidence for this idea in the fact that, in later ages, people in Japan and Korea called their languages “方言” (“topolects” or “languages of place”) or “俗語” (“vulgar language; vernacular speech”) in contrast to Literary Sinitic. However, this vague language awareness was current only at the early stages of the transmission of sinographs, and as knowledge of Literary Sinitic deepened, people clearly understood that Chinese was a language completely different from Japanese. It was probably the influence of Buddhism that changed this vague understanding into a definite awareness.

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Kundoku and Chinese Translations of Buddhist Sutras

2.1 The Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese Languages From ancient times, the Chinese wrote foreign geographical and personal names using sinographs. Well-known examples of this include “邪馬臺國” (C. yemataiguo “Land of Yamatai,” i.e., Yamato Japan) and “卑弥呼” (C. beimihu, J. himiko, i.e., “[Queen] Himiko~Pimiko,” the ruler of Yamatai), found in the sub-section on the woren 倭人 (J. wajin, “Wa/Japanese people”) in the “Dongyi zhuan” 東夷傳 [Encounters with Eastern Barbarians] chapter of the “Weizhi” 魏志 [Record of Wei] portion of the Sanguozhi 三國志 [Records of the Three Kingdoms]. In these examples, sinographs function like phonograms or phonetic loan characters (C. jiajie, J. kasha, K. kach’a 假借); that is, they are used solely for representing sounds without concern for their original meaning. For example, the character “我” (“I, me”), which contains the element “戈” (“hook,” “spear”), originally referred to a type of weapon, but since it happened to have the same pronunciation as the personal pronoun “I,” its use was extended to incorporate the meaning “I.” Ancient Chinese people, who proudly considered themselves the central bearers of civilization, were not particularly interested in the geographical and personal names of peripheral barbarians. This attitude is evident in their use of sinographs with negative connotations, such as “邪” (J. ya, “evil”) and “卑” (J. hi, “inferior”) to transcribe Yamatai and Himiko. However, as a result of the transmission of Buddhism this attitude changed, and the appropriate use of sinographs to transcribe foreign words phonetically became a problem of the utmost importance to the Chinese. It is clear that the transmission of Buddhism to China from its birthplace in India was essentially the only major cultural shock experienced by the Chinese before their encounter with Western European civilization in the modern period, and it exerted tremendous influence on all aspects of China in later periods. By the “transmission of Buddhism to China” we mean specifically the translation of sutras written in Indic languages like Sanskrit into Chinese. In China, as well as in Japan, Buddhist sutras are usually translations into Literary Sinitic. While Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras are accompanied by copious annotations in Literary Sinitic, they contain many traces of the translation process from the original Sanskrit. Clear examples of this are glosses that give Chinese equivalents for Sanskrit words, such as the note “梵云優婆 塞、此云清信男” (“What in Sanskrit is called ‘upāsaka’ is here called ‘a man with pure beliefs’”), found in the Renwang huguo bore jingshu 仁王護國般若經 疏 [Commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra for Humane Kings Who Wish to Protect their States], a work by Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597) of Sui, the founder of the Tiantai 天台 (J. Tendai) school of Buddhism.

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In this commentary, Sanskrit “upāsaka,” meaning “lay believer,” is first transcribed in sinographs (according to the same principle as Yamatai and Himiko noted above) as “優婆塞” (C. youposai, J. ubasoku), and then the Chinese translation is given as “清信男” (“man with pure beliefs”). In this case “此云” (“here it is said”) sometimes written as “此間云,” or with dynastic names such as “隋 云” (“in Sui it is said”) or “唐云” (“in Tang it is said”), means “here, such-andsuch is said,” where “here” refers to China. This method of glossing Buddhist sutras makes use of the Confucian kunko glossing method discussed above, but whereas the problem addressed with this method in the context of the Confucian classics was the explanation of ancient words using current language, the problem addressed with this method in the context of Buddhist sutras was translation from a foreign language into Chinese. Moreover, translation from Sanskrit into Chinese was initially thought of as a kind of annotation or glossing and sometimes referred to as kun 訓. For example, in Yudaolun 喻道論 [Discussion of Understanding the Way] in the third fascicle of the Hongmingji 弘明集 [Collection of Essays Magnifying the Light], the scholar Sun Chuo 孫綽 (314–371) of Jin says “佛者梵語、晋訓覺也.” That is, “佛 [transcription of “Buddha”] is a Sanskrit word, and its kun in Jin 晋 [China] is 覺 [realize; become aware; achieve enlightenment].” The notion behind this “晋訓” (“Jin kun”), applied in the Japanese context, becomes “和訓” (J. wakun, “Japanese kun”). The Asuka (552–710) and Nara (710–794) periods, when texts in sinographs were brought to Japan on a large scale, were ages of Buddhist efflorescence and the majority of texts introduced from China at this time were Buddhist sutras. Those Japanese, especially priests, who read the sutras during this time certainly knew about the realities of Sanskrit-to-Chinese translation. This meant that by reversing the process, they could arrive at the idea of Chinese-to-Japanese translation. The kundoku method of reading Literary Sinitic in Japanese started with the interpretation of sutras in Buddhist monasteries, and its direct origin was probably the translation from Sanskrit into Chinese found in Buddhist sutras. 2.2 “此云” in the Nihon shoki Concrete examples confirming this point can be found in the Nihon shoki 日本 書紀 [Chronicles of Japan] (720). The Nihon shoki is written in Literary Sinitic (although in a somewhat Japanese style), and it is the first Japanese historical chronicle. Within this work, many Literary Sinitic words appear with annotations specifying Japanese equivalents. For example, in the first fascicle, titled “The Age of the Gods” ( Jindai 神代), to “彦舅” is appended the gloss “此云比古 尼,” while “皇産霊” carries the gloss “此云美武須毗.” These annotations indicate that “彦舅” and “皇産霊” are read in Japanese as pikwoni (“man (honorific);

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prince”) and mi-musubi (“August Producing Deity”), respectively. Since at that time there were as yet no kana, Japanese words were transcribed in the socalled man’yōgana script using sinographs as phonograms, in the same manner as in China. These sort of annotations are referred to as kunchū 訓注 (gloss annotations), while the expression “此云” seems to be imitating the formula “梵云～、此云～” (“in Sanskrit it is said …, here it is said …”) used in Literary Sinitic translations of sutras. The only difference is that in sutras, “此” (“here; this”) refers to China, whereas in the Nihon shoki it refers to Japan. But in the case of the Nihon shoki, the Japanese words pikwoni and mi-musubi existed prior to their being translated into Chinese as “彦舅” and “皇産霊,” after which the phonetic transcriptions “比古尼” and “美武須毗” were added as glosses. This means that the formula “此云～,” which is the same as that found in the Buddhist sutras, was created as a kind of fiction in order to align the format of the Nihon shoki with that of other histories written in Literary Sinitic. The text of a sutra translated into Chinese is in Literary Sinitic, to be sure, and so the glosses added to its main text read “梵云～、此云～” (“in Sanskrit, it is called …, here it is called …”). However, since the text of the Nihon shoki is not in Japanese but in Literary Sinitic, there is no need to add the first half of the gloss, which in this case might read “漢云～” (“in Chinese it is said …”). Except for this one point, the glossing method of the Nihon shoki is very similar to the process used in Sanskrit-to-Chinese translations of sutras. It is thus possible to discern a conceptual chain: Sanskrit-to-Chinese-to-Japanese. The glossing formula “此云～” in the Nihon shoki has traditionally been read in Japanese as “kore oba hikoni to iu” 此をば比古尼と云う (“this is called hikoni [pikwoni]”) or “kore woba mi-musubi to iu” 此をば美武須毗と云う (“this is called mi-musubi”), and it is read this way in the Iwanami Nihon koten bungaku taikei edition, for example. According to this reading, “此” refers to “彦舅” or “皇産 霊” in the text, but this seems to me to be a misreading, as it goes against both the comparison with Buddhist sutras and the grammar of Literary Sinitic itself. The intent of the Nihon shoki compiler can be read in the way he switched the referent of “此” (“here”) from China to Japan while following the format found in Literary Sinitic translations of Buddhist sutras. Among Nara-period annotated editions of Buddhist texts, there are examples of Chinese words glossed with man’yōgana. For instance, in the Nara period edition of the Daihannyakyō ongi 大般若經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra] held by Ishiyamadera Temple 石山寺, there is an annotation which reads “眼睛、倭言麻那古” (“眼睛 [“eye”]: in Japan [Wa] one says manakwo”) (Tsukishima 1978). At that time, this method was probably widely used in Buddhist circles.

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Incidentally, the above-mentioned “比古尼” (pikwoni) resembles the words “比丘” (biku) and “比丘尼” (bikuni), meaning “Buddhist monk” and “Buddhist nun,” respectively, and perhaps these characters were chosen by those who were conscious of this similarity. Moreover, “比丘” and “比丘尼” are originally transcriptions of the Sanskrit words “bhikṣu” and “bhikṣuṇī” meaning “beggar” and “beggar woman,” respectively. It does not seem accidental that the characters “丘” (qiu) of Confucius’ name and “尼” of his courtesy name, Zhongni 仲 尼, were used to transliterate these Sanskrit words into Chinese. In contrast to the ancient period, when characters with pejorative meanings were intentionally used for foreign place and personal names, this example indicates that Buddhism was considered as important as Confucianism. 2.3 How Buddhist Sutras Were Translated into Chinese I discussed above word-level translation, but translation, of course, does not stop at the level of words. After translating individual words, it is necessary to rearrange them so that they fit into the grammatical system of the target language. How was this done in the process of translating Sanskrit sutras into Chinese?5 Usually, Literary Sinitic translations of Buddhist sutras are prefixed with the names of the individual translators, such as “鳩摩羅什譯” “translation by Kumārajīva” (344–413) or “玄奘譯” “translation by Xuanzang” (602–664), but in actuality the work of translation was in many cases done not by individuals, but by dividing the work among a group. The translation of Buddhist sutras into Chinese began in the second century ce when Buddhism first entered China, and continued for nearly a millennium. The method was not uniform and varied depending on time period and circumstances. Here I will introduce, as the most typical and complete form of the method, the protocol for translating the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra (J. Hannya shingyō 般若心經) [Heart Sūtra], as conducted by a group headed by the Indian monk Devaśāntika (C. Tianxizai, J. Tensokusai 天息災) at the Buddhist Scriptures Translation Bureau located in the Northern Song (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng, beginning in the seventh year of the Taiping xingguo era (982 ce) (Zhipan 1991, fascicle 43). Many monks and government officials gathered at the Sutra Translation Hall and carried out the work of translating according to the following system of teamwork: 1) The Translation Master (yizhu 譯主) recites the original Sanskrit text. In this case, it was done by the Indian monk Tianxizai 天息災; 5 The description follows Funayama (2010).

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2)

The Verifier of Meanings (zhengyi 証義) sits to the left of the Translation Master and discusses with him the semantic content of the Sanskrit text; The Verifier of the Text (zhengwen 証文) sits to the right of the Translation Master and checks that there are no errors in the Sanskrit text as recited by the Translation Master; The Sanskrit Studies Monk ( fanxueseng 梵學僧) tasked with writing sinographs (shuzi 書字) transcribes in sinographs the Sanskrit text as recited by the Translation Master. This corresponds to the “梵云～” (“in Sanskrit it is said …”) part of the formula “梵云～、此云～” (“in Sanskrit it is said  …, here it is said  …”) discussed above. For example, Sanskrit “hṛdaya” is transcribed as “紇哩第野” (helidiye) and Sanskrit “sūtra” as “素 怛羅” (sudaluo). In the texts of the sutras, one can also find parts written only in Chinese transcriptions of Sanskrit (i.e., without an accompanying Literary Sinitic translation), in contexts such as dhāraṇī (ritual incantations) and fanbai 梵唄 (Sanskrit hymns); The Holder of the Brush (bishou 筆受) translates the sinographic transcription of the original Sanskrit into Chinese. “紇哩第野” becomes “心” (“heart”), “素怛羅” becomes “經” (“sutra”), and together they form “心經” (“Heart Sutra”); The Linker of Text (zhuiwen 綴文) adjusts the order of the words translated into Chinese by the Holder of the Brush in accordance with Chinese grammar, thus making a Literary Sinitic text; The Comparer of Translations (canyi 參譯) checks for correspondence between the Sanskrit text and the Literary Sinitic translation, and corrects any errors; The Correcter of the Text (kanding 刊定) excises verbose parts of the translated Literary Sinitic text. This is done because concision is valued in Literary Sinitic, while Sanskrit texts tend to have detailed and longwinded expressions; The official Text Embellisher (runwenguan 潤文官) examines whether the expressions of the translated text are proper in Literary Sinitic, and makes appropriate embellishments. In the passage “照見五蘊皆空、 度一 切苦厄” (“He [Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara] illuminated the Five Skandhas and saw that they were all empty, and he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty”) from the Heart Sūtra, the clause “度一切苦厄” (“he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty”) is not found in the original text, but was added at this stage. While the first eight roles were generally assigned to monks, this final role was the responsibility of the Text Embellisher (runwenguan 潤文官).6

3) 4)

5)

6) 7) 8)

9)

6 This section relies on Funayama (2013: 59).

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The above procedure was conducted as a kind of ceremonial protocol. In practice, however, it was not so complicated and there are accounts of monks translating sutras in ancient times by holding the Sanskrit text in hand, reading out the Sanskrit and providing a Chinese translation orally, skipping steps 2, 3, and 4. However, the sutra translation projects of Xuanzang (602– 664) and others in the Tang period were conducted for the most part according to the teamwork system outlined above, with some simplifications. 2.4 Awareness of Difference between Sanskrit and Chinese What catches our attention first in the sutra translation procedure is the transription of the Sanskrit pronunciation in sinographs by the Sanskrit Studies Monk (step 4). From the standpoint of modern common sense, this may seem at first glance to be a superfluous step. In order to translate the English word “book” into Japanese “本” (hon), there is no need to go through the step of first transcribing its pronunciation phonetically as bukku. While such transcription makes sense in the case of something like “陀羅尼” dhāraṇī, which would remain in transliterated form, if in the end the text will be translated into Chinese, it seems useless to record the original Sanskrit pronunciation in sinographs beforehand, and therefore this step was probably often omitted. In many cases, however, it was done, so this act of transcription must have been meaningful in some way. In any case, the very fact that Sanskrit sounds were being transcribed in sinographs prior to translation into Literary Sinitic means that there must have been a largely standardized set of sinographs for each syllable of Sanskrit. Otherwise, it would not have been possible to transliterate quickly. Next, the Holder of the Brush would translate the transliterated Sanskrit into Chinese (step 5), and in this case polysyllabic Sanskrit words usually became monosyllabic Chinese words, such as “紇哩第野” (Skt. hṛdaya, C. helidiye) becoming “心” (C. xin, “heart”) and “素怛羅” (Skt. sūtra, C. sudaluo) becoming “經” (C. jīng, “sutra”). “心” and “經” have meanings in Chinese, but the sinographs in “紇哩第野” and “素怛羅” simply indicate pronunciation and have no meaning (i.e., whatever meanings they might otherwise be associated with are here irrelevant). The meaning is produced only when multiple sinographs (syllables) are assembled together. This is because Chinese uses “ideographic” sinographs and individual syllables typically carry meaning, whereas Sanskrit is polysyllabic and uses phonetic writing. Chinese people were aware from early on of the differences between the two languages and their writing systems. In the Huhan yijing yinyi tongyiji 胡漢 譯經音義同異記 [Record of Similarities and Differences in Pronunciation and Meaning among the Chinese Translations of Sutras from the Hu Languages], part of the Chusanzang jiji 出三蔵記集 [Collection of Records on the

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Emanation of the Chinese Tripiṭaka], Seng You 僧佑 (445–518) of the Liang dynasty says the following: In the Hu [Sanskrit] language, there are both monosyllabic and polysyllabic words; sometimes one syllable carries multiple meanings, sometimes several syllables convey one meaning. If we look at the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (C. Da banniepan jing 大般涅槃經) [Nirvāṇa Sūtra], for instance, there are fifty syllables arranged in a row, and all carrying multiple meanings; fourteen of them are called “basic letters” [vowels]. When one hears the language pronounced, these sounds [consonants and vowels] are used together in a smooth-flowing way, produced at the root of the tongue and lips, differing in length. Moreover, a single sound of a Hu letter cannot make a word. Phrases must be completed by adding words [inflectional endings], and only after this is meaning created. How could it not be difficult for translators to convey meaning?7 The expression “Hu language” can refer to various foreign languages spoken in the region of the Silk Road, but in this case it refers to Sanskrit. The sequence “列字五十” (“fifty syllables arranged in a row”) refers to the Sanskrit consonant and vowel letters, and “十有四音” (“fourteen sounds”) to just the vowels among them, while “宛轉相資” (“used together in a smooth-flowing way”) indexes the formation of syllables by combining consonants and vowels, and “餘言足句” (“complete phrases by adding words”) refers to verbal inflections and other grammatical elements. It is thus shown how difficult it is to translate Sanskrit, a language with properties and a writing system that are completely different from Chinese. Sanskrit was a completely different language for the Chinese, but for ancient Japanese speakers, the polysyllabic Sanskrit language with its inflectional endings probably seemed similar to Japanese. It may be for this reason that the Japanese arrived at the idea of transcribing Japanese with sinographs in the same way as the Chinese had earlier transliterated Sanskrit, as seen in the gloss formula “此云～” (“here [in Japan] it is said …”) in the Nihon shoki. In addition, translating Chinese translations of Sanskrit texts into Japanese, a language very 7 The discussion of Compilation of Notes on the Translation of the Tripiṭaka follows Kōzen Hiroshi (1982). For the influence of Indic scripts on China, see Funayama Tōru (2009). The original text reads: 至於胡音。爲語單複無恒。或一字以攝眾理。或數言而成一義。   尋大涅槃經列字五十。總釋眾義十有四音。名爲字本。觀其發語裁音。宛轉相資。   或舌根脣末。以長短爲異。且胡字一音不得成語。必餘言足句。然後義成。譯人傳 意豈不艱哉。Cited from http://www.buddhist-canon.com/REF/misc/T550004b.htm.

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similar to Sanskrit, also likely gave the impression that Japanese and Sanskrit were in a correspondence relationship with Chinese as the intermediary. It is likely that this relationship became a powerful basis legitimizing vernacular Japanese kun readings of sinographs. In the mid-Heian period Literary Sinitic-Japanese dictionary, Wamyōruijūshō 倭名類聚抄 [Japanese Names (for Things) Classified and Annotated] (938), the kun readings of characters are recorded in man’yōgana. In his preface to this work, the compiler Minamoto no Shitagō 源順 (911–983) writes, “A sinograph’s phonographic usage expresses the sound and not the [meaning of] that character. Sanskrit in Buddhist sutras is also like this. [Japanese kun readings are] sometimes based on this.” This passage observes that the use of phonetic loan characters (C. jiajie, J. kasha, K. kach’a 假借) and the adaptation of such graphs for transliterating Sanskrit was the foundation for Japanese kun readings. As for the “fifty letters arranged in a row” (列字五十)—that is, the Sanskrit alphabet—this expression refers specifically to the Siddhaṃātṛkā (“perfected script”; usually rendered in English as just Siddhaṃ) letters derived from the Indian Brahmi script. In China this was translated as xitan 悉曇 (J. shittan, K. siltam) and each of its letters was paired with a specific sinograph, for example, 阿 (a), 伊 (i), 憂 (u), 曀 (e), 烏 (o).8 This was likely done to simplify the transcription of Sanskrit with sinographs. Studies on the Siddhaṃ script were transmitted to Japan in the Nara period, and later, research on it would develop in Japan to a greater extent than even in China. The concept of kana, that is, of writing Japanese syllables with several specific sinographs, as well as the gojūon (“fifty sounds”) table of kana, came into existence under the influence of such Siddhaṃ research. It is certainly not accidental that kana, especially katakana, were first used in kundoku reading of Buddhist sutras written in Literary Sinitic. 2.5 “Rearranged Text” (廻文) and the Beginnings of kundoku After transcribing the individual Sanskrit words in sinographs and then translating them into Chinese, the Linker of Text changed the order of these Chinese words to make them fit Chinese grammar (step 6). The language of Indian Buddhist texts (Sanskrit) belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, along with Ancient Greek and Latin, and since the grammatical function of words, such as subject or object, is clearly expressed by their morphology, word order is not very important. Languages of this kind are called inflectional languages, and differ from the isolating and agglutinating languages mentioned 8 See the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra 大般涅槃經, fascicle 8, “Section on the Qualities of Buddha” 如来性品.

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above. However, while word order in Sanskrit is free, objects are usually placed before verbs—the opposite of Chinese word order. Apparently, this issue attracted the attention of the Chinese from early on. For instance, in the fifth fascicle of the Yuanjue jing lüeshuchao 圓覺經略疏 鈔 [Abridged Commentary on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment] (824) by the Tang period priest Guifeng Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (780–841), we find the following passage: “Languages of the western region are inverted and so they say ‘鐘打’ [“bell + strike = strike a bell”], ‘飯喫’ [“food + eat = eat food”], ‘酒飲’ [“wine + drink = drink wine”], and ‘經讀’ [“sutra + read = read a sutra”].” These phrases in Chinese would be “打鐘,” “喫飯,” “飲酒,” and “讀經,” respectively. Similar comments often appear in the annotations to Buddhist sutras, because of course, the difference in word order was also a problem in the process of rearranging words during the sutra translation work. In addition, Kong Yingda’s point about the inverted word order of ancient Chinese, found in his annotation to the Book of Documents (quoted above), may have been the result of an awareness of the difference in word order between Sanskrit and Chinese. During the translation process, the rearranging of the translated Sanskrit words to fit Chinese word order was at the time called huiwen 廻文, “rearranging the text.” For example, in the first fascicle on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (C. Da bore boluomiduo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經) [Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra] in the Yiqie jing yinyi 一切經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of (all the words in) the Buddhist Canon], a hundred-volume dictionary of Buddhist terms compiled by Huilin 慧琳 (737–820), there is the following passage: “播囉弭多、唐 言彼岸到、今迴文云到彼岸 [pāramitā: in Tang language this is 彼岸到, and if we rearrange the text this is 到彼岸].” Here, “播囉弭多” is the same as “波 羅蜜多” and is a transcription of the Sanskrit word pāramitā in sinographs. The pāram of pāramitā is “彼岸” (“the other shore”) and -itā is the feminine past participle form of “arrive, reach” meaning “having reached” (there are also other explanations). The passage states that a literal Chinese (Tang language) translation yields “彼岸到” (lit. “yon-shore-reach”) and upon rearranging (huiwen 廻文) it to fit Chinese word order, it becomes “到彼岸” (“having reached/ reaching the other shore”). Conceptually speaking, this “rearranging of the text” is no different from changing the order of Literary Sinitic words into Japanese word order in Japanese kundoku. That is, the Sanskrit {object + verb} word order becomes {verb + object} in Chinese translation and then reverts to {object + verb} order in Japanese. Japanese is similar to Sanskrit not only because it is a polysyllabic language, as mentioned above, but also because it has a similar basic word order with respect to object and verb. Here again, it is possible to see a correspondence between Sanskrit and Japanese, with Chinese serving as an intermediary.

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The Close Relationship between Japanese kundoku and Literary Sinitic Sutra Translations In Japan itself, original Sanskrit sutras were never translated, but we can assume that the details of the circumstances of Sanskrit-to-Chinese sutra translation and the linguistic nature of Sanskrit were largely known from accounts about Chinese translation methods recorded in annotations to Buddhist sutras, from scholar-monks accompanying Japanese envoys to Sui and Tang China, and from Chinese and Indian monks arriving in Japan. For example, the monks Chitsū 智通 and Chitatsu 智達, who went to Tang China in 658, received teachings directly from Xuanzang (Nihon shoki Saimei 4.7). In addition, the Indian monk Bodhi (J. Bodai 菩提), who was the officiating priest at the consecrating ceremony for the Great Buddha of the Tōdaiji Temple, brought with him one hundred palm leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit, and Buttetsu 佛徹, a monk from Linyi (Champa, in modern-day southern Vietnam), who came to Japan together with Bodai, brought a shittanshō 悉 曇章 (“table of Siddhaṃ script”). At Hōryūji Temple, there is also a palm leaf manuscript with a Sanskrit inscription that was brought in the eighth century. Moreover, as will be discussed later, during that time there were monks from Silla (on the Korean Peninsula) who had actually participated in sutra translation work in China, and it is therefore possible that information about sutra translation came to Japan through Silla as well. Until recently, Literary Sinitic vernacular reading practices (kundoku) were thought to have been originally invented in Japan, but it has become clear, following our discussion, that their development was closely linked with the process of translating Buddhist sutras into Chinese. This point has been completely overlooked in the research to date on kundoku. In the reception of Chinese culture, primarily Confucianism, China had absolute authority, but in the case of Buddhism, with its origins in India, the position of China was relativized. This relativization of Chinese culture, and especially the perception of Japanese and Sanskrit as similar languages (however much this may have been a misunderstanding, given that the inflectional Indic languages and agglutinating Japanese belong to completely different language families and have different linguistic typologies), were the driving forces behind the creation of the kundoku “vernacular reading” concept, i.e., reading Literary Sinitic through Japanese. Next, I would like to examine further the relationship between kundoku and the development of this perception in later ages. 2.6

Why Is It Possible to Translate Buddhist Sutras? Three Brothers Who Invented Scripts Why did the Chinese translate Buddhist sutras from the Sanskrit at all, instead of just reading them in the original language? This may seem like a foolish 2.7

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question, but actually it is not. The Qur’an is still in Arabic and translations of it are not even allowed in Islam. The Christian Bible was translated from ancient Hebrew into Greek, and from Greek into Latin, and in this aspect it is similar to the Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras; however, until Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, only the Latin Bible was considered legitimate. Moreover, apocrypha and forged texts were rigorously excluded from the Bible, which contains only those canonical books recognized by the early Church. The Buddhist canon, on the other hand, absorbed many of the forged texts produced at a later time in China, ultimately becoming one vast corpus of Buddhist sutras. The only explanation for this is the idea that the Bible and the Qur’an are the words of God, which must be transmitted exclusively in a sacred language; further, any words that are not divine in origin must be excluded. So why, then, was the translation of the Buddha’s words possible, and, moreover, why was it that even fabrications thereof were tolerated? First of all, the idea that the Buddha preaches in all languages formed the larger context for this attitude. As stated in fascicle 41 of the Literary Sinitic translation of the Abhidharma mahāvibhāṣa śāstra (C. Apitan piposha lun 阿毘 曇毘婆沙論) [Great Commentary on the Abhidharma] (437): Buddha’s teachings, although spoken in Sanskrit, reveal various meanings. If there were a Chinese person (真丹人) in the gathering, he would say that Buddha preaches for him in Chinese (真丹語). If there was a Shakya 釋迦 person, or people from Yamuna 夜摩那 [or Jumna], Dharadha 陀羅陀 [Nalanda?], Malasha 摩羅娑 [not identified], Kashgar 佉沙 [Kucha], or Tukhara 兜佉羅 [Tocharia] in the gathering, each would think that Buddha preaches only for him in his language.9 “Buddha’s teachings” are here rendered as “一音” (J. itton, “one sound; same voice”), which refers to the idea that while his words were originally Sanskrit, each of the listeners would hear his preaching in the language of their various home countries. Note that China is rendered as “真丹” (J. shintan) and the Chinese language as “真丹語” (J. shintango). Moreover, the “Section on Script” in the Nirvāṇa Sūtra takes the following view on the words of the Buddha: “all kinds of opinions, incantations, languages, and scripts are considered Buddhist teachings; they are not non-Buddhist 9 The original text reads: 一音者謂梵音。現種種義者。若會中有真丹人者。謂佛以 真丹語。為我說法。如有釋迦人夜摩那人陀羅陀人摩羅娑人佉沙人兜佉羅人。   如是等人。在會中者。彼各各作是念。佛以我等語。獨為我說法。Cited from http:// buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/BDLM/sutra/chi_pdf/sutra12/T28n1546.pdf.

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heretical teachings.” That is, all statements, including all the differing opinions found in the world, are Buddhist teachings, and these are expressed in all the various languages and scripts of the world. In the above-mentioned Huhan yijing yinyi tongyiji 胡漢譯經音義同異記 [Record of Similarities and Differences in Pronunciation and Meaning among the Chinese Translations of Sutras from the Hu Languages], Seng You, after quoting the above passage from the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, says: Therefore, originally words are the same, but the Sanskrit (Hu) and Chinese (Han) languages differ in sound. Although the meaning is nondual, the nature, text, and style of these languages differ. While things are lost during translation and transmission proceeds by chance, the subtle meanings of sacred sutras will always shine through in full.10 That is, although Sanskrit and Chinese differ in pronunciation and written form, their true meaning is the same, and therefore the subtle meanings of the sutras are not lost due to the unpredictable nature of translation and circulation. The same Huhan yijing yinyi tongyiji also contains an interesting story specifically about scripts: In the past, there were three masters of writing. The name of the eldest was Fan 梵, who wrote in lines going from left to right. The next one was called Qulou 佉楼, who wrote in lines going from right to left. The youngest one was Cangjie 蒼頡, who wrote in lines going from top to bottom. Fan and Qulou were in India, and Cangjie was a chronicler in Middle Xia (中夏). Fan and Qulou took their method from the pure sky, while Cangjie relied on bird tracks for his pattern (華). Although their written texts are truly different, they nonetheless convey meaning in the same way.11 Fan 梵 is 梵天 (C. Fantian), that is, the Indian god Brahma. The script he created, “Sanskrit writing” (J. bonji 梵字 = “Brahman script,” but usually referring to Siddhaṃ script in Japan), is written horizontally from left to right. The second, 10 The original reads: 然則言本是一。而胡漢分音。義本不二。則質文殊體。雖傳 譯得失運通隨緣。而尊經妙理湛然常照矣。Cited from http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/ mobile/index.php?index=T55n2145_001. 11 The original reads: 昔造書之主凡有三人。長名曰梵。其書右行。次曰佉樓。其書 左行。少者蒼頡。其書下行。梵及佉樓居于天竺。黃史蒼頡在於中夏。梵佉取 法於淨天。蒼頡因華於鳥跡。文畫誠異。傳理則同矣。Cited from http://tripitaka .cbeta.org/mobile/index.php?index=T55n2145_001.

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Figure 2

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Kharoṣṭhī script

Qulou 佉楼, is the Indian ascetic Kharoṣṭhī, whose writing is the Kharoṣṭhī script used in ancient India and Central Asia. Kharoṣṭhī is written horizontally from right to left, the opposite of Sanskrit, but similar to Arabic or Persian (Fig. 2 above). The last is Cangjie 蒼頡, a subject of China’s legendary Yellow Emperor, who is said to have created sinographs after seeing the footprints of birds in the mud. Sinographs are written vertically, from top to bottom. Sometime later than Seng You’s time, in the Wuyiwude dasheng silun xuanyiji 無依無得大乗 四論玄義記 [Profound Meaning of the Four Mahāyāna Treatises], a work by Huijun 慧均 (fl. late sixth century) found in the Japanese Tendai monk Annen’s Shittanzō 悉曇蔵 [Treasury of Siddhaṃ] (880), these three are brothers. In other words, even if the three types of script created by these three brothers differ in form, structure, and manner of writing, they are alike in conveying the Buddha’s truth. Herein lies the reason why it was possible to translate Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese. 2.8 Kundoku and Precision in Translation And yet, the question of whether a foreign language translation can correctly convey the meaning of the original is, so to speak, an eternal question that remains unanswered even until now, and the monks who translated Buddhist texts into Chinese could not ignore it. What they devised was a group-based division of labor system aimed at producing the most precise and objective translation possible. Accordingly, even the seemingly useless task of transcribing the whole of the Sanskrit text into phonographically deployed sinographs was seen as one of the processes indispensable for accurate translation. Moreover, the process of going through the orderly step-by-step protocol for making a literal translation of Sanskrit and then polishing its style guaranteed accuracy. Thus, together with the conviction that translation is fundamentally

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possible, the belief that translation must nonethetheless undergo a strict process for the sake of accuracy guided the Chinese translation of Buddhist texts. The fact that no original Sanskrit texts remain in China, even though numerous Sanskrit Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, perhaps indicates how confident the translators were in the accuracy of their translations. Much the same can be said of kundoku “vernacular reading” techniques. If the Buddha’s teachings can be related in all languages, Japanese was no exception. For the translations themselves, however, a precise method must be used. Since the sutras with which Japanese readers came into contact were not the original Sanskrit sutras from India but Chinese translations thereof, a different but equally precise methodology was called for: rendering literal translations of all the sinographs one by one, and then rearranging them to fit Japanese grammar. This is what is known as kundoku “vernacular reading.” 3

The Ideological Context of kundoku

From the Debate about the Common Ancestry of Sanskrit and Chinese to the Theory of Sanskrit and Japanese Being Identical The transition from Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts to kundoku renditions of Chinese translations of Buddhist texts was linked with the specifically Japanese view of the world consisting of three countries (India, China, Japan), and thus contributed to further expansion of the Chinese debate about the common ancestry of Sanskrit and Chinese; this in turn led to the development of the concept that Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese were actually one and the same. Omitting the details of these developments, here I merely point out that this view emerged from within Siddhaṃ Studies. In his book Shittan yōketsu 悉曇要訣 [Main Points of Siddhaṃ] (ca. 1101), the late Heian period Tendai priest Myōgaku 明覺 (1056–1106), in discussing a gojūon “fifty sounds” syllabary table where he matched Sanskrit script with Japanese kana, writes “in the languages of the three courts [of India, China, Japan], not a single language has ever exceeded these fifty letters,”12 thus describing the languages of the three countries as one and the same. This idea was further developed by Jien 慈圓 (1155–1215), a famous Tendai monk and poet of the early Kamakura period (1185–1333) (Itō 2001). In his discussion of poetic theory in his poetry collection Shūgyokushū 拾玉集 [Collection of Gleaned Gems], Jien affirms the practice of reading Literary Sinitic via kundoku: “Although both the content of Confucius’ teachings and 3.1

12 The original reads: 三朝之言，一言未出於此五十字矣。 Cited from Taishō 84, no. 2706 (Zokushoshūbu 15 shittanbu 續諸宗部十五 悉曇部全), fascicle 2, 530.

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the manner in which they are composed are remarkable, one does not come to know their essence without the Yamato language.” He then points out the affinity between Sanskrit and Japanese, stating, “Sanskrit, on the other hand, is close to and similar to the Yamato language,” and argues that Japanese waka poetry is consistent with Buddhist doctrines, writing, “It is only through the way of poetry that one can also realize the way of Buddha.”13 These ideas of Jien later led to the conception of new theories, such as the notion that waka are the same as Buddhist dharani incantations, presented by Mujū Dōkyō 無 住道曉 (1226–1312) in his Shasekishū 沙石集 [Collection of Sand and Pebbles] (1283), or the claim that Sanskrit was the language of Japan during the mythical Age of the Gods, as argued by Shōgei 聖冏 (1341–1420) in his Kokinjochū 古今 序註 [Notes on the Kokinshū Preface]. It is not clear to what extent these theories on the identicality of Sanskrit and Japanese are grounded in the concrete typological similarities mentioned above, but it seems certain that they were somehow an extrapolation based on these similarities. 3.2 The Theory of honji suijaku and kundoku The theory of honji suijaku 本地垂迹 is among those closely connected to the idea of Sanskrit and Japanese being identical languages. According to the theory of honji suijaku, the Japanese Shinto gods are manifestations of Indian buddhas and bodhisattvas. For example, the true form (honji) of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami is the Dainichi Nyorai Buddha (Vairocana). Later, some Shinto clergy opposed this idea and advocated an anti-honji suijaku theory, claiming instead that the reverse was true, that is, that the original forms of buddhas and bodhisattvas are in fact the Japanese gods. In combination, these two theories allowed for the syncretic fusion of Shintoism and Buddhism and the identification of Shinto gods with buddhas, and greatly influenced Japanese religious views. The origins of these ideas are likely to be found in the theory created in the context of conflict between Buddhism and Chinese Daoism—that is, the claim that the founder of Daoism, Laozi 老子, went to India and became the Buddha, or, for that matter, in the opposing theory, according to which Indian bodhisattvas went to China to become Laozi and Confucius. Incidentally, another controversy over whether India or China was the center of the world lay in the background of this Buddhist and Daoist dispute over who came first.14 Needless to say, China was home to the so-called sinocentric 13 Cited from Taga (1971: 607–608). 14 See chapter 12, “Chūdo hendo no ronsō” (The Debate over Center and Periphery) in Yoshikawa (1984).

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worldview, in which they saw themselves as the center of the world, and styled themselves the Middle Kingdom 中國. The Buddhists, however, claimed that India was the center of the world—the middle land—and that China was a peripheral country. This controversy over center and periphery continued from the Six Dynasties period (ca. 220–589 ce) until the Tang period and had a profound influence on the worldview of the Chinese. It is probable that the main tenets of these ideologies were transmitted to Japan. The theories of honji suijaku and Sanskrit and Japanese being identical may have been an outgrowth of them. Seen from a different angle, these theories are nothing more than attempts to raise the status of and legitimize Japanese language and the existence of Japanese gods (kami) by borrowing the authority of both the Buddha and of Buddhist language and writing (Sanskrit). Here, one can catch a glimpse of a latent sense of rivalry with China. This attitude can be explained by the fact that, in contrast to China, a major power with which there were actual relations, India was a far-away place with which no real relations could be imagined. In the epilogue to the Monjū hyakushu 文集百首 [One Hundred Poems from Bai Juyi’s Collected Works], a work in which Jien, together with Fujiwara no Teika 藤原定家 (1162–1241), composed Japanese waka on the Chinese poems found in Baishi wenji 白氏文集 [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846)—a mid-Tang poet who greatly influenced Japanese literature— Jien, who had developed the theory of Sanskrit and Japanese being identical, considers Bai Juyi to be a reincarnation of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom and intellect. Then, in the following poem, he depicts the winds of Chinese culture, represented by Chinese poetry, as being opposed by waves of Japanese waka: から國や、

ことのは風の吹きくれば、

karakuni ya, koto no ha kaze no fukikureba, よせてぞ返す和歌のうら波

yosete zo kaesu waka no uranami “A wind of words blows across from Cathay; in response, I send back waves of waka.”15 The mindset that consisted of attempting to oppose China by borrowing the authority of India was also a part of the thinking behind reading Literary Sinitic via kundoku. As discussed above, it is possible to say that kundoku is a method of translating Chinese into Japanese grounded in the alleged identical 15

English translation cited from Clements (2015: 103).

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nature of Sanskrit and Japanese. From the middle of the Heian period onward, when theories of honji suijaku and the identity of Sanskrit and Japanese flourished, kundoku reading practice was extended from Buddhist texts to all Literary Sinitic texts. Further, its system of signs grew more precise, and with its application to entire texts, it acquired an importance far exceeding that of a mere supplementary method for reading comprehension of Literary Sinitic texts. One of the reasons for the expansion of kundoku reading methods in this period was probably a decline in the ability to read Literary Sinitic texts directly without kundoku, and in addition to this, there was also the influence of the above-mentioned changes in thinking related to language and religion. Thus, kundoku became more than just a mere expedient in translation and came to be regarded as a style of written Japanese language that could claim a status on par with original texts in Literary Sinitic. That present-day Japanese speakers can read the Analects of Confucius by means of kundoku and feel they have understood it is the result of a history like the one sketched out above. But the sort of system of kundoku that Japanese people use nowadays to read the Analects did not exist from the start. Kundoku underwent great historical changes and developments that correspond to changes in intellectual history. Next, I will trace in detail the history of changes in kundoku reading methods from the ancient period to modern times, dividing them into four time periods: the initial stage, the period of maturity, the period of new developments, and the Meiji period onward. 4

The Initial Stage of kundoku: From the Early Nara to the Mid-Heian Periods

4.1 Reading and Writing: kundoku before the Use of Notations It is generally thought that kundoku began in the period from the eighth century (late Nara period) to the early ninth century (early Heian period). What this means, however, is simply that reading by kundoku during this period can be confirmed, because kundoku notations and kana are attested in extant texts from this period. But how were Literary Sinitic texts read before this period? Since there were no audio recordings back then it is impossible to know for sure, but it is usually said that Literary Sinitic texts were read via the Sino-Japanese on readings of sinographs in their original Chinese word order (J. chokudoku, K. chiktok 直讀); that is, in basically the same way as they were read by Chinese readers. This seems reasonable enough, but by the same token it is difficult to accept that at a certain time, kundoku methods with full-blown notations just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. There must have been a

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prior stage—a time when texts were read by kundoku but without the benefit of written notations. The possibility of reading sinographic words via vernacular kun glosses can be inferred from the use of man’yōgana, especially from the use of words with vernacular kun readings in waka poems by Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人 (665– 731) and Yamanoue no Okura 山上憶良 (ca. 660–ca. 733), or from the existence of so-called ongi mokkan 音義木簡, inscribed wooden strips which feature kun readings for sinographs transcribed in man’yōgana. The question with materials like these is whether these texts were read by rearranging the word order to match Japanese, but there is indirect evidence for this, too. At that time, to “read books” could only mean “read books in Literary Sinitic,” including the Buddhist sutras. Such books were all treasured items brought back from China, and as numerous as they were, to compound matters, individual works were also made up of multiple fascicles. Moreover, since this was before printing technology, in order to read a book one had first to copy it by hand. That is, “reading a book” was synonymous with “copying a book.” In the process of hand-copying, some errors are to be expected, and there is a possibility for certain types of errors to occur if the copyist is reading the original via kundoku. In the collection of the Shōsōin 正倉院, the treasure repository connected to Tōdaiji Temple 東大寺 in Nara, Japan, there is a manuscript of the Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家立成雑書要略 (J. Toka rissei zassho yōryaku) [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] in the hand of Empress Kōmyō 光明 (701–760). It is an early Tang period collection of exemplary texts for epistolary practice showing what kinds of letters should be written for different occasions. For example, first it shows a “Letter of invitation to an acquaintance to drink together on a cold, snowy day” (雪寒喚知故飲書). Since it is unlikely that the empress herself sent such letters, she likely copied the text to serve as a calligraphic example (Fig. 4). About twenty years ago, at the Kawabashi Nara-period archaeological site in Tagajō City, Miyagi prefecture, a mokkan (wooden strip) was discovered with an inscription copied from this same Synopsis of Diverse Letters (Fig. 3). It was presumably written by an official dispatched to this frontier outpost. Notably, the mokkan transcription of the letter title given above is “雪寒呼 知故酒飲書.” Comparing the two texts we notice two interesting facts. First, in place of “喚” from the Shōsōin version of the text the mokkan transcription has “呼.” Both characters are read in vernacular Japanese as yobu (“call”), but since in this case one does not “call directly by voice,” but “invites by letter,” the correct character is indeed “喚.” The fact that it appears as “呼” is due to a transcription error, whether on the part of the person copying the text onto

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Figure 3

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Mokkan with passage from Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe,… discovered in Tagajō City, Miyagi prefecture

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

Figure 4

Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家立成雑書要略 (J. Toka rissei zassho yōryaku) [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] Shōsōin 正倉院 collection ms., 8th c.

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the mokkan, or in an original manuscript text used as the source for the mokkan. This error suggests that these two sinographs shared the vernacular kun gloss yobu. Second, “飲” appears as “酒飲” on the mokkan, but the character “酒” is unnecessary, because in Literary Sinitic the character “飲” (“drink”) in this case implies “飲酒” (“drink liquor”). The writer of the mokkan, however, probably thought that “飲” by itself was ambiguous, or that the original sample had mistakenly omitted a sinograph. Therefore, he supplemented the character “酒” (“liquor”), but wrote “酒飲” in Japanese {object + verb} word order, instead of “飲酒,” which would be correct Chinese {verb + object} word order. In other words, this scribe was thinking in Japanese word order. This evidence suggests that the scribe who copied this excerpt onto the mokkan or the copier of a source text had been reading the original work via kundoku. Incidentally, the Synopsis of Diverse Letters is no longer extant in China, and has only survived in Japan. Sinographic Numerals Indicating Reading Order: Word-Order Notations If we say that Literary Sinitic was being read in this way, that is, by converting the original Chinese word order into Japanese word order, the addition of some notations for this purpose would probably be convenient. This is the reason that explicit kundoku markings became necessary. Kundoku notations can be classified broadly as signs that make use of sinographs and those that adapt punctuation marks and other symbols. I summarize them briefly below.16 One of the oldest extant texts with kundoku notations is the Nara-period manuscript copy of the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記 (J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra], which is in the possession of the Daitōkyū kinen bunko 大東急記念文庫. The Tang dynasty monk Huiyuan 慧苑 (J. Eon, 673?–743?) wrote this commentary on the Flower Garland Sūtra, of which only fifteen sheets of the “Section on Illuminating the Teachings” (J. Myōhōhin 明法品) from the fifth fascicle remain out of an original eighty fascicles. In various places in the text there are corrections of sinographs along with symbols such as punctuation marks written in black ink, in white (written in whitewash), in red cinnabar, or impressed with a stylus.17 Among these 4.2

16

The following description is based mainly on Kasuga (1956), Kobayashi (1974), and Ōtsubo (1961), notably the chapter, “Kaeriten no hattatsu” [Development of the Inversion Mark]. 17 J. kakuhitsu 角筆 (K. kakp’il), i.e., marks written without ink by impressing the paper with a sharp pen-shaped instrument made of bamboo, bone, ivory, etc.

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Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

are marks related to kundoku.18 Based on information found in the postscript, these marks are thought to have been made some time between 783–788, in the late Nara period. An example of the type of kundoku notation seen in this text can be found in Figure 5. A word-processed transcription of this (with the notations from the righthand side of either line of text rendered in superscript) would look like this: 按前問中有三句・ 今此答中品有両句・ 由五束ヽヽ 問中初二句ヽ 爲四一 句ヽヽヽ 故也   (Sheet 13)

The punctuation mark “・” and the numbers on the right-hand side of the text are written in red cinnabar, with “一二三” (“1 2 3”) written via a corresponding number of marks (i.e., as ‘ヽ,’ ‘ヽヽ,’ and ‘ヽヽヽ,’ respectively), while “四” (“4”) and “五” (“5”) are rendered as the sinographs “四” and “五,” which are written over ‘ヽヽヽヽ’ and ‘ヽヽヽヽヽ,’ respectively. Although the precise reading cannot be known, as there are still no okurigana (“send-off kana” added to sinographs to indicate pronunciation), the passage can be read out via kundoku as follows. 按ズルニ

前問

中ニ

三句

有リ、

ANzuru ni ZENMON CHŪ ni SANKU ari, 今 此ノ 答中ニ 品シテ19 両句ト ima kono TŌCHŪ ni HIN shite RYŌKU to

nasu wa,

問中ノ

初メノ

二句ヲ

MONCHŪ no

hajime no

NIKU o tabanete IKKU to nasu ni yoru

故

束ネテ

為スハ、 一句ト

為スニ

由ル

ナリ

yue nari In this case, the kundoku numerals only appear in the second half of the passage. The meaning of the text is: “It seems that the previous question consisted of three sections, and now this answer consists of two sections because the first two sections of the question are grouped into one section.” This system is not as precise as modern kaeriten (inversion marks), but it is unmistakably a kundoku method based on notations. There are other examples from this period where sinographic numerals indicate kundoku reading. These are called “word-order glosses” (gojunfu 語順符) because they are not only used for going up from below and reading backwards 18 See Kobayashi (2017: 25–30). 19 The character “品” is not found in the version of this text found in the Taishō shinshū daizōkyō [Taishō Tripiṭaka]. It may be a superfluous character added by mistake.

38

Chapter 1

Figure 5 Nara period manuscript copy of Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記 (J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra]

39

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

as in the case of kaeriten (inversion glosses), but also in the case of reading in sequence from top to bottom (e.g., in the case of compound words composed of two or more sinographs) because they indicate the order of reading. For example: 二者因ヽヽヽ 彼ヽ 樂ヽヽ 乗ヽヽ 便ヽ 爲説一切諸法本来寂静不生不滅

(Sheet 12)

This passage, from the same manuscript of Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記 cited above, can be read out via kundoku as follows. 二ハ

彼ノ

NI wa

ka no tanoshimi ni yorite,

タメニ

樂シミニ

一切諸法ハ

因リテ、 便ニ乗ジテ、

BEN ni JŌjite,

本来寂静ニシテ

tame ni ISSAI SHOHŌ wa HONRAI JAKUJŌ ni shite 不生不滅タルヲ

説ク

FUSHŌ FUMETSU taru o toku Two, since he was happy, he used this opportunity to preach that all the things in the universe are not born and do not perish when they are originally delivered from worldly attachments. Note that the sinographs “彼樂” (“that happiness”) are read in sequence. In order to differentiate “乗便” (“using the opportunity”) from the preceding phrase, the numerals are added to the left-hand side of the text instead of the right. This method of using both the left- and right-hand sides is a peculiar feature not found in the kunten markings of later times. Moreover, the sequence beginning “爲説” (“for preaching”) and below was likely read via kundoku as well, but there are no marks added. Word-order markings can be found in this manuscript of the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji in thirty-four different places, but unlike kunten markings of later ages, they are not added throughout the entire text. Rather, they were probably added only to those passages that were considered difficult to comprehend. Thus, there is reason to believe that kundoku in this period had only a supplementary role in reading comprehension and that, as a rule, Literary Sinitic texts were basically read via the Sino-Japanese on readings of sinographs in “direct” (Chinese) or sequential order from top to bottom. 4.3 Origin of Word-Order Markings (I): Numerals in dharani It may be sufficient to view the word-order symbols as simple marks numbering the order of reading that arose naturally and whose origins require no

40

Chapter 1

particular consideration. In general, however, when considering the origin of kunten symbols in Japan, it is necessary first to have a good understanding of their relationship with textual markings used in China. Of course, there were no kunten used in China, but there were nonetheless various symbols, including punctuation marks, used in texts. Since these symbols were also used in Japan, it is possible that Japanese kunten markings were influenced by these sorts of textual symbols. There are two cases wherein numerals were added to texts in China, and both are related to Buddhist sutras. One is the case of so-called dharani (Skt. dhāraṇī), where a Sanskrit text was transcribed in sinographs. For example, in the dharani found in the Dasheng wuliangshou jing 大乗無量壽經 (J. Daijō muryōju kyō) [Great Vehicle Sūtra of the One of Immeasurable Longevity] (abbreviated as IL below), semantic units are numbered: IL 南謨薄伽勃底(一) 阿波唎蜜哆(二) 阿喻紇硯娜(三) 須毘儞悉指陀(四)… C. nánmó bójiābóde 1 ābōlìmìduō 2 āyùjiéyànnà 3 xūpínǐxīzhǐtuó 4 … Skt. (oṃ) namo bhagavate 1 aparimita 2 āyurjñāna 3 suviniścita 4 …

These numerals were added in China, since it is unlikely that they would have been present in the original Sanskrit text. For the simple purpose of indicating semantic divisions, punctuation marks should have sufficed, so why were numbers used? Presumably this matter is linked with the process of translation. In the translation process involving teamwork and division of labor discussed above, transliterating the Sanskrit text into sinographs corresponds to step 4, “writing sinographs,” while the next step is literal translation into Chinese by the “Holder of the Brush” (step 5), which is then followed by the rearranging of the order to construct a text in Chinese by the “Linker of Text” (step 6), who produced a “rearranged text” (huiwen 廻文). Numbering each vocabulary item probably made it possible to perform this series of operations more efficiently under the division of labor system. For example, in the the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定 記, in order to explain the section title “Section on Illuminating the Teachings” (C. Mingfapin 明法品) Huiyuan refers to the original Sanskrit text, first citing a sinographic transcription of the Sanskrit:20

20

The Early Middle Chinese readings (from Pulleyblank 1991) and Sanskrit equivalents are: 達摩 dat-ma; 阿嚕迦 ā-lɔ’-kɨa; 娜忙 na’-maŋ; 鉢里勿多 pat-li’-mut-ta.

41

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku 按梵本云。

達摩阿嚕迦娜忙鉢里勿多。

According to the Sanskrit text, it reads: dámāālūjiānàmángbōlǐwùduō. Huiyuan then translates each vocabulary item into Chinese, explaining that “dámā 達摩 is teachings (法; dharma),” “ālūjiā 阿嚕迦 is light (光明; āroka),” “nàmáng 娜忙 is name (名; nāman),” “bōlǐwùduō 鉢里勿多 is section (品; parivarta).”21 This results in: 法 – 光–明 – 名 – 品

teaching – light – name – section After rearranging this into Chinese word order and removing superfluous characters, this would become the section title “明法品” [“Section on Illuminating the Teachings”]. In cases like this, it is fully possible that they added numbers to the original Sanskrit text as transcribed in sinographs. Unfortunately, no materials revealing the process of sutra translation remain, and extant examples of numerals in dharani go in order, that is, “一二三…” [“1 2 3…”]; there are no examples of numerals in inverted order. If, however, such numerals were used until the stage of “rearranging the text,” it would have been possible to reconstruct the original Sanskrit by means of these numbers and, consequently, they could have had a similar function to the Japanese word-order marks. 4.4 Origin of Word-Order Markings (II): Text in Sections and kundoku Yet another case when numbers are used in Buddhist texts is linked with the method of annotating them. As stated earlier, kunko annotations of Confucian classics mainly explained readings and meanings of sinographs. Annotations of Buddhist texts also contain such notes on reading and meaning, but more important was the analysis of the content structure of the text as a whole. That is, annotations would divide the text into sections and explain how the point of each section unfolds. The content structure of Buddhist sutras has a logical quality that requires such analysis. This method of annotation is called “text in sections” (C. kewen, J. kabun 科文) and each section is called a 科段 (C. keduan, J. kadan). To each section was affixed either a numeral or the section symbol “⅂.” This method originated during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period in China (420–589), and during the Tang dynasty it developed into an extremely detailed and 21 The original reads: 達摩法也。阿嚕迦光明。娜忙名也。鉢里勿多品也。Cited from http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/sutra/10thousand/X03n0221.pdf.

42

Chapter 1

complicated system with sections being divided into smaller sub-sections and so on. This resembles the “Chart”22 long-passage comprehension method used today in Japan by those preparing for entrance examinations in the subjects of Japanese or English. The Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊 定記 is a commentary that uses this “text in sections” method, with section symbols affixed in red ink. For example, the “Section on Illuminating the Teachings” is structured as a series of questions asked by Bodhisattva Exertion (Virya) Wisdom (J. Shōjin’e bosatsu 精進慧菩薩) and answers given by Bodhisattva Dharma Wisdom (J. Hōe bosatsu 法慧菩薩). Since the questions and answers correspond closely to each other, their analysis is the main content of the annotations. One example is the third clause in the passage as seen in Figure 5 above: 由束問中初二句爲一句故也 問中ノ

初メノ

二句ヲ 束ネテ

一句ト

為スニ 由ル 故ナリ

MONCHŪ no hajime no NIKU o tabanete IKKU to nasu ni yoru yue nari This annotation explains why there are only two answers by bodhisattva Dharma Wisdom corresponding to three questions asked by bodhisattva Exertion Wisdom. Moreover, the first part of this passage, which reads: 二者因彼樂乗便 二ハ

彼ノ

樂シミニ

因リテ 便ニ

乗ジテ

NI wa kano tanoshimi ni yorite, BEN ni JŌjite … and so on is an explanation of the point of the section, which is structured “一 者 …” (ICHI wa … [“As for the first (question), …”]), 二者 … (NI wa … [“As for the second (question), …”]), 三者 … (SAN wa … [“As for the third (question), …”]), etc. Such a close analysis of textual structure, especially when done in Japan, necessarily extended as far as the grammatical analysis of the phrasal level of sentence formation. This, too, resembles a modern-day long-passage explication of an English text. Kundoku is nothing more than exactly this sort of grammatical analysis applied to Literary Sinitic texts, and there must have been a reason why early kundoku techniques were used not on a sutra text itself, but on a “text in sections” annotated version of a sutra, the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記. 22

“Chart” is a modern educational reference series in Japan published by Sūken shuppan.

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

43

4.5 Kundoku Using Signs of Various Kinds 4.5.1 Punctuation Marks (C. judoudian, J. kutōten, K. kuduchŏm 句讀点) As in modern times, in ancient China, too, supplementary textual marks were used to make texts easier to read. Representative examples are punctuation marks that indicate semantic units, such as ・, 。, 、, and －. At present, however, punctuation marks are included in the text from the start, whereas in ancient China they were added later by readers. To be specific, when reading a text consisting of sinographs arrayed in lines without breaks, a reader would add punctuation marks as they went, usually in red ink. That is, to read a book meant to add reading marks. A correct understanding of the meaning was a prerequisite for the correct placement of the marks. This Chinese custom must have been transmitted to Japan concurrently with the importation of Chinese books. Therefore, the quickest and easiest method to indicate reading order would have been to use these existing punctuation marks as kundoku marks. There were various ways of placing punctuation marks in China, but the most standard method was to place “・” or “。” at the end of a sentence on the right-hand side of the line, and to place “、” in the middle of the line, anywhere in a sentence where it was natural to pause. The Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記 is somewhat irregular in this regard, with comma marks placed on the right-hand side of the line and periods in the center. However, punctuation marks were never placed on the left-hand side of the line. This is only natural, as sinographs are written in vertical lines going from right to left; this is also true of punctuation in modern-day Japanese. Nevertheless, we can find examples of punctuation marks placed on the left-hand side of the line in Buddhist texts from the early Heian period. It appears they were used as kaeriten (inversion marks). For example, the marks placed in the Tōdaiji Temple copy of the Chengshi lun 成實論 (J. Jōjitsuron, Skt. Tattvasiddhi-śāstra) [Treatise on the Establishment of Truth] and dated to the fifth year of Tenchō (828), are as follows:23 若憐愍心爲利益． 故苦言无罪・

This passage can be read out in Japanese via kundoku as:

23

From fascicle 12. Here and elsewhere in this book, glosses on the right-hand side of the line are transcribed in superscript, while glosses on the left-hand side of the line are transcribed in subscript. While the original text contains okoto marks (discussed below), they have been omitted from this transcription. See Ōtsubo (1961: 6).

44 若シ

Chapter 1 憐愍ノ

心ヲ

モチテ

利益ノ

為ノ

故ニ

moshi RENBIN no kokoro o mochite RIYAKU no tame no yue ni 苦言スルハ

罪无[無]シ

KUGEN suru wa tsumi nashi “If a person with compassionate heart gives unpleasant advice to save another person, there is no sin in this.” The “・” on the bottom left of “益” can be thought to have functioned as a kaeriten inversion marker sending the reader back from “益” to “爲” for the kundoku reading “利益の為に” (riyaku no tame ni, “so as to save another person”), while the “・” on the bottom right-hand side of the final “罪” is the usual period. This is a case in which punctuation marks placed on the left-hand side of the line were used as kundoku marks, a usage not seen in China. 4.5.2 Inversion Signs: The レ Mark and Others I mentioned earlier that to read a book in medieval times meant to copy it. Copying inevitably entailed errors, and there were marks used for correcting these. In many cases when sinographs were written in the wrong order the sign “∾” was used to indicate an inversion back to the correct sequence. This is the same as the symbol for inverting the order of characters in modern-day proofreading. Nowadays “∾” is written on top of characters, but in China “乙” or its abbreviated form “レ” was written between the characters to be inverted. There is an interesting story related to this in the Soushenji 捜神記 [In Search of the Supernatural] (4th c.), a text discovered at Dunhuang. One day, Guan Lu 管輅 (209–256 ce), a famous soothsayer of China’s Three Kingdoms period (220–280), saw a youth cutting wheat in the field and said, “What a pity that your span of life lasts [only] until noon tomorrow!” The startled youth and his parents pleaded with Guanlu to prolong his life somehow. Then Guan Lu said, “Tomorrow two men will gamble under the mulberry tree to the south of the wheat field. Quietly place liquor and snacks there and bow without saying anything. If you do so, you will probably escape death.” The next day, the youth did as he was told, and the two men, absorbed in their game, drank the liquor without taking any notice of the youth. Before long the game was over, and the man of the northern side, who had finally noticed the youth, began to get angry. Whereupon the second man, of the southern side, said, “As I drank the liquor, I have no other choice but to help you.” With his brush he put a mark indicating the inversion of characters in the register that the man of the northern side was carrying and said, “Your span of life was nineteen (十九) years, but now it has become ninety (九十).” Since that time, whenever characters were inverted, people started using “乙” to indicate the

45

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

need to rearrange them. The two men were the Big Dipper, who governs death, and the Milk Dipper,24 who governs life. Not only does this mark appear in documents and manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang and other places, but it is also found in such things as hanging scrolls with calligraphy from later times—for example, in the Songfenggeshi 松風閣詩 (J. Shōfūkakushi) [Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind] (ca. 1102), now held by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, by Huang Shan’gu 黄山谷 (also known as Tingjian 庭堅; 1045–1105), a famous calligrapher of the Song period (1127–1279). This method was quickly transmitted to the Korean Peninsula25 and Japan, with examples already present on mokkan (wooden strips) of the early historic period. For example, a mokkan with a waka poem transcribed in man’yōgana excavated from a site within the Heijō (Nara) capital (710–784) reads: 目毛美須流レ安保連紀我許等乎志宜見賀毛美夜能宇知…

This can be read as: 目も

見ずある

保連紀が

事を

繁みかも、

me mo mizu aru 保連紀 [Poreki?] ga koto wo sigemi kamo, 宮の内…

miya no uti….

Okimori and Satō 1994: 112

Here, the error “流安” (rua), instead of the correct “安流” (aru), is corrected by the “レ” sign. This character inversion mark developed quite naturally into the kaeriten (inversion gloss) used in kundoku. For example, in fascicle 18 of a Sifen lü 四 分律 [Vinaya of the Four Categories] manuscript in the possession of Shidō Bunko at Keiō University, which contains a Buddhist prayer written by Empress Kōmyō and is dated to Tenpyō 12 (740), there is a sign added in whitewash as follows: 見二他夫主共婦レ嗚捫二－摸身體一捉二捺三一乳一26

24 A constellation within Sagittarius. 25 Examples from the Korean Peninsula can be found in Pak Chongik (2007: 203). 26 The okurigana and okototen used in the original are omitted here.

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Chapter 1

The long dash-like mark “－” between “捫 － 摸” is called a gappu 合符 (“joining mark”), and it shows that the upper and lower sinographs comprise a single compound word. Reading this text according to the kaeriten, okurigana, and okototen seen here, we get: 他ノ

夫主ノ 婦ト

共ニ

嗚ヒ、

ka no otto no tsuma to tomo ni kuchisui, 身体ヲ

捫摸トナデ、

乳ヲ

捉リ

捺クムヲ

見ル

SHINTAI o MONMO to nade, chi o tsukamari oshikumu o miru. “[A nun] saw how that gentleman was kissing his wife, caressing her body, and pressing her breasts.” Ōtsubo 1961: 1227

In between the sinograph sequence “共婦,” the kaeriten “レ” is added on the left-hand side, indicating this should be read as “婦ト共ニ” (tsuma to tomo ni, “together with the wife,” i.e., with the order switched). The word-order marks—in this case sinographic numerals—are meant to be read first on the left-hand side and then on the right-hand side. The numerals of the right-hand side would presumably be marked instead as “上下” (“top-bottom”) in the kundoku system of later ages. There are also cases where two sinographs that are in the wrong order are corrected by placing signs that look like elongated single quotation marks (“ ˛ … ᷎ ”) instead of “レ.” Examples of this sign do not appear in ancient Chinese materials, but as far as I know, in the manuscript of the Ming-period play Huanlaomo 還牢末, there are examples of correcting mistakes, such as 娶要他 instead of 要娶他 (“wants to marry her”), using this mark (Fig. 6). In Japan, however, in chapter five of the above-mentioned manuscript of Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記, there is an example of the marks “ ˛ … ᷎ ” added by stylus, as follows: 四禪支者十句˛初中   ᷎一句及第三句內下半是對治支 (Sheet 8) Kobayashi 2004: 361

27 Sven Osterkamp (p.c.) suggests that 捉リ here was most likely read as tori (from toru) while 捺クム was probably read as kumu (oshikumu does not appear to exist, and neither Ōtsubo nor Kin supply any indication as to the intended word).

47

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

Figure 6 Inversion marks in the Ming-era play, Huanlaomo 還牢末

This should be read as: 四禅支トハ、

十句ノ

中ノ

初一句及ビ

SHIZENSHI to wa, JŪKU no naka no SHOIKKU oyobi 第三句内ノ

下半ハ

コレ 対治支

DAISANKU NAI no KAHAN wa kore TAIJISHI “As for the fourth limb of meditation, the lower half of the first state and the third state among the ten states is the limb of controlling worldly desires” with the marks “ ˛ … ᷎ ” correcting the inversion of the characters “初” and “中.”

48

Chapter 1

There is also an example, considerably closer to the present time, of Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901) writing the title of one of his Chinese poems as “書學” and then correcting it to “學書” (“studying writing”) (Fig. 7). He probably made this correction after noticing later that he had written the sinographs in Japanese word order: “書ヲ學ブ” (SHO o manabu, “studying writing”). This mistake by Fukuzawa is interesting because it apparently shows an occasion for the transformation of the correction mark into a kundoku sign. There are many examples of these “ ˛ … ᷎ ” marks being used to indicate

Figure 7 Inversion marks in the title to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ms. poem, “學書”

49

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

the inversion of the order of distantly separated sinographs in the Heian period. For example, in fascicle 14 of the prayer sutra of Empress Kōmyō in the Iwabuchi copy of the Sifen lü 四分律 [Vinaya of the Four Categories], we find the following passage:28 ˛如月行二虚-空一無   ᷎有二諸雲-翳一 Ōtsubo 1961: 16

This reads: 月ノ

虛空ヲ

行スルニ、

諸ノ

雲翳有ル

コト

tsuki no KOKŪ o GYŌzuru ni, moromoro no UN’EI aru koto 無キガ 如シ

naki ga gotoshi “Like the Moon going through the empty sky without any cloud or mist.” First, one reads the two pairs of “一二” marks on the left-hand side, and then at the end goes back from “無” to “如” according to the “ ˛ … ᷎ ” symbols. Thus, it is equivalent to the “top-bottom” “上下” marks in the kundoku system of later times. In addition, there are also examples of using marks such as “十, ○, ＝” twice instead of the “ ˛ … ᷎ ” signs, but these symbols were probably invented in Japan. The kundoku marks mentioned above have their origins in Chinese symbols for the correction of accidentally inverted characters. Incidentally, during the Edo period the inversion symbol “乙” was used to refer to kundoku more broadly. The Confucian scholar Oka Hakku 岡白駒 (1692–1767), famous as a translator of Chinese novels, added kunten to a Japanese edition of Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], by Liu Xie 劉勰 (5th c.), that was published by Bunkaidō in Osaka in 1731. In the preface to this edition, Oka writes: 遂に

校訂し、

并びに

乙

付す

tsui ni KŌTEIshi, narabi ni OTSU FUsu “Subsequently I revised the text and also added 乙 [marks].” In this case, “adding 乙” refers to the placing of kunten.

28

Again, I have omitted the okurigana and okototen.

50

Chapter 1

4.6 Okurigana and okototen The marks discussed above are related to word order in reading Literary Sinitic, but kundoku additionally requires Sino-Japanese on readings and vernacular Japanese kun readings for individual sinographs, along with okurigana. As an early example of such kundoku marking practice, I will cite the first fascicle of an early Heian period manuscript of the Fanwang jing 梵網經 (Skt. Brahmajāla Sūtra) [Brahma’s Net Sūtra] in the possession of Daigoji Temple, which has word-order marks and okurigana in man’yōgana script added in whitewash. 一切論一切行我伊皆得入己止生弖「入」 (superfluous character) 佛家尓 坐二奴佛地一。 Ōtsubo 1961

Word-order marks are on the left-hand side, while okurigana transcribed in man’yōgana are on the right-hand side. The okurigana are “伊” (subject particle i), “己止” (koto), “弖” (te, a variant form of 底), “尓” (ni), and “奴” (nu). They are not added to every character, but when read out, bracketing off those parts where the text lacks corresponding okurigana, we get: 一切[ノ]

論[ト]

一切[ノ]

行[ニ]

我イ

ISSAI (no) RON (to) ISSAI (no) GYŌ (ni) ware i コト

得、 佛家ニ

生[レ]テ、

佛地[ニ]

皆

入[ル]

mina

i(ru)

坐ヌ

koto e, BUKKE ni uma(re)te, BUTSUJI (ni) suwarinu “I came to understood all the doctrines and all the actions, and being born into the Buddha’s family I sat at the position of Buddhahood.” In the early period, man’yōgana were used, as in this example, but later their abbreviated variant forms, known as hentaigana 変体仮名, were frequently used instead, which, in turn, led to the creation of katakana. Initially, katakana was a script for the purpose of kundoku. In this system, however, there were limits to the number of katakana characters one could write in the narrow interlinear space, and moreover, it was cumbersome. Therefore, the okototen method was developed. Users of the okototen method could save the time and effort required to write out all the katakana characters by placing dots along the perimeters and at the center of sinographs, having established in advance which dots in which locations corresponded to which kana. There are many different versions of this method, used in texts annotated by different Buddhist and Confucian schools, which each developed a different correspondence key between the locations of the dots and certain kana readings. Since two of the most prominent types

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

Figure 8

51

Key to the Myōgyōten 明經点 style of okototen glosses

of okototen, the Myōgyōten 明經点 style used mainly by the Kiyohara 清原 family of court Confucian scholars, and the Kidenten 紀傳点 style established by the Confucian scholars of the Sugawara 菅原 family and widely used starting in the Insei period,29 both dictated that the upper right dot indicated the object marker “ヲ” (o30) and the dot below indicated the nominalizer “コト” (koto), the system came to be called okototen (“o koto dots”) (Fig. 8). 4.7 Origins of okototen Okototen can already be seen in Buddhist manuscript texts from the early Heian period, where they were used in combination with word-order marks, okurigana, and inversion symbols that were based on earlier punctuation marks (i.e., 乙 and レ). So what is the origin of these okototen markings? On this issue, the following passage, from the Muromachi period (1337–1573) Zen master Tōgen Zuisen 桃源瑞仙 (1430–1489)’s “Senjimon jo” 千字文序 [Preface to the Thousand Character Classic] is relevant: As for reading by the Japanese, depending on the meaning they read going back from the bottom to the top. This is called “反点” (kaeriten) and 29 30

The Insei 院政, or “cloistered rule” period: a time during the late Heian period when retired or abdicated emperors who had gone to live in monasteries retained power. Technically speaking, this character should be Romanized as wo.

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marked in red or black. Setting a square around a character they place ki[den]ten 紀点 or [myō]gyōten 經点. This is similar to the Four Tone Circles 四聲圏. Ashikaga 1932: 831

Kiten 紀点 here refers to kidenten 紀傳点 and gyōten 經点 refers to myōgyōten; in short, okototen. The “Four Tone Circles,” which are similar in conception to okototen, refer to the shōten 聲點 (tone dots) indicating the traditional four tones in Chinese: level (C. pingsheng, J. hyōshō, K. p’yŏngsŏng 平聲), rising (C. shangsheng, J. jōshō, K. sangsŏng 上聲), departing (C. qusheng, J. kyoshō, K. kŏsŏng 去聲), and entering (C. rusheng, J. nisshō, K. ipsŏng 入聲). These are explained in the section “Fazili” 發字例 [Examples Explaining Characters] of the Shiji zhengyi 史記 正義 [Correct Meanings of the Records of the Grand Historian], a Tang-period commentary on Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 [Records of the Grand Historian] written by Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (active 725–735). According to this source, because there are cases in which the tone of a single sinograph may vary based on differences in meaning or part of speech, a special mark can be used to indicate the proper tone. Specifically, this mark was “・” or “。” placed in one of the character’s four corners. A mark in the lower left-hand corner would indicate level tone, a mark in the upper left, rising tone, a mark in the upper right, departing tone, and a mark in the lower right, entering tone. An example of a sinograph with different tones is “降,” which in the meaning “surrender” carries the level tone (in modern Mandarin, it is second tone xiáng), but in the meaning “[rain] falls” carries the departing tone (in Mandarin, fourth tone jiàng). Such characters are called poyinzi 破音字 (“broken reading characters”) in Mandarin. A good example of this practice of indicating differences in tone by placing a mark in one of the four corners of a sinograph can be found in some modern Literary Sinitic-Japanese dictionaries published in Japan, which enclose the sinograph representing the phonetic rhyme in a square beneath each new character and indicate the tone by means of a mark placed in one of the four corners. Tonal marks were used widely from the Tang until the modern period. For example, tonal marks are added without exception to all characters with “broken readings” in the massive Ming-period series Yongle dadian 永樂大典 [Yongle Encyclopedia] (1408), and in the oldest extant version of the novel Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms] (Fig. 9). In addition, tonal marks were introduced early to both the Korean Peninsula and Japan, and in Japan, these were later affixed even to kana, in order to indicate the (pitch) accents of Japanese words.

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

53

Figure 9 Tone marks in the Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms] Note: The tone marks (lower left-hand corner of “朝” [line 2], and upper right-hand corner of “将” [line 2] are to be distinguished from the punctuation marks (periods) (e.g., lower right-hand corner of “也” [line 1]).

Tonal marks and okototen glosses are similar in that both are symbols placed on the outer perimeter of a sinograph. Further, unlike punctuation marks, both types of markings are added directly on top of the existing strokes of a sinograph. Thus, we cannot exclude the possibility that okototen are derived from tonal marks. A clear awareness of the four tones arose in China during the Six Dynasties period, and this is thought to have been the result of the influence of Buddhist Siddhaṃ Studies. The development of tonal marks indicating these four tones probably also occurred in the Buddhist context. There was ample

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reason, then, for kundoku, a method that likewise originated in the context of Buddhist sutras, to borrow these marks. Kundoku in the Period of Maturity: From the Mid-Heian to Insei Periods (ca. 10th to 12th Centuries ce)

5

How to Read okototen: The Example of the Baishi wenji 白氏文集 [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] By the middle of the Heian period, the combined use of okototen, word-order marks and other symbols became the mainstream method of kundoku annotation. Moreover, kundoku reading following this method was widely practiced, in the context of not only the Buddhist sutras, but also the Confucian classics and even literary texts. Next, I will present a passage marked according to this mature system, and explain how to read it. The material in question is a section from the beginning of the “Xinyuefu” 新樂府 [New Yuefu] found in fascicle 3 of Baishi wenji 白氏文集 (J. Hakushi monjū) [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] (845; Bai’s dates are 772–846), from a manuscript formerly in the collection of Japanese orientalist Kanda Kiichirō 神田喜一郎 (1897–1984), and now in possession of the Kyoto National Museum. The kundoku marks were added in 1107 by the court scholar Fujiwara no Mochiakira 藤原茂明 (ca. 1093–?).31 Figure 10 is a photograph of the original, which is followed by a word-processed transcription: 5.1

•

序• 曰• 七－ 德－ 舞•美三ホ撥ヲ七メ• 乱•陳二爪ル・・ 王˚業一也。

The marks in the original are in black and red, but for the convenience of printing, all of them appear here in black. Let us read it according to the key (J. tenzu 点図, “diagram of markings”) in Figure 11. 1) First, the dots on the upper left and lower left of “序” correspond to “ニ” (ni) and “テ” (te) in the key. In the first case, one reads JO ni 序ニ, and in the second, one adds in “シ” (shi) to read JO shite 序シテ. Thus, two possible readings are indicated. 2) The mark (in red ink) just below “曰” is a comma, not an okototen. It was presumably read as iwaku 曰ク. 3) The “－” seen in the sequence “七－ 德－ 舞” is a gappu 合符, that is, a connecting mark, indicating that these three sinographs are to be read according to their Sino-Japanese on readings as a single compound word: 31

Here I am following Ōta and Kobayashi (1982).

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

Figure 10 “Xinyuefu” 新樂府 [New Yuefu], opening section of fascicle 3 of the Baishi wenji 白氏文集 Kyoto National Museum

55

56

Figure 11 Key for the okototen in the Baishi wenji 白氏文集

Chapter 1

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Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

“シツトクブ” (SHITSUTOKUBU). When connecting marks are used between characters meant to be read according to their vernacular kun readings, they are placed on the left-hand side of the sinographs. 4) The mark (in red ink) on the lower right-hand side of “舞” corresponds to the topic marker “ハ” (wa) in the key, producing the reading SHITSUTOKUBU wa 七徳舞ハ. 5) The “ホ” (ho) to the right of “美” is the vernacular Japanese kun reading, abbreviated from “ホメ” (home). The vertical line on the lower left corresponds to “タリ” (tari) in the key, producing the reading hometari 美タリ. The numeral “三” on the left-hand side of the character is a word-order mark. 6) The “ヲ七メ” to the right of “撥” is the vernacular Japanese kun reading. In this case, “七” is a variant kana for “サ” (sa). The reading is osame ヲサメ. 7) The mark (in red ink) on the upper right-hand side of “亂” (the original form of 乱) corresponds to “ヲ” (o) and the mark (in red ink) on the lower left-hand side corresponds to “テ” (te) in the key. The lower left-hand mark for “te” also serves as an inversion mark, so the reading is RAN o osamete 亂ヲ撥テ. 8) The “爪” of “爪ル” seen to the right-hand side of “陳” is a variant kana for “ス” (su) and so the reading becomes CHINsuru 陳スル. As for the two marks (both in red ink) that appear on the upper right-hand side of “陳,” the upper mark corresponds to “ヲ” (o) in the key, while the lower corresponds to “コト” (koto). Altogether, this is read as CHINsuru koto o 陳スルコ トヲ. The “二” on the left is a word-order mark. 9) The circle “ ˚ ” on the upper right-hand side of “王” is a tonal mark indicating the departing tone (discussed below). The “一” to the left of “業” is a word-order mark. While there is no okurigana indicated, I read this as ŌGYŌ o 王業ヲ, adding the object particle o. 10) The “也” is not read. The mark on the lower right-hand side (in red ink) is a punctuation mark. Based on the above, we can read this sentence as follows: 序ニ

曰ク、

七徳舞ハ

亂ヲ

撥テ

王業ヲ

JO ni iwaku, SHITSUTOKUBU wa RAN o osamete ŌGYŌ o 陳スル

コトヲ

美タリ

CHINsuru koto o hometari “By way of preface, I say: the Dance of Seven Virtues32 praises the putting down of a rebellion and the display of deeds for becoming king.” 32

That is, symbolizing the seven virtues of Tang Emperor Taizong (599–649).

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The beginning might also be read as JO shite iwaku 序シテ曰ク. The entire text of this manuscript of the Baishi wenji is marked up with kunten along similar lines. The tonal mark “ ˚ ” placed on the upper right-hand side of the character “王” (“king”), that is, in the position for the departing tone, has the following meaning. “王” is a character with “broken readings,” so the noun “王” (“king”) is read in level tone (modern-day Mandarin wáng) whereas the verb “王” (“to be/ become king”) is read in departing tone (Mandarin wàng). The tonal mark in the above sentence indicates that “王” should be read in departing tone (wàng) and that, therefore, the meaning of “王業” is not “deeds of a king,” but “deeds required to be[come] king.” Thus, tonal marks do not merely indicate tone, but also function as an annotation that can indicate meaning. The combined use of tonal marks and okototen seen here hints at a close connection between them. 5.2 Independence of the kundoku Style and Its Secret Transmission Japanese texts marked up with kundoku symbols are attested from the late Nara period, and although various methods were devised by trial and error, such as the application of word-order marks, punctuation marks, inversion glosses (re-ten レ点) and okototen, these methods were only used when necessary and for convenience, mainly in short sections of Buddhist texts. Kundoku at this stage can be said to have functioned simply as an auxiliary expedient for the comprehension of a Literary Sinitic text. However, after the middle Heian period, beginning in the Insei era, kunten began to be added to entire texts, not just in random shorter sections. Moreover, the scope of kunten widened from Buddhist texts to include Confucian and literary texts, and the mainstream method of textual mark-up combined the use of okototen with word-order marks and other symbols. A good example of this “mainstream method” is the Baishi wenji manuscript discussed above. This tendency, as already stated, was the result of the conceptualization of Japanese language kundoku as being equal in status to Literary Sinitic through the putative correspondence relationship between Sanskrit and Japanese, and went hand-in-hand with the beginning of the so-called period of native styles and customs (kokufū jidai 國風時代). It is safe to say that in this period, reading Literary Sinitic by means of kundoku came to be taken for granted, and kundoku itself became a goal. At this stage, not only was kundoku considered to be a sufficient means for understanding the meaning of the original Literary Sinitic text, but the question of a standardized way of reading by kundoku—that is, a kundoku inscriptional style (kundoku no buntai 訓読の文体)—came to the fore. To take the Baishi wenji as an example, although “序ニ曰ク” (jo ni iwaku) and “序シテ曰ク”

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

59

(jo shite iwaku) differ little in meaning, both readings are nonetheless expressly indicated, because the manner of reading via kundoku is the issue here. Thus, okototen was a suitable method for reading the entire text via kundoku and for specifying precisely even minute details of its reading. There is, however, an additional problem here. It is impossible to read a text marked with okototen without knowing in advance the correspondences (the key) between the locations of the marks and the readings they indicate. Moreover, okototen glossing styles were different for each school of Buddhism and each family of court scholars. Different schools developed subtle and complicated styles, such as the Sanronshūten 三論宗点 and Kitainten 喜多院点 of Nara’s Kōfukuji temple lineage; the Nishihakaten 西墓点 and Nitohakaten 仁都波迦点 of the Tendai school lineage; and the Tōnan’inten 東南院点 and Endōten 円堂 点 of the Shingon school lineage. Scholar families also developed styles, such as the Myōgyōten 明經点 of the Kiyohara family and the Kidenten 紀傳点 of the Sugawara family mentioned above. Because of this, keys (“marking diagrams”) were created to illustrate the correspondence relationships between the locations and forms of the marks and their readings. Apparently these keys were preserved and transmitted in secret by each school. These secret styles of okototen are closely linked with the scholarly practice of this period, both Buddhist and Confucian, which involved the secret transmission of knowledge from masters to disciples. Consequently, as new strains of Buddhism and Confucianism took shape beginning in the Kamakura period, and scholarship as a whole became more open, kundoku techniques began to change too. The word kunten itself originally referred to okototen, but in later periods various kundoku marks that were not marks (ten 点), such as “一 二” (“one-two”) or “上下” (“top-bottom”) and okurigana, were also called kunten by extension. 6

New Developments in Kundoku: From the Kamakura to Early Modern Periods

6.1 Decline of okototen and a New System of kundoku New popular forms of Buddhism, like Hōnen, Shinran, and Nichiren, among others, flourished in the Kamakura period, and the new Zen school was introduced from China as well. Moreover, with the founding of the military government, scholarship, which had hitherto been monopolized by nobles and priests, spread into the warrior class, and the closed-off cultural situation of earlier times was finally cast aside in favor of a more open culture. In addition, printing, as exemplified by the kasugaban 春日版 (Kasuga Buddhist printed

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publications) produced by the Kōfukuji Temple in Nara, gradually began to flourish during this time and probably played a major role in breaking up the monopoly on scholarship. Amid the changes of this period, okototen markings gradually fell out of use, since they could not be read without knowing the key, had different readings according to school, and were unfit for woodblock printing. A new kundoku system was devised that was more rational and comprehensible to everyone, and combined inversion glosses (re-ten レ点), Chinese numerals functioning as kundoku marks rather than as word-order symbols, sequencing signs such as “上中下” (“top-middle-bottom”) and “甲乙丙” (“A-B-C”), as well as okurigana written in katakana. Okototen fell out of use during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), and by the Edo period (1603–1868) they had ceased to be used by anyone except for some court nobles. One of the kundoku signs, the inversion mark (re-ten), was written at first as a “∨” in the middle of two sinographs, and was called the “wild geese mark” (kariganeten 雁金点) due to its similarity in shape to the V-formation of flying geese (see Fig. 12, where it appears more like the check mark sign ✓).33 But in the Muromachi period the point of this mark shifted to the left, producing the modern inversion mark (レ). For this reason, some scholars distinguish between the “レ” that originated as a variant form of the earlier inversion mark “乙” and the “レ” that originated as a modified kariganeten. The Zen master Tōgen Zuisen 桃源瑞仙, in the same “Preface to the Thousand Character Classic” cited above, says the following on this point: “When inverting a sinograph with the character above it, one places ‘乙’ between the sinographs. Its shape resembles wild geese flying in the autumn sky.” In other words, the kariganeten and the “乙” mark were seen as identical.34 A New Way of Thinking about kundoku: Aspirations for “Direct Reading” Priests of the Zen school played an especially important role in the creation of this new kundoku system that is still used to this day. The so-called Five Mountains (Gozan 五山), located in Kamakura and Kyoto, of the Zen school, which reached its zenith during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, were 6.2

33 The image in Fig. 12 is presented courtesy of Professor emeritus Satō Michio 佐藤 道生 of Keio University. The manuscript was copied by Kiyohara Narikata 清原業賢 (1499–1566). 34 Ashikaga (1932: 831).

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

61

Figure 12 An example of the “wild geese (inversion) mark” (kariganeten 雁金点) seen in a manuscript copy dated 1526 of the Rongo shikkai/Lunyu jijie 論語集解 by He Yan 何晏 (195–249 CE). The first inversion mark can be seen in line 3 beneath the second “不”.

at that time not only centers for Buddhism, but also centers for all kinds of scholarly pursuits. Especially important for our examination of new methods of kundoku is the fact that Zen monks imported Neo-Confucianism, the school of Confucian philosophy that was newly flourishing in Song China. From the Edo period onward the mainstream of Japanese scholarship shifted from Buddhism to Neo-Confucianism, and Zen monks were the first intermediaries in this process. Giyō Hōshū 岐陽方秀 (1361–1424), a priest at one of Kyoto’s Five Mountain (Gozan) temples, Tōfukuji 東福寺, was the first to lecture in Japan about Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) most important work, the Sishu jizhu 四書集注 (J. Shisho

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shitchū) [Commentary on the Four Books].35 The kunten used by Giyō were later revised by Keian Genju 桂庵玄樹 (1427–1508) and perfected by Bunshi Genshō 文之玄昌 (1555–1620). The latter’s system, the so-called Bunshiten 文之 点, became the basis for Edo-period kundoku renditions of the Four Books.36 Keian, who lived for a long time in Satsuma (southern Kyūshū), is called the founder of the Southern Satsuma School (J. Satsunangakuha 薩南學派) of Confucianism, and was active in spreading Neo-Confucian scholarship, publishing Zhu Xi’s Daxue zhangju 大學章句 (J. Daigaku shōku) [Passages from the Great Learning] in 1481. He also wrote a book about kundoku known as Keian oshō kahō waten 桂庵和尚家法倭点 [Senior Priest Keian’s Family Method of Japanese Kunten]. In this book, he writes: 文字讀ヲバ無落字様ニ、唐韻ニ讀ミ度キ也。其故ハ偶一句半句、 ソラニ覚ユル時モ、ヲキ字不知曰其何字也、 口惜事

I want to read characters without omitting characters (rakuji 落字) and following Tang pronunciation. The reason is that occasionally, even when one memorizes a phrase or a part of a phrase, one does not know the characters that were omitted (okiji). This is regrettable. The rakuji 落字 and okiji 置字 mentioned here are mainly grammatical function particles like “而” and “也,” that appear in the original Literary Sinitic text, but are typically neither glossed nor read out in kundoku. In earlier kundoku annotations done by scholars and others, these particles were mostly not read. In the passage from the Baishi wenji [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] cited above, the final particle “也” is not read. It is an example of an okiji or a rakuji. Keian says that he wants to read all of these okiji~rakuji and, in addition, to read texts not with vernacular Japanese kun readings (i.e., in a sort of translationese), but in the “唐韻” (Tang pronunciation, lit. “Tang rhymes”); by this, we can assume he means the Chinese pronunciation of his own time. He considers it regrettable that in the case of kundoku annotations where one does not read okiji, even when the text is memorized, one does not know which sinographs are okiji in the original text. To give a specific example, in the above citation from the Baishi wenji, one reads the end of the sentence as hometari

35 36

The “Four Books” 四書 are: the Daxue 大學 [Great Learning], Zhongyong 中庸 [Doctrine of the Mean], Lunyu 論語 [Analects], and Mengzi 孟子 [Mencius]. The following description follows chapter 13 (“Kunten”) of the third edition of Ashikaga (1932).

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63

美タリ, and the fact that the original text is rounded off with “也” ends up

being forgotten. This view is in direct opposition to the thinking of the middle and late Heian periods, when Literary Sinitic was to be read and understood entirely via kundoku. For Keian, kundoku was merely an auxiliary expedient for comprehension of the original Literary Sinitic; the meaning of a text should be understood, to the extent possible, from the original. Moreover, his desire to read the original in Chinese, if possible, signals a new aspiration for “direct reading.”37 6.3 Monks Studying Abroad and the Rise in Literary Sinitic Proficiency At least two facts led to Keian thinking in this way. First, exchange with China, from which Japan had grown increasingly estranged since missions to Tang China ceased in the early Heian period, resumed with renewed vigor as many Zen monks started going to China for study beginning in the Kamakura period. Usually, the phrase “exchange with China” calls to mind the diplomatic missions to the Tang, but in reality, in terms of the numbers of people who went to China in the premodern period, the overwhelming majority were Zen monks who went during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Before the modern era, it was in this period that exchange with China most flourished. Keian himself studied in Ming China for seven years beginning in 1467, and likely knew spoken Chinese to some degree. For a person who had resided for a long period in China and was well-acquainted with the language and the affairs of that country, it was natural to think that Literary Sinitic texts should be read “directly,” i.e., in the original and without recourse to interpretive methods such as kundoku. Keian paid particular attention to the functions of particles that were mostly left unread as okiji in former Literary Sinitic kundoku practices. At first blush, particles such as “而,” “也,” or “之” seem to have no connection with meaning, but there are cases in which they are significant for understanding the intricate nuances of Literary Sinitic. In the “Daigaku” 大學 (C. Daxue, K. Taehak) [Great Learning] section of his book Shisho dōjikun 四書童子訓 [The Four Books Explained for Children], Ichijō Kaneyoshi38 一条兼良 (1402–1481), the greatest intellectual of the Muromachi period and a disciple of Giyō, emphasizes a point similar to that made by Keian:

37 38

The exposition below relies on Nakada (1954: 166). Editor’s note: This name is sometimes rendered as Kanera in the scholarly literature.

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本經ヲバ、

モノ

也。

HONKYŌ oba, kanara[zu] sora ni JUzubeki

必（ズ）

mono

nari

其

在所ヲバ、

字ヲ 落シテ

ソラニ 誦スレバ、

誦ズベキ ヤスメ字ノ

sono JI o otoshite JUzureba, yasumeji no ZAISHO oba ソラニオボエヌ。 別ニ

又

文章ヲ

sora ni oboenu. BETSU ni mata

ナス

爲ニモ

BUNSHŌ o nasu tame ni mo

益ナキナリ。

EKI naki nari Original classics definitely have to be recited from memory. If they are recited with omitted sinographs, the locations of the skipped sinographs (yasumeji) cannot be memorized. Moreover, it is also ineffective for composing texts.39 Here, yasumeji certainly refers to okiji. It is noteworthy that in this passage, in addition to saying that it is impossible to reproduce the original text correctly if all the okiji (Literary Sinitic function particles) are left unread, Kaneyoshi also points out that it is undesirable for writing Literary Sinitic (BUNSHŌ o nasu tame ni mo EKI naki nari). Many instances of the so-called “Japanese custom” (J. washū 和習, i.e., “incorrect expressions in Literary Sinitic due to the influence of Japanese language”) appear in Literary Sinitic texts composed by Japanese in earlier periods, and the use of particles was especially problematic in this regard. Aware of this problem, Kaneyoshi understood the need to pay attention to the usage of particles in order to write proper, orthodox Literary Sinitic. This shows perhaps how the Japanese understanding of Literary Sinitic had deepened compared with earlier periods. Kaneyoshi also writes: 且ハ

又

ヤスメ字ト

云ハ、 皆

詞ハ

katsu wa mata yasume-JI to iu wa, mina kotoba wa 虛ナレドモ、

ヲキ所ニヨリテ、

体

アル 字ニナルナリ。

KYO naredomo, okidokoro ni yorite, TAI aru JI ni naru nari Moreover, although all yasumeji are empty words, depending on their placement, they become sinographs with substance.40 In other words, while particles are function words and generally have no relation to meaning, depending on their syntactic position they influence meaning in the same way as sinographs with concrete meaning (that is, substantives 39 40

Cited from Ashikaga (1932: 848). Cited from Ashikaga (1932: 848).

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65

as opposed to function words). He then explains in detail examples where “之” is relevant to the meaning of sentences found in Zhu Xi’s Daxue zhangju 大 學章句. From this period on, the general level of Literary Sinitic written by Japanese scholars gradually rose, reaching its peak from the late Edo to early Meiji period, and it is possible to say that this process started with this perception of Kaneyoshi. Keian’s Senior Priest Keian’s Family Method of Japanese Kunten (J. Keian oshō kahō waten 桂庵和尚家法倭点) also explains the functions of particles in detail. 6.4 The Neo-Confucian Worldview and kundoku The second contextual key to Keian’s view of kundoku as an auxiliary means and his aspiration to “direct reading” of Literary Sinitic is related to the Neo-Confucian worldview. Keian and Ichijō Kaneyoshi applied their new system of kundoku not to Buddhist sutras, but to Zhu Xi’s texts, typically the commentaries on the Four Confucian Classics. I have already discussed how the worldview of Buddhism, a foreign religion for China, differed from traditional Chinese ethnocentrism in considering India and China as equals, or even viewing India as the center; how Japanese used this view to devise a worldview with the three countries of India, China, and Japan on equal footing, or with India and Japan being seen as identical; and how this worldview guaranteed the independence of kundoku and its equality with Literary Sinitic. Neo-Confucianism, however, not only inherited the originally Confucian Chinese ethnocentrism, but also reinforced it by relentlessly advocating the distinction between civilized China and uncivilized barbarians. This attitude reflects the historical situation in the Southern Song period (1127–1279), when Neo-Confucianism first arose, a period when the northern part of China was controlled by non-Chinese ethnic groups. In subsequent periods, too, these non-Chinese ethnic groups remained an overwhelmingly superior force in the north. Since the Chinese were inferior in strength, their ethnocentric claims were in large part idealistic and radical. The slogan “revere the [Chinese] emperor and expel the barbarians” (sonnō jōi 尊王攘夷), which was used frequently at the end of the Edo period in Japan, appears in the Sishu yinwen 四書因 問 [Questions Concerning the Four Books] by the Ming-period Neo-Confucian scholar Lü Nan 呂柟 (1479–1542). Japan imported Neo-Confucianism, respected China, and certainly did not view itself as barbarian. On the contrary, the Japanese version of Chinese ethnocentrism—claiming that Japan had been in existence since ancient times and was the center—was further reinforced based on the Neo-Confucian strain of Chinese ethnocentrism, with the difference that the “王” (“king, emperor”) in sonnō jōi 尊王攘夷 was reinterpreted as the Japanese emperor. The

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anti-honji suijaku theory mentioned earlier was created in Shinto circles during the Kamakura period. In any case, the former idea of equality between India, China, and Japan could no longer hold water in the context of these new views emphasizing Japan’s superiority. Thus, the theoretical basis for the equality of classical Literary Sinitic and Japanese kundoku was also lost. Furthermore, as a natural consequence of Neo-Confucian idealistic Chinese ethnocentrism, the foreign religion of Buddhism came to be rejected as a barbarian teaching. Moreover, since Neo-Confucian metaphysical philosophy, which did not exist in traditional Confucianism, was actually adapted from Buddhist doctrine, Neo-Confucianists were even more determined to eliminate Buddhism. Thus, while in the earlier periods there was a kind of segregation that allowed for the co-existence of Buddhism and Confucianism, in the early modern era, when Neo-Confucianism flourished, Confucian-Buddhist syncretism progressed on the one hand, but the de facto predominance of Confucianism was established on the other. Moreover, Neo-Confucianism developed an abstract metaphysical philosophy and, in contrast to the earlier tradition of Confucianism, which focused on xungu 訓詁 philological scholarship for the interpretation of expressions in the Confucian classics, Neo-Confucianism also emphasized practical aspects; that is, the idea that by correctly understanding the classics as the teachings of Confucius and other sages, and by putting them into practice, anyone could become a sage. For this reason, the need to correctly understand the true meaning of each and every sinograph and phrase in the classics acquired new importance in Neo-Confucianism. When Neo-Confucianism was introduced to Japan in the Kamakura period, its features and views of traditional Confucianism and Buddhism greatly influenced Japanese kundoku practice. Keian and Ichijō Kaneyoshi’s aspirations for reading entire original Literary Sinitic texts without omitting any particles stem in part from the Neo-Confucian attitude of striving to understand the true meaning of the sages from each and every sinograph and turn of phrase. The clearest expression of this aspiration is the statement made by Ichijō Kaneyoshi in his work, The Four Books Explained for Children (J. Shisho dōjikun 四書童子訓), in the section on the Great Learning, where he divides kundoku into original annotations (J. honchū 本注, i.e., “old annotations dating to the Tang period and before”) and new annotations (J. shinchū 新注, i.e., “Zhu Xi’s annotations”) and says that in the kundoku for the new annotations, each and every sinograph should be read: In the case of the original annotations, reading them has to be done with omission of characters such as “而” and “之.” Thus, these characters

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Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

become useless and people cannot know their deep meaning. Therefore, those who would study the new annotations should recite without omitting even a single character.41 6.5 Kundoku in the Edo Period How did the new kundoku trends of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods discussed above develop into the Edo period when Neo-Confucianism was introduced on a full scale and became the mainstream philosophy? First, let us compare the Hakaseketen 博士家点 (kunten of scholar family traditions) used since the Heian period, the Bunshiten 文之点 from the Muromachi period, and the Dōshunten 道春点 from the early Edo period, by taking this passage from the beginning of the Analects as an example: 子曰、

學而時習之、

子曰く、

學びて時に之を習う、

SHI iwaku, manabite toki ni kore o narau, 不亦説乎 亦た説ばしからずや [modern kundoku reading]

mata yorokobashikarazu ya The Master said, “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?” The Master said, “To learn and rehearse it constantly, is this indeed not a pleasure?”42 This phrase was read as follows by court scholars beginning in the Heian period: 子の曰く、

學んで時に習う、

また説からずや。

SHI no notōbaku, manande toki ni narau, mata yorokobashikarazu ya. Comparing this reading to the modern one, we see that the character “之,” as it is an okiji, is not read, and that “子曰” has the peculiar reading “Shi no notōbaku.” Thus, we can say that the omission of okiji (function particles) and unique kundoku readings are features of Hakaseketen. 41 The original reads: 本注ヲ讀メル例ナラバ、此而ノ字、之ノ字ヲ落シテヨムベシ。サ ル時ハ此字ガイ夕ズラモノニ成リテ、深キ義理アル事ヲ、人シルマジキ也。故ニ新 注ヲ學バン者ハ、一字ノヤスメ詞ヲモ残サズ誦ジベキ也。 Cited from Ashikaga (1932: 849). 42 Discussion here and below based on Nakada (1954: 154–173). English translations cited from Legge (1930: 1) and Gardner (2007: 11), respectively.

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According to the so-called Bunshiten devised by the Muromachi-period Zen priest Bunshi Genshō, the passage should read as follows: 子の曰く、

學んで而して時に之を習ふ、

SHI no notamawaku, manande shikōshite toki ni kore o narau, 亦た 説からざらんや。 mata yorokobashikarazaran ya Here “而,” which is not read in either the Hakaseketen or the modern kunten method, is read in this case as shikōshite (“and then; thereupon”), while the negation marker “不” is read as –zaran (“is it probably not …”). This reading does not omit particles and renders the original faithfully. The next reading follows the Dōshunten 道春点 of the representative NeoConfucian scholar of the early Edo period, Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (Buddhist name Dōshun 道春; 1593–1657): のたまは

子の曰く、

よりよりならはす

學んで

かさ

時之   を習ぬ、

SHI no notamawaku, manande yoriyori narawasu o kasanu, よろこばし

亦た説からずや。

mata yorokobashikarazu ya. (寛文 kanbun 4 = 1664, original version) 子の曰く、

學んで

SHI no notamawaku, manande

時に

之を

toki ni kore o

習う、

亦た

narau, mata

説からずや。

yorokobashikarazu ya. (天宝 tenpō 3 = 1832, revised version) This is a sort of compromise reading, similar to the Hakaseketen rendering in that it omits “而” and reads the negative “不” as -zu, and yet resembling the Bunshiten 文之点 in reading “之” and rendering “曰” as notamawaku. The Dōshunten 道春点 method is a representative type of kunten system that was used widely during the entire Edo period, but the influence of the Hakaseketen system weakened in the latter half of the period. Apart from these, many other kunten systems were created by Confucian scholars like Ukai Sekisai 鵜飼石斎 (1615–1664), Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682), Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 (1627– 1705), Dazai Shundai 太宰春台 (1680–1747), Gotō Shizan 後藤芝山 (1721–1782), and others. Most of these were based on the Bunshiten system. In general, the tendency was for kunten systems created in the first half of the Edo period to

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69

retain some features of the Hakaseketen, while those created in the second half were influenced by it less and less. 6.6 Debates about the Abolition of kundoku: Tōgai 東涯 and Sorai 徂徠 In the Edo period, the kundoku method of the Gozan Zen monks, who played the role of forerunners in the adopting of Neo-Confucianism, became mainstream. Going a step further, it is perhaps only natural that the wish that Keian had previously expressed to read Literary Sinitic directly—in other words, to abolish kundoku—should re-emerge. This issue was first raised in Sakubun shinketsu 作文真訣 [True Secrets of Composition] (1748) by Itō Tōgai 伊藤東涯 (1670–1736), a Confucian scholar no less prominent than his father Itō Jinsai. In a section titled “Inversion is disadvantageous for composition,” Tōgai writes as follows: The people of the four corners of the world have different tastes and different languages, but only the Middle Plain [China] has the correct ones. The language of the people of this country [the Japanese] is originally greatly inverted, and to say “飲酒” (“drink liquor”) they say “liquor” first and then “drink,” and to say “喫茶” (“drink tea”) they first say “tea” and then “drink.” The Chinese way of saying “飲酒” and “喫茶” is superior. In composing a text in Literary Sinitic and placing sinographs, one unavoidably writes incorrectly, being pulled to some extent by the vulgar language [zokugo 俗語 = Japanese], and for this reason it is difficult to reach the level of mastery of the illustrious [Chinese] people.43 The True Secrets of Composition states the essential points of writing in Literary Sinitic for Japanese people. Tōgai’s statement that the difference in word order between Japanese and Chinese hinders Literary Sinitic composition does not necessarily mean that he is arguing directly about the pros and cons of kundoku practice per se. From his later writings, however, it is clear that Tōgai considered kundoku undesirable. Incidentally, Tōgai’s worldview as a Confucian scholar can perhaps be inferred from his statement that different countries have different languages, but only Chinese is correct. 43 The original text reads: 四方之民、 嗜欲不同、 言語各異、 唯中原爲得其正。 國 人語言本是多如倒曰飲酒先呼酒而後稱飲, 如曰喫茶先叫茶而後云喫。 不如中 國之稱飲酒、 喫茶。 故其臨文命字之間、 動牽俗言[日本語] 不免錯置則難得 華人通暁。 Cited from page 5a of the manuscript edition owned by Waseda University Library.

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Following the above quotation, Tōgai introduces the view of the famous early Ming-period Chinese scholar Song Lian 宋濂 (1310–1381), who thought that the Japanese were not skilled in Literary Sinitic because they read via kundoku, inverting the word order. Tōgai points out, however, that this inversion is not only found in the Japanese language, giving examples from Sanskrit and Korean. For Sanskrit, he gives an example from the process of translating Buddhist sutras into Chinese. Namely, according to the annotation of the Yuanjue jing 圓覺經 [Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment], Sanskrit also uses word order like “鐘打” (“bell + strike”) and “飯喫” (“food + eat”), and when translating Buddhist sutras the Sanskrit is translated first and then the text is rearranged (廻文) to match Chinese word order, resulting in “打鐘” (“hit the bell”) and “喫飯” (“eat food”). Next, in Korean exegeses of the Four Books, a translation in the vernacular Korean script (K. ŏnmun 諺文) mixed with sinographs is found below the original Literary Sinitic text, and one can see that Korean word order is “reversed” just like Japanese. Based on these examples, he states: “We realize that the languages of these two countries are similar to our custom.”44 In other words, Tōgai knew that Japanese had the same word order as Sanskrit and Korean, and that Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras were made by rearranging (廻文) Sanskrit texts. If so, it is fully possible that he thought that Japanese kundoku practice originated in the Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras and that kundoku practices also existed in Korea. The person who insisted most adamantly on abandoning kundoku reading practices was the Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728), a contemporary of Tōgai who criticized the teachings of Tōgai’s father Jinsai. In his Kun’yaku jimō 訓譯示蒙 [Instructions for the Ignorant on Translation into Kundoku] (1766) he rejected kundoku, plainly stating his views as follows: Today, because they always keep to their Japanese vernacular kun readings, and because they seek to understand the meaning of characters by means of these kun readings, there is a layer of separation [between scholar and text] … If present-day scholars think they want to study translation, they must rid themselves of the Japanese vernacular kun readings and the inversion of sinographs practiced in Japan since ancient times.45

44 二國之言亦如我方之習也. Cited from page 5b of the Waseda University Library copy. 45 The original reads: 今時ノ和訓ヲ常格ニ守リテ和訓ニテ字義ヲ知ラントスルユへニ 一重ノ皮膜ヲ隔ル也 … 今ノ學者訳文ノ學ヲセント思ハバ、悉ク古ヨリ日本ニ習来 ル和訓ト云モノト字ノ反リト云コトヲ破除スベシ. Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 1:5).

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Furthermore, Sorai insisted that Literary Sinitic should be read “directly” in contemporary Chinese pronunciation and not by kundoku. The context for this view was the boom in “Tang speech” (tōwa 唐話, i.e., spoken Chinese) studies that gained currency through Japan-China trade via Nagasaki during that time. Actually, Sorai himself studied the Chinese language and tried to have conversations with Chinese people. Thus, his mention of “studying translation” (yakubun no gaku) likely refers not to kundoku, but to translation into spoken Japanese. In the introductory notes to another work by Sorai on this topic, Yakubun sentei 訳文筌蹄 [Guide to Translation] (first edition pub. 1715), he writes: I have set forth these principles of scholarship for my students. One must follow the Nagasaki Method of Chinese language study, employ vernacular Chinese (zokugo 俗語) in the classroom, read Chinese texts according to Chinese pronunciation (kaon 華音), translate Chinese texts into vernacular Japanese (此方俚語) and, at all costs, avoid wakun annotation.46 In other words, Sorai emphasizes that one should learn contemporary spoken Chinese, read Literary Sinitic in Chinese, and translate it into Japanese, not kundoku translationese. One of the insights for this opinion might have come from Korean ŏnhae 諺解 (J. genkai, “vernacular explications”) exegeses of Literary Sinitic texts into vernacular Korean. The Korean editions of Confucian classics seen by Tōgai were probably ŏnhaebon 諺解本 (J. genkaibon, “Sino-Korean hybrid exegeses”). Tōgai and Sorai, neither of whom was a Neo-Confucian scholar in the Cheng-Zhu tradition, differed in terms of theory. However, both started from a position critical of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, and both inherited and further developed the thinking of Keian and others. 6.7 The Issaiten 一斎点 and the Limits of the Debate about the Abolition of kundoku The book Wadoku yōryō 倭讀要領 [Essentials of Japanese Reading] (1728) by Dazai Shundai, a disciple of Sorai, is an elaboration of his teacher’s views, although it was actually published earlier than Sorai’s Kun’yaku jimō 訓譯示蒙

46

English translation from Pastreich (2001: 156). The original reads: 余嘗爲蒙生定學問之 法. 先爲崎陽之學. 敎以俗語. 通以華音. 譯以此方俚語. 絶不作和訓廻還之讀. Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 6). Note that Kin, somewhat differently from Pastreich, interprets zokugo 俗語 here as “colloquial Chinese” (中国語の口語).

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(1766). In the section “How inversion of reading spoils the text’s meaning” (顛 倒讀害文義説), Shundai writes: Inversion (顛倒) means “upside down.” The whole language of the people of Japan is upside down. While Chinese people say, 治國平天下 [rule the country [and] pacify All under Heaven], people in Japan say, kuni o osamu, TENKA o taira ni su 國ヲ治ム、天下ヲ平ニス [country-pacify, All under Heaven-make pacified]. […] What Chinese people say first they say last and what Chinese say last they say first. In general, the whole language is inverted like this. This inversion is found not only in our Japan, but also in the lands of eastern, western, southern, and northern barbarians outside China. Although each of their languages has its own distinct properties, all of them are inverted. Because people of our country now read Chinese texts by rendering them in the language of this region and inverting them, the meaning of texts is often spoiled.47 This assertion is similar to the one by Tōgai given above. The only difference is that Tōgai mentioned Sanskrit and Korean as examples of languages similar in structure to Japanese, whereas Shundai says that this applies to all the languages in the lands surrounding China from east, west, south, and north. Moreover, Tōgai focuses on Literary Sinitic composition, whereas Shundai points out the harmful influence of kundoku on reading. Next, Shundai considers Kibi no Makibi 吉備真備 (695–775), a scholar and court noble of the Nara period, to be the creator of kundoku and kana, writing: By creating kana and establishing reading in Wa [Japanese] language via rearranging and inverting the text, has not Lord Kibi treated later scholars to sweet poison? It has sunk into the marrow of people’s bones and is hard to remove. If one intends to remove it, it is best to learn contemporary Chinese (華語). Chinese is the vulgar [zokugo 俗語 = vernacular]

47 顛倒トハサカサマナルヲイフ。日本ノ人ノ言語ハ皆サカサマナリ。中華ノ人ハ治國 平天下トイフコトヲ日本ノ人ハ、國ヲ治ム、天下ヲ平ニストイフ。…中華ノ人ノ先ニ オヨソ

イフコトヲ後ニイヒ、中華ノ人ノ後ニイフコトヲ先ニイフ。凡言語皆カクノ如ク上下顛 倒ス。此顛倒ハ我ガ日本ノミニアラズ、中華ノ外ハ東夷、 西戎、 南蛮、 北狄、 言 コト

語各殊 ナレドモ顛倒セズトイフコトナシ。今吾國ノ人、中華ノ書ヲ以テ此方ノ語ト ナシテ顛倒シテ讀ム故ニ、文義ヲ害スルコト多シ。 Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 3:393).

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

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language of China, the present-day Tang speech (唐話). Thus, a person aspiring to learning (文學) should definitely study Tang speech.48 The “literary studies” (bungaku 文學) mentioned here refers to scholarship as a whole. In short, he says that people engaged in scholarship have to study contemporary Chinese and read Literary Sinitic based on contemporary Chinese. In Shundai’s time, however, this was easier said than done. In the Literary Sinitic preface added by Shundai to the Essentials of Japanese Reading, he asserts that “it is clear that Chinese (“Middle Xia” 中夏) texts should not be read in Japanese (“the language of Wa” 倭語).”49 Ironically, this Literary Sinitic preface is marked with kunten. Moreover, Shundai himself, contrary to his assertion, marked the Four Books with kunten. Although Shundai argued for the abolition of kundoku, he was probably fully aware that it “had sunk into the marrow of people’s bones and was hard to remove.” There are at least two reasons for the difficulty of abolishing kundoku. First, kundoku is a reading method using marks based on fixed rules, and anybody who knows the rules and the meanings of the symbols can read Literary Sinitic relatively easily. Second, under the circumstances of national seclusion (sakoku 鎖國) at that time, it was probably completely unrealistic for many people to study contemporary spoken Chinese. It is possible to read Literary Sinitic “directly” in Chinese order with Sino-Japanese on readings of the sinographs, as was later advocated by Aoki Masaru 青木正児 (1887–1964), a scholar of Chinese literature, but it was surely difficult to abandon the longtime custom of reading via kundoku. The only practical and realizable method was to make kundoku as faithful as possible to the original text. One of the culminations of this approach was the Issaiten 一斎点 style developed by Satō Issai 佐藤一斎 (1772–1859) in the late Edo period.50 The Issaiten system is characterized not only by explicit reading of all the particles, similar to Bunshiten, but also by reading characters in their Sino-Japanese on readings rather than in their vernacular kun readings. For example, the phrase 人不知而不慍 (“If people do not know [you], and [you] are not indignant …”) from the Analects is usually read:

48 吉備公ノ國字ヲ造リ倭語顛倒ノ讀ヲ創ケルハ、後ノ學者ニ甘キ毒ヲ啗シメタルニア ラズヤ。此レ人ノ骨髄ニ淪テ除キガタシ。若コレヲ除ントオモハバ、華語ヲ習フニシ クハナシ。華語トハ中華ノ俗語ナリ、今ノ唐話ナリ。サレバ文學ニ志アラン者ハ必 唐話ヲ學ブベキナリ。 Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 3:395). 49 倭語不可以讀中夏之書審矣。 Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 3:386). 50 See Saitō (2008).

74 人

Chapter 1 知らずして

慍らず

hito shirazu shite ikarazu, But in the Issaiten system the character “慍” is read with its on reading (un) as: 人

知らずして

慍せず

hito shirazu shite UNsezu. This is done to avoid confusion with the character “怒,” which is usually used for the Japanese word ikaru, and to make it easier to restore the original Literary Sinitic text from the kundoku. Nevertheless, when using Issaiten, unless one knows beforehand that “慍” (un) means “to be angry, indignant” (ikaru) it is impossible to understand what it is, and the function of kundoku as translation is largely destroyed. Moreover, it is extremely odd as a text in Japanese. For these reasons Issaiten came to be criticized later as deliberately breaking the Japanese idiom. The aim of Issaiten is to be able to restore faithfully the original Literary Sinitic from the kundoku. In fact, in order to increase proficiency in composition, the exercise of restoring Literary Sinitic from kundoku was widely practiced and was called fukubun 復文 (“returning the text; retranslation; back-translation”). As a result, there was a great progress in the level of Literary Sinitic ability among the Japanese in this period. Furthermore, the condition of Literary Sinitic texts composed by Japanese scholars—deplored earlier by Tōgai, who had said of them, “they are unable to reach the level of mastery of the Chinese”—improved considerably. Issaiten is a style of kundoku that is just one step away from direct reading. The advent of this kundoku system meant that, as a result of the long history of studying Literary Sinitic since the Nara period, by the late Edo period—the last stage when Literary Sinitic enjoyed official authority—many people finally reached the level of being able to understand Literary Sinitic directly without using kundoku as a translation technique. Emura Hokkai 江村北海 (1713–1788), a scholar of the late Edo period, expressed his opinion about “useless kundoku” as follows:51 無点ノ

書ヲ

ヨミ得ル

ホドノ人ニハ、

訓点ハ

MUTEN no SHO o yomiuru hodo no hito ni wa, KUNTEN wa

51

From chapter 3 page 3 of his Jugyō hen 授業編 [Compilation of Lessons] in Emura (1910– 1911: 606). Cited from Saitō (2008: 167).

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku モトヨリ

無用ノ

75

モノナリ

motoyori MUYŌ no mono nari. Needless to say, for people who can read unmarked texts, kunten marking is of no use. Issaiten was very popular from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era and strongly influenced texts in the Kanbun kundoku style—a type of written mode, where texts are composed in a style that specifically mimics the translationese of kundoku reading practice—of the Meiji period. For example, Kajin no kigū 佳人之奇遇 [Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women]52 by the politician and novelist Tōkai Sanshi 東海散士 (1852–1922), who was famous for his political novels of the early Meiji period, is written in a kundoku style based on Issaiten.53 7

Kundoku since the Meiji Period

7.1 Using kundoku to Study English Starting in the Meiji period, with the intensive importation of Western civilization, Literary Sinitic was destined to become useless. Nevertheless, as is well known, Literary Sinitic remained alive and well for some time because much of Western culture, institutions, and ideas were translated into Japanese using sinographic coinages, and Kanbun kundoku style was widely used as the written register for sociopolitical debates. In addition, with the introduction of movable type printing, media such as newspapers and magazines flourished, publications of Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic prose increased dramatically and, as a result, it is even possible to say that Literary Sinitic became even more widespread than during the Edo period. As for kundoku itself, however, there was no change in its basic method, even though there were small modifications, such as replacing the reading shi notamawaku (“Confucius said” [honorific]) used earlier when Confucius was venerated as a sage, with shi iwaku (“Confucius said” [plain]). Indeed, the only major change was instead that, due to the end of the national isolation period and the opening of relations with foreign countries, kundoku, which was previously only a matter of the Japanese language, was actually extended to other languages as well. 52 Published from 1885 to 1897, this political novel outlined the history of independence movements in the world and took a romantic view of Japanese nationalism. 53 See Saitō Fumitoshi (2008) and Murayama (1980).

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The first example of this is the use of the kundoku method in English language studies. In the Meiji period, the pride of place earlier occupied by Literary Sinitic was taken, needless to say, by Western languages such as English, German, French and others, but especially by English. People who until then had been studying Literary Sinitic started learning English, either abandoning Literary Sinitic entirely or studying the two languages together. A good example is the novelist Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916), who attended a school for (classical) Chinese studies as a boy and then became a scholar of English literature. There are many instances of kundoku being used in English textbooks of the early Meiji period. For example, in Quackenbos English Grammar with Translation by George Payn Quackenbos (1826–1881) and translated into Japanese by Shima Kazunori 島一徳 (fl. 1870s) as Kakkenbosu-shi Eibunten sōyaku 格賢勃斯氏英文典挿訳 (1871), the English text is translated as follows (Fig. 13):

Figure 13 Kunten glossing in a Meiji-period English textbook

⑴ ホルスト horusuto ⑵ first ⑶ 第一ノ ㊂ DAIICHI no ⑶

ブーク

イン

グランマル

būku book

in in

guranmaru grammar

書籍 ㊃

於テノ ㊁

文典ニ ㊀

shoseki ⑷

oite no ⑵

bunten ni ⑴

Reading Literary Sinitic—kundoku

77

The first line shows the pronunciation in katakana, the second line is the English text, and the third line has translations of each word along with numerals. Following these numerals, the text reads as: 文典ニ

於テノ

第一ノ

書籍

BUNTEN ni oite no DAIICHI no SHOSEKI At that time, this method was called chokuyaku 直譯 (“direct/literal translation”) and this translation, when changed one step further into mixed kanjiplus-hiragana Japanese style, was called hon’yaku 翻譯 (“translation”).54 This system is basically the same as that used earlier in China to produce Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist sutras. Numerals added to words, including those read in order as in “daiichi no ⑶ shoseki ⑷,” match the wordorder marks of the Nara period and not the kundoku marks used during the Meiji period. This does not mean, of course, that translation of Buddhist sutras into Chinese was imitated in this case, and the coincidence is probably due simply to this system being the most natural and expedient one possible. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that I consider the word-order signs of the Nara period as originating in the Chinese translation of Buddhist sutras and only later being employed in Japanese kundoku. The compiler of the English textbook in the Meiji period likely did not know about the process of translating Buddhist sutras into Chinese, but Buddhist monks of the Nara period certainly did. It seems that a similar kundoku-style method of studying English was also used in university classes of the Meiji period. In the regulations (laid down in 1870) of the Daigaku Nankō 大學南校 (“University Southern School,” a government education group), the predecessor of the University of Tokyo, English language classes were divided into two types: seisoku 正則 (“regular”) and hensoku 變則 (“irregular”). The “regular” classes consisted mainly of the study of pronunciation and conversation taught by foreign professors, while the “irregular” ones were taught by Japanese professors and focused on kundoku kaii 訓読解意 (“explaining the meaning by kundoku”). It is not clear whether the English kundoku method discussed above was used during these “irregular” classes, but since the term used was “explaining the meaning by kundoku,” it seems that a similar method was probably used. In any case, this example indicates the depth of the roots of the kundoku mode of thought.

54

See Kamei Hideo (2000).

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7.2 Liang Qichao’s Method of Reverse kundoku The second example of the spread of kundoku beyond Japanese is the influence kundoku had on China. As can be understood from the statement by the Ming-period scholar Song Lian, who said that the Japanese are unskilled in Literary Sinitic because they read via kundoku, Japanese kundoku was already known in China to some extent before the modern period. For Chinese before the modern period, it was a strange method of reading used by foreigners, probably nothing more than a matter of curiosity, or even contempt. In the modern period, however, the situation changed entirely because China, which accepted Western civilization and initiated reforms later than Japan, was actively trying to import Western learning via Japan. A notable figure in this process was Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (J. Ryō Keichō, 1873–1929), one of the leading reformers of the late Qing period (1644–1912). In 1898, after a coup d’état organized by reformers—the so-called Hundred Days’ Reform 戊戌政變—ended in failure, Liang Qichao sought refuge in Japan in September. In April of 1899, in the journal Qingyibao 清議報 [Pure Discussion News] that he had founded, he wrote an article entitled “Lun xue ribenwen zhi yi” 論學日本文之益 [On the Benefit of Studying Japanese Texts] in which he outlined the following ideas. – For Chinese people who wish to study Western learning, the quickest method is to read Japanese books, rather than Western ones. This is because Japan received Western civilization before China and has already accumulated numerous translations of Western works over the course of the thirty years since the Meiji restoration. – In addition, it is difficult to study English, whereas Japanese is easy, and within several days one can achieve modest success at reading Japanese texts, and attain perfection within several months. – Japanese texts are 70 to 80 percent sinographs, while the remaining 20 to 30 percent are verbal and other inflectional endings and particles, written in kana. Since “true characters” (實字, substantives such as nouns and verbs) come first, and “empty characters” (虛字, function words such as particles and inflectional endings) come later, one can simply “invert them according to the rules.” Liang described this method in his book, Hewen handufa 和文漢讀法 (J. Wabun kandokuhō) [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese], and claimed that after studying it, a Chinese could read Japanese without effort (Fig. 14). This method might be called a “reverse kundoku method” (J. gyakukundokuhō 逆訓読法). Its principle is essentially the same as the above-mentioned Japanese fukubun 復文 (“returning the text; retranslation; back-translation”). The only difference is that “復文” meant restoring the kundoku text to its

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79

Figure 14 The first page of Liang Qichao’s Hewen handufa 和文漢讀法 [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese]

original Literary Sinitic, whereas Liang Qichao’s method corrects a text written in the Kanbun kundoku style of the Meiji period into a modern form of Literary Sinitic. In February of 1899, Liang Qichao was staying at the Japanese inn Kansuirō 環翠楼 (built in 1614) at Tōnosawa, Hakone, together with his compatriot friend

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Luo Pu 羅普 (dates unknown), who had come to Japan a year earlier. As a result of learning Japanese from Luo Pu and studying various Japanese books, Liang later recollected that he wrote the book that he recommends, How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese, in a single day. At that time, Liang Qichao had been in Japan for merely half a year and knew practically no Japanese. The proficiency of Luo Pu, who acted as his teacher, was also very modest and he probably had no proper knowledge of Japanese grammar. The two of them devised this method by relying entirely on the sinographs in Japanese books, and inferring the meaning of particles and other elements in kana. This was, in a way, the reverse of the process by which Japanese people, who did not know Chinese, formerly studied Literary Sinitic grammatical elements and devised kundoku. How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese has forty-two sections in total, and the first section explains the difference in word order between Japanese and Chinese as follows: 漢文讀書、日文則云書ヲ讀ム、漢文遊日本、日文則云日本ニ遊フ

Chinese “讀書” (du shu, “reading a book”) is expressed as “書ヲ讀ム” sho o yomu (“a book-read”) in Japanese texts; Chinese “遊日本” (you riben, “travel [to] Japan”) is expressed as “日本ニ遊フ” Nihon ni asobu (“Japan-to-travel”). This observation is the same as the ones we have seen earlier by Itō Tōgai and Dazai Shundai, but is stated from the opposite perspective. From the second section on, the book consists of explanations of particles and inflectional endings and a kind of dictionary in which Sino-Japanese words coined in Japan are arranged by radicals and translated into Chinese, such as “切符－券、票” (J. kippu, C. quàn, piào [“ticket”]). This also goes hand in hand with Japanese kundoku textbooks, such as the aforementioned Senior Priest Keian’s Family Method of Japanese Kunten, that focused on explanations of Literary Sinitic particle usage. After its original publication, How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese was reprinted repeatedly and greatly influenced the Chinese at that time. It certainly played a role as a kind of handy method for the Chinese to read texts in Japanese, but at the same time it cannot be denied that the book’s overly schematic and simplified method often led to misreadings and created among the Chinese the illusion that the Japanese language was simple. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967), the younger brother of the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), who together with his

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81

older brother studied in Japan and was later known as China’s foremost expert on Japan, wrote an essay entitled “Hewen handufa” 和文漢讀法 [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese] that appeared in his Kuzhu zaji 苦竹雜 記 [Miscellaneous Notes on Bitter Bamboo] (1936). According to this essay, it seems he had read Liang Qichao’s book in his youth, and he speaks of its influence: “It spread the study of Japanese language, but also created a misunderstanding about the simplicity of Japanese.” Moreover, while this method is effective in its own way for reading the kanbun kundoku style of works from the early Meiji period such as Kajin no kigū 佳人之奇遇 [Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women], it is useless for other written registers. Zhou gives a direct warning that since Japanese and Chinese are fundamentally different languages, Japanese has to be studied thoroughly from the very beginning and Japanese texts have to be read as Japanese. Interestingly, this point seems to have something in common with the views of Sorai and Shundai, who argued that Literary Sinitic had to be read in spoken Chinese. 7.3 Debate about “Direct Reading” Redux The “direct” method of reading Literary Sinitic in Chinese (J. chokudoku) was discussed as an aspiration by Keian in the Muromachi period and championed by Sorai and Shundai in the Edo period. In the Meiji period, when Japan and China entered into diplomatic relations as equals and traffic between the two countries became unrestricted, the idea of “direct reading” resurfaced as a method that now might possibly be realized However, the debate about direct reading of Literary Sinitic in the Meiji period became all the more tinged with shades of complexity precisely because this method was now realizable. In his 1879 “Kangaku yoroshiku seisoku ikka o mōke shōnen shūsai o erami shinkoku ni ryūgaku seshimubeki ronsetsu” 漢學宜しく正則一科を設け少年秀 才を選み清國に留學せしむべき論説 [Editorial on the Need to Set Up Sinitic Learning as a Regular Course, to Choose Talented Youth and Send Them to Qing to Study], Shigeno Yasutsugu 重野安繹 (1827–1910), an eminent historian and scholar of Sinitic Learning in the early years of the Meiji period, was one of the first to point out the need to study contemporary spoken Chinese and, in addition to introducing Sorai’s views, he argued that a method similar to the above-mentioned “regular” method for studying English (i.e., the teaching of conversational English by foreigners) should be put into practice for the study of the Chinese language.55 55

See Shigeno (1989: 3:345–352) and Tao (2008: 51).

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In his 1886 article, “Shinago tokuhō no kairyō o nozomu” 支那語讀法ノ改良 ヲ望ム [Looking Forward to the Reform of the Method for Reading Chinese],56

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), the British Japanologist who wrote A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (first edition 1888, with subsequent editions in 1889, 1898, and 1907) and was teaching philology (linguistics) at Tokyo Imperial University at the time, also explains in detail the unnaturalness of kundoku and comments as follows, drawing ironically on the contemporary political situation: In short, everybody knows that Japanese language has Japanese word order and English language has English word order. Why is Chinese language the only one placed under [Japanese] jurisdiction and denied extraterritorial rights?57 In the eyes of a Westerner, kundoku must have been a strange thing indeed. The concept of “countries” such as India, China, and Japan had existed earlier, but this was by no means the same as the concept of “nation-states” in the modern sense. In the Meiji period, the concept of the modern nation-state provided the debate about direct reading of Literary Sinitic with new theoretical weapons. Sorai, assuming the universal nature of Confucianism, had argued for direct reading with the aim of internalizing Chinese civilization by means of a more accurate understanding of Confucian texts. In the Meiji period, by contrast, since China was now considered to be a foreign country and Chinese was to be studied as a foreign language alongside English and other languages, the externalization of China became the basis for direct reading. Further, Shigeno, in presenting reasons for the imperative to study the Chinese language, probably contrary to the intent of Chamberlain’s tongue-in-cheek comments, may have been aiming at a language-based argument for the idea of “quit Asia and join the West,” as seen in the following statement from his 1879 editorial, where he correctly foresees the coming Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895): We and China contact each other now as neighboring countries, but it cannot be guaranteed that in the future there will never be events such

56 Tōyō gakugei zasshi vol. 4, no. 61 (1885). 57 畢竟日本語ハ日本語ノ言序アリ、英語ハ英ノ語序ノ存スルコト皆々承知セリ。唯支 那語ニノミ治外法權ヲ許サズシテ權内ニ置クハ何ゾヤ. (Original is in Japanese.)

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as the Taiwan campaign of several years ago [1874], an important matter for army and state.58 The discourse around the direct reading of Literary Sinitic in the Meiji period was later inherited by researchers in the field of Sinitic Learning. Their notable representatives are Aoki Masaru and Kuraishi Takeshirō 倉石武四郎 (1897–1975).59 Aoki was the first to discuss the literary revolution that started in China in 1917, and he was a proponent of research on Chinese literature based on new concepts. In his article “Kanbun chokudoku ron” 漢文直讀論 [On the direct reading of Literary Sinitic] (1921),60 he does not necessarily insist on reading Literary Sinitic in Chinese, but accepts direct reading in Sino-Japanese on readings (kan-on and go-on). However, the publication of this work had to be postponed due to pressure from the academic world of the time. Kuraishi, on the other hand, was a pioneer of Chinese language education who compiled the first dictionary of modern Chinese in Japan to include romanized pronunications (published by Iwanami Shoten). According to his recollections, around the time when Aoki’s article was published, he was also cautioned by his senior colleagues against expressing his views on the issue of direct reading. With the rise of nationalist ideology after the First World War, kundoku was reassessed as a means to raise the Japanese spirit. For this reason, the direct reading advocated by Aoki and Kuraishi came under pressure from the academic world. The “Regular Sinitic Learning” (seisoku no kangaku 正則の漢學) emphasized by Shigeno Yasutsugu in the Meiji period did eventually contribute to some extent to Japan’s China policy in the form of practical language studies, but kundoku, which was supposed to be “irregular” (hensoku 變則), was revived by being taken up by and absorbed into nationalism. In the postwar period, the rift between them, with direct reading advocated by pro-PRC reformers and kundoku supported by anti-PRC conservatives, has in a sense continued to the present. I have outlined above the history of kundoku, taking into account the context of each period. Kundoku is nothing more than a method for reading and translating Literary Sinitic, but its history reflects transitions in both intellectual 58 今我と支那と隣國相接すれば、軍國の重事往歳臺灣役の如きもの、後来必ず無 きを保せざるべし. Cited from Shigeno (1989: 3:350). 59 See Tao Demin (2008). 60 Reprinted in his Shina bungei ronsō (Aoki 1927: 549–563); the original article was published in Shinagaku with the title, “Honpō shinagaku kakushin no daiippo” 本邦支那學 革新の第一歩 [First Step toward Reform of China Studies in Japan].

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and cultural history, such as the introduction of Buddhism, Japanese indigenous aristocratic culture, the conflict between Buddhism and Shinto, the introduction of Neo-Confucianism and its development, and finally the reception of Western civilization. The link between kundoku and history is also seen in the close correspondence between the four periods of kundoku discussed above and the flow of history: from the ancient ritsuryō period of the seventh and eighth centuries, to the Fujiwara regents (866–1086) and Insei “cloistered rule” periods (1086–1185), the period of military rule (twelfth to sixteenth centuries), and the early modern and modern periods (seventeenth century to the present).

Chapter 2

Vernacular Reading in East Asia Hundok on the Korean Peninsula

1

1.1 Literary Sinitic and ŏnhae Practice in Today’s Republic of Korea Today in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), han’gŭl, the vernacular Korean script, is used almost exclusively, and sinographs are not commonly used in everyday life. Nonetheless, since Confucian traditions have deep roots in Korean culture, the number of people who study Literary Sinitic texts is not insignificant. How do Koreans read Literary Sinitic today? Let me explain using this famous passage from the “Xue Er” 學而 [To Learn] chapter of the Analects. 有子曰、其爲人也、孝弟而好犯上者鮮矣。 不好犯上而好作亂者、未之有也。

The philosopher You said, “They are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors. There have been none, who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion.”1 In Japan, this is read as follows: 有子曰く、

其の人となりや、

YŪSHI iwaku, sono hitotonari ya, こうてい

孝弟にして

上を 犯すを

すくな

好む

者は

鮮し。

KŌTEI ni shite ue o okasu o konomu mono wa sukunashi. な

作すを 好む ue o okasu o konomazu shite RAN o nasu o konomu 上を 犯すを

好まずして

未だ

有らざる

なり。

imada kore arazaru

nari.

これ

亂を

者は、

mono wa

1 English translation from James Legge, cited from http://ctext.org/analects/xue-er.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_004

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In Korea, this is read as follows:2 有[유] YU 孝[효] HYO 而[이] I 不[불] PUL 亂[난] NAN 未[미] MI

子[자]이 曰[왈]、 其[기] 爲[위] 人[인] 也[야]이、 CHA i WAL, KI WI IN YA i, 弟[제] 오、 CHE-o, 好[호] 犯[범] 上[상] 者[자]이 鮮[선] 矣[의]니、 HO PŎM SANG CHA i SŎN ŬI-ni, 好[호] 犯[범] 上[상]이오、 而[이] 好[호] 作[작] HO PŎM SANG-io, I HO CHAK 者[자]이、 CHA i, 之[지] 有[유] 也[야]이니라 CHI YU YA-inira

The han’gŭl letters in subscript square brackets are the Sino-Korean pronunciations of the sinographs, while those letters in bold are grammatical elements similar to Japanese endings and particles; 이 (i) is the subject marker, -니 (-ni) is a non-final verbal ending corresponding in function to Japanese de, and -오 (-o), -이오 (-io) and -이니라 (-inira) are forms of the Korean copula -ida. Equivalent in function to Japanese okurigana, these are called kugyŏl 口訣 or t’o 吐 in Korean. The Chinese word “口訣” (C. koujue, K. kugyŏl) originally designated phrases or verses with mnemonic qualities to facilitate learning. In Buddhism, the secret transmissions passed on verbally from priests to their disciples are called kugyŏl. In Korea, reading Literary Sinitic in the traditional Korean style is also called kugyŏl, which is perhaps derived from the fact that Korean methods of reading Literary Sinitic used to be a secret practice transmitted orally. The graphs used in the practice of kugyŏl are known as kugyŏlcha 口訣字 (“kugyŏl graphs”). As for the term t’o 吐, this seems to be a distorted reading of the tok/ tu 讀 in the word kudok/kudu 句讀 (“punctuation mark; reading mark”), and means “grammatical marker.” This practice of reading Literary Sinitic by inserting vernacular grammatical elements between sinographs glossed with their Sino-Korean readings was established during the Chosŏn period (1392–1897), and even in North Korea, where the use of sinographs has been completely abolished, Literary Sinitic is probably still read in this way. 2 The premodern han’gŭl spellings here have been converted to their modern reflexes.

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1.2 Ŏnhae Exegeses Using han’gŭl and Sinographs However, reading a sentence like this does not help with understanding the original meaning of the text. Thus, in addition to reading with kugyŏl, Koreans produced hybrid translations using han’gŭl and sinographs, which were called ŏnhae 諺解. Ŏn 諺—meaning “local speech”—here means Korean or han’gŭl, while hae 解 means “understanding; solution; explication.” Thus, “ŏnhae” refers to an explanation of a Literary Sinitic text in the vernacular Korean script. For example, in the excerpt from Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解 [Vernacular Exegesis of the Analects] seen in Figure 15, the text that follows the circle (line 15) is the kugyŏl reading—the original text with particles inserted—whereas the following indented portion of the text (beginning in line 19) is the ŏnhae exegesis.

Figure 15 A page from the Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解 [Vernacular Exegesis of the Analects]

A Romanized version of the ŏnhae portion, juxtaposed with a modern Japanese translation, would look like this:3 有子曰: YU CHĂ i kărodăe: YŪSHI ga notamawaku: Youzi NOM say

其爲人也、 kŭ sarăm-irondi, sono hitotonari ga, that person COP

孝弟 HYOhămyŏ TYEhăgo, KŌ de ari TEI de ari, filial-be-and  fraternal be-and

3 The Romanization here follows the premodern han’gŭl spellings in Figure 15.

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而好犯上者 鮮矣。 SANG ŭl PŎMhom ŭl HOhăl CHYA i chyŏgŭni, ue o okasu o konomu mono wa sukunai no de, above ACC offend-ing ACC like-MOD person NOM few-CONJ “Master You said: In being that person, those who are filial and fraternal, yet like offending those above them, are few, and yet …” 不好犯上而 SANG ŭl PŎMhom ue o okasu above ACC offend-ing

ŭl HOt’i ani hăgo, o konomazu shite, ACC like-NEG do-CONJ

好作亂者、 未之有也。 RAN ŭl CHAKhom ŭl HOhăl CHYA i isti ani hănira. RAN o nasu o konomu mono wa inai no de aru. chaos ACC create-ing ACC like-MOD person-NOM exist-NEG-DECL “Those who dislike offending those above them, and like causing trouble, do not exist.” The rough and ready Romanization and grammatical parsing above should make it clear that the Korean ŏnhae more or less matches the Japanese kundoku rendition of the text. As I have mentioned previously, this is because Korean and Japanese have almost identical grammar. Itō Tōgai 伊藤東涯 (1670–1736) must have seen Korean ŏnhae like this, because in his Sakubun shinketsu 作文 真訣 [True Secrets of Composition] (1748) (discussed above), he wrote that the Korean method of reading Literary Sinitic also performs inversions in word order.4 It is unlikely that Itō was able to read han’gŭl, but he probably made this assumption by observing the parts where the word order was switched, such as “好犯上” in the original becoming “上犯好” in the ŏnhae. Korean ŏnhae exegeses were relatively well known among Japanese intellectuals of the Edo period (1603–1867); for instance, Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) called his Japanese editions of Literary Sinitic texts with accompanying Japanese interpretations genkai (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the sinographs for “ŏnhae”), including Kobun shinpō genkai taisei 古文眞寶諺解大成 [Grand Compendium of Vernacular Exegeses to the Guwen zhenbao] (1663) and Seiri jigi genkai 性理字義諺解 [Vernacular Exegeses to the Xingli ziyi] (1629). Of

4 The relevant passage can be found on page 5b of the manuscript edition owned by Waseda University Library.

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course, in these cases the gen 諺 (K. ŏn) (“vernacular”) indicates Japanese. The term “ŏnhae” does not exist in China and was coined in Korea. 1.3 Vernacular Reading in Korea: The Thousand Character Classic As stated above, in today’s Korea, people read Literary Sinitic texts using Sino-Korean readings (K. ŭmdok, J. ondoku 音讀), and in sequential/“direct” (K. chiktok, J. chokudoku 直讀) style, i.e., in its original Chinese word order. However, this was not the case in earlier times, and traces of older vernacular reading techniques (K. hundok) can be found in traditional readings for the Thousand Character Classic (C. Qianzi wen, J. Senjimon, K. Ch’ŏnjamun 千字文). According to the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 [Chronicles of Japan], during the reign of Emperor Ōjin 應神, a scholar called Wani 王仁 from the Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 bce–660 ce), who first introduced sinographs to Japan, allegedly brought copies of the Analects and the Thousand Character Classic with him. The latter text is still used in Korea today for learning sinographs. In Korea, the Thousand Character Classic is traditionally read in its own characteristic manner. For example, the first phrase “天地玄黄” is read: 하늘 天[천] 따 地[지] 감을 hanŭl CH’ŎN tta CHI kamŭl heaven CH’ŎN earth CHI dark Heaven and earth, dark and yellow.

玄[현]

HYŎN HYŎN

누를 nurŭl yellow

黃[황].

HWANG HWANG

The words preceding each sinograph, e.g., hanŭl, tta, kamŭl, and nurŭl, are the vernacular Korean glosses for each sinograph, whereas the words in brackets are the Sino-Korean pronunciations. Translated into Japanese this would be: てん

あめ天、

ち

つち地、

げん

くろい玄、

こう

きいろい黄.

ame (heaven) TEN, tsuchi (soil) CHI, kuroi (black) GEN, kiiroi (yellow) KŌ. heaven TEN, soil CHI, dark GEN, yellow KŌ. By memorizing these passages according to this manner of reading, it is possible to recall both the meaning (vernacular gloss) and Sino-Xenic (i.e., Sino-Korean or Sino-Japanese) pronunciation of sinographs. In Japan, this method of chanting the glosses and Sino-Japanese pronunciations of sinographs together is traditionally called monzen-yomi 文選読み (“monzen readings”). The Wenxuan 文選 (J. Monzen) [Selections of Refined Literature] is a representative anthology of Chinese poetic masterpieces and the term monzen-yomi was derived from the fact that this practice was mainly used for reading that text. But the Thousand Character Classic was also read

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via monzen readings. Unlike the Korean reading practice of the Thousand Character Classic, however, in the Japanese case the Sino-Japanese on readings of the sinographs precede the vernacular Japanese kun readings, and pairs of sinographs are read as one set. The above passage would be read as: 天地玄黄 テンチの

あめつちは、

ゲンコウと

くろく

きなり.

TENCHI no ame tsuchi wa, GENKŌ to kuroku kinari. “‘TENCHI’s heaven and earth, ‘GENKŌ’-ly dark and yellow.” Moreover, in the following passage, the Japanese monzen reading not only glosses each sinograph according to its vernacular kun reading, but also performs kundoku by inverting the last two sinographs.5 閏余成歳 ジュンヨの

うるふ 月の

あまりは、

セイサイ

ととしを なす.

JUN’YO no uruu tsuki no amari wa, SEISAI to toshi o nasu. “The excess of ‘JUN’YO’, the intercalary month, makes ‘SEISAI’, a year.” In the Korean reading of the Thousand Character Classic, however, because the Koreans read each sinograph separately, the word order remains untouched. This practice of “monzen reading” was also used in the reading of Buddhist texts in Japan. In the above-quoted Sifen lü 四分律 [Vinaya of the Four Categories], the sequence “捫－摸身體” (“to touch a body”) was read もんも

“身体 wo 捫摸 to nade,” where the word 捫摸 is read first according to its Sino-Japanese on reading as monmo (where both characters mean “to touch”), which is followed by the kun reading nade (also meaning “to touch”). Since Japan and Korea share the practices of reading sinographs according to on readings and kun readings, it is possible to conjecture that there was some sort of influence relationship. However, I would rather say that since both shared a common need to read sinographs in their Sino-Xenic pronunciations (on reading) as well as via vernacular gloss (kun reading), these practices arose naturally in both countries. 1.4 Hundok with Word-Order Markings during the Chosŏn Dynasty Han’gŭl script was officially called Hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 [Correct Sounds to Instruct the People]. Because transcribing the Korean language in sinographs was inconvenient, in 1446, King Sejong (r. 1418–1450) newly 5 For the Thousand Character Classic, I have consulted Ogawa and Kida (1997).

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promulgated this phonetic script with the goal of correctly transcribing the sounds of the Korean language and teaching the people. The above-mentioned ŏnhae 諺解 exegeses written in han’gŭl started to develop after 1446 and were firmly established as a genre only in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Prior to han’gŭl, Koreans used sinographs phonetically to write in vernacular Korean in a way that mirrors Japanese kana; further, they also used sinographs whose forms had been simplified. Moreover, again like in Japan, they performed hundok (i.e., kundoku) using these simplified sinographs; this practice is known as sŏktok 釋讀 (“interpretive reading”) in Korean. Here, I will draw an example of such practice from the Śūraṃgama Sūtra 楞嚴經 (K. Nŭngŏm kyŏng, J. Ryōgonkyō) (specifically, from a version with commentary by Wenling Jiehuan 温陵戒環 of Song) and introduce some hundok markings thought to have been added to the text around the sixteenth century (Fig. 16).

Figure 16 Korean kugyŏl glosses (hundok marks) in a 16th-c. copy of the Nŭngŏm kyŏng 楞嚴經 [Śūraṃgama Sūtra]

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In the picture, Chinese numerals and other signs are written in ink on both sides of the original text. A word-processed version of the Korean kugyŏl markup looks like this: 不二

not²hăya 隠一그

教一 而能三 、 不二 願一 而爲三 、 teach¹ then-can³hămyŏ, not² wish¹ then-do³ho-mi-ho-n,

기然

若有二二

secret¹kŭzŭgi-ADV 而不亖毛

if-be⁴tăshăya



驅二모라

策三채티리

drive²mora whip³ch’aet’iri

能一

自二제 已三마디 者 、 then-not⁴mi can¹ self₂che already₃madi personn, 宿아

習 之使시교미也。 formerarăe disciplineŭi GEN-causesigyomi DECL

In Japanese kundoku, it would read as follows: 不レ教而能、不レ願而爲、 教えずして 能くし、

願わずして為すこと、

Oshiezu shite yoku shi, negawazu shite nasu koto 隠然若レ有二驅策二 さながら

隠然

か

むち

駆りて 策うつこと

sanagara karite muchiutsu koto

有るが

ごとく、

aru ga

gotoku

而不二レ能自已一者、 や

能く

自ら

已まざる[自ら已む能わざる]

yoku mizukara yamazaru [mizukara yamu atawazaru]

者は、

mono wa,

宿習之使也。 ふる

宿き

せし

習いの

使むるなり。

furuki narai no seshimuru nari. The sentence means, “I do well without instruction and do it against my will as if I were driven by a whip; I cannot stop myself from doing it because the old discipline makes me do it.” The following is a transcription of the same text, isolating just the Chinese numerals among the Korean hundok 訓讀 marks:

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Vernacular Reading in East Asia 不二

not²

教一而能三、

不二

願一

而爲三、

teach¹then-can³, not² wish¹ then-do³, 若有亖 驅二 secret¹-ADV if-be⁴ drive² 策三 而不亖 能一 自二 已三 者、 whip³ then-not⁴ can¹ self₂ already₃ person, 宿 習之 使也。 former discipline-GEN cause DECL 隠一然

The Chinese numerals are written on both sides of the line, but in this case this has no relation to meaning; rather, if one reads each chunk by following the order of the numbers, the word order becomes the same as that of the Japanese kundoku reading presented above (i.e., 教不能, 願不爲, 隠然驅策有 [the meaning of 若 is included in 有, so 若 is not read], 能自已不). The numerals simply indicate the word order of the sentence, not only when it is inverted but also when it remains unchanged, which is identical to the use of word-order markings (J. gojunfu 語順符) in the Nara period, as seen above, even down to the rendition of “four” (四) as “double two” (亖).6 Hundok Written with Simplified Sinographs: Common Features with kana The small graphs written on both sides of the lines of the main text represent either the vernacular hun-reading of a particular sinograph or vernacular grammatical elements (equivalent to Japanese okurigana), and are written in either simplified sinographs or han’gŭl. Let us examine them line by line. 1.5

[1] 不二 教一 而能三 、 hăya not² teach¹ then-can³hămyŏ, “ ” on the lower left-hand side of “不” are simplified forms of “爲也” and are pronounced hăya ( 야). In origin, the sign “ ” is the first two strokes of the sinograph “爲,” the vernacular Korean hun reading for which is “hă-” ( -), the stem of the verb hă-da ( 다 “to do”), and “ ” represents the Sino-Korean ŭm (J. on) pronunciation of “也” (ya 야). The older form hăda 다 is written hada 하다 in modern Korean orthography. The characters “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “能” are simplified forms of “爲” again and “弥,” with the

6 Regarding hundok with Korean word-order markings and its relationship to Japan, see Fujimoto (1992).

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latter read as -myŏ -며, resulting in the reading hămyŏ 며 (“do/be-and”). As a whole, the phrase means “I do well without instruction.” [2] 不二 願一 而爲三 、 not² wish¹ then-do³ho-mi-ho-n, The sign “ ” of “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “爲” is a simplified form of “乎,” and “乎未” is read homi 호미 (“doing it”). The “ ” on the right-hand side of “ ” is another simplified form of “乎” and the “ ” below “未” is a simplified form of “米.” Just like “乎未,” “乎米” seems to also be a transcription of homi 호미. Thus, this phrase means “doing it against my will.” [3] 隠一그 기然 若有二二 驅二모라 策三채티리 kŭzŭgi secret¹ -ADV if-be⁴tăshăya drive²mora whip³ch’aet’iri The han’gŭl form kŭzŭgi 그 기 to the left of “隠然” means “just (like).” Mora 모라 to the right of “驅策” and ch’aet’iri 채티리 mean “drive” and “whip,” respectively. The forms “ ” on the right-hand side of “有” consist of tăs (“just like”) and “ ,” a simplified form of hăya 爲也. Adding tăs to hăya 야 gives -tăs hăya 야, meaning “it seems like,” which corresponds to “若” in the original text but is included under “有.” This phrase thus means, “seems as if it is being driven by a whip.” There is another “ ” placed on the lower right-hand side of “策,” but this kugyŏl is applied to the entire phrase “若有驅策” only when the text is read in Sino-Korean pronunciation without switching the word order (K. chiktok), which would yield the reading “若有驅 策 hăya.” [4] 而不亖毛 能一 自二제 已三마디 者 、 then-not⁴mi can¹ self₂che already₃madi personn, The graph “毛” below “不” is pronounced mo 모, which indicates the first sound of mothăda 몯 다 (“cannot do”). The han’gŭl form che 제 (“I [myself]”) on the right-hand side of “自” is a vernacular hun reading, while the han’gŭl madi 마디 on the right-hand side of “已” is also a vernacular hun gloss which means “stop it.” The “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “者” is a simplified form of “隠” representing the Korean topic particle ŭn 은~ . Thus, the entire phrase is understood to mean “I cannot stop myself from doing it because….”

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[5] 宿아 習 之使시교미也。 formerarăe disciplineŭi GEN-causesigyomi DECL The han’gŭl arăe 아 written on the right-hand side of “宿” is a vernacular hun gloss indicating this character means “old; from former times” in this context, and the “ ” on the lower left-hand side of “習” is a cursive form of “衣” and is pronounced ŭi 의, representing the adnominal marker. The han’gŭl sigyomi 시교미 written on the right-hand side of “使” signifies a causative: “making somebody do something.” Thus, the entire phrase means “old discipline makes me do it.” Overall, the breakdown of the kugyŏl in (1) through (5) yields a result consistent with the Japanese kundoku reading of the text. Moreover, amongst the marks added for the sake of hundok, while there are some exceptions, generally han’gŭl are used for vernacular hun glosses of individual sinographs, while the simplified sinographs are employed to indicate grammatical elements, corresponding to Japanese okurigana. There is a difference in handwriting between the han’gǔl and the simplified sinographs, suggesting they were likely added by different readers. Among the simplified sinographs used as phonograms, the following four methods can be observed: [1] sinographs read in their Sino-Korean pronunciations, e.g., 未 (mi), 毛 (mo) [2] simplified sinographs read according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations, e.g., 也 → (ya), 弥 → (myŏ), 乎 → (ho), 米 → (mi), 隠 → (ŭn) [3] simplified sinographs read according to their vernacular Korean hunreading, e.g., 爲 → (hă-) [4] sinographs in cursive style which are read according to their vernacular hun- reading, e.g., 衣 → (ŭi) These are exactly the same as manyōgana, katakana, and hiragana in Japanese. In addition, some phonographic usages of sinographs, like “也” (ya), “毛” (mo), etc., are common to both languages. Could this be pure coincidence? The word-order markers used in Japanese kundoku annotation can be observed starting from the late Nara period (710–794) and throughout the Heian period (794–1192), but fall out of use later on (though they reappear in the Meiji period for kundoku readings of English). On the other hand, according to the documents found to date, word-order marks in Korea are attested only after the fifteenth century, meaning there is a great time lag between the two.

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Nonetheless, one must keep in mind that few documents related to the earliest period of hundok practice on the Korean Peninsula are extant today. Besides, the old kundoku sources surviving in Japan that include word-order markings betray a relationship to the Korean Peninsula, as I will demonstrate later. 1.6 From Korean hundok to ŏnhae Hybrid Exegeses The Śūraṃgama Sūtra, which I mentioned above, has a Korean ŏnhae exegesis, the Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae 楞嚴經諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra] (1461). The ŏnhae version of the passage discussed above is seen in Figure 17.

Figure 17 A page from the Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae 楞嚴 經諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra]

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The text of this passage can be represented as follows (the top line features the Literary Sinitic with accompanying kugyŏl, while the bottom line is the Romanized ŏnhae): 不敎而能 hămyŏ 不願而爲 homi kărăchidi ani hăyado NŬNGhămyŏ NGWŎNt’i ani hăyado homi 隱然若有驅策而 不能自已者 năn kŭzŭgi mora ch’aet’iri isnŭn tăshăya NŬNGhi che madi mothom ăn 宿習之使也 ira arăes SSIP ŭi sigyom ira The fact that, even though nobody teaches it, one is capable of it, and even though one does not desire it, but does it, is just like being goaded and whipped, and the fact that one cannot help oneself is due to the force of old habit. The bolded parts are forms that also appear in the kugyŏl annotation seen in Figure 16 above. A closer look reveals that most of the han’gŭl and the kugyŏl grammatical glosses from the hundok text are identical to those in the ŏnhae, which signifies that probably either the ŏnhae was based on the hundok or the hundok was based on the ŏnhae. In this case, because han’gŭl were used alongside the simplified sinographs (kugyŏl characters) in the hundok, the latter is the more likely scenario, but in general, because hundok had been practiced in Korea for a long time prior to the promulgation of han’gŭl, ŏnhae exegeses using han’gŭl were probably typically composed by consulting older hundok annotations. The Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae was composed in 1461 by the order of King Sejo (r. 1455–1468) and first printed with moveable type, and then reissued as a woodblock print in the following year. Its format was similar to that of the Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Analects] mentioned previously: a portion of the original Literary Sinitic text was first transcribed and “read” in its original word order according to Sino-Korean pronunciation, with grammatical elements inserted in han’gǔl after each clause (K./J. ku 句), followed by a recasting of the same chunk of text in ŏnhae translation format, written in a mixture of sinographs and han’gŭl. In 1457, King Sejo had founded the Directorate of Buddhist Publications (K. Kan’gyŏng togam 刊經都監) and promoted the publication of ŏnhae exegeses of Buddhist texts, but the bases for these new exegeses were the earlier hundok editions of Buddhist texts glossed with simplified sinographs (kugyŏl) during the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), prior to the promulgation of han’gŭl.

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In the sixteenth century, ŏnhae exegeses of the Confucian classics, such as the Four Books, Book of Odes (C. Shijing, K. Sigyŏng 詩經), Book of Documents (C. Shujing, K. Sŏgyŏng 書經; a.k.a. C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ 尚書), and Book of Changes (C. Zhouyi, K. Chuyŏk 周易; a.k.a. C. Yi jing, K. Yŏk kyŏng 易經), were composed in the same manner and published by a newly founded office called the Office of Proofreading (Kyojŏngch’ŏng 校正廳). This was a matter of course for a country whose state religion was now Confucianism (Neo-Confucianism, to be exact). In the following seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ŏnhae trend led by Confucian classics reached its peak, by which time the hundok practices of earlier times were largely forgotten. Such is the situation in today’s Korea, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. 1.7 Calls to Abolish hundok in Korea and kundoku in Japan Besides the promulgation and dissemination of han’gŭl and the evolution of Neo-Confucianism into the state religion, there was yet another factor behind the advent of the ŏnhae exegesis genre—increased interest in spoken Chinese. Because of Korea’s direct land connection to the continent, we can assume that there was a long history of learning spoken Chinese in the country, but beginning with subjugation of the kings of the late Koryŏ dynasty by the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the Chinese dynasty established by the Mongols after they swept across the Eurasian continent, the relationship between the two states grew closer and the interactions between bureaucrats, merchants, and monks more frequent. Consequently, in 1276, with the aim of training interpreters of the Chinese language, the Office of Interpretation (T’ongmun’gwan 通文館) was established (later renamed the Sayŏgwŏn 司譯院, or Bureau of Interpreters) and Chinese conversational manuals such as Nogŏltae 老乞大 [The Old Cathayan] and Pak T’ongsa 朴通士 [Interpreter Pak] were compiled. This system of training and textbooks for interpreters of spoken Chinese was inherited by the subsequent Chosŏn dynasty and the Sayŏgwŏn trained interpreters not only for Chinese, but also for the Mongolian, Jurchen (Manchu), and Japanese languages. Quite understandably, the most important language was Chinese. For the sake of a smooth and sound diplomatic relationship with the Ming, not only lower-level interpreters but also many higher-ranking government officials studied spoken Chinese, and revised editions of The Old Cathayan and Interpreter Pak—this time in ŏnhae editions with added pronunciations in han’gŭl for the contemporary Chinese readings—were published. Alongside this trend in Chinese language learning, it is not difficult to imagine that people were motivated to read Literary Sinitic texts “as is” and without resorting to conventional hundok techniques. Such an impulse must have led to the development of the ŏnhae style of textual exegesis, whereby on

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the one hand readers read texts “directly” in their Sino-Korean pronunciations following the original word order, and on the other, availed themselves of vernacular Korean translations as an aid to understanding. It is interesting to note that this flow from hundok to ŏnhae resembles the movement to abolish kundoku in Japan, which I treated earlier. Calls to abolish kundoku, accompanied by advocacy for the “direct reading” (J. chokudoku 直読) of Literary Sinitic texts in the original word order, started among Zen monks in the Muromachi period who had co-opted Neo-Confucianism; these monks were later succeeded by Confucian scholars of the Edo period, including Itō Tōgai 伊藤東涯, Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠, Dazai Shundai 太宰春台, and others. As we have already seen, Ogyū Sorai, in his Yakubun sentei 訳文筌蹄, urged, “[R]ead Chinese texts according to Chinese pronunciation, translate Chinese texts into vernacular Japanese.”7 That is, the argument for the “direct reading” of Literary Sinitic was inseparable from the argument for translation into Japanese. If we switch out “direct reading using contemporary Chinese pronunciation” for “direct reading using the Sino-Korean pronunciations of sinographs,” we get the method of ŏnhae exegeses. Overall, behind these similar moves in both Japan and Korea concerning vernacular reading practice was a shared background in the intellectual and sociopolitical climate of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century East Asia, where people interacted actively and Neo-Confucianism had become the new cultural wave. Nevertheless, insofar as Korea preceded Japan in these developments and Edo scholars later wrote about Korean ŏnhae, the possibility of a certain Korean influence upon Japan cannot be denied. However, there were also some differences between Korea and Japan. First, an extreme abolitionist stance such as the attitude that drove calls for Chinese chokudoku in Japan never arose in Korea. There were no distinct campaigns against hundok practice in Korea; instead, it seems to have died a natural death there. On the other hand, in Japan, despite repeated anti-kundoku movements, and despite the invention of new kundoku styles that grew ever closer to chokudoku (such as the Issaiten 一斎点 system), kundoku itself never disappeared. The reasons for this are as follows. First, the Koreans invented their own script, han’gŭl (before which they had used simplified sinographs in a fashion similar to Japanese kana, as mentioned earlier). Second, whereas Buddhism, which had functioned as a major driving force behind hundok practice in Korea, declined there after the introduction of Neo-Confucianism, it remained powerful in Japan. Third, in Korea, by the fifteenth century there had already been established a robust social class of literati, equipped with Neo-Confucian 7 通以華音. 譯以此方俚語. See footnote 45 above.

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knowledge, which made the abandonment of hundok practices more realistic; moreover, knowledge of spoken Chinese had also spread to the extent that it was clear to these same literati just how unrealistic it was to do “direct reading” of Literary Sinitic in Korea via contemporary spoken Chinese pronunciation—a realization that never dawned on literati in Japan. Korean Diplomatic Missions to Japan and Their Views of Japanese kundoku In 1764, a Korean Embassy of Communication (J. Chōsen tsūshinshi, K. Chosŏn t’ongsinsa 朝鮮通信使) arrived in Japan and held a meeting in Osaka with Daiten Kenjō 大典顕常 (1719–1801), a Zen monk from Shōkokuji Temple 相國寺 in Kyoto and a well-known writer and scholar. A text called the Hyōgūroku 萍遇 録 [Record of the Chance Encounter of Floating Bits of Duckweed] (1764) is a record of their written conversation in Literary Sinitic, and contains an intriguing exchange about Japanese kundoku. When Daiten showed his Literary Sinitic writing to Sŏng Taejung 成大中 (1732–1812), who was a scribe (K. sŏgigwan 書 記官) with the Korean mission, Sŏng found kundoku marks in it and remarked: 1.8

Your honorable country’s texts all have translation markings (J. yakuon, K. yŏgŭm 譯音) alongside the sinographs, but this is a practice to be conducted solely within one country and is not universally accepted practice. It is only the collected works of Ogyū Sorai that do not carry translation markings. From this episode, we can see that Sorai is a giant among literati.8 “Translation markings” here must refer to kundoku marks and okurigana. Sŏng Taejung noted that kundoku was not a “universally accepted practice” and praised Ogyū Sorai, a scholar known for his kundoku abolitionist stance. His comment reveals the sense of superiority harbored by contemporary Korean intellectuals over their counterparts in Japan, but at the same time it also reveals their views toward kundoku. Sŏng Taejung probably knew that hundok was once practiced in Korea, too. But for him, this practice no longer met the global standard. Responding to this comment, Daiten made an excuse, saying, “these are only for beginners.” Daiten pursued Confucianism as part of Ogyū Sorai’s faction and probably agreed with his kundoku abolitionist views to some degree; however, at the same time, he must also have recognized that it would be impossible to completely do away with kundoku in Japan. At that

8 貴邦書冊, 行傍皆有譯音, 此只可行於一國, 非萬國通行之法也. 惟物茂卿文集無 譯音, 可知茂卿之爲豪傑士也. Cited from Daiten Kenjō (2013: 355).

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point in the eighteenth century, there was already a marked difference in the situation surrounding vernacular reading practices in Korea and Japan. Nevertheless, despite this difference, it is important to note that both countries shared the same background and major trends—that is, away from reading according to vernacular (J. kun, K. hun 訓) glosses toward vocalizing Literary Sinitic according to the Sino-Xenic (J. on, K. ŭm 音) readings and then on to “direct reading” (J. chokudoku, K. chiktok 直讀). In the following section, in order to better understand this point, I examine the situation in Korea before the promulgation of han’gŭl and the development of ŏnhae exegeses. Hundok before the Koryŏ Dynasty: The Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra A representative example of pre-han’gǔl hundok is found in a textual fragment with hundok markings from a Koryŏ period manuscript of the Kuyŏk Inwang kyŏng 舊譯仁王經 [Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra], which was discovered along with several other items inside the belly of a statue of the Seated Vajrasattva Buddha at Munsusa Temple 文殊寺 in Sŏsan county, Ch’ungch’ŏng province, South Korea, in 1973.9 The discovery of this Humane King Sūtra fragment was a major breakthrough for hundok research in Korea and since then, many other similar documents with hundok markings have come to light. The Humane King Sūtra exists in two Literary Sinitic translations, one by Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什 (C. Jimoluoshi) from the Later Qin dynasty (384– 417 ce) and the other by Amoghavajra 不空 (C. Bukong) from the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce), with the former called the “Old Translation.” Only five leaves of the first volume of the Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra of Koryŏ were discovered, but on these pages simplified sinographs and inversion glosses are written in ink on both sides of the lines of the main text. Going by the date noted in the “Aspirations Postscriptum” (發願文), which was found together with the text, the sutra was copied prior to 1346. The method for reading the markings is as follows: 1) following the simplified sinographs on the right-hand side of the main text, read the text in either Sino-Korean ŭm-pronunciations or vernacular Korean hun-glosses; 2) stop at the first inversion gloss (a dot “・”) and then go back to the point where the first simplified sinographs are marked on the left-hand side of the text; 3) read the text using the vernacular hun-readings transcribed in simplified sinographs on the left. This is best explained using a short example of text (Fig. 18):10 1.9

9 10

See the exposition in Misul charyo 18 (1975) published by the National Museum of Korea (Han’guk kungnip chungang pangmulgwan) for a reproduction of the fragment and accompanying analysis. The following interpretation is taken from Nam and Chŏng (1998: 231).

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Figure 18 Excerpt from the Kuyŏk Inwang kyŏng 舊譯 仁王經 [Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra] with Korean kugyŏl glosses

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A word-processed version of the short passage in the box looks like this: 時 佛 告 THAT-s-hă-n TIME-kŭi BUDDHA-n ADDRESS- hă-si-lq 大衆 . GREAT-ASSEMBLY-ŭi-kŭi. At that time, Buddha addressed the great assembly. 爾

The interpretation proceeds as follows: [1] First, “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “爾” are the simplified forms of “叱爲隠” respectively, where “叱” and “隠” are interpreted as phonograms for “s” and “n,” whereas “爲” is read in its vernacular hun reading as “hă-,” the stem for the Korean verb “do; be.” Taken together, this string becomes “-s-hă-n” (in han’gŭl, “ㅅ- -ㄴ”). By adding “爾,” which is read “yŏ 여,” according to its vernacular hun reading in Middle Korean, this chunk becomes “yŏshan 엿한,” meaning “this/that.” [2] Second, “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “時” (time, moment) is a simplified form of “中” and is read as kŭi 긔, an Early Middle Korean locative marker. When this is added to pskŭ , the old hun reading of “時” in Middle Korean, we produce the reading pskŭ kŭi 긔, meaning “at the time when …” [3] “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “佛” (Buddha) is a simplified form of “隠,” and in this case represents the topic/contrast particle ŭn 은. [4] The following sinograph “告” is skipped temporarily because the simplified sinographs are written on the left-hand side of the line. [5] “ ” on the lower right-hand side of “大衆” (great assembly) are simplified forms of “衣中,” read as ŭi-kŭi (ŭigŭi 의긔), a dative marker which corresponds to the modern ege 에게 (to someone). Hence, this sequence is interpreted as “to the public assembly.” [6] The dot representing the inversion gloss is placed below “ ,” meaning that now we must return to the point where the simplified sinographs are marked on the left-hand side of the text and read “告.” [7] “ ” on the lower left-hand side of “告” (to tell) are the simplified forms of “爲示”; while “爲” is read as hă- again according to its hun reading, “示” is read as si (i.e., as a phonogram, according to its Sino-Korean pronunciation), which yields hăsi 시. The “si 시” here is the subject honorific marker, while the final “ ” represents Middle Korean -ᇙ -lq,11 which functions as a 11 I.e., the Middle Korean letter combination l + q (ㄹ + ㆆ) for the future~prospective modifier.

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connective suffix. As a whole, this sequence becomes “addressed [the great assembly], and [then]…” In summary, the phrase will be: *yŏshan pskŭ kŭi 佛[Buddha] ŭn 大衆[Great Assembly] ŭigŭi 告[say, tell] hăsilq *엿한 긔 佛은 大衆의긔 告 “At that time, Buddha addressed the great assembly, and …” At the time, 佛 (Buddha) was likely read as put’yŏ (which became modern Korean puch’yŏ and then puch’ŏ 부처, and is probably cognate with the Japanese hotoke), but “大衆” and “告” were probably read in their contemporary Sino-Korean ŭm pronunciations. All of the Literary Sinitic text in the five remaining leaves of the Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra is annotated in a similar fashion for the purpose of hundok vernacular reading. This style, in which the inversion gloss “ ・ ” and simplified sinographs on either side of the line supplement each other, is not found in Japan. Nonetheless, the overall conceptualization is remarkably similar, including the use of okurigana-type grammatical markers written in simplified sinographs as well as the use of an inversion gloss (in Japan, punctuation marks down the lefthand side of the main text function mainly as inversion glosses), and the fact that the right-hand and left-hand sides of the text have different functions in the context of the vernacular reading technique. 1.10 The Humane King Sūtra in Korea and Japan The Renwang jing 仁王經 (J. Innōgyō, K. Inwang kyŏng) [Humane King Sūtra], together with the Fahua jing 法華經 (J. Hokekyō, K. Pŏphwa kyŏng) [Lotus Sūtra] and the Jinguangming zuishengwang jing 金光明最勝王經 (J. Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō, K. Kŭmgwangmyŏng ch’oesŭngwang kyŏng) [Golden Light Sūtra] were called the “Three Sutras for State Protection” (C. huguo sanbu jing, J. gokoku sanbukyō, K. hoguk sambu kyŏng 護國三部經) and were considered to be the most important sutras in State-Protection Buddhism. The first service of the Humane King Sūtra, where the sutra was chanted for the protection of the state, was held in Japan in 660, during the reign of Empress Saimei (r. 655–661) (Nihon shoki 日本書紀, vol. 26, 6th year, 5th month12), and from that point on the Humane King Assembly (J. ninnōe, K. inwanghoe 仁王 會), also known as a Hundred Seat Assembly (J. hyakuzakai, K. paekchwahoe 百座會) because it consisted of one hundred monks, became an important event at the court, held biannually in spring and autumn during the middle Heian period. 12

See Sakamoto et al. (1965: 343).

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On the other hand, on the Korean Peninsula, the oldest record of a “Hundred Seat Assembly” (K. paekchwa kanghoe 百座講會) comes from a record for the kingdom of Silla in the twelfth year of the reign of King Chinhǔng (551).13 From that time on, the assembly was frequently held as an important court event in Silla and throughout the following Koryŏ dynasty, disappearing at the end of the fourteenth century with the demise of Koryŏ.14 The origins of chanting the Humane King Sūtra for state protection are to be found in China, although the oldest Chinese document refering to the practice dates to 559, later than that of Silla. Moreover, although such chanting was practiced in the Tang period, it was discontinued after the Song. However, the ritual flourished over a long period of time in both Korea and Japan, and it is likely that it was Silla practice, rather than that of the Tang, that affected its popularity in Japan. The Inwang kyŏng so 仁王經疏 (J. Ninnōkyōsho) [Commentary on the Humane King Sūtra], a commentary by the Silla monk Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696), has been well preserved to this day and points to the high status of the Humane King Sūtra in Silla. The founder of the Tiantai sect, Tiantai Zhiyi 天台智顗 (538–598) also authored a commentary on the sutra, the Renwang huguo bore jingshu 仁王護國 般若經疏 [Commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra for Humane Kings who Wish to Protect their States], which was later introduced to the Korean Peninsula by the Silla monks Pŏbyung 法融, Iŭng 理應, Yŏngsun 瑛純, and others; it also found its way to Japan. In China, however, the book was lost and a copy was reimported from Japan at the very end of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). The current text carries a preface written in 1112 by Chao Yuezhi 晁 說之 (1059–1129), a famous contemporary writer, which includes the account of the text’s transmission and re-transmission. Inside the belly of the Seated Vajrasattva Buddha at Munsusa Temple, together with the Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra, was also found the Sokchanggyŏng kan’gi 續藏經刊記 [Colophon to the Tripiṭaka Supplement] (printed in 1095), written by National Master Ŭich’ŏn 大覺國師 義天 (1055– 1101), the son of Koryŏ’s King Munjong who actively promoted Buddhism across East Asia. The pan-East Asian context surrounding the Humane King Sūtra and Humane King Sūtra assemblies allows at least three things to be said concerning the Koryŏ hundok fragment examined here: first, the fact that a hundok rendering exists reflects the popularity of Humane King Sūtra assemblies in Koryŏ. Second, a hundok method of this complexity could hardly have been developed overnight. Given that the history of Humane King Sūtra assemblies can be traced back to the Silla period, the origins of this type of hundok must 13 See Samguk sagi 三國史記, vol. 44, “Biography of Kŏch’ilbu” 居柒夫傳. 14 See Ninomiya (1959).

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be at least as old as the gatherings. Third and last, the similarity between this hundok annotation scheme and that of Japanese kundoku, in the context of the frequent interactions between Korean and Japanese Buddhism, points to the possibility that Korean hundok influenced its Japanese counterpart. In order to examine these three points, especially the last two, I will now turn to the history of hundok in Silla. 2

Hundok in Silla and Kokunten in Japan

2.1 Sŏl Ch’ong, Silla’s hundok Entrepreneur, and Japan The Samguk sagi 三國史記 [History of the Three Kingdoms] (1145), compiled by Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151), and the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms] (ca. 1280), written by the monk Iryŏn 一 然 (1206–1289), the two major extant historical texts on the ancient history of the Korean Peninsula, both describe Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰, a Silla scholar from the seventh century, as follows: 以方言讀九經、 訓導後生、 use-local-speech-read-canonical text, interpret-lead-later-students, 至今學者宗之。 until-now-study-person-revere-him He read the Nine Classics using local speech and taught this to later generations; even today, scholars consider this [or him] the foundation. Samguk sagi, vol. 46, “Biography of Sŏl Ch’ong” 薛聰傳

以方音通會会華夷方俗物名、 use-local-sound-interpret-gather-Chinese-barbarian-local-custom-thing-name, 訓解六經文學。 gloss-interpret-six-classics-belles-lettres 至今海東業明經者傳受不絶。 until-now-sea-east-specialize-clarify-canonical text-person-transmit-receive-not-cease He used local sounds to interpret and reconcile Chinese and local words for things, and translated via the vernacular the Six Classics and other works of literature. Even to this day, Korean scholars of the classics learn his teachings without break. Samguk yusa, vol. 4, “Wŏnhyo, the Unbridled Monk” 元曉不覉

Here, “local speech” (pangŏn 方言) and “local sounds” (pangŭm 方音) signify the vernacular language of Silla (Old Korean). “Nine Classics” and “Six Classics”

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refer to the Confucian classics, while “文學” (K. munhak, “scholarship; belles lettres”) means Literary Sinitic prose and poetry. Thus, these two texts imply that Sŏl Ch’ong read and explained the Chinese Classics using the Silla language. They refer to this explication of Literary Sinitic texts in the Silla language as hun 訓 (J. kun), which is the first element of Japanese kundoku 訓讀 (K. hundok). Moreover, the portion of the text in the Samguk sagi that reads “以方音通會華夷方俗物名” (“He used local sounds to interpret and reconcile Chinese and local words for things”) indicates that Sŏl Ch’ong read sinographs using vernacular hun glosses in the Silla language, and that this practice had been transmitted to Koryŏ times when Kim Pusik and Iryŏn lived. The above story, according to which Sŏl Ch’ong originated hundok practice in Silla, is perhaps similar to that of Kibi no Makibi 吉備真備 (695–775), who allegedly invented Japanese kana and kundoku. While it is only a single legend, it nonetheless tells us that hundok was practiced in Silla, and that this practice was transmitted from generation to generation through the Koryŏ period. The details of the practice had remained unclear for a long time, but thanks to the discovery of the Koryŏ period fragment from the Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra, its nature has become considerably clearer. Sŏl Ch’ong was the son of Wŏnhyo 元曉 (617–686), a secularized monk known as the great populist of the Hwaŏm (Avataṃsaka) sect in Silla, and Sŏl Ch’ong himself was later secularized. Based on remarks in the Koryŏsa 高麗 史 [History of Koryŏ] such as, “According to local custom, children must learn from monks how to read and write [“punctuate”],” and “the custom originated in Silla,”15 Literary Sinitic training seems to have been monopolized by monks during Silla and through the Koryŏ period. Perhaps the legend of Sŏl Ch’ong as the founder of hundok was also produced against the background of this interaction between monks and the secular world. In Silla, amongst various Buddhist sects, the Hwaŏm sect was particularly popular. The writings of Wŏnhyo were also read in China and were brought to Japan in the Nara period (710–794), where they were widely circulated amongst the Nara Buddhist establishment. The Japanese priest Myōe 明恵 (1173–1232) of the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the founder of Kōzanji Temple 高山寺 in Kyoto, depicted the lives of Wŏnhyo and Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702), another wellknown monk of the Silla Avataṃsaka sect, in a series of painted scrolls called the Kegon engi 華嚴縁起 [Origins of Flower Garland Buddhism]. Incidentally, in the entry for the first month of Hōki 11 (780) in the Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 [Chronicles of Japan Continued] (797), the name Taep’an’g­ wan Hannama Sal Chungŏp 大判官韓奈麻薩仲業 (J. Daihangan Kannama 15 “國俗幼必從僧習句讀 … 其風起自新羅” (Koryŏsa, vol. 108, “Biography of Min Chongyu” 閔宗儒傳).

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Satsu Chūgyō) appears as the name of a member of a diplomatic mission from Silla. This can be compared with the inscription on the Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang pi 高仙寺誓幢和上碑 [Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang stele] discovered at Kosansa Temple in Kyŏngju, South Korea, which features the following content related to Wŏnhyo:16 大暦之春、大師之孫翰林字仲業、 □使滄溟、□□日本、彼國上宰因□語諸人…17 In the Dali 大暦 year, the Great Master [Wŏnhyo]’s grandson Hallim 翰 林, styled Chungŏp 仲業, went across the great ocean to Japan as an envoy, and the prime minister of that country told many people … Dali 大暦 is the reign name of Tang Taizong, so the year must be year fourteen of Dali (779 ce), when a diplomatic mission from Silla arrived in Japan. We conclude that “Sal Chungŏp” 薩仲業 in the Shoku Nihongi record cited above is a mistaken transcription of Sŏl Chungŏp 薛仲業, and that Sŏl Chungŏp was a grandson of Wŏnhyo and the son of Sŏl Ch’ong.18 2.2 Interactions with Ōmi no Mifune The Samguk sagi also features the following passage in its “Sŏl Ch’ong chŏn” 薛聰傳 [Biography of Sŏl Ch’ong]: It is related in the secular world that in the preface to a poem presented by a Japanese called Mabito 真人 to Sŏl p’an’gwan, it says, “Previously, I read the Kŭmgang sammae ron 金剛三昧論 [Vajrasamadhi Treatise] written by Wŏnhyo kŏsa and deeply regretted that I did not have a chance to meet him. When I heard that Silla diplomat Sŏl is none other than his grandson, even though I could not meet the kŏsa, I was very happy to meet his grandson. Therefore, I have composed this poem and hereby present it to him.” The poem is extant even today but the name of the grandson is unknown.19

16 Cited from Ollimp’ik chunbidan (1987: 10). 17 Here “□” represents illegible sinographs. 18 For information on Sŏl Chungŏp, I have referred to Horiike (1980: 403–404) and Wang Yong (2002: 300–302). 19 丗傳日夲國真人贈新羅使薛判官詩序云甞覽元曉居士所著金剛三昧論深恨不 見其人聞新羅國使薛即是居士之抱孫雖不見其祖而喜遇其孫乃作詩贈之其詩 至今存焉伹不知其子孫名字耳.

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In other words, Sŏl p’an’gwan, a grandson of Wŏnhyo, received a poem from a Japanese man named Mabito, who had been impressed by the work of Wŏnhyo, and even though the poem was still extant at that time in Koryŏ, the name of the grandson had already been forgotten. Needless to say, this Sŏl p’an’gwan is surely the same Sŏl Chungŏp. The Japanese man named Mabito is presumed to be Ōmi no Mifune 淡海三船 (722–785),20 a great-grandson of Prince Ōtomo, who was a son of Emperor Tenji (r. 668–672) and who committed suicide following defeat in the Jinshin War in 672. Ōmi no Mifune had been ordained as a Buddhist priest, but later returned to lay life and received the kabane (hereditary family title) Mabito. When the diplomatic mission from Silla came to Japan in 779, Ōmi no Mifune occupied the position of Daigaku no kami 大學頭, the highest position in the Daigakuryō 大學寮 (Institute of Higher Learning), and it was also in this year that he authored his Tō Daiwajō tōseiden 唐大和上東征傳, a biography of Jianzhen 鑑真 (J. Ganjin; 688–763). He was without a doubt the most prestigious intellectual in Japan at the time, and there is no more likely candidate for this “Mabito,” who had read the works of Wŏnhyo and presented a poem to his grandson, than Ōmi no Mifune. The works of Wŏnhyo, the father of Sŏl Ch’ong, who allegedly originated hundok vernacular reading practice in Korea, had a great influence on Japan during the Nara period, and moreover, Sŏl Chungŏp, the son of Sŏl Ch’ong, came to Japan and spoke with Ōmi no Mifune, and even received a poem from him. In reflecting on this situation, it would be rather strange if in fact Korean hundok practice had not been transmitted to Japan. The hundok practice in Korean, a language with a similar structure to Japanese, could be easily applied to Japanese. I will examine this point in the following section. Use of Buddhist Texts from Silla to Revise the Buddhist Canon in Japan Previous studies have maintained that the use of Japanese kunten 訓点 (K. hunchŏm) was initiated by monks in Nara, especially those belonging to the Kegon/Hwaŏm (Avataṃsaka) sect.21 The fifth volume of the manuscript of Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經略疏刊定記 (J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra] held by the Daitōkyū kinen bunko, from which I have quoted the oldest example of kunten, contains two colophons written in two different hands, neither of which matches the handwriting of the main text: 2.3

20 21

See Wang Yong (2002). See, for example, Tsukishima (1969: 29).

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(1) 延暦二年十一月廿三日、 於東大寺與新羅正本自校勘畢。 以此善根、生々之中殖金剛種、 斷一切障、 共諸含識入無異門。 On the 23rd day of the 11th month of the second year of Enryaku [783], at Tōdaiji Temple I personally referred to the original copy from Silla, revised errors, and finished [copying the text]. With this good root, I will plant Golden Beam seeds among living beings, eradicate all obstacles, and together with all manner of living things, attain enlightenment. (2) 以延暦七年八月十二日、 與唐正本相対校勘、 取捨得失、 楷定此本。 後學存意、 可幸察耳。 自後諸巻亦同此矣、 更不録勘年日等。 On the 12th day of the 8th month of the seventh year of Enryaku [788], I referred to the original copy from Tang, revised errors, and wrote out this corrected copy. Later readers are humbly requested to honor my intentions and keep this in mind. After this, the other volumes also follow along the same lines; thus, I do not record the copying date and other data. This text, in other words, was revised by referring to a Silla version in 783, and then again five years later, in 788, with reference to a copy from Tang China. Based on this information, Kobayashi Yoshinori argues that it is natural to conclude that the kundoku signs written in red ink were added when the copyist first referred to the text from Silla.22 This is because a text from Tang would never include kundoku signs. Fujimoto Yukio also points out that because the word-order glosses written in Chinese numerals resemble those from Korean texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (i.e., the Chosŏn period), the kundoku system must have come from Silla along with the Flower Garland Sūtra (Fujimoto 1992). It is assumed that the “original copy from Silla” referred to was brought to Japan by the monk Shinshō 審祥 (or 審詳, ?–ca. 742) of Daianji temple. Among the Shōsōin documents is a document dated to the twenty-ninth day of the fourth month of the second year of Jingo Keiun (768), titled “Memo from the Buddhist Canon Copying Bureau” (奉写一切經司移), that reads as follows: 奉寫一切經司移東大寺司、 請華嚴經恵園師疏一部審詳師所者。 右、 爲須勘經所証本、 所請如件。

22 I have based this account on Kobayashi Yoshinori 2008 and 2004 (chapter 2 on stylusglossed documents from Korea, section 2 on the connections to ancient kunten practices in Japan).

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We, the Buddhist Canon Copying Bureau, request the Tōdaiji Temple office to please lend us a copy of Huiyuan’s commentary (恵園師疏) on the Flower Garland Sūtra (owned by the priest Shinshō). This is because we need to make reference to it to copy and revise the sutra. Such is our request. The sinograph “移” here signifies the memos that moved back and forth between different offices. In this case, the Buddhist Canon Copying Bureau (Hōsha Issaikyōshi 奉写一切經司), the office set up under order of Empress Shōtoku 称徳 (r. 764–770) in order to copy the Buddhist Canon (Issaikyō 一 切經, a.k.a. Jingokeiunkyō 神護景雲經) was sending a memo to the office of Tōdaiji Temple in order to borrow for reference Shinshō’s copy of Huiyuan’s commentary on the Flower Garland Sūtra, which is none other than the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji referenced earlier and which was stored at Tōdaiji Temple. The Japanese priest Shinshō was known as a “Silla student,” that is, as a priest who had studied in Silla, and was responsible for bringing to Japan many works by the great priests of Silla’s Hwaŏm sect, including Wŏnhyo and Ŭisang. Moreover, in 740, at the solicitation of Rōben 良弁 (689–773), he gave the first ever lecture on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra in Japan, at Konshuji Temple 金鐘寺 on Mount Wakakusa in Nara (Horiike 1980, 386). Konshuji Temple was established by Emperor Shōmu 聖武 (r. 724–749) in 728, but following this lecture this temple would become the headquarters of the Hwaŏm sect, renamed Tōdaiji, and welcome the completion of the Great Buddha statue in 752. Silla Buddhism was closely connected to the building of the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji, the biggest event in Japan’s early history. Prior to the Nara period, during the Hakuhō period (ca. 645–710), a total of fourteen monks in training can be counted as having gone to study in Silla (these are only those whose names are recorded), whereas just eleven are recorded as having gone to study in Tang China. In addition, many of those who went to Tang used Silla ships (Tamura 1983, 188–189).23 Chitsū 智通 and Chitatsu 智達, who allegedly studied under Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664), also traveled to Tang on a boat from Silla. During this period, Japanese Buddhism adopted many things from Silla; therefore, it is very likely that the kundoku annotations seen in the Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji are the result of influence from Silla.

23

See in particular the chart, “Daitō gakumonsō, Shiragi gakumonsō ichiran” [Overview of Great Scholar Monks of Tang and Silla] on these pages.

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In any case, as can be clearly seen from the above memo from the Buddhist Canon Copying Bureau, in copying the Buddhist Canon, monks referred to many different copies of the same sutra and checked for discrepancies and possible errors. On such occasions, there can be no doubt that they discussed the interpretation of each text carefully, and kundoku annotation must have been generated during the process. 2.4 Beginnings of Vernacular Reading in Japan and Silla I will present one further example demonstrating the relationship between early Japanese kundoku practice and Silla. Among the commentaries related to the Flower Garland Sūtra listed in the Kegonshū shōsho narabi ni inmyōroku 華嚴宗章疏并因明録 [Catalogue of Commentaries and Logic Works of the Flower Garland (Kegon) Sect] (Taishō vol. 55) compiled in 914 by Enchō of Tōdaiji Temple, there is listed Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl ogwŏn 華嚴文義要決五 卷 (J. Kegon mongi yōketsu gokan) [Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra, in five volumes], a text written by the Silla monk P’yowŏn 表員 (fl. latter half of the 8th c.). An early Heian period manuscript of this text is labeled “Compiled by P’yowŏn of Hwangnyongsa Temple” 皇龍 寺表員集, pointing to it being a work by a monk of a major temple in Kyŏngju, the capital of Silla. Unfortunately, the original early Heian manuscript was burned in the Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and today only photographs of the text remain,24 but it is easy enough to make out section demarcations (kadanfu 科段符) added in red ink, horizontal line clause punctuation (kugirifu 句切符), okoto-ten marks, curved-line inversion glosses, and word-order marks in Chinese numerals. Let us examine a passage from it here (Fig. 19). Variant forms of sinographs in the original are indicated with their modern forms in parens; gappu 合符 (joining marks indicating compound nouns) are indicated with underscores.

24 See Satō (1939). The Kegon yōgi mondō 華嚴要義問答 (copied in 799 and held by Enryakuji Temple 延暦寺) is the same text under a different name (Tōdaiji Fujumonkō Kegon mongi yōketsu 東大寺諷誦文稿 華嚴文義要决). For the latter, please refer to the bibliographic note by Yamada Yoshio 山田孝雄 in Satō (1939).

Vernacular Reading in East Asia

Figure 19 Excerpt from the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl 華嚴文義要決 [Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra]

A word-processed version of the relevant excerpt looks like this: 説̲華̲嚴̲會• 総無了時、 何 容一有二此一部經教。 答有二義。 一義 者、 爲下劣衆生、 於無盡説中、略取二此等結集流 通、 故有此部、 令•̲ 其見聞、方̲便̲引•̲ 入無際限中、如三 観牖̲隙̲見二無際虚空。 (lines 188–189)

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If we convert the sentence above into kundoku, the translation will be as follows: おわ

説

華嚴會は

総べて

了る

時

なければ、

SETSU KEGON E wa subete owaru toki nakereba, If the service where the Buddha expounds the teachings of the Avataṃsaka has no end, い

何ぞ

此の

一部

の

經教

あるを

容れんや。

nani zo kono ICHIBU no KYŌGYŌ aru o iren ya. why must we accommodate the existence of this sutra? 答

に

二義

あり。

TŌ ni NIGI ari There are two answers to this question. 一義は、

下劣の

衆生のため、

ICHIGI wa, GERETSU no SHUJŌ no tame, おいて、 此等を

oite 此の

略取して

結集

korera o RYAKUSHUshite 部

無尽の

説中に

MUJIN no SETTCHŪ ni 流通せしむ、

故に

KESSHŪ RYŪTSŪseshimu, yue ni

あり、

kono BU ari One is that the sutra is a collection of excerpts from an endless teaching, gathered together for distribution to lowly sentient beings. 其れをして

見聞せしめて、

方便にて

無際限

中に

sore o shite KENMONseshimete, HŌBEN nite MUSAIGEN CHŪ ni 引入れること、

hikiireru koto, Leading them via upaya to witness and hear it 牖の

隙を

観きて

無際の

虛空を

見るが

如し。

mado no sukima o nozokite MUSAI no KOKŪ o miru ga gotoshi. is like peering at the vast sky through a chink in a window. Here is an explanation of how to read the parts with kundoku markings: [1] The dot on the right-hand side of “會” is an okoto-ten which indicates the Japanese topic particle wa (see Fig. 20). Thus, this is read as “説華嚴會 wa” (“the service where Buddha expounds upon the Hwaŏm [Avataṃsaka] teachings-TOP”).

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Figure 20 Okoto-ten Key for the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl 華嚴文義要決

[2] The long curving line stretching from the bottom left-hand side to the upper left-hand side of “經教” is either the inversion gloss or a combined marking of the inversion gloss and clause punctuation; in any case, it corresponds to the Chinese numeral “一” (one). From there, the reader goes back to “有” where “二” (two) is marked on the right-hand side. The sinograph “客” is a mistaken transcription of “容” due its similar shape, and because “一” (one) to the righthand side of it seems to be a mistake for “三” (three) given the context, this clause can be interpreted: イ

何ゾ

此ノ

一部ノ

經教

有ルヲ 容レンヤ

nani zo kono ICHIBU no KYŌGYŌ aru o iren ya? Why do we brook the existence of this [Avataṃsaka] Sūtra? Alternatively, if “一” (one) is not a mistake, the sentence can be read: 何ゾ

此ノ

一部ノ

經教

nani zo kono ICHIBU no KYŌGYŌ Why does this [Avataṃsaka] Sūtra exist?

ヨク

有ランヤ

yoku

aran ya?

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[3] The curved line at the bottom of “流通” is again an inversion gloss; this sends the reader back to “取” where “二” (two) is marked. Perhaps it was read: 略シテ

此等ノ

結集流通ヲ

取ル

RYAKUshite korera no KESSHŪ RYŪTSŪ o toru summarized and then undertook the collection and distribution of these But considering the meaning of the context, this should probably have been: 此等ヲ

略取シテ

結集

流通

セシム

korera o RYAKUSHUshite KESSHŪ RYŪTSŪ seshimu Took and summarized these and then had them gathered together and distributed. Thus, this seems to be a mistake in the kundoku annotation. [4] The dot on the lower left-hand side of “令” is an okoto-ten for the Japanese connecting suffix -te. Hence, this is: 其レヲ シテ

見聞

セシメテ

sore o shite KENMON seshimete making them personally experience it … [5] The dot on the left-hand side of “引” is an okoto-ten which indicates the Japanese object particle o. A gappu compounding mark has been added to “方 便引.” Thus, treating “方便引” as one word, the kundoku seems to be: 方便引ヲ

無際限

中ニ

入ラシム

HŌBEN’IN o MUSAIGEN CHŪ ni irashimu have an upaya “dragger” enter eternity, But normally this would be read: 方便ニテ

無際限

中ニ

引入レル

HŌBEN nite MUSAIGEN CHŪ ni hikiireru … lead them them into eternity by means of upaya. [6] The inversion gloss placed below “虛空” sends the reader back to “二” (two) and “三” (three), and results in:

117

Vernacular Reading in East Asia 牖隙ヲ

観キテ

無際ノ

虛空ヲ

見ルガ

如シ

YŌGEKI o nozokite MUSAI no KOKŪ o miru ga gotoshi … as if peering at the vast sky through a chink in a window. The word “牖隙” implies Japanese mado no sukima (“gap or chink in a traditional paper window”), but because of the gappu compounding mark, it may have been read in its Sino-Japanese on reading as yōgeki. 2.5 The kunten Markings in the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl and Stylus Glosses in Korea Ultimately, the kundoku annotation seen in the above manuscript, featuring okoto-ten and word-order marks written in Chinese numerals, is no different from other kundoku documents of the Heian period. Nevertheless, according to Kobayashi Yoshinori (2004: 189), the kind of okoto-ten used in the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl is not seen in other documents from Japan but instead strongly resembles Korean chŏmt’o 点吐, pointillographic markings added by stylus to the late eleventh-century copy of the Flower Garland Sūtra recently discovered among the holdings of the Sŏngam Antiquarian Book Museum in Seoul. The chŏmt’o stylus markings in this copy of the Flower Garland Sūtra consist of various signs, including a single dot, double dots, horizontal lines, vertical lines, oblique lines, etc., and are extremely complex. But here let us focus only on the single dot patterns needed for the purpose of comparison with the Japanese counterpart. Following the analysis by Korean researchers in Nam P’unghyŏn et al. (2001), the key to the pattern of annotation in chŏmt’o is translated into Japanese in Figure 21. If we compare this with the okoto-ten key for the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl seen in Figure 20, going clockwise from bottom left, connective -te, object marker o, conjunction to, and adnominal no match in both, while the exception is the topic marker wa, which is placed on the right-hand side in the Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl but directly in the middle of the sinograph in the Korean annotated version of the Flower Garland Sūtra (the sign corresponding to Korean -(ŭ)n looks somewhat like , only with a straight vertical line on the right). Overall, however, the schemes are very similar. Moreover, in Japan, although punctuation marks on the lower left-hand side of sinographs function as inversion glosses in some cases, inversion glosses with long curving lines are never found. Further, the gappu compounding mark, which runs through two or more characters to indicate compound nouns, is also not found in the oldest Japanese materials. However, these marks appear

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Figure 21 Key for Korean Pointillographic Stylus Glosses (kakp’il chŏmt’o 角筆点吐)

in Korean stylus-glossed documents from the eleventh century, including the Flower Garland Sūtra and the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra (C. Yujia shidi lun, K. Yuga saji ron 瑜伽師地論) [Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice]. Stylus-glossed documents were first discovered in Korea in February 2000 by the Japanese researcher Nishimura Hiroko. After this first discovery, her teacher and today’s leading expert on stylus glosses (J. kakuhitsu, K. kakp’il 角 筆), Kobayashi Yoshinori, followed by Korean scholars like Nam P’unghyŏn, have found a great number of kakp’il-glossed documents, and many of these include okoto-ten-like hundok markings that show striking commonalities with Japanese counterparts, like in the example above. To date, no hundok markings dating to the Silla period have been found; nevertheless, if the characteristic hundok markings seen in the Heian period manuscript of Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl authored by P’yowŏn of Silla were already present in the manuscript originally brought over from Silla, this would constitute proof of the existence of hundok practice in Silla. Research on kakp’il glossing in Korea is still relatively young, and depending on the future development

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of studies, the relationship between Silla hundok and kundoku in Japan will likely be clarified. 3

Ideological Background of hundok on the Korean Peninsula

3.1 Silla Monk Pilgrims Who Translated Sutras from Sanskrit There are various reasons why it is highly likely that Silla hundok influenced the development of kundoku in Japan. First, Buddhism was introduced to Silla earlier than it was to Japan, and in addition, the Sillan language, the direct ancestral form of modern Korean, was structurally very similar to Japanese. These are surely important causal factors, but what affected this practice even more directly was the unique development of Silla Buddhism focused on the Hwaŏm sect. By the early seventh century the Korean Peninsula consisted of three kingdoms: Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla. Koguryŏ adopted Buddhism in 372, Paekche in 384, and Silla was the last to adopt it, from Koguryŏ in 527 (Japan adopted Buddhism from Paekche in the mid-sixth century). Although Silla was the last of the three to adopt Buddhism, it developed quickly there, reaching its zenith following the unification of the three kingdoms by Silla in 668. Indicative of this phenomenon is the large number of pilgrim monks from Silla who went to India. The Tang monk Yijing 義浄 (635–713) stayed in India for twenty-five years, brought back many Sanskrit sutras to China, and was well known for his writings about his experiences, found in his Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan 南海寄歸内 法傳 [Account of Buddhism Sent from the South Seas]. Another work of his, Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐西域求法高僧傳 [Buddhist Monks’ Pilgrimages to the West of the Great Tang in Pursuit of the Dharma], recounts the exploits of monks who traveled to India by land and sea in the late seventh century to study Buddhism. Of the sixty names recorded in this work, eight (Ananyabalma 阿難耶跋摩, Hyeŏp 慧業, Kubon 求本, Hyŏnt’ae 玄太, Hyŏn’gak 玄恪, Hyeryun 慧輪, and two others) are Silla monks. As for pilgrims from Japan, according to volume 3 (“Beibian” 貝編 [Chapter of Shells]) of the Youyang zazu 酉陽雑俎 [Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang], the author of the work, the Tang writer Duan Chengshi 段成式 (?–863), had once met a Japanese monk named Kongō Zanmai 金剛三昧 who had been to India, but this is the only record of its kind.25 There is no recorded information about this 25 The full record reads: 國初僧玄奘往五印取經、西域敬之。成式見倭國僧金剛三 昩言、嘗至中天、寺中多畫玄奘麻屩及匙筯、以綵雲乗之。盖西域所無者、每至

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Kongō Zanmai in Japan and it is uncertain who exactly he was. On top of that, Duan Chengshi lived in the ninth century, meaning that Kongō Zanmai went to India much later than the Silla monks. This is a significant difference. It seems likely that many of the Silla monks described in Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan died in either India or Tang and never returned home to Silla. However, there were considerably more monks from Silla in Tang China than monks from Japan, and while the Japanese monks who studied in Tang only went as far as Mount Tiantai on the southeast coast or the capital Chang’an, Silla monks went further inland to places like Sichuan. Further, Silla monks in Tang probably had frequent contact with their home country, as Silla controlled regional maritime traffic at the time (Japanese monks and diplomatic missions to Tang often boarded Silla ships, as we have seen above). Moreover, among the Silla monks staying in Tang, there were some who participated directly in the translation of sutras from Sanskrit to Chinese. For instance, Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696), the author of the Commentary on the Humane King Sūtra (J. Ninnōkyōsho, K. Inwang kyŏng so 仁王經疏), went to study in Tang, listened to the lectures of Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664), and later entered the Sutra Translation Bureau (Yijingguan 譯經館), where he was working as an editor when Tripiṭaka Dharma Master Rizhao 日照 (a.k.a. Divākara, 613–687), a monk from India, translated works such as the Dasheng xianshi jing 大乗顯識經 (J. Daijō kenshikikyō) [Mahāyāna Sūtra of Consciousness Revealed a.k.a. Clarification of Consciousness Sūtra].26 In addition, Wŏnch’ŭk worked on the translation team together with Yijing and others when Jisshananda 實 叉難陀 (652–710), a monk from the Kingdom of Khotan, produced a new translation of the Flower Garland Sūtra (80 volumes) in 695. In this way, Wŏnch’ŭk was actively involved in work at the center of the Chinese Buddhist world of the time. According to biographical data on Wŏnch’ǔk found in volume 2 of the 齋日、輒膜拜焉。又言那蘭陁寺僧食堂中、熱際有巨蠅數萬至、僧上堂時、悉 自飛集於庭樹。“At the beginning of the [Tang] dynasty, the monk Xuanzang went to the Five Indias and brought back sutras; the people of the western regions all respected him. I [Duan Chengshi] once met the Japanese monk Kongō Zanmai, and he told me: ‘I once went to Middle India; the temples have many paintings of Xuanzang riding a multi-colored cloud up to the heavens with his straw shoes and spoon and chopsticks. Because these are things they do not have in the western regions, every time they perform a ceremony, they place their hands together in front of them.’ He also said: ‘In the refectory at the temple in Nalanda, there are hundreds of thousands of giant flies on hot summer days, and whenever the monks come to eat, they all fly in and gather in the trees in the yard.’ ” 26 See Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳 [Biographies of Eminent Monks Compiled during the Song], vol. 2, “Biography of Rizhao” (Rizhao zhuan 日照傳), and vol. 4, “Biography of Wŏnch’ŭk” (Yuance zhuan 圓測傳).

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Xuanzang sanzang shizi zhuan congshu 玄奘三藏師資傳叢書 [Compendium of Biographies and Materials Related to Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang],27 he was a “grandson of the King of Silla.” He died in Tang China, but Ŭisang, a prominent priest of the Silla Hwaŏm sect on a par with Wŏnhyo, might well have met Wŏnch’ŭk in Chang’an when he went to Tang to study (Kamata 1988: 322). Silla Monk Hyech’o: Pilgrim and Translator of Sutras from the Sanskrit Among the Silla monks who made pilgrimages to India and also translated sutras from Sanskrit to Chinese, the most conspicuous figure is Hyech’o 慧超 (ca. 704–787). Hyech’o went to study in Tang when only a boy,28 and soon continued on across the sea to India and traveled around various regions from the northwest of India to Bamiyan, located in today’s Afghanistan, which was well-known for its old Buddhist remains, before proceeding in 727 by way of the Silk Road to Kucha in the administrative region of Tang’s Protectorate General to Pacify the West (Anxi dadu hufu 安西大都護府; today’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region). Hyech’o recorded this long journey, which took him several years, in his Wang o ch’ŏnch’ukkuk chŏn 往五天竺國傳 [Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India]. The book had been lost, but in the early twentieth century, some parts of it were recovered from the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang in China. After returning to Tang China, Hyech’o studied under Vajrabodhi (C. Jin’gangzhi 金剛智) (671–741), an Indian monk who introduced Esoteric Buddhism to China, and in 740, at Jianfu Temple 薦福寺 in Chang’an, he joined the Emperor Xuanzong-mandated Buddhist scripture translation project led by Vajrabodhi as a “Holder of the Brush.” This suggests he was probably also proficient in Sanskrit. After Vajrabodhi died, Hyech’o studied under Amoghavajra (C. Bukong Jin’gang 不空金剛; 705–774), who was not only Vajrabodhi’s student and successor, but also Emperor Xuanzong’s and Emperor Suzong’s most trusted monk. When Amoghavajra died in 774, Hyech’o listened to his master’s final precatory words together with five other students. In that same year, perhaps replacing his teacher, Hyech’o conducted a successful ritual for rain at Yunütan 玉女潭 to the west of Chang’an by order of the emperor. In 780, Hyech’o, taking the sutras he had previsouly translated with his teacher Vajrabodhi, headed to Qianyuan Bodhi Temple 乾元菩提寺 on Mount 3.2

27 28

To be exact, an inscription titled “Dazhou Ximingsi gu dade Yuance fashi fosheli ta ming” 大周西明寺故大德圓測法師佛舍利塔銘 [Inscription from the Relic Pagoda of the Late Dharma Master Taedŏk Wŏnch’ŭk from Ximing Temple of Great Zhou]. For the biography of Hyech’o, I consulted Takakusu (1915a, 1915b).

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Wutai 五台山. There, he composed a preface to a completed translation of Dasheng yujia jingang xinghai manshushili qianbi qianbo dajiaowangjing 大乘 瑜伽金剛性海曼殊室利千臂千鉢大教王經 [Mañjuśrī with a Thousand Arms and Thousand Bowls Sūtra] in which he outlined his own biography and described the esoteric meaning of the sutra. This is the last known source we have about him; after staying in Tang for about 54 years, he probably lived to a ripe old age of eighty years or more. Twenty-five years later, in 805, the renowned Japanese monk Kūkai 空海 (774–835) went to Tang and received consecration (Skt. abhiseka, C. guanding 灌頂) as well as esoteric instruction from Huiguo 慧果 (746–805). Huiguo was also a disciple of Amoghavajra, and had listened to his teacher’s final words together with his senior disciple Hyech’o. By the time Kūkai went to Chang’an, Hyech’o was probably already dead, but he surely would have known the name of his predecessor under the same teacher. Moreover, in addition to learning the esoteric Buddhism of the Vajraśekhara Sūtra (C. Jin’gangding jing, J. Kongōchōkyō 金剛頂經) [Diamond Apex Sūtra] from Amoghavajra, Huiguo was initiated into the esoteric Buddhism of the Mahāvairocana Sūtra (C. Dari jing 大日經 or Da piluzhena chengfo shenbian jiachi jing 大毘盧遮那成佛神變 加持經) [Great Illuminator Sūtra] and the Susiddhi-kara Sūtra (C. Suxidi jing 蘇悉地經) [Tantra for Wondrous Achievement] by Hyŏnch’o 玄超, a disciple of another Indian monk, Śubhakarasiṃha 善無畏 (673–735). This Hyŏnch’o was also a monk from Silla.29 Kūkai brought both esoteric traditions back to Japan and started Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. In other words, Silla monks also indirectly influenced Shingon Buddhism. In Chapter 1, I argued that the Japanese kundoku method for reading Literary Sinitic was derived from the practices related to the translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit into Chinese. If this is true, owing to the existence of monks like those mentioned above who both traveled to India and participated in the sutra translation process, Silla would likely have been able to acquire, at an earlier time than Japan, more detailed information on the linguistic situation in India and Sanskrit-Chinese sutra translations. This is the most significant piece of circumstantial evidence we have for the claim that kundoku reading practices had their origins in Silla. Hyech’o’s Writing Style: Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India The extant portions of a manuscript of the Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India, recovered from the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang (in 3.3

29

As per the postscript to the Da piluzhena jing guangda yigui 大毘盧遮那經廣大儀軌.

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present-day Xinjiang province) and currently in the possession of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, are not only a precious source for understanding the situation in the “Western Regions” (i.e., India and Central Asia) at the turn of the eighth century, but their style of writing is also of considerable interest.30 Hyech’o commented on local customs of the places he visited and, perhaps because he was a monk, paid special attention to the hairstyles of local people. For example, about the kingdoms of Lesser Bolor 小勃律國, Tokhara 吐火羅 國, and the Khuttal 骨咄國, he comments, “men wear their hair cut and beards shaved, but women wear their hair long.” However, in order to express “women wear their hair long,” he writes “女人在髪” [“women have long hair”]. Further, with regard to the kingdom of Kapiśa 罽賓國 (= Kaniṣka) in the ancient Gandhara region (today’s Kashmir), he writes “女人髪在,” and of the Türküts 突厥 and Wakhān (C. Humi 胡蜜), on the upper reaches of the Amu Darya, he writes, “女人在頭.” About the kingdom of Greater Arabia (C. Dashiguo 大𥦽 國), he writes, “男人剪髪在鬚、女人在髪,” by which he means to say “men have their hair cut and keep beards, while women have long hair.” In all of these examples, “在髪” is used to mean “have hair,” but this usage of “在” is incorrect. Hyech’o should have written “女人有髪” to mean “women have long hair.” In fact, to make it more sophisticated as a Literary Sinitic expression, “畜髪” or “留髪” would have been more appropriate; nonetheless, in order to say simply “one has something,” Hyech’o should have used the character “有.” Both “有” and “在” are verbs meaning “to exist,” and both are glossed with a singular verb, as aru in Japanese and isi- in Korean. However, “有” corresponds to the Japanese pattern {A ni B ga aru}: “in/unto A there is B” (i.e., possession), while “在” corresponds to the structure {A ga B ni aru}: “A is located at/in B” (i.e., location). In short, the subject and object are switched in these two different patterns, which are two distinct verbs in Chinese. For instance, “天有命” means “Heaven has the Mandate,” whereas “命在天” means “The Mandate is in/lies with Heaven.” Hence, grammatically, “女人在髪” would be “women are [“located”] in hair,” and “男人剪髪在鬚” would be “men cut their hair and are [“located”] in beards.” In other words, as written, both of these sentences are utter nonsense. A phrase like “女人髪在” may look fine, since there is nothing that follows “在” to indicate the location of the subject; however, Chinese speakers would never compose a sentence in this way. But for speakers of Japanese and Korean, it is difficult to distinguish “有” from “在.” Indeed, these two verbs are sometimes confused in Literary Sinitic writing 30

For this section I have consulted Kuwayama (1998).

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from Japan and Korea, and even today, this is an important point when teaching beginning-level Mandarin in both countries. What’s more, Hyech’o even writes “女人在頭.” Literally, this means “women are located in/on a head,” which sounds even more unreasonable. In modern Korean, people express “have long hair” by saying “has a long ‘head’” (mŏri ka kilda); in Korean, both of the meanings “hair” and “head” are contained in the same word, mŏri. This is because the noun for “hair on one’s head” (mŏrit’ŏl) is usually shortened to simply “head” (mŏri). Both Japanese and Chinese have expressions like “頭を刈る” (atama o karu, cut one’s hair) and “剃頭” (C. titou, J. teitō, shave one’s head), but because “head” (頭) and “hair” (髪) are two distinct terms in these languages, they do not say “has a long head.” Due to the lack of historical documents, it is not certain if the use of this type of Korean expression existed during Silla times, but at least in the ŏnhae texts compiled after the promulgation of han’gŭl in the fifteenth century, “hair” is translated as “mŏri” (head) so it is probably safe to assume that a similar usage existed in the ancient language. The reason Hyech’o wrote “女人在頭,” therefore, is probably related to the influence of his mother tongue. The fact that he also wrote things like “中天不殊” (central-India-not-different) with the verb-final word order typical of Korean, when he theoretically should have written “不 殊中天” for “not different [from those in] Central India,” can be attributed to the same reason. Considering that Hyech’o mixed up “在” and “有” as well as “頭” and “髪,” it seems he is likely to have written these Literary Sinitic texts within the mindset of the Silla language. Hyech’o traveled from Tang to India in his youth, and we can assume that when he returned to Tang in 727, he was not yet thirty. Assuming he authored his Memoir of a Pilgrimage by compiling the notes that he took during his travels, his knowledge of Literary Sinitic at the time must have come from the education he had received in Silla. This in turn suggests that the traces of Silla language in his text derive not from his own personal Literary Sinitic writing style but from the writing style of contemporary Silla. Misuse of “在” and “有” by Hyech’o is limited to the examples of “在髪” and “在頭” cited above; in the rest of his memoir, Hyech’o uses these verbs properly. In Literary Sinitic texts written in Silla with some admixture of Silla language, one can find examples in which “在” means not only “to be [located in]” but also “keep; own, have”;31 therefore, in this sense, Hyech’o’s meaning could be that women did not have their hair in a certain style but “kept” it. Later, Hyech’o studied diligently in Tang and worked as a scribe as part of a teambased sutra translation project, which implies he must have gone on to master 31

See Nam P’unghyŏn (2000: 301).

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proper Literary Sinitic composition. Indeed, in works from his later years, this sort of influence of the Silla language is absent. The fragments of the Memoir of a Pilgrimage discovered in Dunhuang are regarded as drafts, rather than as remnants of a finalized version. This may be why they include some irregular expressions, which seem to be attributable to the influence of the Silla language. Incidentally, the Yiqie jing yinyi 一切經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of (all the words in) the Buddhist Canon], by Huilin 慧 琳 (737–820) of Tang, contains an annotation from the third volume of Memoir of a Pilgrimage. Huilin was also a student of Amoghavajra alongside Hyech’o, and perhaps what he had seen was the finalized version of the third volume of the book after corrections had been made. Since the portions of Memoir of a Pilgrimage found in the Mogao Caves do not include the beginning or end of the work, and do not contain the name of the author, it is only through the quotations found in Sounds and Meanings of [all the Words in] the Buddhist Canon that we have been able to confirm that the manuscript fragments are from Hyech’o’s book. 3.4 Language Ideology in the Biography of Kyunyŏ As outlined in Chapter 1, in Japan, Jien and others advocated the view that Sanskrit and Japanese were identical based on an understanding of the relationship between Sanskrit and Chinese in the process of translating Buddhist sutras into Literary Sinitic. Assuming that Silla had known about the Sanskrit-Chinese sutra translations more intimately and earlier than Japan, and that Silla language and Japanese shared similar grammatical structures, it should come as no surprise that a similar view that focused on perceived resemblances between Sanskrit and Korean arose in Korea just as it had done in Japan. Indeed, precisely such a stance can be observed in the biography of Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973), a head monk in the Avataṃsaka sect in the early part of the Koryŏ period (918–1392). The Tae Hwaŏm sujwa wŏnt’ong yangjung taesa Kyunyŏ chŏn 大華嚴首座 圓通兩重大師均如傳, compiled in 1075 and usually referred to simply as the Kyunyŏ chŏn [Biography of Kyunyŏ],32 contains a sequence of eleven hyangga 郷歌 known as “Songs of the Ten Great Vows of Samantabadhra” (K. Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka 普賢十願歌), which Kyunyŏ composed to enlighten the public. Hyangga songs, like the ancient poems of the Japanese collection Man’yōshū 万葉集 [Collection of Myriad Leaves] (c. 759), are ancient Korean songs transcribed using sinographs primarily as phonograms. Kyunyŏ’s eleven hyangga 32

See Ch’oe and An (1986) for an annotated translation in Korean and a reproduction of the original text, and see Buzo and Prince (1993) for an English translation.

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verses were translated into Literary Sinitic by Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (dates unknown), a scholar of the Hallimwŏn (Academy of Letters) who lived in the period. His translations appear alongside the vernacular hyangga originals in the Kyunyŏ chŏn. In his preface, Ch’oe Haenggwi states that although the poems of China and “our country” (Koryŏ) are composed in different languages, their significance is equal. However, he notes, while “we” can understand Chinese poetry, the Chinese do not understand “our” poetry, and this is to be regretted. He continues: 唐文如帝網交羅、 我邦易讀。 Tang-writing-like-Indra-net-crisscross-encompass, our-land-easy-read. 郷札似梵書連布、 local-letters-resemble-Sanskrit-script-line up-spread out, 彼土難諳。 that-land-difficult-recite. Chinese literature, though as elaborate as Indra’s net, is easily studied in our land; while our writings are intricate like Sanskrit texts, and it is hard for anyone in that country to become familiar with them.33 In this preface, the author still refers to China as Tang 唐, despite the fact that this preface was written in 967, eight years after the Song dynasty was established; the Tang dynasty, meanwhile, had collapsed in 907, and following the brief Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom Period (907–960), the Song dynasty was founded in 960. A similar phenomenon concerning the term “Tang” 唐 can be seen in Japan. The word “diwang” 帝網 (emperor-net) in “diwang jiaoluo” 帝網 交羅 (Indra’s net catching all in its embrace) alludes to the expression “yintuo­ luowang” 因陀羅網 (Indra’s net) used in the Flower Garland Sūtra, which refers to a net of gems that decorated the palace of Indra, also known as Śakra, the ruler of the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven in Buddhist cosmology. Each node in the net has a jewel attached to it, and these gems reflect off each other in multiple layers. Thus, in this sentence, the author regards sinographs metaphorically as jewels, referring to the typological nature of Chinese as an isolating language whereby each sinograph is strung along in a row to make sentences. At the same time, as the “Songs of the Four Side Wings of the Palace” (C. Sixiangge 四 廂歌) of the Jin 晋 dynasty “Yuezhi” 樂志 [Treatise on Music] in the Songshu 宋書 [History of Song] make clear, the expression “diwang” 帝網 (Indra’s net) also symbolized Chinese imperial rule: 33

English translation cited from Buzo and Prince (1993: 54).

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燿三光、張帝網、正皇綱、播仁風

Shine the three brightnesses, extend Indra’s net, rectify imperial rule, and disseminate humane customs. Therefore, Ch’oe Haenggwi’s preface implies that in the “wo bang” 我邦 (our country), which is encompassed by the net of Chinese imperial rule, Chinese writing is easily understood. Moreover, because hyangch’al, which refers to texts written in Korean (in the same way that hyangga refers to songs composed in Korean), is thought to resemble the structure of Sanskrit, it is therefore difficult for a person of “that land” (i.e., China) to understand. When he writes, “[Korean writing is] similar in its arrangement to Sanskrit,” he probably means that the word order of Korean is the same as that of Sanskrit. The above passage, then, metaphorically describes Chinese as structurally different from Sanskrit, but Korean as similar to Sanskrit, by referring to the contemporary political situation surrounding China and the Korean Peninsula. Ch’oe Haenggwi goes on to say, “Hallim academician Sŏl took great pains to alter the [Confucian] texts (C. siwen, K. samun 斯文) and went to great trouble to add mouse tails,” which indicates that Hallim scholar Sŏl (i.e., Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰) read the Confucian classics via hundok; without a doubt, the “mouse tails” must refer to the fact that Korean nominal particles and verb endings are “stuck on” to the main texts like the tail on a mouse. Ch’oe Haenggwi’s understanding that “Korean writing is similar in its arrangement to Sanskrit” matches perfectly with what we saw earlier from the Japanese monk Jien, who said, “Sanskrit is close to and similar to the Yamato language.” Just as Jien had refashioned a Literary Sinitic poem by Bai Juyi into a Japanese poem, Ch’oe remade Kyunyŏ’s hyangga songs into Literary Sinitic poems in order to demonstrate the value of Koryŏ literature to Chinese readers; in other words, both Ch’oe and Jien possessed a competitive awareness vis-à-vis Chinese culture as well as a desire to stand on a culturally equal basis with the Chinese. Apparently, many other contemporary intellectuals, including Kyunyŏ, shared these perceptions. Moreover, the above commentary by Ch’oe is dated a hundred years before that of Jien. Here we can see the advanced level of Buddist culture in Korea ever since the time of Silla. 3.4.1 Kyunyŏ and Japan The Kyunyŏ chŏn [Biography of Kyunyŏ] contains the following episode. In 973, the Koryŏ court received a report from the magistrate (pusa 府使) of Kimhae to the west of Pusan. According to the report, a mysterious monk had

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appeared on the coast and said, “I have shared the fate of this country for a long time. Now, although the Three Han Kingdoms have been united, I saw that Buddhism still did not flourish in the country, and so as a reward for my actions in my previous existence, I came here yet again, but now I think I will go to Japan,” whereupon he vanished. When they inquired about the date, they found it was the same day that Kyunyŏ had died. This appears to be a legend about a reincarnated Kyunyŏ going to Japan. The backdrop for this legend was the reality of the resumption of diplomatic relations with Japan following the inauguration of the Koryŏ dynasty, after a prolonged period of cooling between Silla and Japan that had begun in the latter half of the eighth century. In the ninth month of the previous year (972), emissaries from both the Namgyŏng 南京 (present-day Seoul) and Kimhae 金海 magistracies in Koryŏ visited Tsushima 對馬. The Japanese side sent a written reply as well as trade officials.34 The above legend of Kyunyŏ going to Japan after his death reflects contemporary relations between Koryŏ and Japan. In addition, it suggests the possibility that the sort of language ideology seen in the Biography of Kyunyŏ might have been transmitted to Japan. 3.4.2 Kyunyŏ’s hundok Practice In addition to the hyangga sequence “Songs of the Ten Great Vows of Samantabhadra,” Kyunyŏ left handwritten annotations to his lectures on such Buddhist texts as the Flower Garland Sūtra, some of which show the traces of hundok reading and writing practices. The following sentence is from the third volume of his Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴敎分記圓通 鈔 [Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra], which was printed in the late thirteenth century as a supplement to the Korean Buddhist Canon (K. Koryŏ taejang kyŏng 高麗大藏經): 或有如佛性隠, 闡提人隠有豆亦, 善根人無如好尸丁. 或有如佛性隠, 善根人隠有豆亦, 闡提人無如好尸丁. In the original (Fig. 22), the small sinographs are adjacent in double lines. This is a hundok-type mark-up based on the following passage from the “Samantabhadra samādhi Chapter” (C. Puxian sanmei pin 普賢三昧品) 34

The relevant information can be found in Dai Nihon shiryō, Tenroku 3 (972), 9th month, 23rd day and 10th month, 20th day (Part 1–14) and Ten’en 2 (974) 10th month, 30th day (Part 1–15).

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Figure 22 Excerpt with Vernacular Glosses from the Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴 敎分記圓通鈔 [Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra]

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of the Huayan jing suishu yanyi chao 華嚴經随疏演義抄 [Exegesis of the Commentary on the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra] written by Chengguan 澄觀 (738– 839) of Tang China—the fourth patriarch of the Chinese Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sect—and originally appeared as a comment in the “Kāśyapa Bodhisattva Chapter” (C. Jiaye pusa pin 迦葉菩薩品) of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra [Nirvāṇa Sūtra]: 一或 有佛性、闡提人有、善根人無。… 二或有佛性、善根人有、闡提人無

First, some Buddha natures exist only in icchantika but not in believers; second, some Buddha natures exist only in believers but not in icchantika. The form 闡提 (C. chanti, K. ch’ŏnje) is a shortened form of 一闡提 (C. yichanti, K. ilch’ŏnje “spiritually deluded being”), which is a transcription of the Sanskrit term icchantika, meaning “a desirer.” The Chinese translation of the term is duanshan’gen 斷善根 (lit. “extirpate wholesome roots”), i.e., “one who pursues the desires of the mortal world and does not follow the teaching of Buddha,” which is the opposite of shan’genren 善根人 “a believer” (lit. “person with wholesome roots”). Whether or not an icchantika has a Buddha nature, or whether or not he or she can become a Buddha, is a matter of great controversy within Buddhist doctrine, and was often the subject of debates. The above sentence is one part of an argument that maintains that there are different kinds of Buddha nature; one kind exists only in icchantika while another kind exists only in “believers”; some exist in both, whereas others exist in neither. This particular passage from the Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o includes Korean particles, which are written in smaller-size sinographs (Fig. 22). According to Nam P’unghyŏn,35 “如” represents the verb-final indicative ending -ta -다, “隠” represents the Korean topic marker ŭn 은, “豆亦” is tuyŏ 두여, and “好尸丁” is ho-l-dyŏ 홀뎌; thus, a more detailed analysis would like this:

35

See Nam P’unghyŏn (2000: 27).

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或 有如 佛性隠, 善根人隠 有豆亦, 闡提人 無如好尸丁. HOK [is]-ta PULSŎNG ŭn, SŎN’GŬNIN ŭn [is-]tuyŏ, CH’ŎNJEIN [ŏp-]-ta holdyŏ. Moreover, “有如” here is is-ta 잇다 → today’s itta 있다 (“to be; to have”) and “無如” is ŏp-ta 없다 (“not to be; not to have”). Hence, these are glossed via their vernacular Korean hun readings, such that “有佛性” becomes 佛性 ŭn 有-ta “Buddha-nature exists.” The Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o was transcribed by a disciple of Kyunyŏ based on a lecture given in 960, and according to its colophon, there were originally two versions: a “local speech version” (pangŏnbon 方言本) and a “version with local speech deleted” (sakpangŏnbon 削方言本). The former is the version written in the mixed style of Literary Sinitic and vernacular Korean using sinographs as phonograms (as seen just above) and the latter is the version “cleaned up” and translated into orthodox Literary Sinitic by deleting the vernacular elements from the former. The texts of the Korean Buddhist Canon extant today are all of the latter type and thus are written entirely in orthodox Literary Sinitic, so it seems this one small snippet somehow escaped the cleansing process whereby the editors deleted the vernacular Korean grammatical markings. Further, it seems that the sinographs used to indicate grammatical markers were probably originally in simplified forms and converted to their full traditional forms later. In addition, there may have been some hundok markings to indicate inversions in word order. Since the original manuscript has been lost, the details are not clear; nonetheless, the above text reveals that hundok practice existed in Kyunyŏ’s time, and that Korean grammatical markers were transcribed in sinographs used as phonograms. Since Kyunyŏ’s lecture itself was certainly originally given in Korean, its original transcript must have been a pangŏnbon, or “local speech version.” Later, it was translated into Literary Sinitic and converted into a sakpangŏnbon, or “version with local speech deleted.” This is probably the reason why there are far fewer hundok-marked documents or texts written in the vernacular using sinograph-based transcription compared to Japan. Still, the type of sinographbased transcription seen in this passage for indicating Korean grammatical markers like “如 -ta” and “隠 ŭn” is also observed in the transcription of the “Songs of the Ten Great Vows of Samantabhadra,” which demonstrates that Kyunyŏ wrote these hyangga by adopting the same techniques used to transcribe the vernacular inflections in his hundok. Concept of the Nation on the Korean Peninsula: Korea Is the Real China! Until this point, the Korean Peninsula and Japan had taken a similar path; they took their hint from the Sanskrit-to-Chinese sutra translation project 3.5

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to develop kundoku-hundok vernacular reading practice and focused on the perceived similarities between Sanskrit and their own languages. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, considering the Korean Peninsula had started down this path earlier than Japan, it is highly likely that vernacular reading was transmitted from Korea to Japan. Nonetheless, henceforth, Korea and Japan would move in different directions. In Japan, as has already been described, the theory that Sanskrit was genealogically related to Japanese was closely related to the claim that Japanese deities were local manifestations of the Indian Buddha and Bodhisattvas, and to the three-country view of the world as consisting of India, China, and Japan. But on the Korean Peninsula, a different development was taking place. In the mythological origins of the nation as described in texts like the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms] (ca. 1280), Hwanung 桓雄, born as a son of Hwanin 桓因, the Lord of Heaven, descended to Mount T’aebaek and married a woman who had been transformed from a bear; she gave birth to Tan’gun 檀君, who founded Ancient Chosŏn with P’yŏngyang as its capital. Similar to the Japanese tenson kōrin 天孫降臨 myth, according to which Amaterasu’s grandson descended from heaven, the backdrop for the Tan’gun myth is ancient northeast Asian shamanistic worship of heavenly deities. Incidentally, Hwanin, the grandfather of Tan’gun, is none other than Śakrodevānām Indraḥ (C. Shitihuanyin 釋提桓因, i.e., Śakra = Dishitian 帝釋天), who appears in Buddhist scriptures such as the Longer Āgama Sūtra (C. Chang ahan jing 長阿含經). Śakra is originally the Hindu god Indra and was later adopted into Buddhism as a guardian of Buddhist dharma who lives atop Mount Sumeru. Consequently, the mythical founder of Korea is a grandson of Śakra. This story, therefore, emphasizes the ties between Korea and India—or Buddhism—even more directly than does the Japanese honji suijaku theory (the idea that Japanese deities are local manifestations of Indian Bodhisattvas). By adding Japan to the Chinese Buddhist worldview consisting originally just of India (C. Tianzhu 天竺) and China (C. Zhendan 震旦), Japanese Buddhists created a new three-country worldview. However, Korea, which was in a tributary relationship with the Chinese empire, could not align itself equally with China. As a result, at this time there emerged an even more direct theory that Korea was the “real China” (K. Chindan 震旦). The term “zhendan” 震旦 originated from a transcription of the Sanskrit word “Cīnaṣṭhāna,” the term for China in ancient India, and was also written as “眞丹” or “振丹” (which were pronounced similarly to zhendan). “Cīna,” of course, is cognate with English “China,” both of which derive from Qin 秦,

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the ancient Chinese state that unified China in 221 bce. The word “ṣṭhāna” means “land.” It is not clear why these two particular sinographs were used to represent the sounds of this place name. Later, this transcription was explained by Huilin (whom we first encountered as the compiler of the Yiqie jing yinyi 一 切經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of (all the words in) the Buddhist Canon]) as follows (as quoted in the fourth volume of the Zhiguan fuxing zhuan hong­jue 止觀輔行傳弘決 [Delineations for Supporting Practice and Broadly Disseminating the (Great) Calming and Discernment] compiled by Zhanran 湛然 [711–782], sixth patriarch of the Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhism): “the Eastern region belongs to zhen 震 and since it is the direction of the sunrise, it is called zhendan 震旦.” Zhen “震” corresponds to the East in the ba gua 八卦 (“the eight trigrams”) of the Yi jing 易經 [Book of Changes] and dan “旦” means “dawn; morning”; hence, the farfetched interpretation that the easterly direction where the sun rises is “Cīnaṣṭhāna” (震旦) began to spread. However, if “Cīnaṣṭhāna” (震旦) means the direction of the sunrise, Korea is located even farther to the east than China. In addition, “旦” (morning) could be taken as synonymous with the sinograph “朝” (morning) in the placename Chosŏn 朝鮮 (lit. “morning freshness”). As a result, there arose the further distorted notion that Korea was a more suitable referand for “Cīnaṣṭhāna” (震旦) than China. In the late thirteenth century, Koryŏ surrendered after a long struggle against the Mongols, but King Wŏnjong (1219–1274) was confused when he received a summons to appear before Khubilai Khan. One Paek Sŭnghyŏn 白勝賢 (dates unknown), a feng shui master, offered counsel to the Koryŏ king, stating that if the king were to set up a Tae Pulchŏng Osŏng Toryang 大佛頂五星道場 (Great Buddha-Corona Five Planets Assembly) and pray, not only would he be able to refuse the order of Khubilai, but moreover, “The Three Han will become Cīnaṣṭhāna (震旦) and the Great Country (大國) will come to our court with tribute.” That is, Paek argued that Koryŏ would become “Cīnaṣṭhāna” (震 旦) and the Great Country—Mongol China in this case—would come to him with tribute.36 The king followed this advice and prayed at the Assembly, but despite these efforts, he ended up appearing before Khubilai anyway.

36 Koryŏsa 高麗史 [History of Koryŏ], vol. 123, “Paek Sŭnghyŏn chŏn” 白勝賢傳 [Biography of Paek Sŭnghyŏn].

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3.6 From “Zhendan” 震旦 (Cīnaṣṭhāna) to “Chindan” 震檀 The Koryŏ dynasty was succeeded by Chosŏn, and on behalf of the first king of the Chosŏn dynasty, T’aejo Yi Sŏnggye 太祖李成桂 (r. 1392–1398), the representative Confucian scholar of the time, Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409), composed the Spirit-Path Stele (sindo pi 神道碑) inscription, part of which reads: “Among the secret texts stored at the Sŏun’gwan 書雲觀 Observatory there is one called the Kubyŏn Chindan chi to 九變震檀之圖 [Illustration of the Nine Changes (of Name) in Chindan]. Erect a tree and acquire a child (建木得子), and Chosŏn will become Chindan 震檀. This has been noted since several thousand years ago but will finally be fulfilled. Respect the will of Heaven, and a sign of truth will be given” (cws, T’aejong 10[1464]/2/8b; Kwŏn Kŭn, vol. 36). According to this passage, it appears that at the time a prophetic text called the Kubyŏn Chindan chi to was in circulation, and within this text it was written “erect a tree, acquire a child.” In other words, a man by the name of Yi would become king: the sinograph for “Yi” 李 consists of “木” (tree) above “子” (child). With a Yi dynasty in place, Chosŏn would become Chindan 震檀. The reason “Chindan” 震旦 (Cīnaṣṭhāna) was rendered here as “Chindan” 震檀—both “旦” and “檀” are pronounced tan~dan in their Sino-Korean readings—is because of the character “檀” (meaning “cinnabar”) in the name of Tan’gun 檀君, the mythical founder of Chosŏn. In his “Explanation of Stories Surrounding the Old Appellations for the Eastern Quarter” (Tongbang kuho kosa pyŏnjŏng sŏl 東方舊號故事弁証説) found in volume 35 of his Oju yŏnmun changjŏn san’go 五洲衍文長箋散稿 [Scattered Manuscripts of Glosses and Comments of Oju], Yi Kyugyŏng 李圭景 (1788–1856), a scholar of the late Chosŏn period, explains that “the word Chindan is derived from ‘Chin’ as in the Eastern direction and ‘Tan’ as in Tan’gun, the first king of the Eastern Quarter.”37 The word “chindan” 震檀 does not appear in any Buddhist scriptures. The Chosŏn dynasty was in a tributary relationship with the Ming dynasty of China and used the name Chosŏn with the authorization of the Ming. However, within Korea, although they altered the sinographs slightly, by using the term “Chindan” 震檀 they were in essence claiming, “we are the real China.” The Mongol invasions at the end of the Koryŏ period (1231–1259) had given rise to nationalistic sentiments on the Korean Peninsula. Both the Samguk yusa, which records the Tan’gun myth, and the “Three Han as Chindan 震旦 (Cīnaṣṭhāna) theory” are products of this period. In the succeeding Chosŏn 37 震檀。以東方在震。而檀君始爲東方之君。故名。Cited from Yi Kyugyŏng (1959: 2:10–11).

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dynasty, these evolved into the theory that Chosŏn was Chindan 震檀. The subsequent promulgation of the vernacular Korean alphabet can also be understood as an extension of this nationalism. One of the most powerful sources for this nationalism was this Buddhist worldview. A similar sort of nationalism arose in Japan at this point after the attempted Mongol invasion there, but the impact on Koryŏ, whose entire territory was conquered and occupied, cannot be compared to that on Japan. Starting from Silla, through Koryŏ, and finally into the Chosŏn dynasty, the Korean Peninsula was never freed from its position as a tributary state of the Chinese empire. While Japan could imagine itself as equal to India and China (震旦), Korea could not. This is probably also why the Japanese could call their vernacular poetry waka—“Japanese songs” (waka 和歌)—while the Koreans called their own vernacular songs hyangga 郷歌, or “local songs.” As a result, they came up with the rather contrived and dramatic idea of equating the Korean Peninsula to China (Chindan 震旦). Moreover, this sort of idea was not confined to the Korean Peninsula. After the collapse of Koguryŏ, that state’s refugees and others established a state called Parhae 渤海 (C. Bohai, 698–926), whose founder, Tae Choyŏng 大祚 榮 (r. 698–719), called himself the King of the state of Chin (K. Chin’guk wang 震國王). The “state of Chin” (K. Chin’guk, C. Zhenguo 震國) may have simply meant “country of the Eastern direction.” However, the case of the Liao dynasty (916–1125) of the Khitan people, which destroyed Parhae, is different. After destroying Parhae, the Liao dynasty temporarily set up a country called the “State of Eastern Dan” (C. Dongdanguo 東丹國) within the former territory of Parhae. Dongdan 東丹 is equivalent to Zhendan 眞丹, one of the alternative ways to write Zhendan (震旦), and because Zhen (震) signifies the East (東), “Eastern Dan” 東丹 can be understood as simply Zhendan 震旦 (K. Chindan). Just like Chosŏn’s claim to be Chindan/Zhendan 震檀, Japan’s three-country worldview was equally self-righteous and ultimately no more than ideological posturing. These views of the state and the wider world were not accepted in China; in fact, it is probably fair to say they were not even known among the Chinese. Furthermore, had the Indians known about them, they would have been surprised. In spite of this, or rather because of it, these views of the state survived into the modern period. Even today in Korea there exists an academic society called the Chindan hakhoe 震檀學會, which is dedicated solely to studies of Korean history. It was established in 1934 during the Japanese colonial period in order to study Korean history and promote awareness of Korean ethnicity. Incidentally, it is not difficult to imagine that the name “Japan” (J. Nihon 日本, meaning “place where the sun rises”) also originated from the

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theory that “Zhendan 震旦 is in the East, the direction of the sunrise.” In that sense, Japan was also discreetly comparing itself with China. 3.7 Opening of Chosŏn and the Sino-Korean Mixed-Script Style Thus far, we have seen that the vernacular reading practices of Japan and the Korean Peninsula, despite the differences in state views and development after the introduction of Neo-Confucianism, had basically evolved under broadly similar conditions and backgrounds. This is only natural considering that both received cultural light from the same source: China. When it comes to the modern period, however, the great wave of Western civilization hit the region, and as Japan played the central role within that wave, the situation changed. In the previous chapter, I introduced the case of Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929), who, as part of his attempts to absorb Western civilization through Japan, invented a reverse-kundoku system to read Japanese texts into Literary Sinitic. But it is interesting to note that a similar phenomenon also occurred in Korea. Korea was opened up with the Treaty of Kanghwa (a.k.a. the Japan-Korean Treaty of Amity), which it was forced to sign by Japan in 1876. Japan did to Korea what had been done to Japan by the American “black ships” twenty years earlier. This treaty recognized Chosŏn as an independent state and denied the suzerainty of Qing China; however, in reality it was an unequal treaty and in practical terms meant that Chosŏn came under the influence of Japan instead of China. Needless to say, the Qing did not approve of this. As a result, thereafter, outside Korea, China and Japan were in conflict, while inside the country, Korean conservatives and reformists were in conflict. Consequently, in December 1894, in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), King Kojong declared independence, issuing his “Hongbŏm sipsa cho” 洪範十四条 [Great Fourteen-Point Plan], the beginning of which states, “We will sever dependence upon the Qing dynasty and build the foundation for independence.” The “Hongbŏm” 洪範 in the title of the document derives from the title of one of the chapters in the Confucian classic the Book of Documents (C. Shujing, K. Sŏgyŏng 書經), in which Qizi (K. Kija 箕子)—a sage from the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600 bce–1046 bce) who is said to have come to Ancient Chosŏn—proclaimed the Great Law of the Universe. King Kojong appropriates this premise to declare the fundamental principles of the Chosŏn state to both foreign and domestic audiences. Preceding this pronouncement, in November of the same year, the first “royal edict” (K. ch’ingnyŏng 勅令)—before this time, the orders of the King were called kyo 教 (“instructions”), a notch below ch’ik 勅 (“edicts”)—declared that “all the laws and edicts shall be entirely in the national script (K. kungmun 國文) and may be accompanied by translations either into Literary Sinitic or in

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mixed script.” Kungmun, or “national script,” here indicates what is now called han’gŭl, but which previously had been called ŏnmun 諺文 (“vernacular/vulgar script”). As a specific example, in January of the following year, a decree to all the nation’s citizens was composed in the mixed-script style combining vernacular Korean script with sinographs: 十二月十二日에 我聖上陛下게셔 我國家의 SIP-I-WŎL-SIP-I-IL e A-SŎNG-SANG-P’YE-HA kesyŏ A-KUK-KA ŭi 獨立自主 基業으로 宗廟에 誓告 시며… TOK-RIP-CHA-CHUhănăn KI-ŎP ŭro CHONG-MYO e SŎ-KO hăsimyŏ … “On December 12, his Majesty declared in front of the ancestral tomb that our country would establish a foundation for independence …” A sort of mixed-script writing style had already been used in earlier ŏnhae exegeses and in private letters, but previously Literary Sinitic had been the official writing style; now their positions were switched. Yet this innovation in inscriptional styles was not so much the result of calling back into service the conventions of ŏnhae as the result of contemporary influence from Japanese culture.38 3.8 Re-importation of Vernacular hun-Reading Practice from Japan In 1881, Kim Okkyun 金玉均 (1851–1894), the leader of a group of reformists who modeled themselves after the Meiji Restoration in Japan, obtained permission from the Korean king to send a research group of Korean literati to Japan to observe the post-Meiji Restoration situation. Following the inspection tour, research group members Yu Kilchun 兪吉濬 (1856–1914), Yu Chŏngsu 柳 定秀 (1857–1935), and Yun Ch’iho 尹致昊 (1864–1945) remained in Japan. The former two men entered Keiō Gijuku (predecessor to Keiō University), while Yun entered the private academy Dōjinsha 同人社 founded by Nakamura Masanao 中村正直 (1832–1891). In Kim Okkyun’s case, he had previously contacted Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤 諭吉 (1835–1901), the founder of Keiō University, by sending a monk to Japan to meet with him. There are earlier examples of this kind of unofficial contact through monks, but it is intriguing that even in this period, Buddhism was still playing a role in bridging the two countries. In any case, these three were the first foreign students in Japan’s history. For Korea’s part, they were the first students to study in Japan; however, the Korean government had also sent thirtyeight students to Qing China earlier that same year. 38

See Kim Yŏnguk (2001).

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Among the three, Yu Kilchun, who later became an important figure in the reformist group, is said to have translated the children’s primer Moji no oshie 文字之教 [Lessons in Writing Characters] by Fukuzawa Yukichi into mixed-script-style Korean while studying at Keiō Gijuku. Later, he also wrote Sŏyu kyŏnmun 西遊見聞 [Things Seen and Heard in the West] in the mixedscript style, which is about his stay in Europe and the United States. His choice of writing style was perhaps due to the influence of Fukuzawa, who was an advocate of mixed-script writing style using sinographs and kana for Japanese. In 1883, because of political upheaval in his home country (the Imo Mutiny of 1882), Yu returned to Korea and, while holding an important position in the government, was placed in charge of the Hansŏng sunbo 漢城旬報, Korea’s first newspaper, in which Inoue Kakugorō 井上角五郎 (1860–1938)—a Japanese politician and businessman who had gone to Korea at the request of Fukuzawa—was deeply involved. Inoue had worked as a private tutor of Literary Sinitic for the Fukuzawa family, but from 1886 began publishing the Hansŏng sunbo in Seoul. Following Fukuzawa’s advice, he adopted for the paper a mixed-script writing style combining han’gŭl and sinographs. The movable type pieces for han’gŭl were created at the Tsukiji Type Foundry in Tokyo, at the order of Fukuzawa. In 1896, Yu was exiled to Japan due to political upheaval in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). He finally returned to Korea in 1907, and in the following year, he promoted vernacular Korean hun-style reading of sinographs in his article, “Sohak kyoyuk e taehănăn ŭigyŏn” [An Opinion on Primary Education] published in the Hwangsŏng sinmun 皇城新聞 [Capital Gazette], another early Korean paper, writing: 苟其訓讀 法을 用 則 其形이 雖曰 KU-KI HUN-TOKhănăn PŎP ŭl YONGhăn CHŬK KI-HYŎNG i SU-WAL 漢字이나 則吾國文의 附屬品이며 輔助物이라 HAN-CHAina CHŬK-A-KUK-MUN ŭi PU-SOK-P’UM imyŏ PO-JO-MUL ira “If we were to use the technique of hundok, even though the shapes are those of sinographs, they would be but an appendage to our national script and an auxiliary device.” In the same year, he implemented this plan in his Nodong yahak tokpon 勞動 夜學讀本 [Nightschool Reader for Laborers], which was compiled for the education of workers. For instance, here is a typical sentence in which sinographs were intended to be read via Korean hun-readings:

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天이 自로 CH’ŎN-i CHA-ro heaven-NOM self-INST

助는 CHO-nŭn help-MOD

人을 助는다 IN-ŭl CHO-nŭn-da person-ACC help-PRES-DECL

is to be read as39 天하날이 自스사로 助돕는 [CH’ŎN]hanali [CHA]sŭsaro [CHO]topnŭn hanal i sŭsaro tom-nŭn heaven NOM themselves help-MOD “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”

人사람을 [IN]saramŭl saram ŭl person ACC

助돕는다 [CHO]topnŭn-da tom-nŭnda help-DECL

It is obvious that this is not a revival of Korean traditional hundok practice, but rather the result of the importation of kundoku from Japan. Nevertheless, this proposal of Yu was never widely accepted in Korean society for various reasons. First, it had been a long time since the practice of hundok had declined in Korea. Second, hundok was not as well suited to the Korean language, which has more complex syllable structures, as it was to the Japanese language. However, perhaps the biggest reason was that reformist attempts (such as that championed by Yul Kilchun) that took Japan as their model ultimately failed, and Korea was soon annexed by Japan. During the ensuing colonial period, anti-Japanese nationalist groups came to the fore. In 1913, with the intent of painting it as “the script of the Han (韓) ethnic group,” the Korean language scholar Chu Sigyŏng 周時經 (1876–1914) gave the new name “han’gŭl” to the vernacular alphabet, which had been called in turn Hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 (correct sounds to instruct the people), then ŏnmun 諺文 (vulgar/vernacular script), and kungmun 國文 (national script). Chu then made efforts to propagate its use widely. Immediately after Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in September 1945, the Committee for the Abolition of Chinese Characters (Hancha p’yeji sirhaenghoe 漢字廃止實行會) was established, and in 1948, the Han’gŭl chŏnyongbŏp [Law for Exclusive Han’gŭl Usage] was promulgated. Following this, the nationalists, who advocated the exclusive use of han’gŭl, and the traditional conservatives, who advocated the mixed use of han’gŭl and sinographs, engaged in fierce debate. However, the exclusive use of han’gŭl had already become embedded in Korean society, especially among the youth. More recently, however, 39

Note that the vernacular glosses in the original are printed on top of the sinographs like Japanese furigana.

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as the economic relationship with China has become more important, there has been a revival of the argument for the necessity of studying sinographs. The fate of sinographs in Korea depends significantly on the political situation surrounding the peninsula. 3.9 And Yet hundok Survived As explained above, hundok practice has already disappeared from today’s North and South Korea, but phenomena related to hundok have not entirely vanished. Although sinographs are no longer in use, much Korean vocabulary has its roots in them, and as long as the indigenous vocabulary corresponding to sinographs exists, the foundation for reading sinographs in their vernacular hun-readings will live on. Moreover, distant memories of the centuries-old heritage of hundok practice must remain somewhere. I will introduce one example of the hun-reading of sinographs in today’s Korea. These days, the logo for the popular Korean soju (a distilled rice alcohol) manufacturer, Jinro 眞露 (i.e., Chillo in McCune-Reischauer romanization)—a brand that has also become popular in Japan lately—reads “ch’am isŭl” 참이 슬 (Fig. 23). The native Korean word ch’am means “true, genuine” (眞), while the native isŭl means “dew, dewdrop” (露); thus, the product’s name means “true dew.” This is none other than a Korean hun-reading for “chillo” 眞露, that is, Jinro. Moreover, in a small number of Korean temples the custom of using hundok for reading Literary Sinitic texts persists. In 1978, when I visited Haeinsa Temple 海印寺 in South Kyŏngsang Province, which owns the printing blocks of the Korean Buddhist Canon, I saw two monks sitting across from each other

Figure 23 Label for the Korean soju beverage Jinro 眞露

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over a small table in the courtyard of the temple, reading a sutra. In the sutra, Arabic numerals were written to indicate word order. When I asked them what the numerals meant, the older monk answered, pointing at the younger monk, “He’s not very quick on the uptake, so I am teaching him like this.” Needless to say, this was a hundok method using word-order markings. 4

Vernacular Reading Phenomena on the Periphery of China

4.1 How Khitans Read Poetry The twelfth century was a turbulent time for East Asia. The Liao 遼 dynasty (916–1125) of the Khitans, who destroyed Parhae, was itself destroyed in 1125 by the Jin 金 dynasty (1115–1234), newly founded by the Jurchens, and the rest of the Jin armies continued on to invade the northern part of China and drive the ethnically Han Chinese Northern Song 北宋 (960–1127) to the south. Thereafter, for the approximately one hundred years prior to the rise of the Mongols, the Jin dynasty in the north and the Southern Song 南宋 (1127–1279) in the south faced off against each other. In 1162, when celebrated Southern Song literatus Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1201) traveled to the Jin court as a diplomatic emissary to congratulate the new Jin emperor, Shizong 世宗 (r. 1161–1189), on his accession to the throne, he left the following record: When Khitan children first learn Literary Sinitic, they switch the word order of the original texts, and there are times when they use two or three words in their vernacular to correspond to one sinograph. When I went to Jin on a diplomatic mission, the secretary of the reception committee, a man called Wang Bu, told me this and we laughed. For example, two lines like 鳥宿池中樹、 bird-nest-pond-middle-tree The birds nest in the trees in the pond, 僧敲月下門 monk-rap-moon-below-gate a monk raps on the gate beneath the moon will be read as 月[明裏][和尚][門子] 打、

moon-[bright-in]-[monk]-[gate]-strike

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[水底裏][樹上][老鴉] 坐. [water-bottom-in]-[tree-top]-[old-crow]-sit This is the general idea. Bu is a Khitan from Jinzhou 錦州.40 In short, according to what Hong Mai heard from his Khitan guide, Wang Bu, when Khitan children first learned Literary Sinitic, they switched the word order of the original texts to read them according to the syntax of their vernacular, and when they did so, there were cases in which one sinograph could correspond to two or three words in the “vernacular language” (俗語). In this case, “vernacular language” seems to refer to the Khitan language, just as “local speech” (方言) signified the Silla language in Korean contexts, such as in the passage “Sŏl Ch’ong read the Nine Classics in local speech” cited from Samguk sagi above. This is similar to the phenomenon in medieval Europe whereby people referred to their native tongue as the “vulgar tongue” vis à vis Latin. Nonetheless, Khitans of the time had already been under the heavy influence of Chinese culture, and the Khitan language contained a significant number of loan words from Chinese; therefore, the Khitan language of the time may have been a heavily Sinicized version of the Khitan language or a variety of Chinese corrupted with Khitan-language-style inflections. The Khitan language is a Mongolic language and belongs to the Altaic language family, so it is similar structurally to Japanese and Korean. The practice of switching the word order of Chinese texts, and the notion that one sinograph corresponds to two or three vernacular words, can also be seen in the contexts of the Japanese and Korean languages. The Chinese poem quoted as an example above is part of “A Poem for the Hermitage of Li Ning” (Ti Li Ning you ju 題李凝幽居) by Jia Dao 賈島 (779–843), and in Japanese kundoku, it would be: 鳥は

池の

中の

tori wa ike no naka no bird-TOP pond-GEN middle-GEN 僧は

月の

下の

樹に

ki ni tree-LOC 門を

宿り、

yadori, lodge, たた

敲く

SŌ wa tsuki no shita no MON o tataku monk-TOP moon-GEN below-GEN gate-ACC rap A bird rests on the tree in the pond, and a monk knocks on the gate under the moon. 40

Cited from Hong Mai, Yijian zhi 夷堅志 [Records of Yi Jian], Bing zhi 丙志 (Record III), vol. 18, “Qidan songshi” 契丹誦詩 [How Khitans Recite Poetry].

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These two lines are the origin of the term tuiqiao 推敲 (J. suikō, K. t’oego), meaning to “polish one’s writing; tinker with one’s drafts.” This term comes out of a famous episode according to which Jia Dao was conflicted about the wording of the poem, unable to decide between “push” (推) and “rap” (敲) for the second line; when he asked the great literary figure Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), who happened to be passing by, Han Yu told him that “rap” sounded better. A Japanese approximation of the way Khitan children would have read this poem is as follows: なか

月[明かり]の

裏で

も ん

[和尚]は

[門子]を

打ち

tsuki akari no naka de KASHŌ wa MON o uchi moon-brightness-GEN inside-LOC monk-TOP gate-ACC strike からす

[水底]の

裏の

樹の

上に

[老鴉]は

坐す

SUITEI no naka no ki no ue ni karasu wa ZAsu water-bottom-GEN inside-GEN tree-GEN top-LOC crow-TOP sit A monk knocks on the gate under the moonlight, and a crow sits atop the tree in the water. This is slightly different from Japanese kundoku, but switching the order of verbs and objects is common to both, e.g.: － 樹” vs. “樹 － 宿[坐]” nest[sit] － tree tree － nest[sit] “宿[坐]

and － 門[門子]” vs. “門[門子] － 敲[打]” rap[strike] － gate[gate] gate[gate] － rap[strike] “敲[打]

Also, it is similar to kundoku in that there are instances where words in Literary Sinitic consisting of a single sinograph are translated into compounds of two sinographs, such as “僧” (monk) becoming “和尚,” “門” (gate) becoming “門子,” and “鳥” (bird) becoming “老鴉” (crow). Here, it may be the case that Hong replaced the original Khitan words with the corresponding Chinese colloquial words (“子” is a common colloquial suffix and “老” an equally common prefix; neither has any meaning), or it could also be that Khitan speakers were using terms that they had adopted from Chinese colloquial speech. Also, in the above translation, it is strange that not only the word order but also the order of the lines has been switched, which might be a misunderstanding on the part of Hong Mai due to his ignorance of the Khitan language.

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It is dubious that a Chinese literatus like Hong Mai would have had a solid understanding of the structural differences between Chinese and the Khitan language, and to him, the way that Khitan children read Chinese poetry was simply a quaint, laughable custom and object of curiosity. Incidentally, given that “鳥” (bird) is translated as “老鴉” (crow), it is possible that the line “鳥宿 池中樹” may have appeared as “烏宿池中樹”— 鳥 “bird” being a common miscopying for the similar-looking character 烏 “crow”— in the poetry collections of Jia Dao that circulated in Khitan. In summary, although Hong Mai’s account contains some unclear points, it reveals that the Khitans practiced a form of vernacular reading in their reading of Literary Sinitic poetry. As I will outline later, the Khitans seem also to have composed poetry in the Khitan language using sinographs as phonograms. 4.2 Khitan Attitudes toward Language and State The Liao 遼 (916–1125) state was multiethnic, consisting of nomadic peoples led by the Khitan, the ruling ethnic group, as well as the Han 漢 Chinese and agricultural peoples like the Parhae 渤海. To deal with its multiethnic diversity, the state had different administrative systems as well as different legal systems for nomadic and agricultural peoples; the former were under the control of the Northern Administration (Beimianguan 北面官) and were subject to each nomadic group’s customary law, while the latter were under the Southern Administration (Nanmianguan 南面官) and subject to Chinese law (or Tang lü 唐律). The reason why the Liao used this dual standard was probably because the Khitans had firmly established concepts of state and ethnicity, the foundations of which undoubtedly stemmed from an awareness of their own ethnic culture and above all of their own language. In 920, soon after the Khitans founded the Liao dynasty, in order to transcribe their language, they invented a logographic script called Khitan large script (C. Qidan dazi 契丹大字) modeled after sinographs, and later created a phonetic script called Khitan small script (C. Qidan xiaozi 契丹小字) using the Uighur script or some other Turkic script as a model. This is the first case of an East Asian country under the influence of Chinese culture inventing its own ethnic script. Later, the Xi Xia (Tangut) script (C. Xixia wenzi 西夏文字) was invented in 1036 by the Tibetan Tanguts of the Western Xia 西夏 dynasty (1032–1227), again using sinographs as a model. The Jin dynasty (1115–1234), which destroyed the Liao, created two native Jurchen scripts—the Jurchen large script (C. Nüzhen dazi 女眞大字) in 1119 and the Jurchen small script (C. Nüzhen xiaozi 女眞小字) in 1138—using the Khitan scripts as their models. And the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), which in turn demolished the Jin, invented the ’Phags-pa script in 1260, modeled after the Tibetan script. The climax of

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this series of script inventions on the periphery of China was Korea’s Hunmin chŏngŭm (i.e., han’gŭl), invented in 1446 during the Chosŏn dynasty. These scripts were all created and propagated upon the order of kings in the early stages of their respective dynasties. Thus, they are essentially different from Japanese kana, which emerged naturally over time through practices not necessarily dictated by the court. The scripts delineated above can be considered a representative phenomenon of the awakening of a sense of ethnic identity on the part of their inventors, peripheral groups who surged one after the other in the wake of the collapse of the Tang Empire. However, among these scripts, han’gŭl is the only one still in use today. 4.3 The Khitan Script Since there are only a few surviving sources on the Khitan scripts, none of which have been fully deciphered, the details of their workings remain uncertain, but we know that Khitan small script was a phonetic script which could transcribe accurately the grammatical characteristics of the Khitan language. Among phonetic scripts, there are syllabic scripts like the Japanese kana, in which vowels and consonants cannot be separated, and phonemic scripts like the Roman script and han’gŭl, in which vowels and consonants can be distinguished. However, the Khitan small script was equipped with elements of both, and represented Khitan vocabulary and Chinese loan words through combinations of approximately 150 original graphs. For instance, the name of the eighth emperor, Daozong 道宗, was written by combining four original graphs—da, u, z, ung—into one character, rather like a Chinese character (Fig. 24). Hong Mai may have had Khitan small script in mind when he wrote, “one sinograph may correspond to two or three words in the vernacular language.” Even after the collapse of the Liao dynasty, Khitan small script remained in use for some time.

Figure 24 An example of Khitan small script

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During the Liao, people translated Chinese books such as the Zhenguan zhengyao 貞觀政要 [Essence of Government in the Zhenguan Period of the Tang], Wudaishi 五代史 [History of the Five Dynasties], and Fengjian ji 諷諫 集 [Collection of Satirical and Admonitory Works] by the Tang poet Bai Juyi into the Khitan language. When they translated Chinese books, they must have switched the word order into that of the Khitan language and added grammatical markers, in a manner resembling Japanese kundoku, and Khitan poetry must have been similar to Korean hyangga and Japanese waka. But unfortunately, no such documents survive. The Liao dynasty, in its early stages of state-building, temporarily established a country called the Eastern State of Dan (Dongdanguo 東丹國), the name of which harkens back to Zhendan 眞丹 (K. Chindan 震旦). The Liao was a Buddhist state; therefore, their state ideology appears to have been based on a Buddhist worldview. It is certainly possible that vernacular reading practices in Liao and Koryŏ were related in some way, as the two shared a common border and had frequent interactions. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra of Koryŏ with hundok signs marked by stylus, mentioned previously, was copied based on the Tripiṭaka published in Liao, the so-called Qidan zang 契丹蔵 [Khitan Tripiṭaka]. However, as we lack the appropriate sources, we can only speculate on the nature of any concrete connections between vernacular reading practices in Koryŏ and Liao. 4.4 Gaochang and Uighur Vernacular Reading Practice In addition to the Liao dynasty of the Khitan, another place where people may have used vernacular reading techniques was Gaochang 高昌 (460–640), an oasis city-state on the Silk Road near what is now Turfan, Xinjiang province, China. The following is a description from the section on Gaochang in the “Biographies of the People of the Western Region” (“Xiyu zhuan” 西域傳) section of the Beishi 北史 [History of the Northern Dynasties]:41 The people use both Chinese writing and Iranian script (C. hushu 胡書). Students study the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), the Analects (Lunyu 論 語), and the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經), under their teachers. But their language of instruction is only Iranian (C. huyu 胡語). China colonized the Turfan basin, where Gaochang was located, early in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), and many Han Chinese were settled there. 41

Written by the Tang dynasty scholar Li Yanshou 李延壽 (fl. 650), this work is an unofficial history of the Northern Dynasties (386–581).

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Then, from the fifth to seventh centuries, the Gaochang kingdom arose with the Han ethnic group as its rulers. But a significant portion of its population consisted of Iranian Zoroastrians and Manicheans; therefore, a unique culture was formed as a mixture of Chinese culture, Buddhist culture, and the Iranian cultures native to the western regions. The above description from the Beishi describes their situation at that time, and the terms huyu 胡語 and hushu 胡書 presumably designate one or more Iranian languages and scripts. Because the account records that they read Confucian classics such as the Analects in an Iranian language and using Iranian script, there must have been a kind of vernacular reading practice; however, the details remain unknown because no documents have survived. However, we can confirm the existence of vernacular reading practice in this region based on documents surviving from later periods. In 640, the Gaochang dynasty was destroyed by the Tang and for a time became a city under the direct control of Tang China. Later, in the ninth century, the Uighurs, a northern nomadic Turkic people, advanced into the region and established a country called Xizhou 西州 Uighur or Gaochang Uighur, which lasted until it was destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. This is the origin of modern-day China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The culture of this Uighur kingdom absorbed the pre-existing Iranian and Chinese culture, and using the Uighur alphabet, a phonetic script adapted from the Iranian Sogdian alphabet, they translated Chinese books like Buddhist scriptures, in which “reading by gloss” vernacular reading practice can be observed. During this period, the Uighurs were mostly Buddhists, and it was only much later that they converted to Islam. In what follows, I will give an outline of Uighur vernacular reading practice by referring to the work of Japanese scholar Shōgaito Masahiro 庄垣内正弘 (2003). First of all, in the same manner as Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean, the Uighur language had its own system of Sino-Xenic (Sino-Uighur) pronunciations of sinographs, in which sinographs were read according to the pronunciations of the Tang period, but lost their tones and were otherwise assimiliated to the Uighur language. The Uighurs read Literary Sinitic texts according to these Sino-Uighur pronunciations, and transcribed these sounds using the Uighur script. This would be similar to a Japanese monk chanting a sutra using Japanese on readings while observing the original word order of Chinese and transcribing the pronunciations of the sinographs in kana. On the other hand, the Uighurs also translated the Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras into the Uighur language, and in these translations, sinographs and Uighur script were used together in a mixed-script style, with the sinographs being read in vernacular Uighur-language kun readings, in much

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the same way that sinographs and kana are used together in Japanese writing. Moreover, the word order in the Uighur language is the same as in Japanese and Korean; that is, the verb follows the object. Therefore, the Uighurs also practiced a kind of vernacular reading that switched the word order of Literary Sinitic. For example, the Uighurs also used the Thousand Character Classic for learning sinographs and, like Japanese monzen-yomi 文選読み and the Korean method of reading this primer (see pp. 89–90 above), the Sino-Uighur readings and vernacular readings of the sinographs were contrasted and read as follows: yun (雲) tiŋ (騰) ču (致) yu (雨) cloud-soar-reach-rain The clouds rise, and form rain. lu (露) ker (結) vi (爲) šo (霜) dew-congeal-become-frost The dew forms, and frost freezes. The romanized syllables in italics are the Sino-Uighur readings of the sinographs, and I also provide a translation of the accompanying vernacular Uighur translation, which tends to be quite free. For example, 霜爲 (lit. “becomes frost,” but in verb-final word order) is rendered as “frost freezes.” In Japanese monzen-yomi this passage would be read: ウントウ[雲騰]と くも のぼって、

チウ[致雨]と あめを いたす。 “UNTŌ” to kumo nobotte, “CHIU” to ame o itasu. “UNTŌ”—雲騰—the clouds rise, and “CHIU”—致雨—create rain. ロケツ[露結]と つゆ むすんで、

ヰサウ[爲霜]と しもと なる。 “ROKETSU” to tsuyu musunde, “ISŌ [WISAU]” to shimo to naru. “ROKETSU”—露結—dew forms, and “ISŌ”—爲霜—turns into frost.

However, the word order of the Uighur translation sometimes remained the same as in Literary Sinitic. For instance, a phrase such as, 菓珍李柰、

菜重芥薑

fruit-cherish-plums-apples, vegetable-treasure-mustard-ginger plums and apples are cherished among fruits, and mustard and ginger are treasured among vegetables.

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is translated in its original word order as: Among fruits, the chosen ones are plums and apples, and among vegetables, the most important are mustard and ginger. The same thing sometimes occurred in Japanese, as well. In Japanese monzenyomi, this phrase is read: クワチン[菓珍]の くだものの

“KACHIN” no

めづらしきは、

kudamono no mezurashiki wa,

リダイ[李柰]の すもも・からなし。

“RIDAI” no sumomo, karanashi. KACHIN—the precious among fruits, RIDAI—plums and apples, サイチョウ[菜重]の くさびらの

よきは、

“SAICHŌ” no kusabira no yoki wa, カイキャウ[芥薑]の からし・はじかみ “KAIKYŌ” no karashi, hajikami. SAICHŌ—the good among vegetables, KAIKYŌ—mustard and ginger. The vernacular reading phenomena described above came about in Uighur because the Uighur language is of the same structural type as Japanese and Korean; however, unlike in Japan or on the Korean Peninsula, the Uighurs did not use any signs or markings to switch word order. 4.5 The Uighurs and Koryŏ The above-mentioned texts with Sino-Uighur pronunciations and vernacular Uighur translations were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after the Uighurs were conquered by the Mongols. During this period many Uighurs went to the court of Yuan (1271–1368)—the Chinese dynasty established by the Mongols—and worked actively there as bureaucrats and merchants. The Yuan dynasty had an ethnic hierarchy in which Mongols were at the top; “colored-eye people” (C. semuren 色目人) second; Han peoples (including ethnic Han Chinese from northern China, Khitans, and Jurchens) third; and Southern people (Han Chinese from southern China), fourth. The term “colored-eye people” designated peoples of various kinds, including Uighurs, Tibetans, and other ethnic groups from Central and Western Asia who worked actively under the Yuan dynasty, but the largest and most significant group were the Uighur.

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Among the Uighur bureaucrats who went to Yuan China, some took the civil service exam and became high-ranking officials in the Yuan dynasty. When they read Literary Sinitic texts, they probably used the Sino-Uighur readings of sinographs and/or vernacular reading methods. I will cover the traces of these practices in the next chapter. After the Yuan dynasty collapsed, many of them either fled to the north with the Mongols or remained in China and assimilated. Interestingly, however, there were also some who immigrated to Koryŏ. A representative example of those who immigrated to Koryŏ is the Sŏl 偰 (C. Xie) clan. They were originally Türküt (突厥) aristocrats and later became high-ranking officials in the Uighur dynasty. After the Mongol invasion they went to China and held important posts under Genghis Khan and Khubilai Khan. Members of the Sŏl clan were well versed in Uighur language and culture but later became typical Sinicized Uighurs, among whom many passed the civil service exams. Originally, Uighurs did not have family names, but following the Chinese style, they began to use the family name Sŏl because their ancestors had come from the Selenge (C. Xienianjie 偰輦傑) River region in what is now Mongolia. They were also known as the Koch’ang (C. Gaochang) Sŏl clan 高昌偰氏. Avoiding the turmoil at the end of the Yuan dynasty, Sŏl Son 偰遜 (?–1360) of the Sŏl clan immigrated to Koryŏ with his family in 1358, was welcomed there and given the title of Count Gaochang (K. Koch’ang paek 高昌伯). His descendants continued to serve into the succeeding Chosŏn dynasty following the collapse of Koryŏ; they accompanied diplomatic missions to Ming China and worked actively in the field of diplomacy while also being deeply connected with the Bureau of Interpreters (Sayŏgwŏn 司譯院), where interpreters were trained in the Mongolian and Chinese languages. In addition, Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1341–1399), a son of Sŏl Son, authored the Sohak chikhae 小學直解 [Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning], a translation of the Xiaoxue 小學 (K. Sohak)—a primer of Neo-Confucianism—into colloquial Chinese, which was used as a Chinese textbook in the Bureau of Interpreters. The Sŏl family scholars may have recognized something familiar when they saw Koryŏ people reading Literary Sinitic texts via hundok. The Sŏl clan settled in Kyŏngju, the ancient capital of Silla, and their descendants remain in today’s South Korea. This family is a rare example in that they moved throughout East Asia from the Türküt kingdom that unified northern China under the Northern Wei 北魏 to the Uighur, Yuan, Koryŏ, and Chosŏn polities, and managed to survive the various turbulent periods stretching from the eighth century to the present. There must have been many other people from different ethnic groups who similarly crisscrossed the region throughout history, but there is no documentary evidence for them like we have for the Sŏl

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clan. Similarly, there must have been opportunities for those groups under the influence of Chinese culture who spoke different Altaic languages to exchange information about the different techniques and practices for reading Literary Sinitic. 4.6 Vernacular Reading Phenomena in Vietnam What is left now is Vietnam, another important country that enthusiastically adopted Chinese culture and used sinographs. Like Chinese, the Vietnamese language is an isolating language composed of single morphemes with tones. However, unlike Chinese, modifiers are placed after the modified word. Considering this point, one might expect Vietnamese to have developed a kundoku-type practice for switching word order, but it did not: they never had the practice of translating Literary Sinitic into Vietnamese using signs or markings.42 However, they still had certain phenomena relevant to vernacular reading. First, like Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean, the Vietnamese have their own uniquely developed system of Sino-Vietnamese readings for sinographs, and sinographs were always pronounced according to their Sino-Vietnamese readings. Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Vietnamese language has tones, and so the original tones of the Sinographs were retained in their Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations. In Vietnam, people were translating Literary Sinitic texts into Vietnamese using Chữ Nôm 字喃 (lit. “vernacular language letters of Vietnam”), an indigenous script which is adapted from sinographs, as well as writing vernacular Vietnamese texts with it. They regarded such Chữ Nôm translations of Literary Sinitic texts as a kind of xungu 訓詁 exegesis (see p. 14 above) and called such translated texts “訣” (Viet. quyết). In 1825, under the Nguyễn 阮 dynasty (1802–1945), the last dynasty of Vietnam, Emperor Minh Mạng 明命帝 (r. 1820–1841) oversaw the publication of the Hoàng việt văn tuyển 皇越文選 [Selections of Refined Literature of the Việt Empire], an anthology of Literary Sinitic texts written by Vietnamese authors. In volume 7 of this work can be found a text titled “Chu dịch quốc âm ca quyết tự” 周易國音歌訣序 [Preface to the Translation of the Songs of the Zhou Yi in Vietnamese], written by a man named Phạm Lập Trai 范立齋 (1760–1825). This was a preface to a Chữ Nôm translation of the Confucian classic the Yi jing 易經 (or Zhou yi 周易; a.k.a. Classic of Changes or Book of Changes), in which the author, in addition to pointing out the importance of exegesis for understanding the Confucian classics, writes, “The translation (訣) into local 42

See Iwatsuki Jun’ichi (2008).

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sounds (國音) of the Book of Changes originated from an exegesis (訓詁).”43 This is a similar idea to that found in Japan, where people considered translating Literary Sinitic texts into their language to be a form of kun 訓, and in Korea, where they called reading Literary Sinitic in Korean kugyŏl 口訣. This reveals that, in the regions surrounding China, the annotations and exegeses of Confucian classics and Buddhist sutras were closely associated with the translation of Literary Sinitic into local languages. Chữ Nôm contains sinographs used as phonograms, i.e., as phonetic loan characters (C. jiajie 假借); sinographs which are unique compounds consisting of a character with a particular meaning and another representing a Vietnamese sound, based on the phono-semantic compound principle (C. xingsheng 形聲); sinographs newly coined based on the pictographic compound principle (C. huiyi 會意), similar in conception to the unique Japanese compound characters tōge “峠” (“top of a mountain”) and tsuji “辻” (“crossroads”); and simplified sinographs. Some of these special characters have affinities with examples from Japanese or Korean vernacular reading practice. However, although Japanese man’yōgana and Korean idu used sinographs as phonograms, Chữ Nôm is an entirely logographic script. This is probably because like Chinese, Vietnamese is an isolating language composed of mono­ syllabic morphemes. Figure 25 shows one section from the Tam Tự Kinh, the Vietnamese version of the Sanzi jing 三字經 [Three Character Classic], which was widely used as a children’s literacy primer in premodern China and can still be purchased today in places like Hanoi’s Temple of Literature (Văn Miếu 文廟). The Chữ Nôm translations are shown to the right-hand side of the sinographs, the Sino-Vietnamese readings of the sinographs are below the sinographs, and the alphabetic representations of the Chữ Nôm graphs are below the Chữ Nôm translations. In this picture, the Chữ Nôm translations of “蜀” (Shu Han, 221–263), “魏” (Cao Wei, 220–265), and “呉” (Eastern Wu, a.k.a. Sun Wu, 222–280) all carry the Chữ Nôm graph “渃” (nước) before them; because “nước” means “country” (國), it is clear that 國蜀 (“country-Shu”), 國魏 (“countryWei”), and 國呉 (“country-Wu”) are all in the Vietnamese (modified-modifier) word order. After matching each sinograph with its corresponding Chữ Nôm graph, the book translates the entire sentence into Vietnamese. For example, here is the last line:

43

Cited from Bùi Huy Bích (1971: fascicle 7, 17a; Vietnamese translation on p. 287).

Vernacular Reading in East Asia

Figure 25 A Vietnamese edition of the Three Character Classic (C. Sanzi jing, V. Tam Tự Kinh 三字經)

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争

爭 漢 茄漢 鼎 鑊 tranh giành Hán nhà Hán dính vạc fight Han throne fighting for the throne of China

will be translated as giành vạc nhà Hán (in Vietnamese word order, 争鼎漢: fight—throne—China) in accordance with Vietnamese word order. Furthermore, “nhà” means “house,” so “nhà Hán” is “家漢” (house—China); thus, the Chữ Nôm translation of the above sentence “争鼎家漢” (fight—throne—house—China; fighting for the throne of the Chinese house) in fact switches the word order twice. This is the same thing in principle as vernacular reading, in that Literary Sinitic is read through one’s own language by switching the word order. If a Japanese reader were to read this sentence in Vietnamese with Japanese kundoku signs, it would be: “争家 漢レ 鼎.” fighthouse Han[go back] throne Referring to the difference between Chinese and its surrounding languages, the Japanese scholar Dazai Shundai 太宰春台 (1680–1747) remarked: 中華ノ

外ハ

CHŪKA no 言語

各

東夷、 西戎、 南蛮、

soto wa TŌI, 殊ナレドモ

北狄、

SEIJŪ, NANBAN, HOKUTEKI, 顛倒セズト

イフ コト

ナシ

GENGO onoono koto naredomo TENTŌsezu to iu koto nashi Even though the languages of the barbarians in the four directions beyond China are all different, there is none which does not switch [the word order of Chinese].44 In other words, vernacular reading is not a phenomenon limited to Japan and the Korean Peninsula, but common throughout East Asia. 44

Cited from Yoshikawa et al. (1979: 3:393).

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5

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Vernacular Reading Phenomena in China

Vernacular reading is a kind of translation of Literary Sinitic into Japanese or Korean; therefore, one might think that there should be no such practices in China. But in fact there are. At the very least, there are “kundoku-esque” phenomena. As Dazai Shundai described it, word order in Chinese is the opposite of that of languages spoken in the regions surrounding China, such as Japanese; however, that is the case with ancient Chinese, but not always with the Chinese language after the premodern period, especially in the case of northern dialects, such as today’s Beijing dialect, which is now considered standard Chinese. In ancient Chinese, the verb always precedes the object, but in Chinese since the early modern period, there is a tendency for the verb to come after the object. 5.1 Vernacular Translations of the Records of the Three Kingdoms In today’s China, due to the social changes resulting from rapid modernization, the prestige of an education in classical Chinese literature (Literary Sinitic) has fallen, and similar to Japan, the number of people unable to read Literary Sinitic is growing within the younger generations. Consequently, many baihua 白話 (vernacular Chinese) translations of ancient literary works written in Literary Sinitic have been published. Let us take the Sanguozhi quanyi 三國 志全譯 [Unabridged Translation of the Records of the Three Kingdoms], published by Guizhou renmin chubanshe (1994), as an example to demonstrate the difference between ancient and modern Chinese. The Sanguozhi [Records of the Three Kingdoms] in question is not the novel, but a historical record written by Chen Shou 陳壽 (233–297) in the third century which includes an important early description of ancient Japan, the so-called “Account of the Wa People” (Weizhi woren zhuan 魏志倭人傳). The later novel often referred to as the Sanguozhi is in fact officially titled Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms]. The “Zhuge Liang zhuan” 諸葛亮傳 [Biography of Zhuge Liang] in the Records of the Three Kingdoms explains that Zhuge Liang, filled with self-pride in his young days, always compared himself with Guan Zhong 管仲 (720–645 bce), a great chancellor and reformer from the state of Qi, and Yue Yi 樂毅, the great Warring States general from the state of Yan. The original text, with Japanese and English translations, comes first, followed by the same passage from the modern Chinese translation, also with accompanying translations into Japanese and English (brackets indicate compounds):

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毎自比於管仲、樂毅。

every-self-compare-unto-Guan-Zhong, Yue-Yi 毎に自ら管仲と楽毅に比す

Every day, he compared himself with Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. 他[常常] 把[自己] 与[古代][賢相] 管仲、

he-[often-often]-take-[self-self ]-with-[old-era]-[worthy-minister]-Guan-Zhong 彼はつねづね自分を古代の賢相の管仲と

[名将] 楽毅相比。

[ famous-general]-Yue-Yi-mutually-compare 名将の楽毅と比べていた

He always compared himself with the great chancellor of ancient times, Guan Zhong, and the great general, Yue Yi. Obviously, the verb 比 (C. bi, “to compare”) is placed before its objects—Guan Zhong 管仲 and Yue Yi 樂毅—in the original text, whereas it is placed after the objects in the modern Chinese translation, rather like in its Japanese kundoku. However, the 与 (“with”) of “compared with Guan Zhong and Yue Yi” is placed before the objects. Next, the night before the Battle of Red Cliff (208–209 ce), while talking with Sun Quan 孫權 (182–252) of Eastern Wu, Zhuge Liang evaluates Liu Bei 劉 備 (161–223) as follows (same format): 衆士仰慕、若水之歸海。

gathered-worthies-revere-admire, like-water-’s-return-sea ごと

衆士仰ぎ慕うこと、水の海に帰るが 若し

People respect him like water returns to the ocean. [人們][仰慕][擁戴] 他、

[people-plural]-[revere-admire]-[embrace-respect]-him, 人々は彼を仰慕し擁戴すること、

[如同] 水帰大海[一様]。

[like-same]-water-return-big-ocean-[one-same] まるで水が大海に帰るようであった

People respect and support him like water returns to the ocean. In the original, 若 (“like”) is translated into modern Chinese as the combination rutong 如同 [“like same”] and yiyang 一様 [“one same”], sandwiching 水

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帰大海 (“water returns to the ocean”). This resembles the pattern “marude … yō

de atta” [“just like … that way it was”] in the Japanese translation. Also, in the well-known “Chushi biao” 出師表 [Memorial on Dispatching the Troops], submitted by Zhuge Liang to Emperor Liu Shan, when it comes to the famous anecdote of “Three Visits to the Thatched Hut” (C. san gu maolu 三顧茅廬), whereby Liu Bei visited Zhuge Liang three times to ask for his help before Zhuge Liang relented, the modern translation reads: 三顧臣於草廬之中。

three-visit-minister-unto-grass-hut-’s-middle 三たび臣を草廬の中に顧みる

He visited his minister in his thatched house three times. 三次到茅廬中去、[訪問] 臣。

three-time-arrive-thatch-hut-middle-go, [visit-ask]-minister 三たび茅廬の中に行って、臣を訪ねた

He went three times to the thatched house and visited his minister. In this case, the verb 顧 (C. gu, “pay a visit”) in the original is divided into two separate actions, 去 (qu, “go”) and 訪問 ( fangwen, “visit”), in which the verb “to go” pairs up with 到 (C. dao, “to; as far as”) and the two are placed before and after the destination 茅廬中 (“the inside of the thatched house”). The word 到 was originally a verb meaning “arrive at,” but in modern Chinese it has lost its function as a verb and now functions as a preposition indicating direction, like the English preposition “to.” Hence, it corresponds to the translation “to” in “to the thatched house,” and the actual verb of the sentence, 去 (C. qu, “go”), is placed after the object/destination. Lastly, the following example is taken from Zhuge Liang’s words to his subordinate: 忠益者莫大於進人。

loyal-useful-TOP-no-great-than-recommend-person 忠益は人を進めるより大なるはなし。

To be loyal to the state, there is nothing greater than recommending a man of great talent. 忠于[國家]爲國造福的[表現]、

loyal-unto-[country-house]-for-country-do-fortune-’s-[sign-appear], 国家に忠で国のため福をもたらす行為は、

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没有比[推薦][人材] 再大的了。

not-have-compare-[push-recommend]-[human-talent]-again-big-’s-CONC 人材を推薦することよりさらに大きいものはない。

Among the expressions of loyalty to the state and bringing fortune for the sake of the country, there is nothing greater than recommending a man with great talent. This sentence features a comparative expression, but the adjective 大 (da, “big; great”) is placed before the clause 進人 ( jin ren; lit. “advance people,” but here, “recommend people”) in the original, whereas it is located toward the end of the sentence in the modern translation. In the clause 没有比推薦人材再大的 了 from the modern Chinese translation, 比 (bi, “compare”) functions as a verb, yet from a different perspective, it could also be considered to function like a preposition meaning “than.” The phrase 進人 ( jin ren) in the original is translated into modern Chinese as the clause 推薦人材 (“recommend people”), keeping the word order of verb + object, but in translating this expression into colloquial Chinese, the number of morphemes increases, just like in vernacular reading practice. As seen above, in modern Chinese, verbs can come both before and after the object. In the case of comparative expressions, predicate adjectives in ancient Chinese can be placed either before or after an adverbial clause, while in modern Chinese, as a principle, they come after. How did this difference come about? 5.2 Chinese History and Changes in the Chinese Language There are many possible reasons for the change, but the most significant cause was probably contact with the Altaic languages of the northern nomadic peoples. The history of China is tantamount to the history of the quarrels between the agricultural peoples in the south and the nomadic peoples in the north. In ancient times, under the empires of Qin and Han, the nomadic Xiongnu 匈奴 (third century bce–460s ce) in the north already posed a great threat, but starting from the third century, following the unification of the Three Kingdoms by the state of Jin 晋 (265–420 ce), until the end of the sixth century, when the Sui and Tang empires were established, northern China was largely under the control of nomadic peoples during what is often called the Period of Disunity (a.k.a. the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties 魏晋南北朝時代, 220–589). Moreover, at the end of the ninth century, when the Tang collapsed, part of the northern region became the territory of the Liao dynasty of the Khitans, after which the Jin dynasty of the Jurchens controlled

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the entire northern region, and finally the Mongols came to conquer the whole of China. Although the ethnically Han Chinese Ming dynasty drove the Mongols back to the north, in the seventeenth century the Manchu Qing dynasty (direct descendants of the earlier Jurchens) conquered all of China. Consequently, throughout history a great number of nomadic peoples migrated into China, especially the northern region. With the exception of the Ming interlude (1368–1644), the area around Beijing was predominantly under the control of nomadic peoples since the time of the An Lushan Rebellion of 755. The usual narrative given for the conquests by nomadic peoples is that, although the northern invaders were superior in military affairs, the ethnic Han excelled culturally; therefore, the nomadic settlers in China tended to lose their indigenous languages and cultures and assimilate to Chinese language and culture. This is true, yet it is merely one aspect of a bigger picture. Certainly the nomadic peoples were assimilated into a Chinese culture vastly superior to their own, but it is hard to believe that being under the control of nomadic peoples for such a long time had no reciprocal impact on Chinese culture. In terms of spoken language, the majority of the nomadic peoples who invaded China and settled there spoke Altaic languages, e.g., the Turkic-speaking Türküts and Uighurs, the Mongolic-speaking Khitans and Mongols, and the Tungusic-speaking Jurchens and Manchus. Upon coming to China, they lost their indigenous languages, and started to speak Chinese. However, as their own languages were genealogically and typologically different from Chinese, the Chinese that they spoke must have been quite different from ancient Chinese, and more like a broken Chinese mixed with elements of both languages. As a result, the distance between spoken Chinese and Literary Sinitic— which had been developed in ancient times as a literary language that remained at a distance from the colloquial language—became progressively greater. Later, when the “baihua” written vernacular style based on the colloquial language appeared, the two written styles with their different structures ended up co-existing as written forms of Chinese. The grammar of ancient Chinese has been preserved to a greater extent in the southern dialects, such as Cantonese, but in modern China the standard language is the dialect of Beijing, the capital city in which the influence of the nomadic peoples remains most conspicuous. The colloquial writing style based on Beijing speech has also become the country’s official writing style. As shown in the examples from the Records of the Three Kingdoms above, the difference in word order between ancient and modern Chinese developed against this backdrop. Thus, if today’s Chinese are to translate ancient Chinese literature into the modern spoken language, to a certain extent they must do something similar

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to Japanese kundoku. Once again, let me introduce another excerpt from the original text of Zhuge Liang’s “Memorial on Dispatching the Troops” along with its modern Chinese translation: 臣本布衣、

躬耕於[南陽]、

minister-origin-linen-clothing, self-till-at-[Nan-yang], ほ い

みずか

臣はもと布衣、

躬  ら南陽に耕し、

苟全[性命] 於乱世。

if-whole-[nature-life]-in-tumult-world いやしく

  苟  も乱世に性命を全うす

I am originally a common fellow, wishing only to till the land by myself in Nanyang and keep myself safe in this turbulent era. 臣本来是一個平民、

minister-origin-come-be-one-counter-common-people, 臣は本来一個の平民で、

在[南陽] 親自耕田種地、

be-[Nan-yang]-personally-self-till-field-seed-land 南陽で自ら田を耕し種を植え、

只想在[乱世] 中[苟且][保全][性命]。

only-think-be-[tumult-world]-middle-[if only-briefly]-[guarantee-whole][nature-life] ただ乱世の中でかりそめに性命を保ち全うしたいと思っていました

I am originally a commoner, who wishes only to till the land and plant seeds, and to at least keep myself safe in this turbulent time. Now, hypothetically, if we were to follow the vernacular reading system used in Japan and Korea and add word-order marks, compound marks, and vernacular glosses in small-size characters to the original ancient Chinese main text, the result would be as follows: 臣本来是一個 布 衣、躬二耕三田種地 於南陽一、只想 苟二–全性三–命 於乱世一中。 平

民

在

且保

在

Of course, Chinese readers would never do something like this. But they perform a similar manipulation inside their heads. Premodern written vernacular

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“baihua” novels, such as Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 [Water Margin], are basically written in a writing style like this, similar to modern Chinese. 5.3 Zhijie 直解: Colloquial Translations of Literary Sinitic Exegetics (xunguxue 訓詁學) in China—traditional annotated commentaries of canonical texts—were only ever partial, and explained only the most difficult vocabulary within canonical texts; they did not endeavor to explain the meanings of entire sentences in simpler language. In the days before the Tang dynasty, when exegetics was most active as a field of scholarship, people may not have needed such detailed explanations because the gap between Literary Sinitic and colloquial Chinese was not yet so great. Hence, the annotations themselves were also written in Literary Sinitic. However, after the Song dynasty, texts appeared that not only explained difficult vocabulary from canonical texts in colloquial language, but also translated the entire text into colloquial language. These texts were called zhijie 直解 (lit. “direct explications”). The following reasons are often given for the appearance of such zhijie editions. First, owing to the new trend of Neo-Confucianism, people often tried not only to understand the meanings of individual vocabulary items but also to grasp the original intention of the sage who had written the text. Second, due to the popularization of the civil service examinations, more and more people started to receive an education, and it was considered particularly necessary to help children understand the meanings of the classics accurately. However, we must add to these explanations the reality that the gap between Literary Sinitic and the colloquial language had expanded to the degree that the old piecemeal explanations of the classics with annotations written in Literary Sinitic were no longer sufficient for an accurate understanding of the meaning of the texts. The oldest zhijie editions extant today are the Daxue zhijie 大學直解 [Direct Explication of the Great Learning] and the Zhongyong zhijie 中庸直解 [Direct Explication of the Doctrine of the Mean], both written by Xu Heng 許衡 (1209– 1281), a scholar of the early Yuan dynasty. Below, I introduce an example from the Direct Explication of the Great Learning: 子曰、

聽訟吾猶人也、

必也使無訟乎。

master-say, hear-lawsuit-I-like-others-COP, must-TOP-cause-no-case-EXCL The Master said: “When it comes to hearing civil litigation, I am as good as anyone else. What is necessary, though, is to bring it about that there is no civil litigation at all.”45 45

English translation from Slingerland (2003).

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The excerpt above is from the main text of the original Great Learning. Below is Xu Heng’s annotation to the above sentence: 子是孔子。 聴是聽斷。 訟是詞訟。 “子”-COP-[Kong-zi]. “聽”-COP-hear-decide. “訟”-COP-case-suit. 子 indicates Confucius. 聽 is to render a judgement by listening to a lawsuit. 訟

means lawsuit.

猶人是与人相似的意思。 “猶人”-COP-with-others-mutually-similar-’s-[intention-thought]. 猶人 is to resemble others. 曽子引孔子説、若論判斷詞訟、

Zeng-zi-quote-Kong-zi-say, if-discuss-judge-decide-suit-case, Zengzi 曾子 quoted Confucius, saying, “If I render a judgement in a lawsuit and 使曲直分明、我与人也一般相似。

make-[crooked-straight]-[divide-clear], I-with-others-TOP-[one-type][mutual-resemble] clarify what is right and wrong, I am like anybody else. 必是能使那百姓毎然無有詞訟、

must-be-can-make-those-hundred-surnames-PL-ly-not-have-case-suit, One must be able to make the common people not have lawsuits and 不待判斷、方纔是好。

not-await-judge-decide, then-only-be-good not rely on judgements; only then is it good.” The text from “子” (zi, Confucius) to “猶人” (you ren, be like others) comprises explanations of the vocabulary in colloquial language. Then Xu Heng points out that the author of the Great Learning, Zengzi, quoted this phrase from the Analects 12.13 (“Yan Yuan” chapter 顔淵篇) of Confucius, and goes on to give a colloquial translation of the text. Here “猶人” (C. you ren “resemble others”) is translated as “与人相似” (C. yu ren xiangsi “with-others-similar”) and then as “与人也一般相似” (C. yu ren ye yiban xiangsi “with-others-also-just like-similar”) because, as shown previously in the example from Records of the Three Kingdoms, the grammars of the literary and colloquial languages are different: the predicate adjectives “similar” (xiangsi 相似) and “just like” (yiban 一

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般) are placed after the comparand, “a man; others” (ren 人), in the colloquial

translation, as opposed to the original Literary Sinitic text, in which the predicate adjective “be just like” (you 猶) precedes the comparand “man” (ren 人). The phrase “fangcai shi hao” 方纔是好 (“only then is it good”) at the end of the annotation does not have a counterpart in the original, but “bi … fangcai shi hao” 必 … 方纔是好 (“only if … will it be good”) is a grammatical pattern used in the colloquial language from early modern (late Ming/early Qing) times to today. Note also that the character “毎” in the phrase “百姓毎” corresponds to the function of “們” in modern-day Chinese, in that it indicates a plural. 5.4 Literary Sinitic Studies by Foreign Ethnic Groups The production of these sort of direct explications beginning in the Yuan dynasty was not only for the sake of Chinese children and commoners but also so that members of the non-Han ethnic groups such as the Mongols and Uighurs—who only understood spoken Chinese—might study Literary Sinitic texts. Although the work Sohak chikhae 小學直解 [Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning] by the Uighur immigrant to Koryŏ, Sŏl Changsu, is no longer extant, it was likely similar to the Direct Explication of the Great Learning cited above. However, the purposes of the books were different: the Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning was written to instruct Korean bureaucrats who understood Literary Sinitic in how to speak colloquial Chinese. This is the opposite of the Direct Explication of the Great Learning, which was aimed at those who could speak colloquial Chinese but could not read Literary Sinitic. I will discuss the Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解 [Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety], another zhijie from the Yuan period, in the next chapter. Zhijie “direct explictations,” as colloquial Chinese translations of Literary Sinitic texts, share certain characteristics with the Uighur translations of Buddhist sutras, Chosŏn han’gŭl ŏnhae exegeses of canonical texts, and Japanese shōmono 抄物 commentaries on Literary Sinitic texts written in kana. Seen from a big-picture perspective, these are parallel phenomena that can be viewed as having occurred both in China and in its peripheral regions as a result of contact between Chinese and the Altaic languages of the ethnic groups on China’s peripheries. At the same time, on an individual level, there must have been interactions as well as mutual influence. Particularly in the case of Korean ŏnhae exegeses, it is very likely these were influenced by Chinese zhijie editions. The Korean ŏnhae exegeses, in turn, influenced Japanese genkai editions of the Edo period, as I have already mentioned (see pp. 88–89 above). In any case, all of these different genres can be understood as part and parcel of the East Asian vernacular reading phenomenon in the broadest sense.

Chapter 3

Writing in Literary Sinitic: The Diverse World of Literary Sinitic in East Asia 1

The World of Poetry in East Asia

1.1 Sinitic Poetry in East Asia To begin, let us examine the following three pieces of Sinitic poetry 漢詩 (C. hanshi, J. kanshi, K. hansi, V. hánthơ; the sinographs in bold typeface indicate rhymes): 水國秋光暮

驚寒雁陣高

water-country-autumn-bright-dusk startle-cold-goose-formation-high 憂心輾轉夜 殘月照弓刀 sad-heart-toss-and-turn-night remnant-moon-shine-bow-blade Autumn light darkens over the sea; wild geese fly high in the cold air. As I toss about anxiously in the night moonlight catches my bow and sword.1 葉聲落如雨

月色白似霜

leaf-sound-fall-like-rain moon-color-white-like-frost 夜深方獨臥 誰爲拂塵床 night-deep-at last-alone-lie who-for-strike-dust-bed “Autumn Evening” Leaf sounds fall like rain, moon color white like frost. Night’s deep, I just lie alone— who will wipe my dusty bed for me?2 樓頭秋雨暗

樓下暮潮寒

tower-top-autumn-rain-dark attic-below-dusk-tide-cold 澤國何蕭索 愁人獨倚欄 marsh-land-how-morose-sad worry-man-alone-lean-railing 1 English translation from Chong-gil Kim (2003: 83). 2 Translation from Levy (1971: 64).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_005

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At tower’s top autumn rain falls, At tower’s bottom evening tides are cold. “Why are the swamp lands desolate?” Laments the lone traveler as he leans on the railing.3 All these poems are about the melancholy of an autumn night and thoughts of loneliness that keep one awake. They express similar sentiments and there are some shared elements in their rhetoric. However, in terms of authorship, these three are distinct in that one each is attributed to a poet from Korea, China, and Japan, respectively. Just by reading them, could one determine the author’s country of origin? Without previous knowledge, making such distinctions would be impossible. To answer who wrote which poem: the first is “Hansando Yaŭm” 閑山島夜吟 [At Night on the Hansan Isle] by Yi Sunsin 李 舜臣 (1545–1598), renowned for his role as a Chosŏn naval commander during the invasions of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1592; 1598). The second is “Qiuxi” 秋夕 [Autumn Evening] by the Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846). And the last is “Yūshi gin” 遊子吟 [Traveler’s Song] by Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The country of origin, time period, and circumstances within which each poet composed his poem all differ, and yet the poems show a tremendous resemblance. This is because formally, all the poems follow the rules of Sinitic poetry, and aspects of their content and rhetoric also draw on the conventions of Sinitic poetry. In other words, so long as one was cognizant of and followed the agreed-upon rules, regardless of time period or country of origin, anyone could compose a Sinitic poem, and in turn, that poem would be understood by those similarly familiar with the rules of the genre. But to be understood only by those who comprehend the same agreedupon rules is a fundamental and universal aspect of linguistic expression, and is not limited to Sinitic poetry alone. The uniqueness of Sinitic poetry lies in the fact that one could compose and understand it without knowledge of spoken Chinese. No one would believe that a non-English speaker could read and write English poetry, yet Yi Sunsin and Natsume Sōseki spoke no Chinese. Nevertheless, their poems not only comply with the proper rhyme scheme at the end of each line, but each and every sinograph in their couplets is arranged in accordance with the tonal alternation rules governing oblique and level tones in Sinitic poetry. And yet, neither Sōseki nor Yi Sunsin had any detailed knowledge of what a “level tone” or “oblique tone” sounded like. This is because tones do not survive in either the Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean readings of sinographs. Without fully comprehending what a level or oblique tone was, 3 English translation from Mewhinney (2013: 115).

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the two men must have either memorized which sinograph had what tone or else consulted a rhyming dictionary when composing their poetry. In Sinitic poetry, rhyme schemes (C. yayunfa, J. ōinhō, K. abunbŏp 押韻法) and tonal alternation rules (C. pingzefa, J. hyōsokuhō, K. p’yŏngch’ŭkpŏp 平仄 法; lit. “law of level and oblique [tones]”) were fixed during the Tang dynasty (618–907) in accordance with the phonetics of the Chinese language at that time. Bai Juyi’s knowledge of rhyme schemes and tonal pattern rules would have been based on the spoken language he used. However, from the Tang era onward and as time progressed, the pronunciations of sinographs changed significantly. At the same time, the rhyme schemes and tonal pattern rules of Sinitic poetry established during the Tang remained intact. As a result, although Chinese composers of Sinitic poetry in later generations continued to abide by the rules established on the basis of the phonetics of the Tang period, these rules were significantly removed from the way they actually spoke Chinese. For example, the sinographs 國 (“country”) and 獨 (“alone”) seen in the poems above, as is apparent from their Sino-Japanese pronunciations “koku” and “doku,” are characters that originally ended with a final “k” phoneme and thus had entering tones (C. rusheng, J. nisshō, K. ipsŏng 入聲), According to the tonal alternation rules, the two sinographs would count as having oblique tones (C. zesheng, J. sokusei, K. ch’ŭksŏng 仄聲). However, because modern Chinese has lost the final k phoneme, these sinographs are now pronounced guo and du in Mandarin and should be categorized as having level tones (C. pingsheng, J. hyōshō, K. p’yŏngsŏng 平聲). And yet, because these two sinographs needed to be treated as having oblique tones for the purpose of Sinitic poetry composition, poets would need to consult rhyming dictionaries. While of course there is a difference in scale, this is not all that different from what Sōseki and Yi Sunsin would have done in order to compose their Sinitic poems. Thus far my focus has been on the pronunciations of the sinographs. Yet, as I have already described in the previous chapter, in terms of grammar, ancient Chinese and early modern Chinese also had different word orders. To summarize, then, Sinitic poetry, at least up until the early modern period, was founded upon artificial conventions that were significantly removed from the actual sounds of the contemporary Chinese language. For that very reason, it was possible for non-Chinese who spoke no Chinese to compose Sinitic poetry; had these conventions changed in accordance with changes in spoken Chinese, foreigners who spoke no Chinese probably could not have composed Sinitic poetry. This is also why even works produced outside of China itself (e.g., Yi Sunsin’s poem above) can be understood in Japan through reading via kundoku.

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Although I have been speaking of Sinitic poetry, the same can be said of Literary Sinitic in general. Remaining unresponsive to changes in spoken Chinese, Literary Sinitic texts were written in accordance with conventions that transcended time and space. For this very reason, Literary Sinitic could serve as the universal written language of East Asia. Premodern East Asian diplomatic documents and the “brush conversations” (C. bitan, J. hitsudan, K. p’iltam 筆談) that connected foreign envoys were generally composed in Literary Sinitic as the common language. Moreover, in international relations, Sinitic poems were exchanged as an important method of social interaction between envoys. For example, Vietnamese and Korean envoys to China met in Beijing and exchanged Sinitic poetry. Korean Embassies of Communication to Japan (J. Chōsen tsūshinshi, K. Chosŏn t’ongsinsa 朝鮮通信使) during the Edo period also exchanged Sinitic poetry with their Japanese counterparts. This was an event that went beyond the matter of an individual’s talents and approximated a kind of international competition whereby the prestige of one’s country was on the line—one might even say that it was something akin to modern-day baseball matches between the national teams of Japan and Korea! However, on neither the Japanese nor the Korean side of things were there many speakers of the Chinese language. Therefore, without fully comprehending the concrete nature of rhyme schemes or tonal alternation rules for Sinitic poetry, the literati of these two countries were striving for superiority merely by applying the agreed-upon rules for composition. Although it is said that the world is a wide place, such an unusual scenario certainly would not have been observable outside of East Asia. 1.2 Ho Chi Minh’s Sinitic Poetry In what manner were Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic acquired as a universal language? Here I take as an example a Sinitic poem from Vietnam, another important country within the East Asian cultural sphere. 清明時節雨紛紛

clear-bright-time-season-rain-dizzy-dizzy 籠裏囚人欲斷魂

basket-inside-incarcerate-person-want-cut-soul 借問自由何處有

borrow-ask-freedom-what-place-exist 衛兵遙指弁公門

protect-soldier-wave-finger-prison-gate

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“Ch’ing-Ming” Pure Brightness Day—it drizzles on and on. Jail inmates feel a wrench within their souls. “But where is freedom to be found?” they ask. The guard points to the yamen far away.4 This poem, titled “Qingming” (Viet. Thanh minh, 清明, “pure brightness; clear and bright”), appeared in Ngục trung nhật ký 獄中日記 [Prison Diary] by Ho Chi Minh 胡志明 (1890–1969), the father of Vietnamese independence, and was written while he was imprisoned in China. “Qingming” is the fifteenth day after the spring equinox (C. chunfen, J. shunbun, K. ch’unbun, V. xuân phân 春 分), and is one of the twenty-four seasonal divisions or solar terms (C. ershisi jieqi, J. nijūshi sekki, K. isipsa chŏlgi, V. nhị thập tứ tiết khí 二十四節氣) in the traditional East Asian calendar. In the drizzling rain, the heart of the incarcerated is dispirited. When Ho Chi Minh asks, “Where does freedom lie?” the guard silently points to the gate of the yamen prison. Freedom exists only outside that gate, he intimates. It is worth noting that this poem alludes to the following famous poem by the Tang poet Du Mu 杜牧 (803–852): 清明時節雨紛紛

clear-bright-time-season-rain-dizzy-dizzy 路上行人欲斷魂

road-top-go-person-want-cut-soul 借問酒家何處有

borrow-ask-wine-house-what-place-exist 牧童遥指杏花村

shepherd-boy-wave-finger-apricot-flower-village “Pure Brightness Day” Pure Brightness Day—it drizzles on and on. The traveler feels a wrench within his soul. “Where can one find a liquor shop?” he asks. The herdboy points to a village far off.5 Education in Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic requires skills that are different from general foreign language skills; it does not build on the memorization of 4 English translation from Marr (1978: 94). 5 English translation from Marr (1978: 94).

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grammatical rules and vocabulary in order to arrange vocabulary in accordance with syntactical rules. Rather, the acquisition of Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic, first and foremost, begins with immersing oneself in the Confucian classics and literary canon, internalizing them completely, and then writing in one’s own words while at the same time emulating those of past masters. This method is the most effective and continues to be used in Literary Sinitic training. Although the poem by Ho Chi Minh above is an extreme example of an obvious parody, the process of the composition of Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic texts looked very much like this. The poems by Sōseki and Yi Sunsin, too, are typical examples of the sorts of literary creations that emerged through complex and sophisticated application of the same procedures. 1.3 Korean hyangga and the Japanese Man’yō Songs This method of learning, however, demanded a long-term commitment and investment as an essential prerequisite, so it was not for everyone. Even for Chinese people, producing precisely written poetry and other Literary Sinitic genres was possible among only a handful of elites. The situation was far worse for non-Chinese. Without a colossal amount of training, accurately written poetry and prose in Literary Sinitic were difficult to produce. The phenomenon of top-tier Japanese elites being able to produce kanshi and kanbun of a caliber that could stand easy comparison with the works of their Chinese counterparts emerged only in the late Edo and Meiji periods, well over a thousand years after the transmission of sinographs to Japan. Moreover, even if one completely masters Literary Sinitic prose and poetry conventions, the types of things one can express with them are restricted by the available forms, such that conveying what one wishes to say in a straightforward manner is often onerous. This led to the birth of a wide range of inscriptional styles based on the use of Literary Sinitic and sinographs. Among them, the most extreme strategy was the inscription of one’s own vernacular language using sinographs as phonograms. I have already discussed how this method was probably inspired primarily by the process of translating Sanskrit Buddhist sutras into Literary Sinitic. As Buddhist teachings spread, peoples on the peripheries of China probably began to experiment with this method, with the only major bodies of evidence for this remaining on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan. Examples from the Korean Peninsula are the aforementioned hyangga songs dating from the Silla and Koryŏ periods. The following example is the text of the hyangga “Song of the Yam Boy” (K. Sŏdongyo 薯童謠) as recorded in the Samguk yusa (ca. 1280). The original sinographs are followed by a

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modern-day Korean approximation of the reading, with words presumed to have been read in their Sino-Korean pronunciations written in CAPS and word spacing to match the analysis: 善化公主-主隠、 他 密只 嫁良 置古、 Princess Sŏnhwa-HON TOP others secretly marry DISP SŎNHWA KONGJU-nim ŭn nam kŭsŭji ŏr-ŏ tu-go 薯童房-乙、 夜矣 卯乙抱-遣 去如。 yam-boy-? ACC night-LOC embrace-GER go-DECL mattungba-ŭl pam-e moran-ko ka-da. This hyangga appears as part of a fable-like tale about a Paekche prince named Sŏdong (later King Mu; r. 600–640) who seduces Princess Sŏnhwa, a daughter of King Chinp’yŏng of Silla (r. 579–631). The song’s meaning can be glossed as: “Princess Sŏnhwa, after a secret affair, steals away at night, with Sŏdong in her arms.”6 Reciting this kind of subject matter in Sinitic poetry would have been a mismatch. Moreover, expressing these sort of emotions would have been difficult in Sinitic poetry. The methods for using sinographs as phonograms seen here include either a) maintaining the original Sino-Xenic phonetic value of the sinograph (J. ondoku, K. ŭmdok 音讀), or b) taking the phonetic values of the sinograph’s vernacular gloss (J. kundoku, K. hundok 訓讀). In the hyangga song above, the topic marker ŭn 隠, the verbal gerund ending –ko 古, and the accusative marker ŭl 乙 are all examples of the former (i.e., phonograms based on the Sino-Korean phonetic value of the sinograph), while the declarative final verb ending marker –ta 如 is an example of the latter (i.e., a phonogram based on the vernacular gloss of the sinograph). On the other hand, the sinographs 密, 嫁, 抱, and 去 are all used for their semantic values (“secretly”; “marry”; “embrace”; “go”), but are read according to their vernacular glosses (i.e., in hundok) rather than their Sino-Korean phonetic values. Next, let us examine song 1.20 from the Japanese Man’yōshū 万葉集: 茜草指、

Akane sasu 武良前野逝、

murasakinwo yuki 6 English translation from Lee (2002: 9). Both Professor Kin and Peter Lee are following Yang Chudong (1987) here—a classic but now disputed interpretation.

171

Writing in Literary Sinitic 標野行、

simenwo yuki 野守者不見哉、

Nwomwori pa mizu ya 君之袖布留。

kimi ga swode puru The madder-shining Purple fields he goes around, The staked fields around: Won’t the guardian of the fields See you wave your sleeve, my lord?7 This well-known song was supposedly sent by Princess Nukata (ca. 630–690) to her former husband, Prince Ōama, who later became none other than Emperor Tenmu (ca. 631–686). This song also pertains to relationships and sentiments difficult to express in Sinitic poetry. In the man’yōgana orthography, too, sinographs are used as phonograms following their phonetic values in Sino-Japanese (e.g., 武良 for [mura]), as phonograms following their vernacular Japanese kun glosses (e.g., 前 for [saki]), and as ideograms according to the original meaning of the sinograph (e.g., 指 for the verb sasu, “indicate”). The basic principles are the same as those of the Korean hyangga orthography. 1.4 Waka, haiku, and sijo Man’yōgana orthography came to be replaced by kana, which were simplified sinographs, and developed to inscribe the Japanese poetic genres of waka/ tanka, and much later, haiku. The poem “Autumn Evening” (秋夕) by Bai Juyi cited above was included in the Monjū hyakushu 文集百首 [One Hundred Poems from Bai Juyi’s Collected Works], a collection of waka translations of his Chinese poetry. The following is a poem by Jien 慈圓 (1155–1225) from the Monjū hyakushu: 夜もすがら

月に

霜

yomosugara tsuki ni shimo all night moon-LOC frost

をく

まきのやに、

oku form

makinoya ni pasture-LOC

7 English translation from Cranston (1993: 486).

172 ふる

Chapter 3 か

この

葉

も

袖

ぬらすらむ

furu ka kono ha mo sode fall Q this leaf too sleeve All through the night Frost forms in the moonlight In the pastures. Do they fall now? The leaves, too, Will surely moisten my sleeves.

nurasuramu moisten-FUT

The version by Fujiwara no Teika reads: 声

ばかり

木の葉

の

雨

は

koe bakari konoha no ame voice only leaf GEN rain 古郷

の

庭

も

wa TOP

まがき

も

月

の

初霜

furusato no niwa mo magaki mo tsuki no hatsushimo old home GEN garden too fence too moon GEN first frost Through sound alone The leaf-rain of autumn— Back at my old home Throughout the courtyard and upon the wicker fence In the moonlight, the first frost. It is also well known that Natsume Sōseki excelled in haiku as well as Sinitic poetry. He composed haiku poems, such as these three: たびね

秋雨

に

明日

思はるる

akisame ni asu omowaruru fall rain LOC tomorrow recall Amid the autumn rains tomorrow comes to mind in my travel shelter.

旅寐

かな

tabine kana travel shelter Q

あんどん

秋雨

に

行灯

暗き

akisame ni andon kuraki fall rain LOC lamp darkness Amid the autumn rains lantern-light too dim at this mountain dwelling.

山家

かな

yamaga kana mountain dwelling Q

173

Writing in Literary Sinitic 眠らざる

夜半

の

nemurazaru yowa no sleep-NEG night GEN Unable to sleep, midnight lantern light amid the autumn rains.

灯

や

秋

の

akari light

ya PART

aki autumn

no ame GEN rain

雨

All of these evoke a similar state of mind to that seen in his kanshi “Traveler’s Song” cited above. The tradition of hyangga on the Korean Peninsula developed into the genre of short vernacular verse known as sijo, a Korean counterpart of Japanese waka. Along with the hansi poem introduced previously, Yi Sunsin wrote the following sijo verses while on Hansan Island, where he achieved a decisive victory over the Japanese naval forces: 한산 (閑島) 섬 달 밝은 밤에 Hansan sŏm tal palgŭn pam e Hansan Island moon bright night LOC 에 혼자 앉아 e honja anja LOC alone sit The moon is bright tonight. I sit alone in the lookout on Hansan Island,

수루（戍樓） suru watchtower

큰칼 옆에 차고 깊은 시름하는 적에 k’ŭn k’al yŏp e ch’ago kip’ŭn sirŭmhanŭn chŏk e big blade side LOC wear deep agonize time LOC my great-sword slung at my side, my spirit deeply troubled. 어디서 일성호가（一聲胡笳） 는 ŏdisŏ ilsŏnghoga nŭn somewhere flute-sound TOP 끊나니 kkŭnnani rend From somewhere the shrill note of a pipe cuts into my heart.8 8 English translation from O’Rourke (2014: 122).

남의 nam ŭi somebody’s

애를 ae rŭl insides ACC

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In this way Jien, Teika, Sōseki, and Yi Sunsin all shared the world of Sinitic poetry and that of poetic forms in their vernaculars, including waka, haiku, and sijo. They were able to do so because Sinitic poetry and poetry in their vernacular languages interacted over a long period of time. However, while Sinitic poetry transcended the boundaries of individual states and was comprehended by people across East Asia, waka and sijo were appreciated only within their respective countries, by people who did not know whether their counterparts beyond their borders had corresponding poetic forms. 1.5 Poetry in the Khitan Language Close connections between Sinitic poetry and poetry in the vernacular can also be found among the Khitan people. The Zhongshan shihua 中山詩話 [Zhongshan’s Notes on Poetry] by Liu Ban 劉攽 (1023–1089) of the Song dynasty introduces the following poem in Khitan, composed by a man called Yu Jing 余靖 (1000–1064)—an official Song envoy to the Liao (Khitan)—in the presence of the Liao emperor: 夜宴設邏臣拝洗 兩朝厥荷情感勤 微臣雅魯祝若統 聖壽鐵擺俱可忒

The parts in bold typeface are elements of the Khitan language rendered in sinographs. The Zhongshan shihua annotates them as follows: “‘設邏’ means ‘thriving and prosperous’; ‘拝洗’ means ‘honored with gifts’; ‘厥荷’ means ‘friendship runs through’; ‘勤’ means ‘thick and heavy’; ‘雅魯’ means ‘dance in veneration’; ‘若統’ means ‘seek good fortune’; ‘鐵擺’ means ‘higher and higher’; and ‘可忒’ means ‘long life.’”9 If we convert the Khitan elements into Chinese and add in Japanese kundoku markings, we would get something like this: 夜宴

wa 厚盛 ni shite 臣 wa 賜 night-feast TOP generous-abundant ADV do I TOP gift o 受-ke、 ACC receive-and The night banquet is extravagant and your humble subject is honored with gifts.

9 Cited from Liu Ban (1983: 274).

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兩朝

wa 好-mi o 通-ji 情感 wa both-states TOP friendship ACC course-and emotion TOP 厚重 tari。 thick DECL Friendship courses through our two states and emotions overflow. 微臣

拝舞 shite 福祐 o 祝-shi、 humble-subject bow-dance do-and fortune ACC wish-and This humble subject dances in veneration, wishing good fortune. 聖壽

wa 嵩髙 ni shite 倶 ni 極-mari emperor TOP venerable ADV do-and together end-NOM nakaran。 NEG-FUT May the emperor’s longevity and our time together never end. This was a poem composed at a banquet by a Chinese envoy with knowledge of the Khitan language. Poems like this would only have come about precisely because Khitan people had been composing poetry using either the Khitan language on its own or mixing the Khitan and Chinese languages. Moreover, poems composed by Khitan people were probably recorded in the Khitan script. Yelü Chucai 耶律楚材 (1189–1243), a brilliant strategist under Genghis Khan, translated a Khitan-language poem originally written in the Khitan script into Literary Sinitic and titled it “Song of Inebriation with Righteousness” (C. Zuiyi ge 醉義歌). This Sinitic poem is included in volume 8 of his collected works, the Zhanran jushi ji 湛然居士集 [Collected Works of the Tranquil Retiree]. Regrettably, the original Khitan verse is not extant. Furthermore, and as we have already seen, the Uighurs also used sinographs together with the Uighur script. It is known that poems were composed in the Uighur language that would have been read through Uighur vernacular reading methods (Shōgaito 2003). On a related note, for something comparable to the Khitan-language poem cited above that was transcribed using sinographs, one might look to the humorous poems (kyōshi 狂詩) of the Edo period. As discussed thus far, Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic prose—as the literary lingua franca of East Asia—continuously interacted with various vernacular languages and scripts on the Chinese periphery, resulting in diverse and complex relationships. Korean hyangga, Japanese Man’yō verses, and the sinographic transcriptions of texts in the Khitan language are all written in sinographs, and yet Chinese people would not be able to decipher their meaning;

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rather, only people from the respective countries could understand them. Even for people of those countries, these texts became more difficult to comprehend with each passing generation. This is because, irrespective of the fact that they were written in sinographs, they were not written in Literary Sinitic. Between the two extremes of orthodox Literary Sinitic forms on the one end, and the exclusively phonographic use of sinographs to transcribe vernacular languages on the other, lies a variety of inscriptional methods and literary styles. I delve deeper into these below. 2

The Diversity of Literary Sinitic

2.1 Chinese Literary Sinitic and Buddhist Literary Sinitic If we are to discuss the diversity of Literary Sinitic, a survey of its use in China— the home base, as it were—is in order. In China, besides orthodox Literary Sinitic, there existed diverse styles of texts written in sinographs. (Within Sinitic poetry alone, there are many different genres; however, I do not deal with them here.) What I call orthodox Literary Sinitic refers to what is typically called kanbun in Japanese and hanmun in Korean, such as the style used in the previously-mentioned Sanguozhi [Records of the Three Kingdoms]. This was the style used as a written lingua franca throughout East Asia. In China, it is generally called wenyanwen 文言文 or guwen 古文, both meaning something like “the classical language.” Still, within the realm of classical language (guwen) there are varying types. For example, a broad definition of classical language denotes literary styles used in ordinances, administrative documents in government offices, as well as expressions used in epistolary writing. Within these genres are contained a large quantity of phrases, idioms, and expressions distinguished from orthodox guwen. These are the so-called “practical genres” (C. shiyongwen, J. jitsuyōbun, K. siryongmun 實用文) and, compared to the orthodox style used in writing belles lettres and history, they boasted more phrases and terms pertaining to aspects of everyday language and enjoyed a wider usage. Diplomatic documents used in foreign relations in East Asia, too, were in fact closely related to the styles of writing used in administrative and epistolary writing. Furthermore, these latter genres used counterpoint couplets (C. duiju, J. tsuiku, K. taekku 對句) and parallel-style prose (C. pianliwen, J. benreibun, K. pyŏllyŏmun 駢儷文; prose with a pattern of parallel four- and six-character rhymed clauses), an ornate style following tonal pattern rules. The most important thing in considering this diversity of Literary Sinitic registers and genres is the style of annotative translation of Buddhist sutras derived from the process of translating sutras into Chinese—i.e., so-called

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Buddhist Literary Sinitic. Sutras translated from Sanskrit into Literary Chinese bear not only traces of the Sanskrit original, but also peculiar styles designed to expedite proselytization. For example, the phrase “thus I have heard” (C. rushi wowen, J. nyoze gamon ~ kaku no gotoku ware kikeri, K. yŏsi amun 如是我聞) frequently appears as the first sentence of a sutra. If this were to be translated according to proper Literary Sinitic word order, it should be rendered as “我 聞如是” [“I have heard thus”], and this order is actually found in some limited cases. However, the more common “thus I have heard” 如是我聞 is a direct, literal translation of the Sanskrit original. Another example is 故, which indicates results in Literary Sinitic and generally appears at the beginning of the second clause—as in: 人殺吾子,

故哭之

person-kill-I-son, therefore-mourn-him Someone has killed my son, therefore I mourn for him.

from the “Annals of Emperor Gaozu of Han,” in the Shiji 史記 [Records of the Grand Historian]

But in Buddhist sutras, “故” is frequently placed at the end of the preceding clause. For example: 淨飯王愛念子故,

常遣使問訊

Śuddhodana-king-love-pine for-son-reason,  often-send-messenger-ask-inquire Because King Śuddhodana [Father of Śākyamuni] missed his son greatly, he always dispatched a messenger to inquire of him. from the “Preface” to the Dazhi du lun 大智度論 [Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom], translated by Kumārajīva

三世諸佛依般若波羅蜜多故、

three-age-various-Buddhas-rely on-Perfect Wisdom-reason Because all the Buddhas of the Three Ages rely on Perfect Wisdom, 得阿耨多羅三藐三菩提

get-anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi they attain Highest Perfect Awakening.

from the Bore xinjing 般若心經 [Heart Sūtra], translated by Xuanzang 玄奘

This usage may have something to do with the “以～ 故” (because of … therefore …) construction in orthodox Literary Sinitic that sandwiches the reason between “以” and “故,” as in:

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以義帝死故,

漢王聞之袒而大哭

by way of-righteous-emperor-die-reason, Han-king-hear-it-strip-then-big-wail On account of the Righteous Emperor’s death, [therefore] upon hearing this, the King of Han stripped to the waist and mourned for him.

from the “Annals of Emperor Gaozu of Han,” Shiji 史記 [Records of the Grand Historian]

In any case, it is diction particular to Buddhist sutras. These irregular styles of Literary Sinitic found in Buddhist sutras are thought to have become a driving force behind the birth of so-called Variant Literary Sinitic (J. hentai kanbun 変 体漢文, K. pyŏnkyŏk hanmun 變格漢文) in East Asia. Moreover, literary styles found in Buddhist sutras generally tend to be wordy, so that a single sentence is long, with repetitions and enumerations. In particular, as in the case of “those beings who are in the immeasurable and inconceivable Buddha-land” (Sūtra on the Buddha of Infinite Life), there is no shortage of long modifiers. By contrast, in orthodox Literary Sinitic it is concision that is valued; long modifiers are generally avoided to prevent the meaning from being easily obscured. Although the process of translation into Literary Sinitic abbreviates such Sanskrit verbosity as much as possible, generally speaking the diction of Buddhist sutra translations in Literary Sinitic tends to be longwinded. This may have been one factor that contributed to the belief that the Japanese and Korean languages, as languages perceived to have similar “elongating” traits, are closely related to Sanskrit. Moreover, early Literary Sinitic translations of Buddhist sutras incorporated a considerable amount of colloquial vocabulary. Starting with the Tang dynasty, records of Zen dialogues were made in the colloquial language. Later on, during the Song dynasty, because of the influence of this practice, colloquial language Neo-Confucian texts like the Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 [Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu Xi] began to appear. These in turn are connected to the birth of Chinese vernacular fiction (baihua xiaoshuo 白話小說) in the Ming and Qing dynasties, including works such as the Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 [Water Margin], Jin ping mei 金瓶梅 [Plum in the Golden Vase], and Honglou meng 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber]. It is a fact that Buddhism influenced not only religion and philosophy, but also the literary styles of the Chinese language and literary works written within these styles. Along with orthodox Literary Sinitic, various types of Literary Sinitic, including Buddhist Literary Sinitic and the styles used in epistolary and administrative writing, were imported to Japan and Korea.

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2.2 Types of Variant Literary Sinitic Variant Literary Sinitic refers to styles that emerged mainly in places like Japan and the Korean Peninsula as orthodox Literary Sinitic, but which, for whatever reason, departed from the usual norms and came to take on irregularities and aberrations. Variant Literary Sinitic can be categorized into the following four general types based on how each originated: 1. The writer intends to write in orthodox Literary Sinitic, but erroneously produces irregularities and aberrations because of his or her inexperience with the grammar of Literary Sinitic. We call this Inexperienced Literary Sinitic (C. weishu hanwen, J. mijuku kanbun, K. misuk hanmun 未 熟漢文). 2. This is similar to type 1, except that the writer’s errors also reflect his or her unconscious use of linguistic elements from his or her first language. In Japan, this type of Variant Literary Sinitic is known as washū 和習, or “Japanese habit” (this is also written as 和臭 [also pronounced washū], lit. “[Literary Sinitic] evoking [the smell of] Japanese [language]”). Similar types of Variant Literary Sinitic existed outside Japan as well. 3. Compared to the unconscious errors made in type 2, in this type of Variant Literary Sinitic the writer deliberately mutates orthodox Literary Sinitic based on the grammar and vocabulary from his or her own first language. This case can be divided into two sub-categories: a) changing the word order while retaining the (overall) structure of Literary Sinitic; b) inserting vernacular nominal particles and verbal endings (transcribed in sinographs) from the writer’s first language for the purpose of rendering a given text readable in that language. The former type (a) is closer to type 2, while the latter is related to type 4 (discussed below). In the case of the latter type (b), if one were to replace the particles transcribed in sinographs with particles transcribed in a vernacular script, one would produce a text in “mixed-script style” (J. kon’yōbun 混用文). If type 2 corresponds to Western cuisine prepared by Japanese people that cannot help but exude Japanese flavors, mixedscript style results from a more self-conscious and proactive display of Japanese flavors and may be compared to using chopsticks to partake of a Japanized foreign dish. The main thrust of Variant Literary Sinitic is found in type 3. There is also a register known as Pseudo-Literary Sinitic (J. gikanbun 擬漢文), which consists of a Literary Siniticization (kanbunification, in the Japanese context) of writing that was first conceived in one’s first language.

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4.

The writer uses sinographs as phonograms in order to transcribe his or her first language. As explained previously, this amounts to writing exclusively in sinographs, but it is not Literary Sinitic. It is, however, not accurate to say that it is completely unrelated to Literary Sinitic. For example, in the lines, 野守は

見ずや

君が

袖

nwomwori pa mizu ya kimi ga swode guardian-TOP see-NEG Q you NOM sleeve Won’t the guardian of the fields See you wave your sleeve, my lord?

ふる

puru wave

from the verse composed by Princess Nukata cited above, the verb “見ず や” mizu ya (“will not … see?”) is inverted and precedes its object (kimi ga swode puru = you wave your sleeve). This structure may be the result of influence from Chinese poetry, such as the following: 君不見,

黃河之水天上來

you-not-see, Yellow-River-’s-water-sky-top-come Do you not see how the Yellow River’s waters come from heaven?

from “Jiang jinjiu” 將進酒 [Invitation to Wine] by Li Bai 李白 [701–762, styled Taibo 太白]

Type 4 later evolves into writing either in vernacular script or mixed-script style. The further one moves from type 1 to type 4, the more deviant the register becomes from orthodox Literary Sinitic and the stronger the writer’s conscious intention to inscribe his or her own vernacular language becomes. Besides the aforementioned four types, it was also possible to produce texts in vernacular scripts such as kana, han’gŭl, the Uighur script, and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, but the majority of such texts include sinographs and are thus examples of mixedscript style. In the past, Variant Literary Sinitic tended to be thought of as a transformation of standard Literary Sinitic that occurred in Japan and other peripheral regions that adopted aspects of Chinese culture. However, this was not necessarily the case. As discussed previously, within the parameters of Literary Sinitic in China itself, there existed various literary registers, among which were a significant number of modes that resembled Variant Literary Sinitic. Chinese written vernacular (baihua) can be thought of as a noble example of Variant Literary Sinitic. Baihua is not typically included within the category

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of Literary Sinitic texts (kanbun) as understood in Japan, but it was also by no means a purely colloquial register. It existed in diverse forms, as seen in the Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms], in which orthodox Literary Sinitic is dominant while baihua is subordinate, or in Water Margin, in which the reverse is the case, with baihua as dominant while the orthodox Literary Sinitic register is subordinate. To put it more accurately, socalled baihua was actually a style that mixed orthodox Literary Sinitic and colloquial baihua, which makes it anything but unconnected to Literary Sinitic. I will revisit the topic of Variant Literary Sinitic in China when I give examples of the four types of Variant Literary Sinitic in the following sections. 2.2.1 Inexperienced Literary Sinitic First, I would like to give some examples of Inexperienced Literary Sinitic from the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 [Chronicles of Japan]. In the record for the sixtyseventh year of Nintoku (volume 11) is recorded the following:10 有大虬、

令苦人

exist-big-serpent, make-suffer-people A mizuchi appeared and caused people to suffer. Mizuchi refers to water spirits or large serpents. In orthodox Literary Sinitic, what appears here as “令苦人 make-suffer-people” should instead be “令人苦 make-people-suffer.” This is probably a mistake based on a preconception that a verb must precede its object in Literary Sinitic. The phrase “令苦人” appears in the Nihon shoki numerous times. In the Nihon shoki record for the eighth year of Chūai (volume 8) we find: 臣敢所以献是物

subject-dare-where-by-present-this-thing As to these things which thy servant dares to offer …11 which, in orthodox Literary Sinitic, would have to be ordered “臣所以敢献是 物.” The “敢” (“dare”) was probably placed out in front as a result of following Japanese word order and demonstrates an incomplete understanding of the structure of Literary Sinitic. A similar example is found in the annals of Richū (volume 12) for the period prior to his ascendancy to the throne:

10 11

Cited from Ishizuka (2007: 50). English translation from Aston (1896: 221).

182 其爲我雖有大功、

Chapter 3 於己君無慈之甚矣

he-for-me-although-has-big-merit,  unto-self-lord-lack-kindness-GEN-severe -CONC … and although for us he has done a great service, yet towards his own lord his conduct has been heartless in the extreme.12 Structurally speaking, the first clause should be ordered “其雖爲我有大功.” In other words, the character “雖” here is misplaced. However, errors like these are also sometimes found in works by Chinese authors. Many such errors are also present in the Literary Sinitic writings by Japanese of later generations. For example, the Kojō zoroe 古状揃 [Compilation of Ancient Epistles], a textbook used in places like the terakoya 寺子屋 (lit. “temple schools,” i.e., local schools) of Edo times, contains the following sentence, part of the text of Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s “Koshigoejō” 腰越状 [Letter from Koshigoe] (Fig. 26): 古亡父尊霊再誕之非縁者、

old-deceased-father-venerable-spirit-again-born-GEN-NEG-fate-COND, 誰人申披愚意悲歎

what-person-report-afflict-my-mind-sad-sigh Unless the venerable spirit of our dead father should be reborn into this world, what man will reveal [to his Lordship] the anguish that afflicts my mind, [and who will bestow any pity on me]?13 The first half of this sentence should have been arranged “非古亡父尊霊再誕之 縁.” Instead, the location of “非” here is strange. However, in this case, this aberration did not result from a lack of understanding of Literary Sinitic. Rather, it seems that there existed a consciousness that Japanese-style Literary Sinitic should be written in a certain way, and as long as it could be read via kundoku there was no problem. However, this style was also sometimes used in diplomatic documents sent from Japan to either China or Chosŏn; those on the receiving end of these must have found them puzzling. 2.2.2 Washū: Japanized Literary Sinitic As I have discussed previously (pp. 33–36), a mokkan discovered from a Nara period site in Tagajō City, Miyagi prefecture contains a transcription of the same 12 English translation from Aston (1896: 305). 13 English translation from Morris (1975: 85). The portion in brackets is not included by Professor Kin.

Writing in Literary Sinitic

Figure 26 Excerpt from Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s “Koshigoejō” 腰越 状 [Letter from Koshigoe]

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“Letter to an acquaintance to drink together on a cold, snowy day” as found in the text of Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家立成雜書要略 [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] in Empress Kōmyō’s hand preserved in the Shōsōin. However, the mokkan transcription of the text contains “Japanese-style” mistakes, such as the substitution of 呼 for 喚 “summon; invite” and the compound 酒飲 “wine-drink” for the single character 飲 “drink.” During the age of manuscripts, reading and writing were directly interconnected, and so this type of mistake in Literary Sinitic texts written by Japanese authors was probably inevitable. Here, I would like to first consider examples of the confusion between the two different “be” verbs, “在” and “有,” found in the Nihon shoki. As I have already discussed in the section on Hyech’o’s Memoir of a Pilgrimage (see pp. 123–125 above), 在 and 有 are easily confused by Japanese speakers because both are glossed in Japanese as aru despite the two different meanings of “to exist” and “to have.” The sentence “若神有其山乎” (“May it be that a God dwells in this mountain?”14), which appears in the record for the seventh month of the eighteenth year of Keikō (volume 7), should have been written “若神在其 山乎,” because “神有” means that the god “possesses” the mountain. Likewise, in the pre-ascension account of Hanzei, whose annals are found at the end of volume 12, there is the following sentence: “時多遅花, 有于井中” (“At the time, a taji flower was in the well”15). Here too, it would be correct to use 在, and therefore the latter half of this sentence should read “在于井中.” As previously discussed, in the Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India by the Silla monk Hyech’o, we find the same sort of confusion in the use of 有 and 在. Next, let us look at examples where word order has been corrupted. 群臣皆不知誰遣

many-ministers-all-not-know-who-dispatch But none of the Ministers knew whom to send.16 In this passage, which appears in the record for the seventh month of the fortieth year of Keikō, “誰遣” should be “遣誰.” In the order “誰遣,” the meaning is “someone dispatches [somebody],” while “遣誰” would mean the intended “dispatch whom.” Likewise, in the pre-ascension account of Yūryaku found in volume 14, there is a sequence which is written “猪有” (shishi ari: “there is a 14 15 16

Cited from Aston (1896: 199). Aston’s translation (1896: 310) reads: “A tajihi flower had fallen into this well [and it was accordingly made the name of the Heir to the Throne].” Cited from Aston (1896: 202).

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wild boar”), but should read “有猪.” Similar examples can be found among epigraphic sources from the Nara period. For instance, a stele erected in the first year of Yōrō (717) that survives at Chōmyōji Temple in Ōtsu city, Shiga prefecture (Fig. 27), reads:

Figure 27 Stele erected in first year of Yōrō (717) at Chōmyōji Temple in Ōtsu city, Shiga prefecture

186 養老元年十月十日石柱立

Chapter 3 超明僧.

Yōrō-first-year-ten-month-ten-day-stone-column-erect Chōmyō-monk Yōrō First Year, Tenth Month, Tenth Day. We erected this stone column. The monks of Chōmyōji. Here, “石柱立” is supposed to mean “erect a stone column,” and thus the inscription should have read “立石柱.” Examples of Literary Sinitic exhibiting Japanese word order like this can still be found today. For example: 初心者歓迎、経験不問

first-heart-person welcome, experience-not-ask Novices welcome, no experience required. These phrases are a familiar sight in the help-wanted pages of the newspaper, but if written in proper Literary Sinitic word order should read instead “歓迎 初心者、不問経験.” In the context of modern Japanese, however, changing the word order to reflect proper Literary Sinitic would probably result in an unnatural sound. This is because washū kanbun (Japanized Literary Sinitic) has already penetrated deeply into the Japanese language. 2.2.3 Variant Literary Sinitic in Korea (I): Imsin Year Oath Stone of Silla Now let us discuss similar examples from the Korean Peninsula. The Imsin sŏgi sŏk 壬申誓記石 [Imsin Year Oath Stone] of Silla is an engraved record of an oath sworn in the imsin 壬申 year (thought to correspond to either 552 or 612 ce) (Fig. 28). The inscription reads as follows: 壬申年六月十六日、 二人併誓記、 Imsin-year-six-month-ten-six-day, two-people-together-oath-record, On the sixteenth day of the sixth month of the imsin year, we two together vow and record. 天前誓、 今自三年以後、 heaven-before-swear, now-from-three-year-henceforth, Before heaven we swear. That from now, for three years hence, 忠道執持、 過失無誓、 loyal-way-grip-hold, pass-mistake-not exist-oath we will commit ourselves to the way of loyalty and not commit any wrongdoings, we swear.

Writing in Literary Sinitic

Figure 28 The Imsin Year Oath Stone of Silla (either 552 or 612 ce)

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若此事失、 天大罪得誓、 if-this-fact-mistake, heaven-big-crime-get-oath, Should we fail to fulfill this, that we will receive great punishment from Heaven, we swear. 若國不安大亂世、 可容行誓之。 if-country-not-stable-big-chaos-world, can-accommodate-undertake-swear-dec Even should the state become unstable and the world fall into disarray, that we will faithfully execute this oath, we swear. 又別先辛未年七月廿二日大誓、 again-separate-first-sinmi-year-seven-month-twenty-two-day-big-oath, On a separate occasion, we previously made a great oath on the twenty-second day of the seventh month in the sinmi year. 詩尚書礼伝倫得誓三年。 poetry-documents-book-rites-canon-consecutively-obtain-oath-three-years That we would gain knowledge of the Book of Odes, the Book of Documents, and the Book of Rites, one after the other, we swore, within three years. This oath is thought to have been engraved on the stone by two hwarang, members of an elite warrior group unique to Silla, who swore to devote themselves single-mindedly to cultivating their character. Except for the very last part (the oath sworn the previous year), the structure of which remains obscure, the writing on the stone follows the word order of the Silla language. If we correct what follows after “天前誓” [“before heaven we swear”] in the second line above according to the rules of orthodox Literary Sinitic, the word order should be switched as follows: 誓於天前, 自今三年以後, 執持忠道, swear-at-heaven-before, from-now-three-years-later, grip-hold-loyal-way, We swear before heaven, from now for three years hence, to uphold the way of loyalty 誓無過失, 若失此事, 誓得大罪於天. swear-no-mistake, if-lose-this-thing, swear-get-big-crime-unto-heaven We swear to make no mistakes, and if we should fail at this, we swear to receive a great punishment from heaven.

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Furthermore, note that “誓之” does not mean “swear this/it,” as one might expect, with “之” functioning as an object pronoun. Rather, the “之” here indicates “-che,” a sentence-final declarative verb ending in the Silla language that is written in later sources as “斉.” Examples of “之” used as a final verb ending in Literary Sinitic are found in texts from the Northern Dynasties dating to the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (420–589). Later, there are also examples of this usage in Japan (Ōshima 2006: 117). The sentence structure in this entirely sinograph-based inscription is that of the Silla language—the ancestor of present-day Korean—and as such is similar to the aforementioned Variant Literary Sinitic inscription “石塔立,” seen on the stele from Chōmyōji Temple in Ōtsu. It is highly unlikely that the writers, who were studying Confucian classics such as the Book of Odes and the Book of Documents, did not know proper Literary Sinitic grammar. Rather, the authors of the oath must have consciously transcribed it in this manner. With regard to the previously introduced four types of Variant Literary Sinitic, this inscription belongs to type 3. However, while the word order follows that of the Silla language, examples of particles or verb endings that must have existed in Silla are limited to the use of “之” in the sequence “誓之.” This is possible because, for example, even if one were to modify a modern-day Japanese sentence like the following: 外相会議 は

理解 を



日本 の

wa TOP

拉致問題解決 についての

no -’s

表明 して

立場 に

ni tsuite no ni concerning -’s LOC

閉幕。

o shite ACC do-and

日本政府 を

支持 する 議長声明 を

発表

o suru o ACC do ACC The Foreign Affairs Council meeting adjourned with a clear acknowledgement of Japan’s position regarding the resolution of the Japanese abduction issue. The chairman issued a statement announcing his support of the Japanese government. by eliminating the bolded vernacular elements to render it as 外相会議日本拉致問題解決立場理解表明閉幕。 日本政府支持議長声明発表。

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it can still be understood. The Imsin Year Oath Stone inscription is comparable to this type of writing. 2.2.4

Variant Literary Sinitic in Korea (II): “Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple, Silla” In this section let us look at an example of Variant Literary Sinitic writing that goes beyond the switching of word order to match the Silla language by also inscribing vernacular nominal particles and verb endings. 二塔天宝十七年戊戌中立在之.

two-pagoda-Tian-bao-ten-seven-year-Mu-Sul-in-erect-kyŏ-che These two pagodas were erected in the musul year, the seventeenth year of Tianbao [758]. 娚姉妹三人業以成在之.

brother-sister-sister-3-person-alms-ro-come about-kyŏ-che Doing so was made possible by funds from three people: a brother and two sisters. 娚者零妙寺言寂法師在弥,

brother-TOP-Yŏng-Myo-Temple-Ŏn-Chŏk-Dharma-Master-kyŏ-myŏ The elder brother is Master Ŏnjŏk of Yŏngmyo Temple, 姉者照文皇太后君妳在弥,

sister-TOP-Cho-Mun-Empress-Dowager-wet nurse-kyŏ-myŏ the elder sister is a wet nurse for the Empress Dowager Chomun, 妹者敬信大王妳在也.

sister-TOP-Kyŏng-Sin-Great-King-wet nurse-kyŏ-da and the younger sister is a wet nurse for Great King Kyŏngsin. This is an inscription found on the stele called “Karhangsa chot’ap ki” 葛項寺 造塔記 [Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple] from the time of King Wŏnsŏng (r. 785–798) of Silla. Note that the sinograph 娚 is a made-inSilla graph designating a male sibling as seen from the perspective of a female sibling, and that “Great King Kyŏngsin” refers to King Wŏnsŏng and “Empress Dowager Chomun” to his mother. Sinographs in bold typeface indicate vernacular verb endings or particles. For example, “在” represents the auxiliary “be” verb kyŏ-, while “以” represents the instrumental particle ro. In these cases, the sinographs function as phonograms the sound of which originates in the

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vernacular glosses (hundok) for these sinographs. The character “弥,” which represents the connective ending -myŏ, is an example of a phonogram based on the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the sinograph. Although the Imsin Year Oath Stone inscription is in Silla language word order, it is still possible to imagine it was read as Literary Sinitic, whereas the “Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple” seems to have been expressly conceived of as Silla writing. The oldest extant case of such Silla language-inflected Literary Sinitic is found on the “Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Silla pimyŏng” 迎日冷水里新羅碑銘 [Inscription on the Stele at Naengsu-ri of Yŏngil, Silla], identified as a record from either 443 or 503. It seems that in late fifth-century Silla, this style of writing was already in wide use. 2.2.5

Variant Literary Sinitic in Japan: Hōryūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] Image Mandorla Inscription Similar to the “Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple” from the Silla period, there are numerous Japanese inscriptions where Japanese word order as well as vernacular nominal particles and verb endings from the Japanese language are transcribed in sinographs. I take here the Hōryūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] image mandorla inscription from the Main Hall of Hōryūji Temple as the most representative example (Fig. 29). 池邊大宮治天下天皇, 大御身勞賜時, 歲次丙午年, 召於大王天皇與太子而 願賜, 我大御身病太平欲坐故, 將造寺藥師像作仕奉詔. 然当時崩乍賜, 造 堪者. 小治田大宮治天下王天皇及東宮聖王, 大命受賜而歲次丁卯年仕奉.17

When the Sovereign who ruled all under heaven from the Great Palace of Ikenobe was in poor health, in the 43rd cyclical year [586], he summoned the Great Queen Sovereign and the Crown Prince and made a vow, proclaiming: “Because We hope to ameliorate Our great illness, We intend to construct a temple and make an image of Yakushi.” However, because around that time he passed away and was unable to complete 17

Japanese translation:

あめ

した し ら

すめらみこと

お お お み いたつ

池辺の大宮に天の下治しめしし天皇（用明天皇）、大御身労 き賜いし時、歳は  ひのえうま

やど

おおきみのすめらみこと

丙午に次りし年（五八六）、大王天 皇（推古天皇）と太子（聖徳太子）を召して誓い やすら

ま

願い賜う、我が大御身の病の太いに平かんと欲し坐すが故に、将に寺を造り薬師 まつ

みことのり

あ

お はり

像を作り仕え奉らんとすと詔す。然れども当時に崩じ賜いて、造り堪えざりき。小治 たの

田大宮に天の下治しめしし大王天皇（推古天皇）および東宮聖王（聖徳太子）、大 命を受け賜いて歳は丁卯に次りし年（六〇七）仕え奉りき。

192

Figure 29 “Hōryūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] Image Mandorla Inscription” from the Main Hall of Hōryūji Temple

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the construction, the Great Queen Sovereign who ruled all under heaven from the Great Palace of Owarida and the Sage Prince of the Eastern Palace accepted the great command and carried it out in the 4th cyclical year [607].18 This record details how Emperor Yōmei, for the purpose of pacifying his illness, intended to construct an image of—not surprisingly—Bhaiṣajya, the Buddha of Medicine, and how Empress Suiko and Prince Shōtoku later completed the project. In terms of the word order of this text, “太平欲,” “将造寺薬師像作仕 奉詔,” “造不堪,” and “大命受” all follow Japanese word order with the verbs at the end of the clause. Rearranged according to Literary Sinitic, they would be “欲太平,” “詔将造寺作薬師像,” “不堪造,” and “受大命,” respectively. The characters “賜” and “坐” (as indicated by their bold typeface) represent vernacular Japanese elements—in this case honorific expressions that are unnecessary in Literary Sinitic, while 而 corresponds to the Japanese connective particle -te. The same sinograph 賜 was also used in Variant Literary Sinitic texts in Silla to transcribe an honorific pre-final ending of the Silla language. I have already discussed the fact that the “故” seen located at the end of the clause in “太平欲坐故” (“because I wish to pacify”) is an expression characteristic of Buddhist Literary Sinitic (see pp. 177–178 above). Yet another structure that is frequently found in Buddhist sutras consists of inserting 於 (“at; unto”) between a verb and its object, as in: 召於大王天皇与太子

summon-unto-great-king-heavenly-emperor-and-crown prince “summoned [“unto”] the heavenly sovereign Ōkimi and the crown prince.” One can conclude that the “Hōryūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] Image Mandorla Inscription” resulted from the further Japanization of Buddhist Literary Sinitic, which was already something like a form of Variant Literary Sinitic in China. Common Traits between Japanese Variant Literary Sinitic and Korean Variant Literary Sinitic: The Style of Japanese senmyō Imperial Edicts and Silla kyo Royal Decrees The Hōryūji Golden Hall Bhaiṣajyaguru [Yakushi] Image mandorla inscription quotes an edict by Emperor Yōmei. A great number of such edicts were written in the same style as Emperor Yōmei’s edict, although by the Nara period such 2.3

18

Translation from Lurie (2011: 220).

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edicts were sometimes also composed in Literary Sinitic. This type of writing is called senmyō style and the oldest extant example of it is found in the record of Emperor Monmu’s ascendency to the throne (697) included in the Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 [Chronicles of Japan Continued] (797 ce). Here is an excerpt from the beginning of that text:19 詔曰、現御神[止]大八嶋國所知天皇大命[良麻止]詔大命[乎]、集侍皇子等・王 等・百官人等、天下公民、諸聞食[止]詔。

Be it decreed: Let the assembled imperial princes, various princes, hundred officials, and all of the people under heaven hear the words which are proclaimed as an edict by the Sovereign, who rules the Great Land of Many Islands as a manifest god. Everything here is written in Japanese word order and the sinographs are read according to kundoku practice as follows: みことのり

のたま

 詔 して

曰 はく、

あきつかみ

お ほ や し ま くに

現御神と

大八嶋國

Mikotonori site notamapaku, akitumikamwi to

opoyasimaguni

知らしめす

sirasimyesu Be it decreed: … who rules the Great Land of Many Islands as a manifest god すめら

おほみこと

天皇が

の

大命らまと

詔りたまふ

大命を、

sumyera ga opomikotorama to noritamapu opomikoto wo, the words which are proclaimed as an edict by the Sovereign うごなは

はべ

 集 り

侍る

み こ たち

おほきみ たち

皇子等、

王     等、

もものつかさのひと ども

百官人       等、

ugonapari paberu mikotati,

opokimitati,  mwomwo no tukasa no pitodomo, the assembled imperial princes, various princes, hundred officials, あめのしたの おほみたから

   天下     公民、

もろもろ

諸

聞きたまへと

ame no sita no opomitakara, moromoro kikitamape to all of the people under heaven, let [them] hear.

19

詔る。

noritamapu.

English translation and Romanized transliteration modified from Bender (2018: 3 and 99, respectively).

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What is more, man’yōgana-style particles such as “止” (quotative and concatenative particle to), “良麻止” (discourse particle rama + to), and “乎” (object marker wo) are written in smaller-sized graphs (set off here in square brackets in small-sized script). This is called “senmyō small-character style” (Fig. 30). Prior to this period, on mokkan there are examples of senmyō texts in which the particle characters are written the same size as the rest of the text; this is known as the “senmyō large-character style.” The reason imperial edicts were written in this style was due to the fact that in reality these writings were meant to be read aloud in front of people to make them understood; no one could have understood edicts written in Literary Sinitic simply by listening. Even today, norito prayers read out loud by priests at Shinto shrines are written in this kind of style. If one changes the vernacular particles in senmyō-style writing into kana, the text is converted to kanji-kana mixed-script style (kanji kana kon’yōbun 漢字仮名混用文). For this reason, senmyō-style writing is thought to have played a key role in the development of kana and other systems for inscribing vernacular Japanese. As to how this type of writing was made possible, scholars point to influence from a similar style found in Silla texts and idu writing, which I discuss in the next section.20 Moreover, when one considers Silla’s Imsin Year Oath Stone, the “Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple,” and the influence of hundok practices from Silla, the conclusion seems unavoidable that Silla’s Variant Literary Sinitic served as an important precedent for the Japanese senmyō style. Besides word order and the transcription of nominal particles and verb endings, there are yet other interesting similarities between the Japanese senmyō style and its Silla counterparts. As seen in the previously introduced examples, in senmyō style the word “詔” (“imperial decree”) appears twice. The edict opens with it (Mikotonori site notamapaku 詔して曰く; “Be it decreed: …”) and also concludes with it (… to mikotonoru …と詔る; lit. “so saying, [the Emperor] decrees”). The example quoted above was from the opening part of an imperial decree. However, each of the individual items that follow also conclude with the same “…と詔る” (“so saying, [the Emperor] decrees”). Incidentally, monarchical edicts in Silla, the counterparts of Japanese imperial edicts, were referred to as kyo 教 (“royal instructions”) but a format similar to that of senmyō can be observed. Let us look at the oldest extant example of a Silla kyo, found inscribed on the “Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Stele”:

20

See Ōshima (2006: 117).

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Figure 30 Imperial edict announcing the ascension of Emperor Monmu (683–707) to the throne—the oldest extant example of senmyō style

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197

斯羅喙斯夫智王, 乃智王, 此二王敎. 用珍而麻村節居利爲証爾, 令其得財敎耳. Royal decree by two Kings, Sabuji and Naeji of the Tal [name of a tribe] of Sara [ancient way of transcribing the name Silla]. Take the words of Chŏgŏri [person’s name] of Chinima/Tolma village as evidence so that he may regain his property. Hereby decreed. The final two sinographs of this decree are “敎耳”: “敎” for the decree and “耳,” a Literary Sinitic particle concluding an affirmation. This is exactly the same structure as the “詔 … 詔” seen in Japan’s senmyō style. This type of format is nothing more than the result of combining Literary Sinitic—in which the verb precedes the object—with the languages of Silla and Japan—both of which place verbs after their objects. In other words, the Japanese senmyō and Silla kyo styles illustrate the process of how Chinese Literary Sinitic became Silla-ized and Japanized into Variant Literary Sinitic. Still, according to rules prescribed by China, the edicts of the Chinese emperor were called zhao 詔 (J. shō, K. cho), while the decrees of kings, who were considered subordinate to the emperor, were termed jiao 教 (J. kyō, K. kyo). The state of Silla, whose ruler was invested as a king by China, was careful not to use the sinograph 詔. From the perspective of China, Japan was in the exact same position as Silla, but Japan instead flouted China’s authority and used the character 詔 for orders issued by its ruler. Examples of 詔 in Korea are not found until the Taehan Empire period (1897–1910), when Korea declared itself an empire independent of Qing China. Moreover, although the method of using smaller-sized graphs for vernacular grammatical markers has been commonly considered a Japanese invention, the custom of using smaller-sized sinographs for annotations was also practiced in China. In Korea, too, there are examples of smaller-sized characters used for transcribing vernacular grammatical markers, as seen in the excerpt from Kyunyŏ’s Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴敎分記圓 通鈔 [Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra] cited above. Therefore, Silla precedent may have influenced the development of senmyō small-character-style transcription. Incidentally, there are also some examples where smaller-size graphs were used for purposes other than annotation in China. These are the scripts for the dramas called zaju 雜劇 (lit. “variety plays”), which were popular during the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the aria parts of

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these scripts, one finds chenzi 襯字 (lit. “filler words,” i.e., extra words inserted in a line of verse for balance or euphony), including particles and other colloquial elements extraneous to the melody used to supplement the main text. These chenzi were customarily written in smaller-sized characters (Fig. 31).

Figure 31 Examples of chenzi 襯字 “filler words” in an aria from a Chinese zaju “variety play”

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These chenzi are unrelated to the Japanese senmyō small-character style. However, the two do have something in common to the extent that in early modern China, due to the large gap between the classical and colloquial languages, texts in the classical language needed to be supplemented with colloquial grammatical elements in order to be comprehensible. This is similar to the manner in which the Japanese supplemented Literary Sinitic with elements from their own colloquial language in senmyō-style transcription. 2.4 A Piece of Humorous Writing in Korean idu-mun The idu writing system (idumun 吏讀文; sometimes also referred to as it’omun 吏吐文), which likely influenced Japanese senmyō-style transcription, first emerged during the Silla period and continued to be used for the composition of administrative documents in government offices until the demise of the Chosŏn dynasty in the early twentieth century. The Korean word t’o 吐 refers to vernacular grammatical particles, while ri 吏 (pronounced i in syllable-initial position) designates petty clerks and low-level administrators who handled a wide range of administrative documents. The style of writing used in administrative documents was called liwen 吏文 (“clerk writing”) in China, and so idumun might be thought of as Koreanized liwen. In this section I introduce a peculiar literary work that takes the format of an administrative document. The text Ŭnggolbang 鷹鶻方 [Art of Falconry and Hawking] by Yi Chonyŏn 李兆年 (1269–1343), written in the fourteenth century at the end of the Koryŏ period, is a practical manual for breeding falcons. Attached to the end of the work is a piece of humorous prose narrative—written in a format resembling a litigation document—titled “Myŏnch’ŏn kŏ Han chinsa chang” 沔川居韓進 士狀 [Petition Submitted by Han chinsa Residing in Myŏnch’ŏn]. The beginning of this work reads as follows: 右謹言所志矣段, 隴西接前翰林李太白亦, 其矣祖上傳来使用爲如乎, ŭistan ?? yŏ ŭi hădaon 婢詩今及一所生婢墨德, 二所生婢筆今, 三所生奴紙筒等四口乙, 被謫多年, ŭl 愁火焦肝分叱不喻, 華陰縣逢辱以後, 日漸增恨, 五臟枯旱爲沙乙餘良, spun andi hăzalnama 謫所窮困, 年老益深, 釀酒難繼乙仍于, 放賣計料是如。 ŭl chijŭro -ida

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The sinographs in bold typeface represent Korean grammatical elements. This excerpt reads as follows in English: My humble petition is as follows: Li Taibo, the former hanlin scholar residing in Longxi, has suffered for many years in exile with four people inherited and employed from his ancestors—a slave woman named Shijin 詩今 [K. Sigŭm, i.e., Poetry] and her first child, a daughter named Mode 墨德 [K. Muktŏk, i.e., Ink]; her second child, a daughter named Bijin 筆 今 [K. P’ilgŭm, i.e., Brush]; and her third child, a son named Zhitong 紙 筒 [K. Chit’ong, i.e., Paper]. The flames of anxiety have not only scorched his liver, but after his sufferings in Huayin County, his sorrows have multiplied day by day. Not only have his five organs withered away, but his place of exile is destitute, his age has advanced all the more, and because [the business of] brewing [alcohol] has become difficult to continue, he is considering selling [these four servants] off. In this first section, we have the famous poet of the Tang Period, Li Bai (styled Taibo), who has made up his mind to sell off Shijin, a slave he inherited from his ancestor, Shijin’s daughters Mode and Bijin, and her son Zhitong—Shijin being a personification of poetry and the children being personifications of stationery materials (ink, brush, and paper)—due to difficulties arising from an extended period of exile, poverty, and the inability to buy the wine that he so loved. After this excerpt, the great Tang poet Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) then appears as a witness, and from there the remainder of the story unfolds. Early idumun had a strong flavor of Variant Literary Sinitic, in that it followed Korean word order and sinographs were read according to their vernacular Korean glosses. However, it soon evolved into something like the example above; that is, its word order followed that of Literary Sinitic and sinographs were read according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations, while vernacular elements (transcribed in sinographs) indicating the relationship between individual clauses were inserted where appropriate. This transformation corresponds to what I discussed in Chapter 2 as a change in the practice of reading Literary Sinitic in Korea, which transitioned from hundok vernacular reading practice—which required inversions of word order—to a practice of reading according to Sino-Korean pronunciation (ŭmdok 音讀, also known as chiktok 直讀 [“direct reading”]), where overall the word order of Literary Sinitic was retained but grammatical elements were inserted between clauses/ sentences. These parallel changes bespeak a close interrelationship between the practices of reading and writing in Literary Sinitic.

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However, while the vernacular particles inserted into Literary Sinitic texts to facilitate reading were written in a smaller size and/or in simplified sinographs, this was not the case for idumun. This is related to the fact that, on the Korean Peninsula, unlike in Japan, the system of simplified sinographs used for the transcription of vernacular particles for the purpose of vernacular reading practice never developed into a syllabary designed for inscribing vernacular texts. Herein lies the inevitability of the invention of han’gŭl. The use of 段 as a topic marker, seen in the first clause of the above passage, is common to Variant Literary Sinitic texts composed in both Korea and Japan. However, there were also other expressions common to both idumun and Japanese Variant Sinitic. Such expressions include the use of 依 to mark the cause of an affair (in orthodox Literary Sinitic, 因 is used); the use of 去 to mark something as the past, as in saru tōka no asa 去る十日の朝 (“the morning of the tenth day past”; a similar usage is found in China, but not in orthodox Literary Sinitic), and the use of 事 to conclude a statement. Although idumun texts were introduced to Japan during the Edo period by way of the Korean Embassies of Communication to Japan, it is also possible that Japanese people had gained knowledge of idumun even before this connection and that the two influenced each other in some way. On a related note, the Korean method of indicating the relationship between Literary Sinitic clauses in idumun resonates with the function of the chenzi used in the arias of the Yuan dynasty zaju plays. 2.5 Variant Literary Sinitic during the Mongolian Empire The Yuan dynasty, during which zaju plays were popularized, was a peculiar era when Mongols ruled over the entire territory of China and various ethnic groups from the western region—e.g., the Uighurs—migrated to China in large numbers. Both the Mongolian and Uighur languages belong to the Altaic language group, and therefore the Yuan period was also a time when the Altaic languages made a lasting impression on the Chinese language. As mentioned above, Xu Heng’s Daxue zhijie 大學直解 [Direct Explication of the Great Learning], a colloquial rendering of the Confucian classic Daxue 大學 [Great Learning], is also a product of this era. Guan Yunshi’s 貫雲石 (1286– 1324) Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解 [Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety], my next example, displays an even more unusual style of writing. 夫孝徳之本也。

Filial Piety is the foundation of virtue.

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This sentence from the Classic of Filial Piety is translated in the Direct Explication as follows (Fig. 32):

Figure 32 A page from Guan Yunshi’s 貫雲石 Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解 [Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety]

Writing in Literary Sinitic

203

孝道的勾當是徳行的根本有。

The Way of Filial Piety is the root of virtuous conduct. Disyllabic counterparts are substituted for monosyllabic expressions in the original—e.g., “xiaodao” 孝道 (“the way of filial piety”) for “xiao” 孝 (“filial piety”) and “dexing” 徳行 (“virtuous conduct”) for “de” 徳 (“virtue”)—and colloquial expressionss such as “goudang” 勾當 (“activity, behavior”) are used. While these traits are also characteristic of the Daxue zhijie, the “you” 有 which appears at the end of the sentence is problematic. In Chinese writing, be it wenyan (classical/Literary Sinitic) or baihua (written vernacular), 有 never appears at the end of a sentence. Generally speaking, a baihua rendering of the phrase in question would be simply “孝道的勾當是徳行的根本.” Because “是” functions as a copula (the equative “be” verb), 有 has no place here. However, 有 here is a sinographic transcription of the Mongolian copula “-a.” In other words, this use of 有 parallels that of 在 in Silla, as seen in above the “Record of Erecting Pagodas at Karhang Temple.” The original name of Guan Yunshi, author of the Xiaojing zhijie, was Sevinch Qaya 小雲石海涯. In other words, Guan was a Sinicized Uighur aristocrat, much like the Gaochang Sŏl clan who immigrated to Koryŏ (see p. 150 above). In the fifth to seventh centuries, prior to the settlement of the Uighur people in Gaochang, the Classic of Filial Piety was already being read there in an Iranian language (huyu 胡語). Later on, this text was also translated into the Jurchen and Mongolian languages. The literary style seen in the Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety is reflective of these circumstances, and therefore it might be described as a form of Chinese, or indeed Variant Literary Sinitic, inflected with elements of the Mongolian and Uighur languages. Rather than the style seen in Xu Heng’s Daxue zhijie 大學直解 [Direct Explication of the Great Learning] (see pp. 161–162 above), the no-longer-extant Sohak chikhae 小學直 解 [Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning] by Sŏl Changsu (a descendant of the Sŏl clan who immigrated to Koryŏ) may have been in this sort of style. This unusual literary style, referred to as the “Mongolian direct-translation style” (C. mengwen zhiyiti 蒙文直譯體)—in other words, a “direct-translation style” which uses the Mongolian language—was also used in the decrees of the Mongolian emperors of the Yuan state (C. shengzhi 聖旨): 至元二十九年十月二十六日, 奏過事內一件, “官人每說, 隨路江南罪囚 每, 哏遲慢着有.” 奏呵, “爲甚那般遲慢着有?” 回奏, “ ‘賊每根底交大札魯 忽赤每斷者,’ 聖旨有來. 爲那上頭, 等交大札魯忽赤每斷呵, 誤着有.” 奏

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Chapter 3 呵, “不須等札魯忽赤斷, 合斷的, 交隨路官人每斷者.” 聖旨了也. 欽此. (斷獄 · 隨路決斷罪囚)

On the twenty-sixth day of the tenth month in the twenty-ninth year of the Yuan dynasty [1292], one of the items presented to the throne was as follows. “According to local officials, the [outcomes of the trials regarding] prisoners in various parts of Jiangnan have been tremendously delayed.” The Emperor queried: “Why such delays?” [Someone] responded: “There was a decree from the Emperor to the effect, ‘The chief judges (yeke jarghuchi) should render a decision regarding the thieves.’ Therefore, we are awaiting the chief judges’ decision and so the process is delayed.” There was then a decree from the Emperor as follows: “Without waiting for the chief judges’ decision, have the officials in each region render a decision.” Be mindful of this. The element 有 here sometimes functions as an auxiliary verb, as in “遅慢着 有” (“it is being delayed”), or as the main verb, as in “聖旨有” (“an imperial decree was made”). However, the latter could just as well have been “有聖旨,” had it been written in (orthodox) Literary Sinitic, and so it is essentially no different from Variant Literary Sinitic. At that time, Khubilai Khan was the reigning emperor. This decree consists of a dialogue between Khubilai Khan and his ministers. The emperor’s words conclude with the phrase “… 聖旨有” (lit. “there was an imperial decree to the effect that ‘…’”). In other words, because it echoes the terminal use of ~詔 in Japanese senmyō, the above Mongolian decree written in the “Mongolian direct-translation style” might be called a kind of Mongolian senmyō style. Haner yanyu 漢児言語: Variant Literary Sinitic as a Spoken Language In addition, it appears that this peculiar “Mongolian direct-translation” inscriptional style was used as a spoken lingua franca amongst Mongolian, Uighur, and Koryŏ peoples residing in China. At that time, a great number of Koryŏ merchants were living in the Yuan capital of Dadu 大都 (present-day Beijing) for trading purposes. For that reason, in Koryŏ a textbook called Nogŏltae (C. Lao Qida 老乞大) [The Old Cathayan, or The Old China Hand] was compiled to help Koreans acquire trade knowledge and conversational Chinese. Let us examine a dialogue from this text. 2.6

恁是高麗人,

卻怎麼漢児言語説的好有? You are from Koryŏ. But how is it you speak Chinese well?

205

Writing in Literary Sinitic 俺漢児人上, 學文書来的上頭,

些小漢児言語省的有. I am learning Chinese from a book so I know some Chinese. at a Chinese person’s home,

The element 有 appears at the end of clauses in these examples too. During the Yuan period, Han, Khitan, and Jurchen peoples who were residing in Northern China all fell under the category of hanren 漢人, “Han people.” The “hanerren” 漢児人 in the above example refers precisely to this type of “Han person.” One can understand from this example that the kind of variant Chinese language that these people spoke was called “haner yanyu” 漢児言語 (the spoken lingua franca of the Han people). What is more, the “Qida” in the text’s strange title, “Lao Qida,” is a transcription of the word “Khitan.” The Khitan people dominated Northern China for a long time and therefore, in Turkish, Persian, and Russian, the word for “China” is Kitai. This word entered English as “Cathay.” The prefix “老-” refers to an abundance of experience. In short, “Lao Qida” means “[someone] well-versed in Chinese affairs.” The Old Cathayan interweaves various situated dialogues from a Koryŏ merchant’s journey to China, his arrival in Beijing, his trading activities, and his preparations for his return. This book may well be the world’s first foreign language textbook to embrace an element of storytelling. The Old Cathayan continued to be used as a textbook for learning spoken Chinese during the Chosŏn dynasty, but its contents were revised periodically to reflect the changing linguistic features of spoken Chinese, and in later revised editions the sentence-final “有” was removed. I have already mentioned that the Uighur people at this time used a kundoku-type vernacular reading practice to read Literary Sinitic. We also know that, at the same time, the Uighur people wrote in a Uighur-style Variant Literary Sinitic, which expressly reflected the grammatical traits of the Uighur language (Shōgaito 1982: 1:117). Letter-Writing: Japanese sōrōbun Epistolary Writing and Chinese Epistolary Style The most common Variant Literary Sinitic style in Japan was the sōrōbun 候文 epistolary style, which was widely used from medieval through modern times. The sinograph “候” (sōrō) can function either as a copula (~de aru; “it is”) or as a verb of existence (~ga aru; “there is”). When translated into the sōrōbun style, the previously-introduced phrase “夫孝徳之本也” (“filial piety is the basis for virtue”) from the Classic of Filial Piety would become: 2.7

それ 孝は

徳の

本に

候.

Sore KŌ wa TOKU no moto ni sōrō.

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That is, “候” functions in the same way as the “有” in Mongolian directtranslation style and the “在” in Silla Variant Literary Sinitic. But why is it that the character “候” came to be used this way? Sōrōbun appeared in the mid-eleventh century, during the late Heian Period, and began in collections of model correspondence called ōraimono 往 来物 or shōsoku 消息.21 The earliest example of sōrōbun is found in Fujiwara no Akihira’s 藤原明衡 (989–1066) Meigō ōrai 明衡往来 [Correspondence of (Fujiwara no) Akihira] (also known as Unshū shōsoku 雲州消息), a text written in Japanese-style Variant Literary Sinitic. In it, we find the following passage: 説法之事, 不堪之身頗恥入候之処,

As for the sermon, this unworthy person feels rather embarrassed. 蒙此仰之間, 弥向壁赤面

As I receive these enlightening words, I face the wall with an ever redder face, 臥地流汗了.

and as I prostrate myself on the ground, I perspire ceaselessly. This is an excerpt from a letter written by a monk, whose sermon is being praised and who is showing humility, essentially saying, “You embarrass me.” The usage of the phrase “恥入候” (lit. “shame enters-sōrō”) is no different from examples of sōrōbun from later ages. However, in Meigō ōrai the places where 候 is used in this way are extremely limited. In the vast majority of cases, it is the verb 侍 (haberi), a precursor of 候, that is used. Roughly one century later, toward the end of the twelfth century, during the Insei period, the use of 候 became widespread, as can be seen in Kirei mondō 貴嶺問答 [Questions and Answers at Kirei] written by Nakayama Tadachika 中山忠親 (1131–1195). The character 候 developed into the default expression, while 侍 became defunct. In short, 候 displaced 侍 over the course of about a hundred years. In the Muromachi period text Teikin ōrai 庭訓往來 [Book of Domestic Precepts], sōrōbun is used exclusively. Why such a change? The character 候 was also widely used in Chinese epistolary writing. Letters had to be written according to a number of strict compositional protocols; one needed to address one’s recipient, inquire about the weather, apologize for not having kept in touch, and wish for the recipient’s good health in the proper

21

From this point on, information on sōrōbun is taken from chaper 7, “Ōraimono” (Epistolary Writings), of Tachibana (1977).

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order and using particular expressions. As a result, there existed numerous compilations of epistolary templates and exemplars called shuyi 書儀 (“templates for letter-writing”), which offered instruction on how to compose letters and what phrases to use. China’s shuyi materials had a significant influence on Japanese ōraimono. All of the expressions used exclusively in letter-writing even in modern-day Japan, such as haikei 拝啓 (“Dear So-and-so”), fuitsu 不一 (“Sincerely yours”), fusen 不宣 (“Sincerely yours”), and keigu 敬具 (“Best regards”), were originally from China. Now I will introduce the basics of Chinese letter-writing by looking at the Yuan-period work, Qizha qingqian 啓箚靑錢 [Letters as Good as Ready Cash] (1324). In this work’s title, the word qizha 啓箚 means “letters,” while qingqian 靑錢 (lit. “bronze coins”) refers to “exemplary writing.” The section “Shoushu yi fu zhengshi” 手書一幅正式 [Correct Method for Writing a Hand-written Letter], found at the beginning of the book, explains the order in which one should compose a letter: 1. juli 具禮: Initial greetings 2. chenghu 稱呼: Addressing the recipient 3. xubie 叙別: Apology for not having kept in touch 4. zhanyang 瞻仰: Admiration for the recipient 5. jiri 即日: Prelude to seasonal greetings 6. shiling 時令: Seasonal greetings 7. fuwei 伏惟: Transition to items (8) onward 8. yanju 燕居: Descriptions of the recipient’s daily life 9. shenxiang 神相: Offering of gods’ blessings 10. zunhou 尊候: Expressions of concern regarding the recipient’s welfare 11. tuobi 托庇: Thanking the recipient for one’s own peaceful life All of these are prefatory steps to “12. rushi 入事: Main business.” Finally, one should conclude the letter by slowly going through the additional steps of: “13. weijian 未見: Expression of regrets for being unable to meet”; “14. zhusong 祝 頌: Wishing blessings of good health”; and finally, “15. buxuan 不宣: Final greetings.” In addition, there are detailed rules as to what expressions should be used in each step depending on such factors as relative social status, special circumstances (e.g., mourning), gender, and time of year. To take the tenth item, “zunhou 尊候: Concern regarding the recipient’s welfare” as an example, one uses “taihou” 台候 to address a bureaucrat, while one must use “zunhou” 尊候 to address a superior; “wenhou” 文候 is a more general expression, but “shuhou” 淑候 is used to address married women, and “fahou” 法候 to address Buddhist priests. These expressions would be used as part of a longer sequence, such as “zunhou qiju baifu” 尊候起居百福 (“Your daily life is blessed a hundredfold”). These are phrases unique to letter writing and not otherwise used in Literary Sinitic texts.

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These sort of rules regarding epistolary composition already existed in the Tang period. It was during the following Song period, however, that such techniques came to be rigidly defined and began to be widely used. As a result, in both letter exemplar collections and actual letters from the Song period and beyond, expressions like “zunhou” 尊候 came to be somewhat cliché and appear with tremendous frequency. For example, Shan’gu chidu 山谷簡尺 [Shan’gu’s Letters], a collection of letters written by the famous poet and calligrapher of the Northern Song, Huang Tingjian 黄庭堅 (styled Shan’gu; 1045–1105), is riddled with similar sounding phrases, including “fuwei zunhou wanfu” 伏惟尊候 萬福 (“I humbly wish you ten thousand fortunes”), “bushen zunhou heru” 不審 尊候何如 (“I have failed to pay attention to your health”), and “xicheng zunhou kanghe” 喜承尊候康和 (“Happy to hear that you are healthy”). Furthermore, there is chronological overlap between the period when 候 came to be used extensively in Chinese letter-writing and the period when sōrōbun began to be appear in Japanese ōraimono. Could this be mere coincidence? 2.8 Spread of “Practical Writing” This style of letter-writing has become obsolete. However, at the time, this was considered “practical writing” and was far more widely used than the sort of orthodox Literary Sinitic seen in histories and literary texts, such that numerous books on the topic were published. Practical writing seems to have been transmitted to Japan as trade between Japan and Song China flourished. The Meigō ōrai referenced above touches on the thriving trade between Japan and Song and contains Akihara’s remarks on imported books. The Qizha qingqian was transmitted to Japan quite early. However, well before that, we have the example of the Nara-period manuscript of the Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家 立成雑書要略 [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] in the hand of Empress Kōmyō, which is also a compilation of exemplary letters. Epistolary writing seems to have had a far greater influence on Japanese Literary Sinitic compared to the orthodox Literary Sinitic styles found in works such as the Shiji 史記 [Records of the Grand Historian] or Baishi wenji 白氏文 集 [Collected Works of Bai Juyi]. In today’s Japan, popular expressions from American English are snapped up by Japanese speakers and become so-called yokomoji 橫文字 (lit. “horizontal letters,” i.e., the roman alphabet) expressions, which stick out like sore thumbs. Similarly, it may well have been that from the time the character 候 first appeared in Chinese epistolary writing, it was quickly taken up by the import-loving Japanese people. In origin, 候 is a noun referring to the “state” or “shape” of things. Therefore, “zunhou” 尊候 originally meant “your venerable shape” and referred to the

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state or appearance of the recipient, and this in turn came to refer simply to the recipient him- or herself. However, because this was a usage unique to epistolary writing beginning with the Song period, Zhu Xi himself, writing in the period of the Southern Song, went so far as to say that the different expressions featuring the character 候 would be incomprehensible to people of the past (Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類, vol. 78). On the other hand, 候 can also function as a verb meaning “to visit; to inquire after,” and so it was also used in later epistolary writing as part of the phrase jinghou qiju 敬候起居 (“I respectfully inquire after your well-being”). We might imagine, then, that because the two meanings were confusingly similar, 候 was understood as a verb in Japan, and this resulted in the creation of the sōrōbun epistolary style. The use of sōrōbun style went beyond letter writing. It was also used for transcribing lines of dialogue in literary works and histories such as the Heike monogatari 平家物語 [Tales of the Heike] (mid-thirteenth century) and the Azuma kagami 五妻鏡 [Mirror of the East] (ca. 1300), as well as in Noh drama and in kyōgen plays. Epistolary collections such as the Teikin ōrai mentioned above were later used as textbooks in terakoya temple schools during the Edo period, during which time decrees and various kinds of official documents also came to be written in sōrōbun. Even Japanese emperors have been known to use this style for writing letters. Its use continued until just after the end of World War II. 2.9 Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Vernacular Writing and sōrōbun The Meiji era was a period of great transformation in the history of Japanese writing. As is well known, the writing style generally used for Japanese today owes its genesis to the Meiji period. The process through which the new literary style of the Meiji period came into being is a complex one, but its foundation is generally considered to have been founded on styles colored by Literary Sinitic (kanbun-chō 漢文調), i.e., the “kundoku style” of writing Japanese. In a narrow sense, the “Literary Sinitic” that I refer to here as “coloring” the new Meiji period literary style encompasses kundoku renderings of both orthodox Literary Sinitic and Sinitic poetry. However, these are not the only types of Literary Sinitic texts that influenced the new literary style of the Meiji period. The establishment of a newly hegemonic literary style in the Meiji period is greatly indebted to Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901). Fukuzawa aimed to produce texts in an easily comprehensible vernacular style (J. tsūzokubun 通俗文), and his lucid style of writing was already held in high repute. In the preface to his Fukuzawa zenshū 福沢全集 [Complete Works of Fukuzawa Yukichi] (1898), he confidently describes his own writing as follows: “That my general writing style is simple and easy-to-understand is what contemporary

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criticism has already acknowledged and what I myself believe without question” (Fukuzawa 1958: 1:3). He then spells out the details of his style as follows: Whether one inserts kana between sinographs in Literary Sinitic or eliminates the character 候 from colloquial-style writing, either method yields a translation-cum-compositional style of writing. Nevertheless, a style based in Literary Sinitic, even if it mixes in kana, is still Literary Sinitic writing, which makes it difficult to decipher. By contrast, if one removes the character 候 from colloquial-style writing, the result is vernacular (俗) at its core, and can thus gain currency among broad masses of readers (俗間). Still, using sinographs to supplement what colloquial writing lacks is extremely convenient, so sinographs should most definitely not be eliminated. Fukuzawa 1958: 1:6

In short, for Fukuzawa the fundamental types of literary composition were two: Literary Sinitic writing with inserted kana (i.e., kanbun kundokutai—the kundoku-style of rendering Literary Sinitic into Japanese) and sōrōbun style where the word 候 has been removed. He made the latter the core of his new style, but also actively incorporated aspects of the former. Later, Fukuzawa’s style was greatly influenced by writings in kana found in the collection Ofumisama 御文章 [Compositions] of Rennyo Shōnin 蓮如上人 (1415–1499). The Ofumisama is a work by the monk Rennyo in which he explains aspects of Buddhist doctrine to his disciplines, written in an epistolary style and using the vernacular; however, in some places it retains certain stylistic elements of Literary Sinitic writing and occasionally uses 候. What should not go unmentioned when considering the relationship between Fukuzawa and sōrōbun epistolary style is his own letter-writing practice. His Fukuzawa Yukichi shokanshū 福沢諭吉書簡集 [Collection of Fukuzawa’s Letters; published by Iwanami Shoten] contains a total of 2654 letters written by Fukuzawa between the ages of twenty-three and sixty-six, i.e., between the fourth year of the Ansei period (1857) and the thirty-third year of Meiji (1900). The great majority of these letters are in sōrōbun, with a few exceptions of letters written in English or colloquial Japanese writing which were addressed to foreigners. This type of writing practice, however, was not limited to Fukuzawa. At the time, it was simply customary to write letters in sōrōbun, and Fukuzawa was only following the cultural practices of his time. The creators of the newly emergent literary styles of the Meiji period, including Fukuzawa, were well versed in Literary Sinitic writing. However, the

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vast majority of their readers were probably less-than-expert users of Literary Sinitic but capable writers of sōrōbun. Fukuzawa paid close attention to this popular and vernacular aspect of sōrōbun. When it comes to the influence of Literary Sinitic on Meiji writing and literature, the story is incomplete if one speaks only of Literary Sinitic in the strictest sense and ignores the importance of the Variant Literary Sinitic style called sōrōbun. In letters addressed to young students at Keiō Gijuku, the public school founded by Fukuzawa himself, Fukuzawa frequently recommends that students write letters in order to improve their overall writing abilities. That is, Fukuzawa encouraged them to write sōrōbun. 2.10 Variant Literary Sinitic Registers across East Asia The new inscriptional styles that emerged in the Meiji period exerted great influence not only on Japan but also on other polities in East Asia. The commonly used written styles in present-day South and North Korea, both in terms of Sino-Korean vocabulary and types of expressions, were greatly influenced by Japanese writing during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945). Furthermore, present-day Chinese writing styles were created by intellectuals like Lu Xun, Liang Qichao, and Zhou Zuoren, who were familiar with the different styles of Meiji writing, the influence of which can be glimpsed throughout their works. In short, the present-day writing styles of Japan, China, and Korea all stem to some extent or other from Meiji writing styles. Though mutually unintelligible and different in many ways, they nonetheless are each, at their core, a sort of Variant Literary Sinitic mode that is shared across East Asia. In the background of all this, of course, lie long traditions of using both orthodox Literary Sinitic and different types of Variant Literary Sinitic in China, Korea, and Japan. This fact is difficult to perceive nowadays, and there are at least two reasons why. The first problem is a practical one and concerns education in the national languages. The literary canon as enshrined in Japan’s national language education system encompasses only literature written in vernacular Japanese, such as the Genji monogatari 源氏物語 [Tale of Genji], and classics in orthodox Literary Sinitic, such as the Analects and Tang poetry. Literature written in Variant Literary Sinitic, such as sōrōbun, is not taught. This has led to the strange phenomenon whereby grandchildren cannot decipher letters from their grandfathers’ generation. Similarly, Korean classical literature as taught in today’s Korean schools refers exclusively to literature written in vernacular Korean in han’gŭl; idumun and the like are not taught, and needless to say, the general public cannot read such texts.

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The other reason is a historical one. From the nineteenth century, Western-style modern civilization became the overriding goal in the East Asian region and efforts were made to establish Western notions of the nation-state and national languages. As a result, any sense of perspective on significant cultural traits that predated modern notions and the modern nation was lost. To take just one example, the vast majority of traditional Korean and Japanese literature consists of Sinitic poetry and other writings in orthodox Literary Sinitic. But the drive toward the modern nation-state and its ideology of a singular vernacular history of the nation and national literature has precluded the consideration of works written in anything other than the vernacular as part of a national canon. As a result, only literature written in kana and han’gŭl can be considered “national” literature. In today’s Japan and Korea, there are many people who know waka and haiku in kana, and sijo in han’gŭl. However, those who can recite a Sinitic poem written by classical poets from their own (pre-) national traditions are extremely rare. Speaking of Variant Literary Sinitic, just as the qualifier “variant” in its name suggests, the general perception is that it represents a localization or nativization of the more orthodox pan-East Asian (Chinese) Literary Sinitic, and in general the fact that such practices also existed in China has been overlooked. As a result, Variant Literary Sinitic has been denied status as either “classical” literature in orthodox Literary Sinitic or “national” literature in the vernacular script, and instead is relegated to the status of stepchild, as it were. This explains why, within modern-day national language education, “Classical Literature” means primarily literature written in the vernacular/“national” script, while orthodox Literary Sinitic is taught only in the most perfunctory manner. However, as I have discussed thus far, when one looks at East Asia as a whole, one realizes that in fact it was Variant Literary Sinitic that occupied a great part, if not the lion’s share, of the diverse world of Literary Sinitic. When one looks at the big picture, expressions like “券売” (“ticket-vending”), “発券” (“issuing-ticketing”), and “改札口” (“ticket gate”), which I discussed in the Introduction, also pertain to the problem of Variant Literary Sinitic. This is a historical problem, but at the same time perhaps one which we encounter on an everyday basis in East Asia.

Chapter 4

Concluding Thoughts: The East Asian Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere 1

A Diverse Range of Ways to Pronounce Sinographs

Sinographs are ideograms: they express meaning. Therefore, the meanings of the individual sinographs, regardless of the passage of time or changes in place, remain unchanged. Whatever the time and wherever the place, the character “山” means “mountain.” To be sure, special meanings can arise, depending on the historical period and region. Especially in regions outside China—like, for example, in Japan, where we saw in the beginning of this book how the character “改” in “改札” has come to have the meaning “check” as in “check tickets”—sinographs can develop new meanings different from that of the original character under the influence of local vernaculars. But overall, such examples are extremely rare, and generally speaking, it is safe to say that the meanings of sinographs change very little. And even in the case of the shapes of individual characters, though they come in various calligraphic styles, like zhuanshu 篆書 (seal script), lishu 隷書 (clerical script), caoshu 草書 (cursive script), xingshu 行書 (running script), and kaishu 楷書 (regular script), as well as in many variant and abbreviated shapes, these too change very little across time and space. In contrast with these relatively stable and unchanging features, the pronunciations of sinographs change greatly across time and space. Even in China, the pronunciations have changed greatly between ancient times and the present, and they also vary widely across regional topolects. If all of these were to be recorded in a phonetic script, it would be possible to change the orthography in accordance with the changes in pronunciation, but then, just as has happened with English, archaic pronunciations would linger in the spelling, and a gap would form between the written representations and the actual pronunciations. But because sinographs are logographs, the meanings and shapes of the graphs remain unchanged, while only the pronunciations continue to change. Even in their homeland of China, sinographs vary widely in their pronunciations, but in the various neighboring countries which have adopted them, and depending on the time of adoption and the influence of the sound systems of the indigenous languages in each of them, a diversity of Sino-Xenic pronunciation systems has arisen: Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese, and Sino-Uighur. And in Japan and in earlier times on the Korean Peninsula, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_006

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methods of hundok/kundoku vernacular reading developed for reading sinographs, with the result that one and the same sinograph could end up with a multitude of possible readings. Because of this, although readers are able to understand if they see the sinographs with their eyes, if they merely were to hear fellow literati from other regions read them aloud without being able to see them, communication would fail. This is why communication using sinographs between the different regions had to take place via “brush conversations”—a phenomenon in world history that is likely unique to East Asia. In Chapter 2, I introduced the episode from the Edo period in Japan of the brush conversation between the Chosŏn envoy and the Japanese monk Daiten; the two of them sat across from each other, brushes in hand, and when one had something to say, he would write it down on a piece of paper and pass it across to his counterpart, whereupon the latter would perhaps crack a faint smile or cock his head before responding in like manner. And so the silent enterprise would continue, a strange sight to behold. 2

A Diverse Range of Ways to Read Literary Sinitic

This diversity in methods for reading sinographs can be seen even more clearly in written compositions comprised of multiple sinographs strung together—i.e., in the methods for reading Literary Sinitic texts. For example, in the case of reading poems by Tang poet Du Fu, the pronunciation of sinographs has changed greatly between the Tang period when he composed them and the present day. And yet, now as then, there exist multiple possibilities for reading, and if one were to simply hear a poem of Du Fu read aloud in either the modern Mandarin of Beijing or Cantonese of Guangdong, it would be impossible to understand what was being read. In Japan, on the other hand, Du Fu’s poems are read in the Japanese kundoku “vernacular reading” style, with word-order inversions, while in Korea they are read in chiktok (“straight reading”) style, pausing at each natural semantic break to insert appropriate vernacular Korean grammatical markers. Vernacular reading can be described as a kind of translation, but because there is no other method used to read out the original text, it is not really a translation but a reading of the original. Moreover, Sinitic poetry is rhymed, but in the Japanese and Korean styles of reading it, the rhymes are only sensed obliquely, if at all. This is why, even when reading the same poems by Du Fu, while the understanding of the basic meaning may remain constant, the ways in which Chinese, Japanese, and Korean readers appreciate and respond to the poems are all vastly different.

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Written texts lay at the core of traditional East Asian culture centered around China, and intellectuals across this region all read Confucian classics like the Analects and canonical works like the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian or the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu for many centuries. But the ways in which they actually read these classical works differed by region, and these different methods of reading influenced in turn the different reception and appreciation of these classical works in each region. This is a phenomenon that would be unthinkable in the cases of reading either the Bible in Latin or the Qur’an in Arabic. 3

A Diverse Range of Literary Sinitic Inscriptional Styles

As I noted earlier, communication between the different regions of East Asia in premodern times took place primarily via brush conversations, and the efficacy of this method was predicated on the rules and norms of orthodox Literary Sinitic. But as I have already described, there were also numerous other inscriptional styles in addition to orthodox Literary Sinitic, and among the many styles of Variant Literary Sinitic there were even some which, though written entirely in sinographs, would have been incomprehensible to readers from other regions. In addition to sinographs, there were also other writing systems specific to individual regions, such as Japanese kana, Korean han’gŭl, the Khitan and Jurchen scripts, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, etc., all of which could be deployed either on their own or mixed together with sinographs, adding further to the plethora of inscriptional styles. To put it another way, the same semantic content could be expressed in any number of different ways using different scripts and different inscriptional styles. This question of diversity in inscriptional options was in many ways even more important than the diversity in reading methods already discussed. After all, whereas methods of reading tend to be singular and fixed in a single time period and single place, different technologies of writing and different inscriptional styles can co-exist in the same place at the same time. For example, in modern-day Japan there are various levels of expression and inscriptional style, ranging from the Literary Sinitic flavor of ware wa gakusei nari 我は学生なり to katakana expressions like watakushi wa gakusei desu ワタシ ハガクセイデス, both meaning “I am a student.” In Korean, too, one has a choice between at least two possibilities—writing exclusively in han’gŭl or mixing in sinographs. This type of diversity in inscriptional styles using a multiplicity of writing systems is probably another phenomenon unique to East Asia. And at

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least in the cases of Japan and Korea, this is intimately connected to the tradition of reading Literary Sinitic via hundok/kundoku vernacular reading, using kana, simplified sinographs that correspond to kana, or han’gŭl. 4

Literary Sinitic Inscriptional Style and Social Class

But it was not simply that these diverse inscriptional styles merely coexisted alongside each other; rather, each was tied to specific groups identified by such features as social class or gender and came to fulfill specific functions and acquire certain specific aesthetic characteristics. For example, in Japan, orthodox Literary Sinitic was the exclusive preserve of an extremely limited group of elite males. On the other hand, more practical inscriptional styles like Variant Literary Sinitic and sōrōbun were used across a broader range of functions like letters and public documents, while texts in kana were used by the broadest class of all, encompassing commoners, women, and children. And then there was the mixed-script style, which combines sinographs and kana; this style was used in narrative literature like the Tales of the Heike and, by way of the kundoku style writing of the Meiji period, developed into the most commonly used inscriptional style for modern-day Japanese. In the midst of these various inscriptional styles, even in the kana-only style of the Tale of Genji, we can detect the influence of Chinese literature in the form of Bai Juyi’s poetry, meaning that, in terms of both content and inscriptional style, there are deep connections running through and across these numerous writing systems and styles. Much the same can be said of the relationship between orthodox Literary Sinitic, Variant Literary Sinitic, idu writing (idumun), han’gŭl-only texts, and mixed-script texts on the Korean Peninsula. Even in China, where only sinographs are used, a similar constellation of relationships holds between Literary Sinitic, practical styles like clerical writing (C. liwen 吏文) and epistolary writing, and the colloquial-inflected styles of baihua and semi-baihua texts. Along with vertical differences along social class lines within each region, we can also discern horizontal relationships among members of similar social classes across different regions. I have already described the relationship between Chinese epistolary style and Japanese sōrōbun style (see pp. 205–208 above), but an even more salient example would be that of women’s inscriptional styles. In Japan, kana were known as “women’s script,” and it is well known that kana gave rise to a unique form of women’s courtly literature called nyōbō bungaku 女房文学, but similar things can be said of Korean literature in han’gŭl from the late Chosŏn dynasty. In this period, han’gŭl was used primarily by

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women, or in letters sent by men to their mothers and wives. As a result, the many han’gŭl narratives and han’gŭl translations of Chinese fiction that arose during this period were mostly enjoyed by female readers. A parallel example from China would be the tanci 彈詞 narratives that attained popularity in the Jiangnan region in the Ming and Qing periods; as reading material they functioned in much the same way as xiaoshuo 小說 fictional narratives, but for the most part were both authored and enjoyed by women. Tanci narratives were of course written in sinographs, but these included many simplified and abbreviated forms as well as many cases of sinographs used as phonograms. The nüshu 女書 (“women’s script”) discovered in Jiangyong county, Hunan province that has garnered so much attention in recent scholarship is a writing system confined to this one region, but is used exclusively by women for exchanging letters and composing written narratives to be read by fellow women. These forms of women’s literature in China, Korea, and Japan share in common certain features like detailed psychological descriptions and a prolix, long-winded literary style, in contrast to the terse concision valued in orthodox Literary Sinitic. This is the result not of relationships of mutual influence, but due to the specialization across social class lines of different inscriptional styles in East Asia. The phenomenon of special forms of women’s literature in special women’s inscriptional styles is yet another feature that is likely difficult to find outside of East Asia. 5

The East Asian Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere

Based on what I have outlined above, it would appear that in order to understand comprehensively the diversity of Literary Sinitic(s) that stood at the center of the premodern East Asian cultural sphere, the concept of “Chinese Character Cultural Sphere,” “Kanji Sphere,” or “Sinographosphere” as used to date is not entirely adequate. The issue lies not in individual sinographs, but in the way they are strung together as text—that is, as an inscriptional style (C. wenti, J. buntai, K. munch’e 文體). Traditionally, the term kanbun in Japan referred to orthodox Literary Sinitic, and this is precisely what was learned in schools. But even while orthodox Literary Sinitic served as a pan-regional, shared written language in East Asia, its scope of coverage was extremely narrow. Thus, it was supplemented by inscriptional styles with broader ranges of use like different forms of Variant Literary Sinitic, various styles based in indigenous scripts that were derived either directly or indirectly from sinographs, and hybrid styles that mixed sinographs and indigenous scripts. These various and diverse inscriptional styles,

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as I have emphasized repeatedly throughout this book, cannot be divorced from each other and together form a complex and interwoven tapestry. In recent years, attempts have been underway across various academic disciplines engaged in the study of East Asia to go beyond nation-centered views of history and examine regional cultures in a more synthetic and comprehensive way. But for such attempts to succeed, our studies of Literary Sinitic should not stop with texts in orthodox Literary Sinitic, but must include any and all inscriptional styles written in sinographs, with the goal of elucidating both the actual uses to which these various styles were put and their relationships with each other. To that end, rather than the term “Sinographic Cultural Sphere,” I propose that adopting the term “Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere” would be more appropriate.

Chapter 5

Epilogue My interest in Literary Sinitic vernacular reading traditions began in 1978 with the episode mentioned earlier in this book (pp. 140–141) at Haeinsa Temple in Korea when I witnessed two monks reading a Buddhist sutra together with the aid of Arabic numerals to indicate word-order differences between Literary Sinitic and Korean. But at that time, instead of realizing that this might reflect in some sense the ancestral origins of the Japanese practice, I assumed it must owe its existence to influence from Japan. It was only later, when I learned of the hundok markings in the fragments of the Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra from the Koryŏ dynasty, that I came to realize that this “reading-bygloss” or “vernacular reading” technique must have been practiced in Korea since ancient times and been transmitted from there to Japan. On the other hand, neither did I assume that vernacular reading must have been invented independently and ex nihilo on the Korean Peninsula. This is because I imagined that similar techniques could just as likely have arisen in any of the regions on the Chinese periphery that had come into contact with sinographs and Literary Sinitic. Subsequently, I came to learn of parallel phenomena among the Uighurs and the Khitan, and made my first attempt at systematizing my thinking on the topic in an article titled, “Vernacular Reading Phenomena in East Asia” (Kin 1988). This book is an extended treatment of that earlier article, incorporating many years of subsequent research convincing me that it was the experience of translating Buddhist sutras into Chinese that lay at the root of all East Asian vernacular reading phenomena. Some of my arguments are at odds with accepted theories in the field, and others are entirely new, making criticism of them on some counts inevitable. But there is no doubting that the translation of the Buddhist canon into Chinese exerted a tremendous influence on thinking about language and writing, not only in China but all across East Asia. Numerous important cultural phenomena—vernacular reading techniques among them—were born of this vast undertaking, and the notion that it influenced not only ideologies of language and writing, but also ideas about peoples and polities across the region, will, I trust, elicit general agreement. The idea of a Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere (as opposed to a Chinese Character Cultural Sphere or Sinographic Cultural Sphere), therefore, is another of the book’s main arguments, and follows directly from these ideas about the seminal project to translate the Buddhist canon into Chinese.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004437302_007

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But whether one refers to it as the Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere or the Sinographic Cultural Sphere, such a concept was by no means prevalent in ancient times, nor is it a part of common East Asian consciousness today. Unlike Japan, both Vietnam and Korea share borders with China and historically have had complex relations with their much larger neighbor. Moreover, because today the one has long since abandoned sinographs, and the other hardly uses them anymore, there would probably be resistance in these countries to the notion of a Sinographic Cultural Sphere. And despite the fact that in premodern times sinographs and Literary Sinitic were shared across this region, even then any common consciousness of this fact was feeble at best. This state of affairs contrasts with the heightened sense of self-consciousness through mutual coexistence found in the Christian and Islamic religio-cultural spheres, and probably owes historically, among other reasons, to the relative poverty of personal experience with other cultures in the East Asian region. The only foreign culture in East Asia was that of Indian Buddhism, but even in this case East Asia had virtually no practical dealings with India in political, economic, or military matters. For East Asia, India was only ever an imagined place, depicted mentally over the ages through the prism of Buddhism. But this situation changed dramatically in the nineteenth century with the shock of contact with alien Western cultures, and today East Asia lives in an age when the global language is English. It would be no exaggeration to say that East Asians today have lost both the foundations and even the faint glimmers of the consciousness of an earlier time when they shared a common heritage in sinographs and Literary Sinitic. Now is the time, then, to examine and compare the historical roles that sinographs and Literary Sinitic have played in the different regions of East Asia, and to study holistically the differences and similarities between them. Whatever new changes and developments subsequent historical forces may bring to East Asia, it is the duty of contemporary scholars to pursue these important questions. This was precisely my motivation in writing this book. In closing, I take great pleasure in acknowledging two debts of gratitude. The book has benefitted immensely from the expertise and guidance of my colleague Funayama Tōru 船山徹, especially with regard to matters Buddhist. And the very first reader of the book, Mr. Hirata Ken’ichi 平田賢一 of Iwanami Shoten Publishers, has provided precious advice and counsel throughout the process, ranging from the overall structure of the work to its cover design. My sincere thanks to them both. 金文京

July 2010

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Index of Named Individuals Amoghavajra a.k.a. Bukong Jin’gang 不空 金剛 (705–774) 101, 121–122, 125 Aoki Masaru 青木正児 (1887–1964) 73, 83 Bai Juyi 白居易 a.k.a. Bai Letian 白樂天 (772–846) 31, 54, 62, 127, 146, 165–166, 171, 208, 216 Bukong 不空 a.k.a. Amoghavajra (705–774)  101, 121–122, 125 Buttetsu 佛徹 (dates unknown) 25 Bunshi Genshō 文之玄昌 (1555–1620) 62, 68 Cangjie 蒼頡 27–28 Chamberlain, Basil Hall (1850–1935) 82 Chao Yuezhi 晁說之 (1059–1129) 105 Chen Shou 陳壽 (233–297) 155 Chengguan 澄觀 (738–839) 130 Chitatsu 智達 (fl. 7th c.) 25, 111 Chitsū 智通 (fl. 7th c.) 25, 111 Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (dates unknown)  126–127 Chu Sigyŏng 周時經 (1876–1914) 139 Daiten Kenjō 大典顕常 (1719–1801) xxviii, 100, 214 Daozong 道宗 (1032–1101) 145 Dazai Shundai 太宰春台 (1680–1747) 68, 71–73, 80–81, 99, 154–155 Devaśāntika a.k.a. Tianxizai 天息災 (J. Tensokusai) 19 Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) xxviii, 200, 214–215 Du Mu 杜牧 (803–852) 168 Duan Chengshi 段成式 (?–863) 119–120 Emperor Minh Mạng 明命帝 (r. 1820–1841) 151 Emperor Monmu 文武天皇 (683–707) 194, 196 Emperor Ōjin 応神天皇 (5th c.?) 89 Emperor Shōmu 聖武 (r. 724–749) 111 Empress Kōmyō 光明 (701–760) 33, 45, 49, 184, 208 Empress Shōtoku 称徳 (r. 764–770) 111 Empress Suiko 推古天皇 (554–628) 193 Emura Hokkai 江村北海 (1713–1788) 74

Fujiwara no Akihira 藤原明衡 (989–1066)  206 Fujiwara no Mochiakira 藤原茂明 (ca. 1093–?) 54 Fujiwara no Teika 藤原定家 (1162–1241) 31, 172, 174 Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901)  xxviii, 48, 137–138, 209–210 Ganjin 鑑真 (688–763) 109 Gishin 義真 (781–833) 11 Giyō Hōshū 岐陽方秀 (1361–1424) 61–63 Gotō Shizan 後藤芝山 (1721–1782) 68 Guan Lu 管輅 (209–256) 44 Guan Yunshi 貫雲石 = Sevinch Qaya 小雲石 海涯 (1286–1324) 201–203 Guan Zhong 管仲 (720–645 bce) 155–156 Guifeng Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (780–841) 24 Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) 143 Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) 68, 88 Ho Chi Minh 胡志明 (1890–1969) viii, 167–169 Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1201) 141–145 Huang Tingjian 黄庭堅 (styled Shan’gu 山谷; 1045–1105) 45, 208 Huiguo 慧果 (746–805) 122 Huijun 慧均 (fl. late sixth century) 28 Huilin 慧琳 (737–820) 24, 125, 133 Huiyuan 慧苑 (J. Eon, 673?–743?) 36, 40–41, 111 Hyech’o 慧超 (ca. 704–787) 121–125, 184 Hyŏnch’o 玄超 (fl. 7th c.) 122 Ichijō Kaneyoshi 一条兼良 (1402–1481)  63–66 Inoue Kakugorō 井上角五郎 (1860–1938)  138 Iryŏn 一然 (1206–1289) 106–107 Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 (1627–1705) 68–70 Itō Tōgai 伊藤東涯 (1670–1736) 69, 74, 80, 88, 99 Jia Dao 賈島 (779–843) 142–144 Jianzhen 鑑真 (J. Ganjin, 688–763) 109 Jien 慈圓 (1155–1225) 29–31, 125, 127, 171, 174

Index of Named Individuals Jisshananda a.k.a. Shichanantuo 實叉難陀 (652–710) 120 Kanda Kiichirō 神田喜一郎 (1897–1984) 54 Keian Genju 桂庵玄樹 (1427–1508) 62–63, 65–66, 69, 71, 80–81 Kibi no Makibi 吉備真備 (695–775) 72, 107 Kim Okkyun 金玉均 (1851–1894) 137 Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151) 106–107 Kiyohara no Nobukata 清原宣賢 (1475–1550)  60n33 Kobayashi Yoshinori 小林芳規 (1929–)  xii–xiii, 110, 117–118 Kojong 高宗 (1852–1919) 136 Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648) 14–15, 24 Kūkai 空海 (774–835) 122 Kumārajīva a.k.a. Jimoluoshi 鳩摩羅什 (344–413) 19, 101, 177 Kuraishi Takeshirō 倉石武四郎 (1897–1975)  83 Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409) 134 Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973) 125–128, 131, 197 Li Bai 李白 (styled Taibo 太白; 701–762)  xxviii, 180, 200, 215 Li Yanshou 李延壽 (fl. 650) 146n41 Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929) vi, xliv, 78–81, 136, 211 Liu Ban 劉攽 (1023–1089) 174 Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223) 156–157 Liu Xie 劉勰 (5th century) 49 Lü Nan 呂柟 (1479–1542) 65 Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) 80–81, 211 Minamoto no Shitagō 源順 (911–983) 23 Mujū Dōkyō 無住道曉 (1226–1312) 30 Myōe 明恵 (1173–1232) 107 Myōgaku 明覺 (1056–1106) 29 Nakamura Masanao 中村正直 (1832–1891)  137 Nakayama Tadachika 中山忠親 (1131–1195)  206 Nam P’unghyŏn 南豊鉉 (1935–) xii–xiii, 117–118, 124n31, 130 National Master Ŭich’ŏn 大覺國師 義天 (1055–1101) 105

229 Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916) 76, 165–166, 169 172, 174 Nishimura Hiroko 西村浩子 (1962–) 118 Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) 69–71, 81–82, 99–100 Oka Hakku 岡白駒 (1692–1767) 49 Ōmi no Mifune 淡海三船 (722–785)  108–109 Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人 (665–731) 33 Paek Sŭnghyŏn 白勝賢 (dates unknown)  133 Phạm Lập Trai 范立齋 (1760–1825) 151 Prince Shōtoku 聖徳太子 191n17, 193 P’yowŏn 表員 (fl. latter half of the 8th century) 112 Quackenbos, George Payn (1826–1881) 76 Rennyo Shōnin 蓮如上人 (1415–1499) 210 Rizhao 日照 a.k.a. Divākara (613–687) 120 Rōben 良弁 (689–773) 111 Saichō 最澄 (767–822) 11 Satō Issai 佐藤一斎 (1772–1859) 73 Seng You 僧佑 (445–518) 22 Sevinch Qaya 小雲石海涯 = Guan Yunshi 貫雲石 (1286–1324) 201–203 Shigeno Yasutsugu 重野安繹 (1827–1910)  81–83 Shima Kazunori 島一徳 (fl. 1870s) 76 Shinshō 審祥 or 審詳 (?–ca. 742) 110–111 Shōgei 聖冏 (1341–1420) 30 Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–86 BC) 52, 215 Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1341–1399) 150, 163, 203 Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰 (fl. 7th century) 106–109, 127, 142 Sŏl Son 偰遜 (?–1360) 150 Song Lian 宋濂 (1310–1381) 70, 78 Sŏng Taejung 成大中 (1732–1812) 100 Śubhakarasiṃha a.k.a. Shanwuwei 善無畏 (673–735) 122 Sun Chuo 孫綽 (314–371) 17 T’aejo Yi Sŏnggye 太祖李成桂 (r. 1392–1398)  134

230

Index of Named Individuals

Tan’gun 檀君 132, 134 Tiantai Zhiyi 天台智顗 (538–598) 16, 105 Tōgen Zuisen 桃源瑞仙 (1430–1489) 51, 60 Tōkai Sanshi 東海散士 (1852–1922) 75

Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎 (1619–1682) 68 Yelü Chucai 耶律楚材 (1189–1243) 175 Yi Chonyŏn 李兆年 (1269–1343) 199 Yi Kyugyŏng 李圭景 (1788–1856) 134, 227 Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598) 165–166, 169, Ŭich’ŏn 義天 (1055–1101) 105 173–174 Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702) 107, 111, 121 Yijing 義浄 (635–713) 119 Ukai Sekisai 鵜飼石斎 (1615–1664) 68 Yu Chŏngsu 柳定秀 (1857–1935) 137 Yu Jing 余靖 (1000–1064) 174 Vajrabodhi a.k.a. Jin’gangzhi 金剛智 (671–741)  Yu Kilchun 兪吉濬 (1856–1914) 137–139 121 Yun Ch’iho 尹致昊 (1864–1945) 137 Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696) 105, 120–121 Wŏnhyo 元曉 (617–686) 106–109, 111, 121 Xu Heng 許衡 (1209–1281) 161–162, 201, 203 Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664) 19, 21, 25, 111, 120–121, 177 Yamanoue no Okura 山上憶良 (ca. 660–ca. 733) 33

Zhang Shoujie 張守節 (active 725–735) 52 Zhanran 湛然 (711–782) 133 Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597) 16, 105 Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) 80–81, 211 Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) 14, 61–62, 65–66, 178, 209 Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234) 155–157, 160 Zongmi 宗密 (780–841) 24

Index of Texts Cited Abhidharma mahāvibhāṣa śāstra (C. Apitan piposha lun 阿毘曇毘婆沙論) [Great Commentary on the Abhidharma] 26 Abridged Commentary on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment (C. Yuanjue jing lüeshuchao 圓覺經略疏鈔) 24 Account of Buddhism Sent from the South Seas (C. Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan 南海寄歸内 法傳) 119 Analects (C. Lunyu, J. Rongo, K. Nonŏ 論 語) 8–9, 12, 14, 32, 62n35, 67, 73, 85, 89, 146–147, 162, 211, 215 Apitan piposha lun 阿毘曇毘婆沙論 (Abhidharma mahāvibhāṣa śāstra) [Great Commentary on the Abhidharma] 26 Art of Falconry and Hawking (K. Ŭnggolbang 鷹鶻方) 199 Azuma kagami 五妻鏡 [Mirror of the East] 209 Baishi wenji 白氏文集 (J. Hakushi monjū) [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] 31, 54–56, 58, 62, 171, 208 Beishi 北史 [History of the Northern Dynasties] 146–147 Biography of Jianzhen 鑑真 (J. Tō Daiwajō tōseiden 唐大和上東征傳) 109 Biography of Kyunyŏ (K. Kyunyŏ chŏn 均如傳; Tae Hwaŏm sujwa wŏnt’ong yangjung taesa Kyunyŏ chŏn 大華嚴首座圓通兩重大師 均如傳) 125–128 Book of Changes (C. Zhouyi, K. Chuyŏk 周易; a.k.a. C. Yi jing, J. Ekikyō, K. Yŏk kyŏng 易經) 98, 133, 151–152 Book of Documents (C. Shujing, J. Shokyō, K. Sŏgyŏng 書經; a.k.a. C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ 尚書) 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Book of Domestic Precepts (J. Teikin ōrai 庭訓 往來) 206, 209 Book of Odes (C. Shijing, J. Shikyō, K. Sigyŏng 詩經) 15, 98, 146, 188–189 Bore xinjing 般若心經 (Skt. Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra, J. Hannya shingyō) [Heart Sūtra] 19–20, 177

Brahma’s Net Sūtra (Skt. Brahmajāla Sūtra, C. Fanwang jing 梵網經) 50 Brahmajāla Sūtra (C. Fanwang jing 梵網經) [Brahma’s Net Sūtra] 50 Buddhist Monks’ Pilgrimages to the West of the Great Tang in Pursuit of the Dharma (C. Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐西域 求法高僧傳) 119–120 Catalogue of Commentaries and Logic Works of the Flower Garland (Kegon) Sect (J. Kegonshū shōsho narabi ni inmyōroku 華嚴宗章疏并因明録) 112 Chang ahan jing 長阿含經 [Longer Āgama Sūtra] 132 Chengshi lun 成實論 (J. Jōjitsuron, Skt. Tattvasiddhi-śāstra) [Treatise on the Establishment of Truth] 43 Ch’ŏnjamun 千字文 (C. Qianzi wen, J. Senjimon) [Thousand Character Classic] 89–90, 148 Chronicles of Japan (J. Nihon shoki 日本 書紀) 17–18, 22, 25, 89, 104, 181, 184 Chronicles of Japan Continued (J. Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀) 107–108, 194 Chusanzang jiji 出三蔵記集 [Collection of Records on the Emanation of the Chinese Tripiṭaka] 21–22 “Chushi biao” 出師表 [Memorial on Dispatching the Troops] 157, 160 Chuyŏk 周易 (C. Zhouyi, J. Shūeki; a.k.a. C. Yi jing, J. Ekikyō, K. Yŏk kyŏng 易經) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 Clarification of Consciousness Sūtra a.k.a. Mahāyāna Sūtra of Consciousness Revealed (C. Dasheng xianshi jing, J. Daijō kenshikikyō 大乗顯識經) 120 Collected Works of Bai Juyi (C. Baishi wenji, J. Hakushi monjū 白氏文集) 31, 54–56, 58, 62, 171, 208 Collected Works of the Tranquil Retiree (C. Zhanran jushi ji 湛然居士集) 175 Collection of Essays Magnifying the Light (C. Hongmingji 弘明集) 17

232 Collection of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Letters (J. Fukuzawa Yukichi shokanshū 福沢諭吉 書簡集) 210 Collection of Gleaned Gems (J. Shūgyokushū 拾玉集) 29 Collection of Myriad Leaves (J. Man’yōshū 万葉集) xix, 125, 170 Collection of Records on the Emanation of the Chinese Tripiṭaka (C. Chusanzang jiji 出三 蔵記集) 21–22 Collection of Sand and Pebbles (J. Shasekishū 沙石集) 30 Collection of Satirical and Admonitory Works (C. Fengjian ji 諷諫集) 146 Colophon to the Tripiṭaka Supplement (K. Sokchanggyŏng kan’gi 續藏經 刊記) 105 Commentary on the Four Books (C. Sishu jizhu, J. Shisho shitchū 四書集注) 61–62 Commentary on the Humane King Sūtra (J. Ninnōkyōsho, K. Inwang kyŏng so 仁王 經疏) 105–106, 120 Commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra for Humane Kings who Wish to Protect their States (C. Renwang huguo bore jingshu 仁王護國般若經疏) 16, 105 Compendium of Biographies and Materials Related to Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang (C. Xuanzang sanzang shizi zhuan congshu 玄奘三藏師資傳叢書) 121 Compilation of Ancient Epistles (J. Kojō zoroe 古状揃) 182 Complete Works of Fukuzawa Yukichi (J. Fukuzawa zenshū 福沢全集) 209 Compositions (J. Ofumisama 御文章) 210 Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra (C. Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji, J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki 續華嚴 經略疏刊定記) 36, 38–40, 42–43, 46, 109, 111 Correct Meanings of the Records of the Grand Historian (C. Shiji zhengyi 史記正義) 52 Correspondence of [Fujiwara no] Akihira (J. Meigō ōrai 明衡往来; Unshū shōsoku 雲州消息) 206, 208

Index of Texts Cited Da banniepan jing 大般涅槃經 (Skt. Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra) [Nirvāṇa Sūtra] 22, 23n8, 26–27, 130 Da bore boluomiduo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經 (Skt. Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra) [Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra] 24 Da piluzhena chengfo shenbian jiachi jing 大毘盧遮那成佛神變加持經 (Skt. Mahāvairocana Sūtra) [Great Illuminator Sūtra] 122 Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐 西域求法高僧傳 [Buddhist Monks’ Pilgrimages to the West of the Great Tang in Pursuit of the Dharma] 119–120 Daigaku shōku (C. Daxue zhangju 大 學章句 [Passages from the Great Learning] 60n33, 61–62, 65 Daihannyakyō ongi 大般若經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra] 18 Daijō kenshikikyō 大乗顯識經 (C. Dasheng xianshi jing) [Mahāyāna Sūtra of Consciousness Revealed a.k.a. Clarification of Consciousness Sūtra] 120 Daijōmuryōjukyō 大乗無量壽經 (C. Dasheng wuliangshou jing) [Great Vehicle Sūtra of the one of Immeasurable Longevity] 40 Dari jing 大日經 (Skt. Mahāvairocana Sūtra) [Great Illuminator Sūtra] 122 Dasheng wuliangshou jing 大乗無量壽經 (J. Daijōmuryōjukyō) [Great Vehicle Sūtra of the One of Immeasurable Longevity] 40 Dasheng xianshi jing 大乗顯識經 (J. Daijō kenshikikyō) [Mahāyāna Sūtra of Consciousness Revealed a.k.a. Clarification of Consciousness Sūtra] 120 Dasheng yujia jingang xinghai manshushīli qianbi qianbo dajiaowangjing 大乘瑜 伽金剛性海曼殊室利千臂千鉢大教 王經 [Mañjuśrī with a Thousand Arms and Thousand Bowls Sūtra] 122 Daxue zhangju (J. Daigaku shōku) 大學章句 [Passages from the Great Learning] 60n33, 61–62, 65

Index of Texts Cited Daxue zhijie 大學直解 [Direct Explication of the Great Learning] 161, 163, 201, 203 Dazhi du lun 大智度論 [Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom] 177 Delineations for Supporting Practice and Broadly Disseminating the [Great] Calming and Discernment (C. Zhiguan fuxing zhuan hongjue 止觀輔行傳弘決) 133 Instructions for the Ignorant on Translation into Kundoku (J. Kun’yaku jimō 訓譯 示蒙) 70–71 Diamond Apex Sūtra (C. Jin’gangding jing, J. Kongōchōkyō 金剛頂經, Skt. Vajraśekhara Sūtra) 122 Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety (C. Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解) 163, 201–203 Direct Explication of the Doctrine of the Mean (C. Zhongyong zhijie 中庸直解) 161 Direct Explication of the Great Learning (C. Daxue zhijie 大學直解) 161, 163, 201, 203 Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning (C. Xiaoxue zhijie, K. Sohak chikhae 小學 直解) 150, 163, 203 Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice (C. Yujia shidi lun, K. Yuga saji ron瑜伽師地論, Skt. Yogâcārabhūmi-śāstra) 118 Discussion of Understanding the Way (C. Yudaolun 喻道論) 17 Dream of the Red Chamber (C. Honglou meng 紅樓夢) 178 Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe 杜家立成雑 書要略 (J. Toka rissei zassho yōryaku) [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] 33–36, 184, 208 Ekikyō 易經 (C. Yi jing, K. Yŏk kyŏng) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 “Epitaph on the Gravestone at Naengsu-ri of Yŏngil, Silla” (K. “Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Silla pimyŏng” 迎日冷水里新羅碑銘) 191, 195 Essence of Government in the Zhenguan Period of the Tang (C. Zhenguan zhengyao 貞觀 政要) 146

233 Essentials of Japanese Reading (J. Wadoku yōryō 倭讀要領) 71–73 Exegesis of the Commentary on the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (C. Huayan jing suishu yanyi chao 華嚴經随疏演義抄) 130 Fahua jing 法華經 (J. Hokekyō, K. Pŏphwa kyŏng) [Lotus Sūtra] 104 Fanwang jing 梵網經 (Skt. Brahmajāla Sūtra) [Brahma’s Net Sūtra] 50 Fengjian ji 諷諫集 [Collection of Satirical and Admonitory Works] 146 Four Books Explained for Children, The (J. Shisho dōjikun 四書童子訓) 63, 66 Fukuzawa Yukichi shokanshū 福沢諭吉書 簡集 [Collection of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Letters] 210 Fukuzawa zenshū 福沢全集 [Complete Works of Fukuzawa Yukichi] 209 Genji monogatari 源氏物語 [Tale of Genji] 211, 216 Golden Light Sūtra (C. Jinguangming zuishengwang jing, J. Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō, K. Kŭmgwangmyŏng ch’oesŭngwang kyŏng 金光明最勝王經) 104 Grand Compendium of Vernacular Exegeses to the Guwen zhenbao (J. Kobun shinpō kōshū genkai taisei 古文眞寶諺解大成)  88 Great Commentary on the Abhidharma (C. Apitan piposha lun 阿毘曇毘婆 沙論, Skt. Abhidharma mahāvibhāṣa śāstra) 26 Great Illuminator Sūtra (C. Dari jing 大日經 or Da piluzhena chengfo shenbian jiachi jing 大毘盧遮那成佛神變加持經, Skt. Mahāvairocana Sūtra) 122 Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra (C. Da bore boluomiduo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經, Skt. Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra) 24 Great Vehicle Sūtra of the one of Immeasurable Longevity (C. Dasheng wuliangshou jing, J. Daijōmuryōjukyō 大乗無量壽經) 40 Guide to Translation (J. Yakubun sentei 訳文 筌蹄) 71, 99

234 Hakushi monjū 白氏文集 (C. Baishi wenji) [Collected Works of Bai Juyi] 31, 54–56, 58, 62, 171, 208 Hannya shingyō (C. Bore xinjing 般若心經, Skt. Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra) [Heart Sūtra] 19–20, 177 Heart Sūtra (C. Bore xinjing, J. Hannya shingyō 般若心經, Skt. Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra) 19–20, 177 Heike monogatari 平家物語 [Tales of the Heike] 209, 216 Hewen handufa 和文漢讀法 (J. Wabun kandokuhō) [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese] 78–81 History of Koryŏ (K. Koryŏsa 高麗史) 107, 133n36 History of Song (C. Songshu 宋書) 126 History of the Five Dynasties (C. Wudaishi 五代史) 146 History of the Northern Dynasties (Beishi 北史) 146–147 History of the Three Kingdoms (K. Samguk sagi 三國史記) 105n13, 106–108, 142 Hoàng việt văn tuyển 皇越文選 [Selections of Refined Literature of the Việt Empire] 151 Hokekyō 法華經 (C. Fahua jing, K. Pŏphwa kyŏng) [Lotus Sūtra] 104 Honglou meng 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber] 178 Hongmingji 弘明集 [Collection of Essays Magnifying the Light] 17 How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese (C. Hewen handufa, J. Wabun kandokuhō 和文漢讀法) 78–81 Huayan jing suishu yanyi chao 華嚴經随疏 演義抄 [Exegesis of the Commentary on the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra] 130 Huhan yijing yinyi tongyiji 胡漢譯經音 義同異記 [Record of Similarities and Differences in Pronunciation and Meaning among the Chinese Translations of Sutras from the Hu Languages]  21–22, 27 Humane King Sūtra (C. Renwang jing, J. Innōgyō, K. Inwang kyŏng 仁王 經) 104–105 Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl ogwŏn 華嚴文義要 決五卷 (J. Kegon mongi yōketsu gokan)

Index of Texts Cited [Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra, in five volumes] 112–113 Hyōgūroku 萍遇録 [Record of the Chance Encounter of Floating Bits of Duckweed] 100 Illustration of the Nine Changes [of Name] in Chindan (K. Kubyŏn Chindan chi to 九變 震檀之圖) 134 Imsin sŏgi sŏk 壬申誓記石 [Imsin Year Oath Stone] 186–188, 190–191, 195 Imsin Year Oath Stone (K. Imsin sŏgi sŏk 壬申 誓記石) 186–188, 190–191, 195 In Search of the Supernatural (C. Soushenji 捜神記) 44 Innōgyō 仁王經 (C. Renwang jing, K. Inwang kyŏng) [Humane King Sūtra] 104–105 Interpreter Pak (K. Pak T’ongsa 朴通士)  xxviii, 98 Inwang kyŏng 仁王經 (C. Renwang jing, J. Innōgyō) [Humane King Sūtra] 104–105 Inwang kyŏng so 仁王經疏 (J. Ninnōkyōsho) [Commentary on the Humane King Sūtra] 105–106, 120 Japanese Names [ for Things] Classified and Annotated (J. Wamyōruijūshō 倭名類 聚抄) 23 Jin ping mei 金瓶梅 [Plum in the Golden Vase] 178 Jin’gangding jing 金剛頂經 (J. Kongōchōkyō, Skt. Vajraśekhara Sūtra) [Diamond Apex Sūtra] 122 Jinguangming zuishengwang jing 金光明 最勝王經 (J. Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō, K. Kŭmgwangmyŏng ch’oesŭngwang kyŏng) [Golden Light Sūtra] 104 Jōjitsuron 成實論 (C. Chengshi lun, Skt. Tattvasiddhi-śāstra [Treatise on the Establishment of Truth] 43 Kajin no kigū 佳人之奇遇 [Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women]  75, 81 Kakkenbosu-shi Eibunten sōyaku 格賢勃斯 氏英文典挿訳 [Quackenbos English Grammar with Translation] 76

Index of Texts Cited “Karhangsa chot’ap ki” 葛項寺造塔記 [Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple] 190–191, 195, 203 Kegon engi 華嚴縁起 [Origins of Flower Garland Buddhism] 107 Kegon mongi yōketsu gokan (K. Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl ogwŏn 華嚴文義要決五卷) [Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra, in five volumes] 112–113 Kegonshū shōsho narabi ni inmyōroku 華 嚴宗章疏并因明録 [Catalogue of Commentaries and Logic Works of the Flower Garland (Kegon) Sect] 112 Keian oshō kahō waten 桂庵和尚家法倭点 [Senior Priest Keian’s Family Method of Japanese Kunten] 62, 65, 80 Khitan Tripiṭaka (C. Qidan zang 契丹蔵) 146 Kirei mondō 貴嶺問答 [Questions and Answers at Kirei] 206 Kobun shinpō ̄genkai taisei 古文眞寶諺解 大成 [Grand Compendium of Vernacular Exegeses to the Guwen zhenbao] 88 Kojō zoroe 古状揃 [Compilation of Ancient Epistles] 182 Kokinjochū 古今序註 [Notes on the Kokinshū Preface] 30 Kongōchōkyō 金剛頂經 (C. Jin’gangding jing, Skt. Vajraśekhara Sūtra) [Diamond Apex Sūtra] 122 Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō (C. Jinguangming zuishengwang jing, K. Kŭmgwangmyŏng ch’oesŭngwang kyŏng 金光明最勝王經) [Golden Light Sūtra] 104 Korean Buddhist Canon (K. Koryŏ taejang kyŏng 高麗大藏經) 128, 131, 140 Koryŏ taejang kyŏng 高麗大藏經 [Korean Buddhist Canon] 128, 131, 140 Koryŏsa 高麗史 [History of Koryŏ] 107, 133n36 Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang pi 高仙寺誓 幢和上碑 [Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang stele] 108 Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang stele (K. Kosansa Sŏdang hwasang pi 高仙寺誓幢和上碑)  108 Kubyŏn Chindan chi to 九變震檀之圖 [Illustration of the Nine Changes (of Name) in Chindan] 134

235 Kŭmgang sammae ron 金剛三昧論 [Vajrasamadhi Treatise] 108 Kŭmgwangmyŏng ch’oesŭngwang kyŏng (C. Jinguangming zuishengwang jing, J. Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō 金光明最勝王經) [Golden Light Sūtra] 104 Kun’yaku jimō 訓譯示蒙 [Instructions for the Ignorant on Translation into Kundoku] 70–71 Kuyŏk Inwang kyŏng 舊譯仁王經 [Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra] 101–102, 104–105, 107, 219 Kuzhu zaji 苦竹雜記 [Miscellaneous Notes on Bitter Bamboo] 81 Kyunyŏ chŏn 均如傳 [Biography of Kyunyŏ]  125–128 Lengyan jing 楞嚴經 (J. Ryōgonkyō, K. Nŭngŏm kyŏng) [Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 91, 96–97 Lesser Learning, The (C. Xiaoxue 小學) 150 Lessons in Writing Characters (J. Moji no oshie 文字之教) 138 Letters as Good as Ready Cash (C. Qizha qingqian 啓箚靑錢) 207–208 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (C. Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍) 49 Longer Āgama Sūtra (C. Chang ahan jing 長阿含經) 132 Lotus Sūtra (C. Fahua jing, J. Hokekyō, K. Pŏphwa kyŏng 法華經) 104 Lunyu 論語 (J. Rongo, K. Nonŏ) [Analects]  8–9, 12, 14, 32, 62n35, 67, 73, 85, 89, 146–147, 162, 211, 215 Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (C. Da banniepan jing 大般涅槃經) [Nirvāṇa Sūtra] 22, 23n8, 26–27, 130 Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (C. Da bore boluomiduo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經 [Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra] 24 Mahāvairocana Sūtra (C. Dari jing 大日經 or Da piluzhena chengfo shenbian jiachi jing 大毘盧遮那成佛神變加持經) [Great Illuminator Sūtra] 122 Mahāyāna Sūtra of Consciousness Revealed a.k.a. Clarification of Consciousness Sūtra (C. Dasheng xianshi jing, J. Daijō kenshikikyō 大乗顯識經) 120

236

Index of Texts Cited

Main Points of Siddhaṃ (J. Shittan yōketsu 悉曇要訣) 29 Mañjuśrī with a Thousand Arms and Thousand Bowls Sūtra (C. Dasheng yujia jingang xinghai manshushīli qianbi qianbo dajiaowangjing 大乘瑜伽金剛性海曼殊 室利千臂千鉢大教王經) 122 Man’yōshū 万葉集 [Collection of Myriad Leaves] xix, 125, 170 Meigō ōrai 明衡往来 [Correspondence of (Fujiwara no) Akihira] 206, 208 Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India (K. Wang o ch’ŏnch’ukkuk chŏn 往五天竺國傳) 121–122, 184 Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (K. Samguk yusa 三國遺事) 106, 132, 134, 169 “Memorial on Dispatching the Troops” (C. “Chushi biao” 出師表) 157, 160 Mirror of the East (J. Azuma kagami 五妻鏡)  209 Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang (C. Youyang zazu 酉陽雑俎) 119 Miscellaneous Notes on Bitter Bamboo (C. Kuzhu zaji 苦竹雜記) 81 Moji no oshie 文字之教 [Lessons in Writing Characters] 138 Monjū hyakushu 文集百首 [One Hundred Poems from Bai Juyi’s Collected Works] 31, 171 Monzen 文選 (C. Wenxuan, K. Munsŏn) [Selections of Refined Literature]  89–90 Munsŏn 文選 (C. Wenxuan, J. Monzen) [Selections of Refined Literature] 89–90

Nirvāṇa Sūtra (C. Da banniepan jing 大般涅 槃經, Skt. Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra) 22, 23n8, 26–27, 130 Nodong yahak tokpon 勞動夜學讀本 [Nightschool Reader for Laborers] 138 Nogŏltae 老乞大 [The Old Cathayan] xxviii, 98, 204, 205 Nonŏ 論語 (C. Lunyu, J. Rongo) [Analects] 8–9, 12, 14, 32, 62n35, 67, 73, 85, 89, 146–147, 162, 211, 215 Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Analects] 87, 97 Notes on the Kokinshū Preface (J. Kokinjochū 古今序註) 30 Nŭngŏm kyŏng 楞嚴經 (C. Lengyan jing, J. Ryōgonkyō) [Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 91, 96–97 Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae 楞嚴經諺解 [Vernacular (Korean) Exegesis of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 96

Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan 南海寄歸内法傳 [Account of Buddhism Sent from the South Seas] 119 Ngục trung nhật ký 獄中日記 [Prison Diary]  168 Nightschool Reader for Laborers (K. Nodong yahak tokpon 勞動夜學讀本) 138 Nihon shoki 日本書紀 [Chronicles of Japan] 17–18, 22, 25, 89, 104, 181, 184 Ninnōkyōsho (K. Inwang kyŏng so 仁王 經疏) [Commentary on the Humane King Sūtra] 105–106, 120

Pak T’ongsa 朴通士 [Interpreter Pak]  xxviii, 98 Passages from the Great Learning (C. Daxue zhangju, J. Daigaku shōku 大學章句)  60n33, 61–62, 65 Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra (K. Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴敎分記圓 通鈔) 128–131, 197 Plum in the Golden Vase (C. Jin ping mei 金瓶梅) 178

Ofumisama 御文章 [Compositions] 210 Oju yŏnmun changjŏn san’go 五洲衍文長箋 散稿 [Scattered Manuscripts of Glosses and Comments of Oju] 134 Old Cathayan, The (K. Nogŏltae 老乞大)  xxviii, 98, 204, 205 Old Translation of the Humane King Sūtra (K. Kuyŏk Inwang kyŏng 舊譯仁王經)  101–102, 104–105, 107, 219 One Hundred Poems from Bai Juyi’s Collected Works (J. Monjū hyakushu 文集百首) 31, 171 Origins of Flower Garland Buddhism (J. Kegon engi 華嚴縁起) 107

Index of Texts Cited Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind (C. Songfenggeshi, J. Shōfūkakushi 松風 閣詩) 45 Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka 普賢十願歌 [Songs of the Ten Great Vows of Samantabadhra] 125 Pŏphwa kyŏng 法華經 (C. Fahua jing, J. Hokekyō) [Lotus Sūtra] 104 Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra (C. Bore xinjing, J. Hannya shingyō 般若心經) [Heart Sūtra] 19–20, 177 Prison Diary (V. Ngục trung nhật ký 獄中 日記) 168 Profound Meaning of the Four Mahāyāna Treatises (C. Wuyiwude dasheng silun xuanyiji 無依無得大乗四論玄義記)  28 Pure Discussion News (C. Qingyibao 清議報)  78 Qianzi wen 千字文 (J. Senjimon, K. Ch’ŏnjamun) [Thousand Character Classic] 89–90, 148 Qidan zang 契丹蔵 [Khitan Tripiṭaka] 146 Qingyibao 清議報 [Pure Discussion News] 78 Qizha qingqian 啓箚靑錢 [Letters as Good as Ready Cash] 207–208 Quackenbos English Grammar with Translation (J. Kakkenbosu-shi Eibunten sōyaku 格賢勃斯氏英文典挿訳) 76 Questions and Answers at Kirei (J. Kirei mondō 貴嶺問答) 206 Questions Concerning the Four Books (C. Sishu yinwen 四書因問) 65 “Record of Erecting the Pagodas at Karhang Temple” (K. “Karhangsa chot’ap ki” 葛項 寺造塔記) 190–191, 195, 203 Record of Similarities and Differences in Pronunciation and Meaning among the Chinese Translations of Sutras from the Hu Languages (C. Huhan yijing yinyi tongyiji 胡漢譯經音義同異記) 21–22, 27 Record of the Chance Encounter of Floating Bits of Duckweed (J. Hyōgūroku 萍遇録)  100 Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu Xi (C. Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類) 178, 209

237 Records of the Grand Historian (C. Shiji, J. Shiki, K. Sagi 史記) 52, 177–178, 208, 215 Records of the Three Kingdoms (C. Sanguozhi 三國志) 16, 155, 159, 162, 176 Records of Yi Jian (C. Yijian zhi 夷堅志)  142n40 Renwang huguo bore jingshu 仁王護國般若 經疏 [Commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra for Humane Kings who Wish to Protect their States] 16, 105 Renwang jing 仁王經 (J. Innōgyō, K. Inwang kyŏng) [Humane King Sūtra] 104–105 Romance of the Three Kingdoms (C. Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義) xxviii, 52–53, 155, 181 Rongo 論語 (C. Lunyu, K. Nonŏ) [Analects]  8–9, 12, 14, 32, 62n35, 67, 73, 85, 89, 146–147, 162, 211, 215 Ryōgonkyō 楞嚴經 (C. Lengyan jing, K. Nŭngŏm kyŏng) [Śūraṃgama Sūtra] 91, 96–97 Sagi 史記 (C. Shiji, J. Shiki) [Records of the Grand Historian] 52, 177–178, 208, 215 Sakubun shinketsu 作文真訣 [True Secrets of Composition] 69, 88 Samguk sagi 三國史記 [History of the Three Kingdoms] 105n13, 106–108, 142 Samguk yusa 三國遺事 [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms] 106, 132, 134, 169 Sangsŏ 尚書 (C. Shang shu, J. Shōsho) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Sanguozhi 三國志 [Records of the Three Kingdoms] 16, 155, 159, 162, 176 Sanguozhi quanyi 三國志全譯 [Unabridged Translation of the Records of the Three Kingdoms] 155 Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 [Romance of the Three Kingdoms] xxviii, 52–53, 155, 181 Sanzi jing 三字經 (V. Tam Tự Kinh) [Three Character Classic] 152–153 Scattered Manuscripts of Glosses and Comments of Oju (K. Oju yŏnmun changjŏn san’go 五洲衍文長箋散稿)  134

238 Seiri jigi genkai 性理字義諺解 [Vernacular Exegeses to the Xingli ziyi] 88 Selections of Refined Literature (C. Wenxuan, J. Monzen, K. Munsŏn 文選) 89–90 Selections of Refined Literature of the Việt Empire (V. Hoàng việt văn tuyển 皇越 文選) 151 Senior Priest Keian’s Family Method of Japanese Kunten (J. Keian oshō kahō waten 桂庵和尚家法倭点) 62, 65, 80 Senjimon 千字文 (C. Qianzi wen, K. Ch’ŏnjamun) [Thousand Character Classic] 89–90, 148 Shang shu 尚書 (J. Shōsho, K. Sangsŏ) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Shan’gu chidu 山谷簡尺 [Shan’gu’s Letters] 208 Shan’gu’s Letters (C. Shan’gu chidu 山谷 簡尺) 208 Shasekishū 沙石集 [Collection of Sand and Pebbles] 30 Shiji 史記 (J. Shiki, K. Sagi) [Records of the Grand Historian] 52, 177–178, 208, 215 Shiji zhengyi 史記正義 [Correct Meanings of the Records of the Grand Historian] 52 Shijing 詩經 (J. Shikyō, K. Sigyŏng) [Book of Odes] 15, 98, 146, 188–189 Shiki史記 (C. Shiji, K. Sagi) [Records of the Grand Historian] 52, 177–178, 208, 215 Shikyō 詩經 (C. Shijing, K. Sigyŏng) [Book of Odes] 15, 98, 146, 188–189 Shisho dōjikun 四書童子訓 [The Four Books Explained for Children] 63, 66 Shisho shitchū 四書集注 (C. Sishu jizhu) [Commentary on the Four Books] 62 Shittan yōketsu 悉曇要訣 [Main Points of Siddhaṃ] 29 Shittanzō 悉曇蔵 [Treasury of Siddhaṃ] 28 Shōfūkakushi 松風閣詩 (C. Songfenggeshi) [Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind] 45 Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 [Chronicles of Japan Continued] 107–108, 194 Shokyō 書經 (C. Shujing, K. Sŏgyŏng; a.k.a. C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ 尚書) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Shōsho 尚書 (C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189

Index of Texts Cited Shūeki 周易 (C. Zhouyi, K. Chuyŏk; a.k.a. C. Yi jing, J. Ekikyō, K. Yŏk kyŏng 易經) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 Shūgyokushū 拾玉集 [Collection of Gleaned Gems] 29 Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 [Water Margin] 161, 178, 181 Shujing 書經 (J. Shokyō, K. Sŏgyŏng; a.k.a. C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ 尚書) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Sifen lü 四分律 [Vinaya of the Four Categories] 45, 49, 90 Sigyŏng 詩經 (C. Shijing, J. Shikyō) [Book of Odes] 15, 98, 146, 188–189 Sishu jizhu 四書集注 (J. Shisho shitchū) [Commentary on the Four Books] 62 Sishu yinwen 四書因問 [Questions Concerning the Four Books] 65 Sŏgyŏng 書經 (C. Shujing, J. Shokyō; a.k.a. C. Shang shu, K. Sangsŏ 尚書) [Book of Documents] 14, 24, 98, 136, 188–189 Sohak chikhae 小學直解 (C. Xiaoxue zhijie) [Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning] 150, 163, 203 Sŏk Hwaŏm kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o 釋華嚴 敎分記圓通鈔 [Perfectly Comprehensive Notes Analyzing the Record of the Doctrinal Classification of the Flower Garland Sūtra] 128–131, 197 Sokchanggyŏng kan’gi 續藏經刊記 [Colophon to the Tripiṭaka Supplement] 105 Songfenggeshi 松風閣詩 (J. Shōfūkakushi) [Poem on the Hall of Pines and Wind] 45 Songs of the Ten Great Vows of Samantabadhra (K. Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka 普賢十願歌) 125 Songshu 宋書 [History of Song] 126 Sounds and Meanings of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra (J. Daihannyakyō ongi 大般若經音義) 18 Sounds and Meanings of [all the words in] the Buddhist Canon (C. Yiqie jing yinyi 一切經 音義) 24, 125, 133 Soushenji 捜神記 [In Search of the Supernatural] 44 Sŏyu kyŏnmun 西遊見聞 [Things Seen and Heard in the West] 138

Index of Texts Cited Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women (J. Kajin no kigū 佳人之奇遇) 75, 81 Summary Key to the Meaning of the Text of the Flower Garland Sūtra, in five volumes (J. Kegon mongi yōketsu gokan, K. Hwaŏm munŭi yogyŏl ogwŏn 華嚴文義要決五卷)  112–113 Śūraṃgama Sūtra (C. Lengyan jing, J. Ryōgonkyō, K. Nŭngŏm kyŏng 楞嚴經)  91, 96–97 Susiddhi-kara Sūtra (C. Suxidi jing 蘇悉地經) [Tantra for Wondrous Achievement] 122 Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment (C. Yuanjue jing 圓覺經) 70 Suxidi jing 蘇悉地經 (Skt. Susiddhi-kara Sūtra) [Tantra for Wondrous Achievement] 122 Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment (C. Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe, J. Toka rissei zassho yōryaku 杜家立成雑書要略)  33–36, 184, 208 Tae Hwaŏm sujwa wŏnt’ong yangjung taesa Kyunyŏ chŏn 大華嚴首座圓通兩重大師 均如傳 [Biography of Kyunyŏ] 125–128 Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 [Taishō Tripiṭaka] 37n19 Taishō Tripiṭaka (J. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大 正新脩大藏經) 37n19 Tale of Genji (J. Genji monogatari 源氏物語)  211, 216 Tales of the Heike (J. Heike monogatari 平家 物語) 209, 216 Tam Tự Kinh 三字經 (C. Sanzi jing) [Three Character Classic] 152–153 Tantra for Wondrous Achievement (C. Suxidi jing 蘇悉地經, Skt. Susiddhi-kara Sūtra) 122 Tattvasiddhi-śāstra (C. Chengshi lun, J. Shōjitsuron 成實論) [Treatise on the Establishment of Truth] 43 Teikin ōrai 庭訓往來 [Book of Domestic Precepts] 206, 209 Things Seen and Heard in the West (K. Sŏyu kyŏnmun 西遊見聞) 138 Thousand Character Classic (C. Qianzi wen, K. Ch’ŏnjamun, J. Senjimon 千字文)  89–90, 148

239 Three Character Classic (C. Sanzi jing, V. Tam Tự Kinh 三字經) 152–153 Tō Daiwajō tōseiden 唐大和上東征傳 [Biography of Jianzhen 鑑真] 109 Toka rissei zassho yōryaku 杜家立成雑書 要略 (C. Dujia licheng zashu yaolüe) [Synopsis of Diverse Letters of the Du House for the Purpose of Impromptu Accomplishment] 33–36, 184, 208 Treasury of Siddhaṃ (J. Shittanzō 悉曇蔵) 28 Treatise on the Establishment of Truth (C. Chengshi lun, J. Shōjitsuron 成實論, Skt. Tattvasiddhi-śāstra) 43 Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom (C. Dazhi du lun 大智度論) 177 True Secrets of Composition (J. Sakubun shinketsu 作文真訣) 69, 88 Unabridged Translation of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (C. Sanguozhi quanyi 三國志全譯) 155 Ŭnggolbang 鷹鶻方 [Art of Falconry and Hawking] 199 Unshū shōsoku 雲州消息 [Correspondence of (Fujiwara no) Akihira] 206 Vajrasamadhi Treatise (K. Kŭmgang sammae ron 金剛三昧論) 108 Vajraśekhara Sūtra (C. Jin’gangding jing, J. Kongōchōkyō 金剛頂經) [Diamond Apex Sūtra] 122 Vernacular Exegeses to the Xingli ziyi (J. Seiri jigi genkai 性理字義諺解) 88 Vernacular Exegesis of the Analects (K. Nonŏ ŏnhae 論語諺解) 87, 97 Vinaya of the Four Categories (C. Sifen lü 四分律) 45, 49, 90 Wabun kandokuhō 和文漢讀法 (C. Hewen handufa) [How to Read Japanese Texts in Chinese] 78–81 Wadoku yōryō 倭讀要領 [Essentials of Japanese Reading] 71–73 Wamyōruijūshō 倭名類聚抄 [Japanese Names (for Things) Classified and Annotated] 23 Wang o ch’ŏnch’ukkuk chŏn 往五天竺國傳 [Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India] 121–122, 184

240 Water Margin (C. Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳) 161, 178, 181 Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons] 49 Wenxuan 文選 (J. Monzen, K. Munsŏn 文選) [Selections of Refined Literature] 89–90 Wudaishi 五代史 [History of the Five Dynasties] 146 Wuyiwude dasheng silun xuanyiji 無依無得 大乗四論玄義記 [Profound Meaning of the Four Mahāyāna Treatises] 28 Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解 [Direct Explication of the Classic of Filial Piety] 163, 201–203 Xiaoxue 小學 [The Lesser Learning] 150 Xiaoxue zhijie小學直解 (K. Sohak chikhae) [Direct Explication of the Lesser Learning] 150, 163, 203 Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji 續華嚴經 略疏刊定記 (J. Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra] 36, 38–40, 42–43, 46, 109, 111 Xuanzang sanzang shizi zhuan congshu 玄奘三藏師資傳叢書 [Compendium of Biographies and Materials Related to Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang] 121 Yakubun sentei 訳文筌蹄 [Guide to Translation] 71, 99 Yijian zhi夷堅志 [Records of Yi Jian]  142n40 Yi jing 易經 (J. Ekikyō, K. Yŏk kyŏng) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 Yiqie jing yinyi 一切經音義 [Sounds and Meanings of (all the words in) the Buddhist Canon] 24, 125, 133 Yogâcārabhūmi-śāstra (C. Yujia shidi lun, K. Yuga saji ron瑜伽師地論) [Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice] 118 Yŏk kyŏng 易經 (C. Yi jing, J. Ekikyō) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 “Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Silla pimyŏng” 迎日冷水 里新羅碑銘 [Epitaph on the Gravestone at Naengsu-ri of Yŏngil, Silla] 191, 195 Yongle dadian 永樂大典 [Yongle Encyclopedia] 52

Index of Texts Cited Yongle Encyclopedia (C. Yongle dadian 永樂 大典) 52 Youyang zazu 酉陽雑俎 [Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang] 119 Yuanjue jing 圓覺經 [Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment] 70 Yuanjue jing lüeshuchao 圓覺經略疏鈔 [Abridged Commentary on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment] 24 Yudaolun 喻道論 [Discussion of Understanding the Way] 17 Yuga saji ron瑜伽師地論 (Skt. Yogâcārabhūmi-śāstra, C. Yujia shidi lun) [Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice] 118 Yujia shidi lun 瑜伽師地論 (Skt. Yogâcārabhūmi-śāstra, K. Yuga saji ron) [Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice] 118 Zhanran jushi ji 湛然居士集 [Collected Works of the Tranquil Retiree] 175 Zhenguan zhengyao 貞觀政要 [Essence of Government in the Zhenguan Period of the Tang] 146 Zhiguan fuxing zhuan hongjue 止觀輔行 傳弘決 [Delineations for Supporting Practice and Broadly Disseminating the (Great) Calming and Discernment] 133 Zhongshan shihua 中山詩話 [Zhongshan’s Notes on Poetry] 174 Zhongshan’s Notes on Poetry (C. Zhongshan shihua 中山詩話) 174 Zhongyong zhijie 中庸直解 [Direct Explication of the Doctrine of the Mean] 161 Zhouyi 周易 (J. Shūeki, K. Chuyŏk; a.k.a. C. Yi jing, J. Ekikyō, K. Yŏk kyŏng 易經) [Book of Changes] 98, 133, 151–152 Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 [Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu Xi] 178, 209 Zoku kegongyō ryakuso kanjōki 續華嚴經 略疏刊定記 (C. Xu Huayanjing lüeshuo kandingji) [Continuation of the Abridged Commentary on the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sūtra] 36, 38–40, 42–43, 46, 109, 111

Index of Terms abbreviated sinographs 44, 50, 57, 213 agglutinating language 10, 23 Altaic languages 142, 151, 158–159, 163, 201 Avataṃsaka (Hwaŏm) Sect 107, 109, 111, 125, 130 baihua (written vernacular) fiction 白話(口語)小説, 155, 159–161, 178, 180–181, 203, 216 Beijing speech 155, 159 benreibun 駢儷文 parallel-style prose 176 bitan 筆談 brush conversation xlii, 10, 167, 214–215 Bohai 渤海 kingdom (698–926) 135, 144 brush conversation 筆談 J. hitsudan, C. bitan, K. p’iltam xlii, 10, 167, 214–215 Buddhist Literary Sinitic 176–178, 193 Bunshiten 文之点, 62, 67–68, 73 Chang’an 長安, 12, 120–122 chenzi 槻字 “filler words” 198–199, 201 chikhae 直解 “direct explication” xiii, 150, 161, 163, 203 chiktok 直讀 “direct reading” 32, 60, 63, 65, 74, 81–83, 89, 94, 99, 101, 200, 214 Chindan Hakhoe 震壇學會 135 Chindan 震旦, 震壇 132, 134–135, 146 Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures  19, 147 chokudoku 直読 “direct reading” 32, 60, 63, 65, 74, 81–83, 89, 94, 99, 101, 200, 214 chokuyaku 直訳 “direct/literal translation”  77 chŏmt’o (see also okototen) 117–118 Chōsen Tsūshinshi 朝鮮通信使 Korean Embassies of Communication to Japan 100, 167, 201 Chosŏn T’ongsinsa 朝鮮通信使 Korean Embassies of Communication to Japan 100, 167, 201 Chữ Nôm 字喃 xlii, 151–152, 154, 180, 215 counterpoint couplets 對句 J. tsuiku, K. taekku 176 Daizōkyō 大蔵經 Tripiṭika 37n19 Daoism xli, 10, 40

Dazang jing 大蔵經 Tripiṭaka 22, 37n19, 105, 120–121, 146 dharani 陀羅尼 vi, 30, 39–41 direct reading 直讀 J. chokudoku, K. chiktok  32, 60, 63, 65, 74, 81–83, 89, 94, 99, 101, 200, 214 Dōshunten 道春点 67–68 Endōten 円堂点, 59 exegetics 訓詰(學) C. xungu(xue), J. kunko(gaku), K. hun’go(hak) 14–15, 17, 41, 66, 151, 161 Four Tones 四聲 52–53 Fujimoto Yukio 藤本幸夫 (1941–) 110 fukubun 復文 “returning the text” 74, 78 Gaochang 高昌(國) 146–147, 150, 203 gappu 合符 “joining mark” 46, 54, 112, 116–117 gikanbun 擬漢文 Pseudo-Literary Sinitic  179 Go’on 呉音 12–13, 83 gojunfu 語順符 word order gloss 8n1, 37, 93, 110 Gozan 五山 60–61, 69 guwen 古文 → wenyanwen 文言文 176 Hakaseketen 博士家点 67 Han’er yanyu 漢児言語, 204–205 han’gŭl xlii, 4, 5, 7, 85–88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–99, 101, 103, 124, 137–139, 145, 163, 180, 201, 211–212, 215–217 hanmun 漢文 Literary Sinitic x–xi, xiin7, 6–7, 169, 176, 181, 217 hanwen 漢文 Literary Sinitic x–xi, xiin7, 6–7, 169, 176, 181, 217 hentaigana 変体仮名 “variant kana” 50, 57 hitsudan 筆談 brush conversation xlii, 10, 167, 214–215 honji suijaku 本地垂迹, 30–32, 66 huiwen 廻文 “rearranging the text” 24, 40–41, 72 Humane King Assembly 仁王會 104–105 hun 訓 vernacular gloss 6–7, 15, 33, 36, 62, 89–90, 94–95, 101, 103, 107, 129, 139n39, 160, 170–171, 191

242 hun’go(hak) 訓詰(學) exegetics 14–15, 17, 41, 66, 151, 161 Hundred Seat Assembly 104–105 Hunmin chŏng’ŭm 訓民正音 90, 139, 145 Hwaŏm sect 華嚴宗 Avataṃsaka Sect 107, 109, 111, 125, 130 hwarang 花郎, 188 hyangga 鄕歌 xix, 125–128, 131, 135, 146, 169–171, 173, 175 hyŏngsŏng 形聲 graphs → phono-semantic graphs 152 hyōsokuhō 平仄法 Level and Oblique (Tones)  165–166 Law of ideogram 表意文字 13 idumun 吏讀文 199–201, 211, 216 Indo-European languages 10, 23 inflecting languages 23, 25 inversion gloss 返り点 kaeriten 6–9, 36n16, 37, 39, 43, 45–46, 51, 58, 60, 101, 103–104, 112, 115–117 isolating language 10, 23, 126, 151–152 Issaiten 一斎点 71, 73–75, 99 it’omun 吏吐文 → idumun 199–201, 211, 216 Japanese Variant Literary Sinitic 変体漢文 → hentai kanbun xiii, 7, 50, 178–181, 186, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 201, 204–206, 211–212, 215–216 jiajie 假借 → phonetic loan characters 16, 23, 152 Jurchen large script 女真大字 144, 215 Jurchen small script 女真小字 144, 215 kabun 科文 text in sections 41–42 kach’a 假借 phonetic loan characters 16, 23, 152 kadan 科段 section paragraph 41, 112 kaeriten 返り点 inversion gloss 6–9, 36n16, 37, 39, 43, 45–46, 51, 58, 60, 101, 103–104, 112, 115–117 Kago 華語 contemporary Chinese 71–73, 81, 98–100, 166 kaibun 廻文 “rearranging the text” 24, 40–41, 72 kakp’il 角筆 stylus glosses 36n17, 110n22, 117–118 kakuhitsu 角筆 stylus glosses 36n17, 110n22, 117–118

Index of Terms Kan’gyŏng togam 刊経都監 97 Kan’on 漢音 12–13, 83 kana 仮名 xlii, 4, 6–7, 18, 23, 29, 32, 37, 50, 52, 72, 78, 80, 91, 93, 99, 107, 138, 145, 147–148, 163, 171, 180, 195, 210, 212, 215–216 Kanbun kundoku Style 漢文訓讀体  xv–xvi, 75, 79, 81, 209–210 Kanbun kundokutai 漢文訓讀体, 210 Kanbun kundoku 漢文訓読 xii, xv–xvi, 75, 79, 81 kanbun 漢文 Literary Sinitic x–xi, xiin7, 6–7, 169, 176, 181, 217 kanji kana konkōbun 漢字仮名混淆文 kanji-kana Mixed Script Style 195 kariganeten 雁金点 wild geese mark 60–61 kasha 假借 phonetic loan characters 16, 23, 152 Kasuga editions (Kasugaban) 春日版 59 katakana xxvi, 23, 50, 60, 77, 95, 215 keduan 科段 section paragraph 41, 112 keisei 形聲 graphs (phono-semantic graphs)  13, 152 kewen 科文 text in sections 41–42 Kharoṣṭhī script 28 Khitan Large Script 契丹大字 144 Khitan Small Script 契丹小字 144–145 Khitan writing 契丹文字 145–146, 175, 215 Kidenten 紀伝点 51–52, 59 Kija 箕子 136 Kitainten 喜多院点, 59 Korean Embassies of Communication to Japan 朝鮮通信使 J. Chōsen Tsūshinshi, K. Chosŏn T’ongsinsa 100, 167, 201 kugyŏl 口訣 (t’o 吐) xii, xxv, 86–87, 91–92, 94–95, 97, 102, 152 kun 訓 vernacular gloss 6–7, 15, 33, 36, 62, 89–90, 94–95, 101, 103, 107, 129, 139n39, 160, 170–171, 191 kun’yomi 訓読み word-level vernacular reading xii, xviiin14, xix, xxiv kundoku vernacular reading x, xii–xiv, xvii–xviii, xix, xxiin20, xxiv–xxv, 5–9, 11–13, 16–17, 23–25, 28–33, 36–37, 39, 41–45, 49–50, 54, 58–63, 65–67, 69–84, 90–93, 95–96, 98–100, 106–107, 110–112, 114, 116–117, 119, 122, 132, 136, 139, 142–143, 146, 151, 154–156, 160, 166, 170, 182, 194, 205, 209–210, 214, 216

243

Index of Terms kunko(gaku) 訓詰(學) exegetics 14–15, 17, 41, 66, 151, 161 kunten 訓点 glossing marks xii, xix, 39–40, 49, 58–59, 62, 65, 68, 73, 75–76, 80, 109, 110n22, 117 kugirifu 句切符 horizontal line clause punctuation 112

phono-semantic graphs 形聲 graphs C. xingsheng, J. keisei, K. hyŏngsŏng 13, 152 p’iltam 筆談 brush conversation xlii, 10, 167, 214–215 pyŏllyŏmun 駢儷文 parallel-style prose 176 p’yŏngch’ŭkpŏp 平仄法 → Level and Oblique (Tones), Law of 165–166

Level and Oblique (Tones), Law of 平仄法 J. hyōsokuhō, K. p’yŏngch’ŭkpŏp 165–166 Liao 遼 dynasty (916–1125) 135, 141, 144–146, 158, 174 Literary Sinitic Cultural Sphere 漢文文化圏  213, 217–220 Literary Sinitic 漢文 C. hanwen, J. kanbun, K. hanmun x–xi, xiin7, 6–7, 169, 176, 181, 217

rakuji 落字 “omitting graphs” 62

okiji 置字 function particles 62–64, 67 okototen ヲコト点 “o-koto dots” 7, 45n26, 46, 49n28, 50–54, 56, 58–60 ŏnhae 諺解 vernacular exegesis 71, 85, 87–89, 91, 96–99, 101, 124, 137, 163 Orthodox Literary Sinitic 7, 64, 131, 176–181, 188, 201, 204, 208–209, 211–212, 215–218

Sanronshūten 三論宗点 59 Sanskrit 7, 16–32, 40–41, 58, 70, 72, 77, 119–122, 125–127, 130–132, 169, 177–178 section paragraph 科段 C. keduan, J. kadan  41, 112 Sejo 世祖 (1417–1468) 97 Sejong 世宗 (1397–1450) 90 semantogram 表意文字 13 senmyō small-character style 宣命小字体  195, 197, 199 senmyō style 宣命体 193–197, 199, 204 shōten 聲點 tone dots 52 Siddhaṃ script 悉曇 23, 25, 27 Siddhaṃ Studies 悉曇研究 23, 29, 53 sijo 時調 171, 173–174, 212 Silla 新羅 xix, 25, 105–112, 118–122, 124–125, 127–128, 135, 142, 150, 169, 170, 184, 186–191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 203, 206 sinographic cultural sphere 漢字文化圏  ix, xiii–xiv, xvi, xix, xxiv, xxvi, xxviii, xli–xlii, 5–7, 10, 167, 213, 217–220 Sino-Uighur pronunciations 147, 149, 213 Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations 151, 213 Sino-Xenic xxiv–xxv, 89–90, 101, 147, 170, 213 Sŏl clan 偰氏 150–151, 203 sōrōbun 候文 epistolary style 205–206, 208–211, 216 stylus glosses 36n17, 110n22, 117–118

parallel-style prose 駢儷文 K. pyŏllyŏmun  176 Parhae 渤海 kingdom (698–926) 135, 144 ’Phags-pa script 144 phonetic loan characters 假借 C. jiajie, J. kasha, K. kach’a 16, 23, 152

t’o 吐 → kugyŏlcha (chosa) 口訣字 86, 199 taekku 對句 counterpoint couplets 176 tanci 弾詞 217 Tangut script 西夏文字 144 text in sections 科文 C. kewen, J. kabun  41–42

man’gyōgana 万葉仮名 50, 95, 152 Mixed Script (Korean) 136–138, 147, 179–180, 195, 216 Mixed Script Style 136–138, 147, 179–180, 195, 216 Mongolian Direct-translation Style 蒙文直 譯體 203–204, 206 monzen yomi 文選読み 89, 148–149 Myōgyōten 明經点 51–52, 59 Neo-Confucianism 61, 65–67, 69, 71, 84, 98–99, 136, 150, 161 Nitohakaten 仁都波迦点 59 Nüshu (women’s script) 女書 216–217

244 theory that Japanese and Sanskrit are related 梵和同一説 29–32, 132, 178 theory that Sanskrit and Chinese are related 梵漢同祖論 29–31, 132 three-country worldview 三國世界観 132, 135 Tiantai Sect 105 Tōnan’inten 東南院点, 59 tone dots 聲點 C. shengdian, J. shōten, K. sŏngchŏm 52 tō-on 唐音 12–13 topolect 方言 10, 15, 106, 142, 213 Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) 136 Tripiṭaka 大蔵經 C. Dazang jing, J. Daizōkyō, K. Taejang kyŏng 22, 37n19, 105, 120–121, 146 tsuiku 対句 counterpoint couplets 176 tuiqiao 推敲 “polish one’s drafts” 143 Uighur Kingdom 147 language 147–150, 159, 175, 201, 203–205 people 147, 149–150, 159, 175, 201, 203–205 style Variant Literary Sinitic 204–205 writing 144, 147, 175

Index of Terms variant kana 変体仮名 hentaigana 50, 57 Variant Literary Sinitic (J. hentai kanbun 変体 漢文, K. pyŏnkyŏk hanmun 變格漢文)   x iii, 7, 50, 178–181, 186, 189–191, 193, 195, 197, 200–201, 203–206, 211–212, 215–217 vernacular language 俗語 C. suyu, J. zokugo, K. sogŏ 15, 69, 71–73, 142 Vietnam xlii, 4–5, 7, 25, 151, 167, 220 Vietnamese language xii–xiii, xv, xvii, xxiv, xlii, 4–6, 10, 151–152, 154, 167, 180 washū 和習(和臭) 64, 179, 182, 186 wenyan 文言 xi, 176, 203 wenyanwen (guwen) 文言文(古文) xi, 176 wild geese mark 雁金点 kariganeten 60–61 word order glosses 8n1, 37, 93, 110 xingsheng 形聲 graphs phono-semantic graphs 152 Xixia script 西夏文字 144 xungu(xue) 訓詰(學) exegetics 14–15, 17, 41, 66, 151, 161 zaju 雑劇 197–198, 201 Zen 51, 59–61, 63, 68–69, 99–100, 178 zhijie 直解 “direct explication” xiii, 150, 161, 163, 200–203 zokugo 俗語 vernacular language 69, 71–72