Archive of messages exchanged on the pmjs mailing list from June 8, 2000. Total of 12 messages.
Question raised by: Denise O'Brien
Discussants: John Bentley, Hank Glassmann, Robert Borgen, David
Pollack, William Bodiford, Elizabeth Markham, Lewis Cook, David
Lurie, Mack Horton
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How are we to understand the references in 10th and 11th C texts to women reading and copying the Lotus Sutra? (Examples from the Eiga monogatari: Ch. 16 Grand Empress Kenshi and her ladies making a copy of the LS; Ch. 7 daughter of Fujiwara Koretada who supposedly read the LS 2000 or 3000 times.) The Lotus Sutra was presumably not written in hiragana [extant examples are in Chinese characters] so if women were actually copying it, they were writing Chinese characters. Artistocratic women could have commissioned male scribes to make copies for them but the secondary sources do not specify that such commissioning was the customary practice (e.g., Baker, Japanese Art; Rosenfeld, Cranston, & Cranston, Courtly Tradition....; Kurata & Tamura, Art of the Lotus Sutra). Similarly, while reading for Heian women may be understood to sometimes be a group practice in which a reader is actually a listener, both primary and secondary sources seem to differentiate between reading the LS and listening to it being read or recited. Granted that some Heian women knew Chinese characters, are we to understand women reading and copying the LS as acts on their parts or do we assume an invisible substratum of male scribes and lectors? Regards, Denise O'Brien
Denise O'Brien Dept. of Anthropology, Temple University Philadelphia, PA
I won't say much about the issue of female literacy in Chinese, I think others on this list are in a much better position to address that question. There is of course the passage in the _Murasaki shikibu nikki_ where the ever modest Murasaki, irked that people are ribbing her for her learning, she fills us in on just how much Chinese she really has managed to pick up. After this, she says she doesn't much care what people say about her because she's just going to immerse herself in reading sutras. She thinks ahead to a time when her eyesight will fail and she won't be able make out the characters on the page anymore. (See Richard Bowring's translation, p. 139-142.) When Ki no Tsurayuki wrote the _Tosa nikki_ in a female persona, he wrote in Japanese, in onnade. (Can't we really call onnade, or hentaigana, or irohamoji, or izumomoji, man'yougana or whatever "hiragana" in this context?)
I've already said more than I meant to on that, so let me get to the point. To copy a sutra one need not be able to read Chinese. (Witness the many Americans and Europeans who are forced to do it everyday at Kokedera Saihouji, where the tourist/pilgrims must each write out [or trace] the Heart Sutra before they view the moss garden.) Isn't it possible that many people (men and women) in Japan could "read" and "copy" sutras without knowing Chinese or Chinese characters? That is, for reading, the characters would hold primarily phonetic value (as John Bentley suggests, see below), and for coying they would hold graphic value. The semantic aspect is not essential. Of course we do know that Heian period aristocratic women were also quite familiar with the content of the Lotus Sutra from the Hokke hakkou and other lectures they attended. Their command of the imagery and doctrine is clear in their poetry. In copying and reading aloud, a good deal of the content that was familiar to them must have come through. Is this a reasonable line of conjecture?
I think I might have misunderstood part of John Bentley's last point. When he says:
In essence, the sutras are just Indic texts converted to phonetic script by Buddhist scribes in China. A form of this script was transmitted to ancient Japan via Paekche.
I'm sure he doesn't mean that the sutras are transliterations of Sanskrit rather than translations into Chinese. (Right?) They are translated into Chinese, and this Chinese may then be read phonetically by Japanese (or Paekcheans) with some training, regardless of whether or not the content is understood.
A famous example of a sutra-copying woman and master calligrapher from the Nara period is Empress Koumyou. As well as copying sutras in her own hand she also oversaw production on a grand scale. See Yamashita Yumi, _ Shousouin monjo to shakkyoujo no kenkyuu_ (Yoshikawa koubunkan, 1999); Uemura Wadou, _Nihon no shakkyou_ (Rikusha, 1981); and (editor/author?)_ Nara jidai no shakkyou to dairi _ (Hanwa shobou, 2000.) (In my own work on Chuujouhime, I consider the relationship between the historical empress and the legendary nun who was famous for her calligraphy and sutra copying.)
Also worth considering are the votive texts or ganmon written by nuns. These involve composition in Chinese using Buddhist ideas so are clearly more difficult and would not follow the pattern I described above. Do we have evidence that women wrote these themselves? Evidence to the contrary? (I know of one Kamakura period [1228] case where it seems clear that the nun wrote it in her own hand. Others?)
Denise O'Brien wonders:
Granted that some Heian women knew Chinese characters, are we to understand women reading and copying the LS as acts on their parts or do we assume an invisible substratum of male scribes and lectors?
I would think the former in the case of sutras, at least. Anyone for the latter? Any ideas on ganmon by women?
best,
Hank Glassman
From: John Bentley
Thanks to Hank Glassman for his comments.
I'm sure he doesn't mean that the sutras are transliterations of Sanskrit rather than translations into Chinese. (Right?) They are translated into Chinese, and this Chinese may then be read phonetically by Japanese (or Paekcheans) with some training, regardless of whether or not the content is understood.
Right. My explanation was overly simplistic. The issue of orthography is terribly complex, and all I wanted to point out was that Indic names and Buddhist concepts that had no equivalent in Chinese would have been transliterated from Indic into Chinese via Chinese phonetic script. This "spelling" orthography was passed on to the three kingdoms on the peninsula, and later transmitted to Japan. Originally the Japanese (or Wa if you rather) knew the phonology behind the graphs, because the phonetic match is too good to be accidental. These graphs are what much later become hentai-gana. I dislike the term hiragana, because hiragana implies one-graph one-sound, where in hentai-gana any number of graphs could be used to transcribe /si/ or /ka/ or what-not.
I find it difficult to believe Heian women are learning hentai-gana but not learning Chinese graphs. It is possible, but as far as I know this is rather uncharted territory. I would rather see standard kanji production learned, and then a step up to soosho or kaisho.
Hope I haven't caused more confusion.
John Bentley
From: Robert Borgen
I have a feeling that some English-language scholarship has gone a bit overboard in emphasizing women's ignorance of Chinese. I've asked a few scholarly acquaintances in Japan whether or not Heian court ladies knew Chinese and the answer was "Of course they did. Well, at least the better educated ones did. And even they were surely not so proficient as the best educated men. But you can't simply say that women didn't know Chinese" And I have a feeling they are right. We may not be looking at an ideal society in which knowledge was equally distributed between men and women, but neither was it a society in which women were willfully kept ignorant of Higher Learning.
From: David Pollack
The discussion of gendered orthography suggests how far interpretation has been conditioned by gender politics. The notion of a strict division into kanji/Chinese texts for men and kana/Japanese texts for women would appear to have supported both sides of the gender divide, men getting to claim superiority in a male world of orthodoxy and technology, women in a female world of fiction. We should recognize the early and fictional nature of this division, while acknowledging the more complex and ambiguous reality that underlay it. I too have been guilty of simply reproducing without adequate research the simplistic notion of an absolute division, blurred only by the somewhat shameful abilities of various court women at Chinese. I'm sure that by the lights of their day it may indeed have made it more difficult for a woman's social and sexual reputation if she were known to be good at Chinese (while I agree that simply "copying" a sutra was another matter entirely). The effect would have been rather like an American highschool girl's being known to be good at math -- ie, a social disaster (pace the recent NYT Sunday magazine article). The reality of the matter in both cases is far more complex.
As for hentaigana, is this really an issue of Buddhist provenance? I seem to recall that Chinese and other Asian "translators" of Buddhist texts developed a fairly uniform system of transliteration for rendering sounds. I don't know how far back this goes, but I do remember Edward Schafer handing us in his first-year wenyan class a densely crowded page of unpunctuated classical Chinese on a Friday and telling us to have a translation by Monday. We labored mightily with our dictionaries and each came up with a different translation of what turned out to be a list of Central Asian place names from the Han Shu (History of the Han Dynasty)! One of the giveaways was supposed to have been the recurrence of characters used (as many of them still are) to reproduce alien sounds as the Chinese of that period heard them. This anecdote is only meant to suggest that Chinese were already used to the idea of sounding out foreign words in their own script from the 3rd-4th century AD (and I'm sure much earlier than that though I have no personal experience of it; I also don't have the date of the Han Shu to hand).
But the much later development in Japan of manyougana, while no doubt conditioned by the Chinese examples of transliteration in Buddhist and other texts, appears to have been a far more complex and difficult system, and I always assumed that this was the starting-point for the development of hentaigana in that country, or at least a mediating vector. That is, the Chinese and Japanese had their own particular linguistic problems to address in this process, and these were not the same. Hentaigana also underwent a long history of aesthetic change that seems to have been more a part of the Japanese than the Chinese experience. Both cultures adapted the script for aesthetic and political reasons (the early distinctions among the various forms of calligraphy in China have to do with considerations of "official vs non-official" and "public vs private" and "in office vs out of office" and these distinctions form the basis for all later uses of lishu vs kaishu vs xingshu vs caoshu, with variants for indicating antiquarianism and unfetteredness as well).
Sorry to burble on; the issue is clearly an extremely complex one and I'm sure that many scholars have written huge treatises on it that I should know about but don't.
David Pollack
From: William Bodiford
Hello. At 6/8/00 , John Bentley wrote:
I find it difficult to believe Heian women are learning hentai-gana but not learning Chinese graphs. It is possible, but as far as I know this is rather uncharted territory. I would rather see standard kanji production learned, and then a step up to soosho or kaisho.
Leaving aside the original question of what Heian women were or were not learning, once onna-de became an established orthography I see no reason why it could have been taught, practiced, and read on its own terms without any knowledge of the underlying kanji. At least that was my experience. I spent one year learning how to write onna-de. The teacher always made a point of telling us the underlying kanji when he introduced new forms, but except in a few cases the kanji were quickly forgotten. Knowledge of them made no difference in how we wrote or read "hentai-gana." How many people today remember all the underlying kanji for the standard hiragana and katakana? I imagine that the situation in earlier times was similar. Best wishes,
From: Elizabeth Markham
To the discusson of gendered orthography a musicologist's question. Is there any particular significance in C12 sources for Japanese Court Song being written-out - as singer's text-copies, or perhaps better, as memory-aids - in manyoogana? I am thinking in particular of Saibara (for which I believe one of the earliest references at Court concerns Princess Hiroi as a renowned singer), the texts for which are set to their actual music in katakana in the late twelfth-century gagaku-compendia for gaku-biwa and soo-no-koto, Sango-yooroku and Jinchi-yooroku. The manyoogana-sources (Tenji-bon, Nabeshima-fu) include various levels of "extra", seemingly performance-orientated information involving things like vowel-reiteration and I have often wondered whether manyoogana was considered neutral or scholarly and so capable of carrying the sort of practical information a musician (and particularly a singer who has to pronounce things as s(he) goes) needs.
Elizabeth Markham
Denise wrote:
The Lotus Sutra was presumably not written in hiragana [extant > examples are in Chinese characters] so if women were actually copying it, they were writing Chinese characters.
I think there is a common misconception here. There was no such thing as hiragana as we know it until after the Meiji Restoration, when the government tried to standardize what should be called hentai-gana before that time.
As anyone who has dealt with handwritten manuscripts will notice, a form of man'yoogana survived down till the Meiji era. The Chinese graphs were written in cursive form, hence the appearance of what we later call hiragana. The point is that one would have been educated in the writing of Chinese from the beginning. Naturally, this does not necessarily mean that the writer was taught to read Classical Chinese.
In essence, the sutras are just Indic texts converted to phonetic script by Buddhist scribes in China. A form fo this script was transmitted to ancient Japan via Paekche. Therefore because the Japanese were originally trained to write in a hybrid script that was related to the phonetic script the Chinese converted Indic texts into, this later meant that literate Japanese could read sutras with a little training.
John Bentley
Aristocratic women could have commissioned male scribes to make copies for them but the secondary sources do not specify that such commissioning was the customary practice
Just guessing, but my understanding is that the merit in question here accrued primarily via the _act_ of transcribing (granted such merit could be transferred to the patron or commissioner).
Granted that some Heian women knew Chinese characters, are we to understand women reading and copying the LS as acts on their parts or do we assume an invisible substratum of male scribes and lectors?
At this level, I don't think we need to assume male scrbes (lectors maybe). Less a question of knowing (how to read) Chinese characters than of how to wield a brush.
Lewis Cook
I've enjoyed reading the recent thread on sutras, gender and writing very much, and am moved to write the following notes about some points of interest. These are issues I've been spending a lot of time thinking about; please forgive me if I've gone on about them for too long.
1) The term hiragana was in use long before the Meiji period. Its first appearance is generally said to be in the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam (Nippo jisho; published in 1603); I have also seen citations of usages in a number of Edo period sources, including the famous dictionary Wakun no shiori. ("Hiragana" is later than many other terms for styles of writing: "kana," "katakana," "otokomoji," "otokode," and "onnade" are all attested to in Heian period texts.) In premodern usage, the general term for what we now tend to refer to as "hiragana"--that is, phonographs (graphs that inscribe sounds; in the Japanese case, syllables) derived from cursivized Chinese characters--was simply "kana." (Katakana are also derived from characters, but primarily through abbreviation rather than cursivization). Man'yogana (Man'yoshu kana) are phonograph characters that have not been cursivized or abbreviated; as the name suggests, they are used in the Man'yoshu and other Nara period works, but they can also be found in a wide range of pre- and post- Nara texts (for example, Edo period kokugaku scholars used them in commentaries and treatises). As John Bentley explains, these phonographs were employed in Chinese sutras to transcribe Indic proper names and unfamiliar terms, as well as incantations (dharani). The notion that newly appears in the Meiji period is that of "hentaigana" (also, less frequently, "itaigana"): hiragana which depart from the familiar forty-eight signs declared as the educational standard by the 1900 Shougakkou rei. It is clear from Meiji material published before 1900, of course, that a great deal of standardization had already taken place with the shift to moveable-type printing. Although John Bentley is quite right to point out how different pre-modern cursivized phonographs are from the modern printed variety, the term "hiragana" can be used to refer to the former as well as the latter (see, for example, the entry on "hiragana" in the Kokugogaku daijiten [Tokyodo: 1980]). For a concise, readable, and reliable discussion of these issues I recommend Christopher Seeley's "A History of Writing In Japan" [Brill: 1991].
2) As Hank Glassman points out, one does not necessarily have to understand a text in order to copy it. It is quite possible that many of the lowly and underpaid copyists employed in the copying bureaus of the Nara period had little understanding of the meaning of the texts which they were reproducing. I am unaware of any female copyists in those bureaus, but of course it could be argued that sutras produced by highborn women like Koumyou kougou were also copied without being read. However, among the works in her hand in the Shosoin is a version of a Tang letter-writing manual (the Dujia licheng [J. Toka ryuusei]), which doesn't seem like the kind of thing one would mechanically reproduce to gain merit. As far as *reading* of Chinese texts by pre-Heian women is concerned, a Nihon shoki description of a mass sutra reading in 651 mentions the participation of nuns as well as monks, and the Shosoin documents include written recommendations (for laypeople seeking to become monks or nuns) which mention women capable of reading not only Buddhist texts but the Analects and the Wenxuan as well.
3) The difficulty, of course, is the question of what reading was. Sutras and other texts which were originally written in Chinese were read by two different methods. "Ondoku" involved intoning the characters one by one, in their original order, with a pronunciation which could range from (initially) a close approximation of the Chinese readings to full-fledged "on'yomi." This method, which does not require comprehension on the part of the 'reader,' is still employed for the chanting of sutras; there are many members of this list who know far more about Buddhist practice than I do, but my impression is that there are many people even now who chant sutras which they are unable to understand. The other reading method is of course "kundoku," which involves associating characters with Japanese words that have meanings similar to those of the Chinese words with which the characters were originally associated, and then rearranging their order so that the resulting reading conforms--more or less--to Japanese grammar. This method, which is a combination of translation and reading, generally results in understanding on the part of the reader, although, as the traditional educational method involved memorizing the kundoku in tandem with the text rather than studying character by character, individuals with limited competency would be able to perform kundoku on some texts but not on others (of course, some texts are simply more difficult than others...). The earliest explicit testimony to the distribution of these reading practices comes at the beginning of the Heian period, with the emergence of kuntenbon (texts with kundoku annotations): Buddhist kuntenbon start to appear from the end of the 8th century, and non-Buddhist ("geten" or 'outer classics') texts from about a century later. (This could be taken to indicate that Confucian scholars were late to start doing kundoku, but I think it is better taken as a lag in *writing down* the readings). Some sutras and textbooks (the Thousand Character Classic or the Mengqiu [J. Mougyuu; a collection of rhymed encomia to famous individuals]) also contain notations of ondoku readings. Despite the lateness of this material, there is widespread evidence for the ubiquity of kundoku much earlier. From the middle of the 7th century onward, there are fragmentary notations of character readings (kun) on mokkan (wooden tablets); moreover, everyday writings on such tablets, not to mention the texts of the Kojiki (712) and many late 7th-century poems in the Man'youshuu, clearly presuppose the process of kundoku. Although ondoku seems to have maintained authority in certain scholarly and religious contexts through the Heian period (and still does, to a limited extent), I believe that from very early on kundoku was the basic method used when one wanted to study or understand a text. When Murasaki Shikibu writes of participating in her brother's classics lessons, or when Sei Shonagon wittily refers to a Bai juyi poem or a Shishuo xinyu episode, we are safe in assuming that their primary access to these texts was through kundoku.
4) This relates to points made by both Hank Glassman and Robert Borgen. There was no absolute linguistic boundary between reading texts via kundoku and hearing a lecture about them (indeed, one feature of such lectures was the kundoku-izing of the text in question). Considering kundoku also encourages us to think about a wide range of partial literacies rather than an all-or-nothing distribution of textual competency; just as many Heian noblewomen were undoubtedly able to perform kundoku (with varying degrees of proficiency), elite Heian men without scholarly backgrounds would have had serious problems with difficult texts.
5) Incidentally, although her gender is no obstacle to Murasaki Shikibu's Lotus Sutra being written in Chinese characters, there were such things as hiragana versions of the text, although not as early as the 11th century: I have seen references to several Kamakura period Kanagaki Hokekyou.
David Lurie
I've been interested for a long time in the role of Sanjonishi Sanetaka's mother in his early education. He wrote the following in an encomium (fujumon [kanji*] ) for the thirteenth anniversary of his mother's death (1484:10:14; Sanetakakoki 1: 527): "When I was a child she herself taught me my Classic of Filial Piety, and after I had grown, she personally introduced me to the Great Learning." She may, therefore, have been able to read Chinese to some degree. But she may also have had a trot, perhaps the undated Daigaku dojikun [*] attributed to Ichijo Kaneyoshi. Does anyone have more on this?