[In the following excerpt, Pollack explores Yoshimoto's involvement in promoting the use of Chinese elements in Japanese poetry.]

The minor art of poetry isn't worth a copper—
Best just to sit silently in Zen meditation:
“Wild words and ornate speech” don't cease to violate Buddha's Law
Just because he died two thousand years ago.(1)

So Gidō Shūshin (1325-1388) wrote near the end of his life to the well-known renga theorist Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1388), suggesting, “humorously” as the title of the poem informs us, that in the two millennia that had elapsed since the death of the Buddha, poets were continuing to find sophisticated and elaborate rationalizations for their pursuit of poetry, contrary to the warnings of the Buddha himself. There is some irony in Gidō's words: of the many famous men of letters who followed in the Zen line of Musō Soseki, Gidō himself, renowned in his own day as a poet, was among the most prominent.

From the time he began religious studies, Gidō had been aware that the young monks of the Gozan often spent more time composing poetry than they did in Zen meditation. No exception himself, Gidō was already enough of a scholar to understand that contemporary poetic practice in the temple world was based on inaccurate and corrupt texts of Chinese models.² At the age of twenty-two, therefore, he compiled an anthology of what he considered proper Chinese poetic models. His Jōwashū (Collection of the Jōwa Era, 1347) contains some three thousand poems by Chinese monks of the Sung and Yüan dynasties. One might well wonder in which of his “three grades of students” Musō would have classified so literary a pupil; the Master, however, was apparently impressed with his young student's zeal. One record says that Gidō regularly volunteered for latrine-cleaning duties, and even went so far as to use his fingernails for scrubbing the woodwork. Apparently concluding from this sort of behavior that Gidō had the proper attitude toward literature as an “expedient” in attracting others toward Zen practice, Musō in 1351, the last year of his life, gave the young monk his seal of enlightenment.

For all of his lifelong devotion to poetry, Gidō was as severe with his poetaster pupils as Musō had been. In 1371, for example, he reprimanded some pupils in Kamakura who had failed to attend a sutra lecture because they had been writing poetry:

I warn you to dissociate yourselves henceforth from these secular activities! If you fail to do this, I shall be forced to gather up all the non-Buddhist writings in the monastery and burn them in the central courtyard as an offering to God.³

Like Musō, Gidō would undoubtedly have been able to cite as precedent for such a drastic course the action taken by the important Southern Sung monk Ta-hui Tsung-kao (1089-1163), known as one of the most influential thinkers in the accommodation of Ch'an Buddhism to the literary interests of the Chinese ruling class. In one of those actions so common in the lives of the Ch'an masters, and so bewildering to posterity, Ta-hui burned the printing blocks of the Pi-yen Lu (Hekiganroku, Blue Cliff Records), a collection of koans compiled in 1150 by his own master, Yüan-wu K'o-ch'in. Ta-hui explained that he found intolerable the fad that this famous collection had created for what was known as “literary [k'an-hua] Ch'an” among the scholar-bureaucrats.⁴ It is ironic, and indicates how little Gidō was prepared to carry out such a threat, that his own restoration of the text of the Jōwashū, which had perished in a fire at Tenryūji in Kyoto in 1358, would become the obsession of his last years, demanding so much of him physically that it probably shortened his life.

After Musō's death in 1351, Gidō moved to Kenninji in Kyoto, a Gozan temple then headed by the Japanese monk Ryūzan Tokken (1284-1358), recently returned from an unprecedented forty-five year sojourn in China. Of the forty monks accepted by I-shan I-ning for study when he first arrived in Japan, the formidable Ryūzan had taken first place, while Musō placed second. Following Ryūzan to Nanzenji in 1354, Gidō records an encounter that year with the older monk that provides a good illustration of the sort of stern “Chinese” attitude toward literary composition Japanese monks could adopt when they had lived a considerable time in China:

In the first month of 1354, I paid a visit to Abbot Ryūzan, taking with me my collection of Chinese verse in the “old” and “regulated” styles to ask for his suggestions. But Ryūzan merely attacked my poems, saying “Dabbling in poetry is nothing a Zen monk should be doing!” I left feeling quite upset. The next day, however, he invited me back for tea and explained, “Poetry is one of the Six Arts. Beginning with the three hundred poems of The Book of Odes, one must apply oneself with utmost diligence for ten, twenty, even forty or fifty years, studying day and night, before one can write well. But Japanese Zen monks seem to think one can write poetry with no study at all!”⁵

Gidō may well have felt abashed, considering the contrast between Ryūzan's forty-five years in China and his own complete lack of first-hand experience. But Gidō's later importance within the Gozan as a representative of Musō's line places him almost by definition within the group of Zen monks who were never to go to China (what can only be called a half-hearted effort to go in 1342 collapsed when he discovered, as he wrote in his diary, that travel by boat made him seasick). Gidō and most of Musō's other disciples would, however—unlike Musō—draw the line at writing in Japanese. Their attitude toward Japanese letters was somewhat like that which Confucius is said to have taken toward ghosts: although there was certainly no denying that something of the sort existed, the true gentleman did not deign to take notice of them. Just enough of other poets' waka and renga compositions are recorded in Gidō's diary, the Kūge Nichiyō Kufūshū, to indicate that he was without a doubt familiar with their composition. We shall see in the discussion that follows that his knowledge of Japanese poetic theory and practice went far beyond what one would expect of a Zen monk.

When we read Gidō's poems in Chinese, we find them to be generally witty and adept, but far too voluminously occasional and slight to indicate truly great talent, or at least to have been very good for the talents he did possess. Rather, his poems reflect in their extremely social cast his political importance among the court and military aristocracy. His real forte was small poems intended for inscription on ink fan-paintings illustrating small scenes, a favorite genre of the Muromachi period:

Fan Landscape
In mist-bordered pine woods, a Buddhist temple,
At the water's edge, willow trees and fishermen's huts;
Zen monk's bowl empty in the afternoon,
Old fisherman's nets drying in the setting sun.(6)
Inscribed on a Fan
Night mists begin to disperse, dew not yet dry,
From the dark, chill sea the round ball of sun emerges;
Somewhere a traveler, anxious to make good time:
On the horizon, a homeward-bound sail sweeps the dawn cold.(7)

The Zen monks in general favored the shorter Chinese genres such as these four-line chüeh-chü (cut-off lines) or the eight-line lü-shih (regulated verse) when they wrote Chinese poetry. This preference may indicate the influence of the brief native waka poetry on the one hand, and on the other some discomfort with the long, untamed stretches of the forms more favored by the Chinese such as p'ai-lü (extended regulated) and ku-shih (old-style verse). Few Japanese poets wrote well in these longer forms, or even bothered much to use them at all, with some notable exceptions who, like Chūgan Engetsu, had spent a considerable amount of time in China. One sometimes gets the impression reading Gozan poetry from about the middle of the fourteenth century on that meaning tends to spill over the ends of lines and couplets more in the manner of the linear, hypotactic progression of thought that characterizes waka poetry, rather than the rigid parataxis that results from (or alternatively results in) the antithetical parallelism characteristic of end-stopped Chinese verse.

This reduction in the scale of the formal elements of poetry is paralleled by a reduction in scale of the natural world depicted in the Zen monks' poems. The horizonless stretches of sky and water of Chinese verse remain—these are after all as much a part of the Japanese landscape as of the Chinese. But conspicuously missing are the abrupt scarp and towering peaks typical of Chinese karst formations, or the sandy wastes and subtropical badlands that figure in so much Chinese poetry. The monks' landscapes tend rather to resemble the gentle and numinous hills and bays of Japanese utamakura, scenic spots hallowed by mention in earlier poetry. For all that the Gozan monks conceived of their world as a “Chinese” one, the scene in the poetic near-distance is often conspicuously un-Chinese: no city walls, no loft-storied buildings, no wail of barbarous Tartar flute or screech of monkeys in river gorges. These alien sights and sounds are replaced in Gozan poetry by thatched village farmhouses seen over low hedgerow fences, the aristocratic thrum of a koto, the twittering of a bush warbler. Inside the temples of the Chinese poetry written by Zen monks, as in the temples of the Gozan itself, cushions and tatami mats take the place of Chinese-style chairs and hard earthen floors, and the study alcove with its sliding window of translucent paper assumes the importance in poetry that it did in the new shoin styles of aristocratic residences.

Gidō himself noted this transformation from Chinese to Japanese content, for example, in the following poem about a Chinese festival known in Chinese as Jen-jih, or People's Day (celebrated on the seventh day of the first month), a name that provides the pun in the first line:

This antique scene may add to “people's days,”
But each passing year subtracts some teeth;
Not for bald Zen monks, those Chinese palace coiffures—
Someone else will have to wear colorful hair ornaments.
Nowadays we eat Japanese tangerines instead of mandarin oranges,
Unable to pronounce the traditional Chinese herb, drink tea instead.
What better image could one find for this lingering cold
Than a shivering Chinese passion flower?(8)

After the typically Chinese remark that each year finds him with fewer teeth, Gidō sets about exploring the dissonances of the Chinese festival as it was then celebrated in Japan: there can be no colorful hair ornaments for bald Zen monks; the traditional Chinese word for the mandarin orange (read in Japanese as karatachi) has become the more congenial Japanese mikan tangerine or tachibana; and the traditional herbal infusion is no longer made from an obscure Chinese herb but from ordinary tea, the character for which is similar to the archaic and by then quite unfamiliar character for the Chinese plant. The “passion flower” of the last line is literally a “flower of Tu-ling,” a Chinese expression for the female entertainer who in China would have livened the holiday festivities; the English translation must serve to render an untranslatable pun. This and many similar poems nicely demonstrate how uncomfortable Chinese conventions could become even within the supposedly “Chinese” world of Japanese Zen temples, revealing a certain ironic distance from alien matter, a distance that was only to grow greater with time.

For all his attention to the proper models of Chinese prosody—and some of his poems are very fine indeed—Gidō's poems in Chinese are at least as Japanese as they are Chinese. In this regard, they stand in marked contrast to poems by his friend Zekkai Chūshin (1336-1405). The two monks came to be linked in traditional evaluations, and are still thought of as the “twin pillars”—a very “Chinese” sort of phrase—of Gozan literature. As personalities, however, they might more accurately be said to have complemented each other as opposites. Unlike Gidō, Zekkai spent more than ten years in China (he left Japan in 1368, the year the Ming dynasty was established), returning home with praise from eminent Chinese, including Emperor T'ai-tsu, with whom he had exchanged poems. Zekkai also appears to have reserved his poetry for moments of deeply felt emotion or inspiration, a trait that seems rather more Chinese than Japanese. One result is that Zekkai left a corpus of poetry less than a tenth the size of Gidō's, much of whose poetry is social verse of relatively slight literary merit. On the other hand, the existence of so much poetry based on human intercourse and relationships suggests something of Gidō's eventual importance within the Gozan as one of the major diplomats of Musō's line. Recognized while still a young monk for his tact, Gidō was dispatched early in his career to help oversee the establishment of a politically important and extremely sensitive branch of Musō's faction in Kamakura. He remained there for two decades, patching over potentially dangerous ruptures with other factions of the Gozan, as well as between various tendentious groups within his own.

After his return to Japan in 1378, Zekkai, apparently less comfortable in the ruling-class world of Muromachi Japan than in that of Ming China, and ill at ease with the life led by the Shogun Yoshimitsu with its astonishing variety of aristocratic amusements, fled to the provinces around Kyoto and could not be prevailed upon to return to the capital. In a poem written during this period, Zekkai alludes to Yoshimitsu as a “haughty prince,” and his poems in general show him in the unyielding stance of a crusty and eccentric Zen hermit. By 1383, however, Gidō had somehow managed to lure his friend out of the hills, and by 1386 Shogun and monk had improved their relationship to the point where Zekkai agreed to return to Kyoto to head the Ashikaga family temple, Tōji-in. Following Gidō's death in 1388, Yoshimitsu came to rely increasingly on Zekkai for the sorts of advice he had earlier sought from Gidō, and by the time of the suppression of the Meitoku Rebellion in 1391 it is reported that the Shogun actually rode forth to battle dressed in Zekkai's own Zen robes.

Gidō spent two decades in Kamakura trying to keep the peace among the various Zen factions there before he was finally recalled to Kyoto in 1380, at the order of the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, to head the Ashikaga family burial temple, Tōjiji. Within a month of his arrival in the capital, Gidō found himself drawn into the very active literary circle around Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1388). Yoshimoto, the most important of the Shogun's aristocratic advisors and soon to be appointed Regent (sesshō), was already the most famous exponent of the art of renga poetry. Gidō took part in frequent literary gatherings with Yoshimoto in much the same way, and for the same reasons, that Musō Soseki had participated in such gatherings half a century earlier—monk hoping to draw ruling-class patron into deeper involvement in Zen practice, as well as to further the interests of his own line within the competitive world of the Gozan temples.

While in Kamakura Gidō had often participated in gatherings with other monks at which renku (linked-verse poetry in Chinese, or lien-chü) was composed.⁹ With the move to Kyoto and the broadening of his contacts among the leaders the of the noble and military classes, Gidō was introduced to wakan-renku gatherings, then in vogue in the capital, at which a hybrid form of renga linked-verse poetry was composed in alternating Japanese (wa) and Chinese (kan) stanzas.

Here we shall pause briefly to review the history of experimentation and practice of waken poetry since the Heian that lead to this development.¹⁰ There had of course been various waves of interest in the ways that Chinese forms might be accommodated to Japanese that extend back into the dawn of history. The Japanese seem to have first become truly self-conscious about their cultural response to China during the Heian period, and I have shown in chapter two that experimentation in this sort of accommodation, known as wakan, was an important part of Heian aristocratic life from the middle of the tenth century on. Chinese culture endowed with a gloss of imported attractiveness whatever was mundanely Japanese, while also helping to define an emerging “native” aesthetic by providing a contrasting “foreign” background. Helen McCullough has aptly described the first part of this practice as it figured in ninth-century literature:

Japanese poets were not incapable of creating topics, techniques and images of their own. But they felt an increasingly explicit desire to refine the waka, to invest it with an aura of sophistication, and to elevate it to the status of Chinese poetry, and one way of achieving those goals, they believed, was to use words, phrases, images and techniques that by their very antiquity, their encrusted connotations, conjured up, like some richly patinated bronze vessel, the whole glorious span of Chinese civilization.¹¹

In contrast to earlier gatherings at which the composition of Chinese and Japanese verse simply went on side by side, gatherings at which wakan linked-verse poetry was composed first appear in Japanese records in 1035.¹² The Shingon monk Ryōki notes in his Ōtaku Fukatsushō (ca. 1278) that wakan-renku was popular in his day, a fact that accords well with the pronounced interest in the “Chinese” culture of the Zen monks at the courts of Go-Uda (r. 1274-1287) and Fushimi (r. 1288-1298), both as emperors and as cloistered emperors (in).¹³ It seems reasonable to assume that the increasing interest at this time in finding grounds for a rapprochement between Japanese and Chinese poetry was related to the arrival in Japan of such émigré Chinese monks as Wu-hsueh Tsu-yüan, who left China in 1279 to establish the most literary line of Zen in Japan. It was only natural, after all, that the courtier and warrior patrons of these important Chinese monks would want to find ways to include them at their gatherings at which the composition of poetry played so large a role.

The occasion that most clearly marks the rise of wakan-renku to popularity among the elite during the medieval period is the elaborate gathering held at Saihōji Temple in Arashiyama by Musō Soseki during the late spring of 1346 to celebrate a particularly ancient cherry tree. This gathering was attended by several important Gozan monks as well as by prominent members of the military and court nobility.¹⁴ The linking of Chinese stanzas was headed by the most eminent of the monks present, the Chinese Chu-hsien Fan-hsien (Chikusen Bonsen, 1291-1348, arrived in Japan 1329), while Musō himself characteristically wrote only lines in Japanese.¹⁵ Musō was now at the peak of his career, and it would be interesting to know what the other monks must have thought of this unmonklike participation in the Japanese rather than the Chinese side of public life.

While Gidō, unlike his ambidextrous mentor Musō, appears never to have actually written poetry in Japanese, Nijō Yoshimoto wrote poetry in both Japanese and Chinese, and frequently called at Gidō's residence to ask him to judge and comment formally on his contributions to renku and wakan-renku gatherings. During the eight years following his arrival in Kyoto until his death in 1388, Gidō recorded some eighteen wakan-renku gatherings in his diary at which both he and Yoshimoto were present. Yoshimoto's name appears about thirty times in those parts of the diary still extant, and twenty-three of these entries are concerned with wakan-renku; it seems likely that a good many less formal wakan-renku sessions were simply never recorded.

Few complete wakan-renku poems remain from this period; the best known is a solo (dokugin) performance of one hundred stanzas by Emperor Go-Komatsu in 1394.¹⁶ The longest extant sequence that includes stanzas by both Gidō and Yoshimoto is a fragment that comprises only the first nine stanzas of the original one hundred, set down in Gidō's diary in an entry dated the last day of the eleventh month of 1384.¹⁷ That day Gidō had invited Ashikaga Yoshimitsu to attend the opening of a subtemple at Daiji-in in Nara:

The Shogun arrived in his carriage and I went forth to welcome him. … In the retinue accompanying him were the Regent [Yoshimoto] and some five others, as well as the monks Fumyō Kokushi [Sessō Fumyō], Shōkai Reiken [a disciple of Kokan Shiren], Taisei Shōi, and some ten others. After we had taken a light meal, we assembled at the Pavilion of the Southern Branch to compose a hundred-stanza wakan-renku poem.

Gidō mentions in his diary that a few days before this gathering he had prevailed upon the Shogun to write the characters for the name of the pavilion, Southern Branch, on a plaque which was to be installed over the entrance. The day following the gathering, he paid a visit to the residence of Sasaki Dōyo, where he was called upon to explain the significance of the Chinese story known as “The Dream of Han-t'an” (also known as “A Record in a Pillow”) written by the T'ang dynasty writer Li Mi (722-789). This request would seem to have been suggested by the theme of the previous day's verse-linking, for “The Dream of Han-t'an” is very similar to another T'ang tale known as “The Story of the Governor of Southern Branch” by the T'ang writer Li Kung-tso (770-850). Both stories concern events that happened in the course of dreams. At least from the scant ten percent of the poem that remains, however, these T'ang dynasty tales would appear to have nothing to do with the wakan-renku poem in question. The poem may also have drawn upon a purely Japanese association of the phrase “southern branch”: in a well-known story in the medieval chronicle Taiheiki, the beleaguered Emperor Go-Daigo (r. 1318-1339) dreamed of a tree whose branches, pointing south, led him to his stalwart defender Kusunoki Masashige, whose family name is a rebus composed of the characters “south” and “tree”.¹⁸

In the first nine stanzas of the poem, however, the allusion to a “southern branch” refers more immediately to a passage from an encyclopedic work by Po Chü-i, the Po-shih Liu-t'ieh. Under the heading of “Flowering Plum,” it says:

The blossoms of the plum trees of the Ta-yü mountains fall from the southern branches while those on the northern are just opening, so different is the warmth on the former and cold on the latter.¹⁹

This passage had long been known in Japan, having been included in the mid-eleventh-century anthology Honchō Monzui as well as in the earlier Wakan Rōeishū, where it appears under the heading “Early Spring” and set in opposition to lines from Po Chü-i's poem “Early Spring Scene.” It is these Heian anthologies of wakan sensibility that are most often the sources of allusions underlying the linking association of the poem that follows in Gidō's diary. Later, in discussing Yoshimoto's theoretical writings about wakan-renku, we shall see that he considered wakan anthologies the primary locus for any Japanese poet's knowledge of “Chinese” sensibility.

Probably in deference to Yoshimoto's stature as a linked-verse expert, the Shogun yielded to him the place of honor at the start of the poem. I shall simply translate the nine extant stanzas first, and then look into the question of the linking between stanzas afterward.

1. Yoshimoto
… Famed for countless generations,
Its very name evokes
Mists in the jeweled pines.
2. Gidō
… In the evening of the year
          It is gladdened by the returning spring.
3. Yoshimitsu
… Its blossoms, as they scatter,
Will soon conceal
The mountain paths.
4. Gidō
… Our sandals with fragrant grasses
          Will soon be redolent.
5. Yoshimoto
… One will find no longer then
Any trace of these walks in the snow.
6. Yoshimitsu
… The blossoms, so haggard
This morning, will have
Long since scattered.
7. Fumyō
… These traces of our spring outings
          So easily lend themselves to poetry.
8. Yoshimoto
… The Kingdom of Shining Rice
Too, with its autumnal fields,
Is peacefully gathered.
9. Taisei
… These crown jewels are reyered
In the imperial handwriting.

It is nearly impossible to gauge the skill of the poets or the success or failure of the poem as linked verse on the basis of this fragment of nine links, representing little more than the omotte hakku, or first eight stanzas written on the first fold of the first sheet of paper of a hundred-stanza sequence. Still, from these few stanzas some generalizations might be sustained.

It is striking that not only is the first link typically gratulatory, but also the eighth and ninth as well. From the tone of the eighth and ninth stanzas one might even imagine that the “Northern Court” backed by the Ashikagas and the “Southern” following the line of the rebellious Emperor Go-Daigo had already been reconciled, an achievement that would have to wait another eight years. Although the gathering was held in the eleventh month, during the period called Lesser Snow in the adopted Chinese agricultural calendar, the poem from the first link addresses itself to spring, giving the clear impression that the scene before the assembled poets is one of a plum tree unseasonably in bloom, a seasonal discrepancy in keeping with the idea of the “southern branch” of early-blossoming plum from Po's encyclopedia. While Taisei's stanza clearly alludes to the jewellike plum blossoms, it may allude as well to one of the three Sacred Treasures of the Imperial Regalia, the jewel Yasakani no Magatama. With neither side possessing all three Treasures, the dispute over the legitimacy of contending emperors could in theory never be resolved. Perhaps the early flowering of the plum blossoms suggested to the participants an omen of the unification of the Northern and Southern Courts, by association with Po Chü-i's vision of a single tree of earlier-blooming “southern” and later-blooming “northern” branches.

A closer look at the participants' understanding of one another's allusions reveals that Gidō was surprisingly well versed in Japanese poetry, certainly more than Yoshimoto was in Chinese. An example or two of the allusions in each link will suffice to show the extent to which the Japanese poets were aware of Chinese allusions and the monks of Japanese.

Yoshimoto's first stanza, in its felicitous connotations of longevity, alludes to spring with the word kasumi, “mist.” While its primary reference is to Man'yōshū 113, it alludes as well to a waka poem by the Heian courtier Minamoto no Muneyuki that is anthologized in the Wakan Rōeishū and appears also in the Spring section of the Kokinshū (1:24):

… Even the greenery
Of the evergeen pine,
Now that spring has come,
Has turned a deeper
Shade of color.

as an adaptation of this poem in the Shinchokusenshū (ca. 1234), poem 461:

… Even the branches
Of the jeweled pines,
Now that spring has come,
Seem to gleam with the brilliance
Of countless generations.

What is particularly interesting about Gidō's succeeding stanza is that in the phrase “returning spring” he appears to indicate that he is aware of the words haru kureba, “Now that spring has come,” not actually used by Yoshimoto but present in both the poems to which he alludes. This stanza perfectly complements the first, receiving it in accord with its seasonal connotations and continuing with little disrupting change. Gidō reveals here a sensitivity we would not have expected from a Zen monk toward the nuances of waka poetry he claimed to know nothing about.

His next stanza, which echoes a line by the Sung poet Tai I, is also interesting, less for any particular sensitivity to tradition—the word “sandals” simply continues the theme of “travel” suggested in the “mountain paths” (yamaji) of the preceding stanza—than because he ends his line with the Chinese character chūn (“equal” or “uniform”), which as it stands makes little sense except that it satisfies the requirement of a unified rhyme throughout the Chinese lines. It is only when we understand that the character is in fact intended to represent the similarly drawn Japanese graph (not used in Chinese) for nioi (fragrant, redolent) that the meaning of the line emerges. This illustrates the sort of thinking that wakan linked verse stimulated as it forced the participants to find ways to adapt Chinese forms to the exigencies of Japanese signification and vice versa.

In the fifth stanza Yoshimoto appears to have had in mind a poem in the Wakan Rōeishū, linking a traveler in a “Chinese” line found there to the unseen footprints of the traveler in Gidō's preceding stanza:

In mountains that recede into the distance clouds bury all trace of the traveler;
In pines that grow increasingly cold blows a wind that shatters the traveler's dreams.(20)

The first line of this couplet has a Japanese counterpart in a waka poem included in the Shingosenshū (ca. 1303; 557) that turns the clouds themselves into “travelers”:

… As they tread the base
Of mountain ranges,
Receding into the distance,
The white clouds, as they depart,
Leave not even a trace behind.

Yoshimoto states explicitly in several places in his theoretical works what he felt the practice of wakan-renku could contribute to the art of renga poetry. In so doing, he throws a certain amount of light as well on the larger question of what the contributions of “Chinese” things in general might be to the development in this period of a new aesthetic that was and still is felt to epitomize something quintessentially “Japanese.”

When Gidō returned to Kyoto in 1380 after a twenty-year absence from the capital, he was a newcomer, albeit one much sought after, to the modish wakan-renku gatherings then in fashion. Yoshimoto, however, had already considered wakan-renku a significant literary genre for more than twenty years, if we may judge from the fact that he had included twenty-four examples of it in his renga anthology Tsukubashū of 1356. Those examples, spanning the years 1329-1349, include several stanzas composed at the 1346 Saihōji gathering sponsored by Musō Soseki. Yoshimoto had also already written about the practice and theory of wakan-renku in such critical works as Tsukuba Mondō (1372) and Kyūshū Mondū (1376), both composed while Gidō was still in Kamakura. Gidō's partially extant diary, Kūge Nichiyō Kufūshū, however, is our principal source of information about Yoshimoto's participation in wakan-renku gatherings between 1380 and 1388, a subject we know almost nothing about before Gidō arrived in Kyoto to take an interest.

Best remembered today as advisor to Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in matters Chinese, Gidō lectured frequently to the Shogun and his circle on such topics of current interest as how Neo-Confucianism was to be interpreted both in theory and in governmental practice, the correct ways of composing Chinese poetry, and the sources and meanings of Chinese classical allusions. He clearly expected that by cultivating this powerful audience he would eventually succeed in bringing his interlocutors to a deeper appreciation of Zen and, perhaps more pragmatically, in insuring their continued support for Musō's line within the Gozan. But he was also realistic enough about such people to understand that they were usually most interested in whatever information he could impart in the area of practical political philosophy or, at the other extreme, in acquiring a sophisticated patina of imported culture. Gidō was very likely not altogether surprised, then, to discover that Yoshimitsu and Yoshimoto often put his solicitous instruction in philosophy and literature to uses that he had probably never intended.

Although they met nearly every day, Yoshimoto mentions Gidō only infrequently in his own writings. In the Jūmon Saihishō of 1383, for example, Gidō is simply cited as the authority for a reference to Chinese traditional poetic theory that Yoshimoto apparently included to support his view that renga poetry developed naturally from the native waka, an idea that he based on the Chinese critical notion of pien-t'i, “evolved form.”²¹ An examination of Yoshimoto's use of Sung dynasty theoretical works reveals that he frequently cited bits and pieces of works like Yen Yü's (1180-1235) Ts'ang-lang Shih-hua, especially as they are excerpted in the important and popular Southern Sung anthology Shih-jen Yü-hsieh (Jade Chips from the Poets, compiled ca. 1244 by Wei Ch'ing-chih and brought to Japan before 1324), less from any profound understanding of the Chinese theoretical concepts involved, or from any attempt to apply these concepts in a systematic way to his own theories, than as ornament that lent authoritative prestige to buttress his own innovative ideas about renga poetry.²² We need only recall that renga, a form with deep roots in noncourtly and nonelite practice, was still in the process of becoming the elite literary genre that would be at the fore of poetic practice and theory in the fifteenth century (along with nō drama, another as yet uncouth entertainment) to understand why Yoshimoto should be so anxious to establish an acceptable pedigree for it in earlier native and Chinese theory and practice.

In view of their close relationship between 1380 and 1388, it is likely that Yoshimoto was familiar with the general range of Gidō's opinions on Chinese literature. One of these opinions, found in a number of Gidō's writings, held that the T'ang dynasty (618-906) had been the golden age of linked-verse poetry in China (lien-chü), especially in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the age of Han Yü and Po Chü-i. Much as Fujiwara Teika had reaffirmed the importance of Po's poetry for the composition of waka in his own time, Gidō now held up Po's linked-verse poetry as the best model for renku poetry in Japan. But Chinese linked-verse (renku) as practiced by his own Japanese contemporaries, wrote Gidō, had fallen into a degenerate pastime of unimaginative superficiality, the poets doing little more than linking together stanzas in the Chinese manner using conventional words in conventional antithesis, “linking ‘yellow’ to ‘white’ and ‘wind’ to ‘moon.’”²³ This comment accords well with Yoshimoto's view that waka poets in his day “merely toy with ‘blossoms,’ sport with ‘wind,’ and show not the least refinement or elegance [fūga].”²⁴ Yoshimoto's response to this deplorable situation lay in part in adopting Chinese models to provide new depth in poetic practice, much as Teika had done two centuries earlier.

In his early treatise Renri Hishō, written when he was twenty-nine, Yoshimoto had listed what he considered to be the fifteen different types of linking possible in renga poetry. Included among these were the two categories of “word-linking” (kotobazuke), or superficial association, and “heart-” or “mind-linking” (kokorozuke), or more profound association. By the time he had reached the age of fifty, Yoshimoto had elevated the distinction between these two types of linking to a position of central importance in his theory of renga poetry, in a new emphasis on the primacy of kokorozuke that was taken up and elaborated by later theorists.²⁵ Yoshimoto's emphasis on the crucial distinction between complementary opposites also parallels Teika's earlier emphasis on the distinction between what he called the “style of possessing ‘heart’” (ushintei) and the rest of the “ten styles” he enunciated in his Maigetsushō of 1219.²⁶

Yoshimoto's elevation of linking by heart over linking by words can be seen in the section of the Tsukuba Mondō that deals with judging renga. It was naturally in evaluation and judgment, more than in any other activity, that theory came to the fore, and Gidō recorded in his diary Yoshimoto's frequent visits to his temple to ask the monk's judgment of a Chinese poem, renku, or wakan-renku. “In the composition of renga poetry,” Yoshimoto wrote,

one may make associations [yoriai] with Chinese literature as well as with matters of the mundane world, and therefore a man who would be a judge must have broad experience in literary practice [keiko]. These days it is usual to make associations to the Wakan Rōeishū and other collections of poetry set to music. The Book of Odes, the very source of Chinese poetry, also provides interesting associations as well as [what Confucius called] “the names of plants and animals.” These sorts of things appear so often in waka poetry that if a poet is not well versed in the ancient poetry and matter of Japan he will certainly find allusion to those of other countries too much for him. It is especially the heart [kokoro] of ancient poetry that is of interest in the practice of wakan-renku poetry. As I have written before, in wakan-renku poetry one should always link by heart rather than by word.²⁷

Yoshimoto is discussing here the importance of not merely keeping one's eye on the points that could be scored by superficially witty word-association (kotobazuke), which he called “a trivial business” (kitanaki mono),²⁸ but having instead the cultivation and refinement that alone would enable the poet to probe beneath the surface of words to discover the true nature of the underlying world created in a line of poetry. In his Kyūshū Mondō four years later Yoshimoto restated somewhat more elaborately the ideas set forth in the Tsukuba Mondō:

The Book of Odes may be called the original model of all Chinese poetry … and so it is of special interest for the practice of wakan-renku poetry. Besides the Odes, also of interest for wakan-renku are the styles of the San-t'i Shih [Poems in Three Styles, an anthology compiled by the Sung author Chou Pi] and the works of poets like Li Po, Tu Fu, Su Tung-p'o, and Huang T'ing-chien. If in linking stanzas one takes the words of Chinese poetry as one's basis for linking, one should be careful to use only those that show delicacy and yūgen—words that are jarring should never be used. In the case of wakan-renku poetry, moreover, there is the additional matter of what I have called “rejecting the words in favor of adopting the heart.” It should be one's general practice in wakan-renku linking to reject the surface meanings of the words, and to link one's lines instead to the heart of the previous line.²⁹

These passages suggest that Yoshimoto found wakan-renku poetry valuable as a kind of “practice of an art” (keiko) that could broaden one's familiarity with the “ancient matter” especially of China, as well as of Japan. Placing Japanese poetry near the more ancient and stately Chinese encouraged the elevation of tone he felt was essential if renga were to be given serious consideration as high art rather than be treated as merely a vulgar amusement. Rather than the term keiko, however, Gidō preferred, and often used, the term shugyō (practice of religion) in the same context when discussing poetry. But as Gidō well knew, men like Yoshimoto concerned themselves little with religious matters.

Given the almost daily necessity of including formidably Sinicized monks in their literary circles, it is also clear that the aristocracy felt a knowledge of Chinese versification and allusion would be helpful in keeping them from appearing foolish at such mixed literary gatherings. This sort of knowledge was also of pragmatic value in preventing the linking association from one stanza to the next in wakan-renku sessions from running aground on the shoals of linguistic and cultural ignorance, for obviously the kotoba or diction permitted in Japanese and Chinese poetry were alien enough to each other to cause severe problems, especially in the crucial matter of tone, as we have seen in the lines of the wakan-renku poem translated above.

It remains to ask just what Nijō Yoshimoto, a well-known theorist of renga poetry, could have expected to gain by such intense involvement in the ungainly hybrid genre of wakan-renku linked verse. One possible response to this question lies within the larger framework of the changing concept held by monks, nobles, and warriors alike of “China” and its cultural artifacts. A generation earlier, Musō Soseki, for all of his involvement in the composition of waka and renga poetry, had waxed quite indignant in his assessment of the new uses to which tea-drinking was being put in what he termed “scandalous” tea gatherings, severely condemning as well the newfangled zeal for connoisseurship in poetry, music, and landscape gardening (sansui, an area in which Musō was acknowledged a master). “These are elevated pursuits,” he wrote.

that can regulate the evil in men's hearts and give rise to a refined elegance. But the way they are carried on these days, they amount to little more than artistic accomplishments [nōgei] that give rise to egotism, and as such are detrimental to the Way of refinement and a source of evil.³⁰

What he found so objectionable, Musō continued, was that like the tea that had traditionally been used in the temples to stimulate drowsy minds to greater effort and concentrate scattered attention, and had even been used as a medicine, Zen monks were beginning to turn poetry as well to uses for which it had not originally been intended within either Chinese or Japanese temples. Musō located this change of emphasis within the context of the degeneration of the concept of kufū, a word that originally included any activity performed within a religious context, and in both China and Japan still meant “work” or “effort” expended in practice of the Way. By Musō's time, the Chinese (and so the Japanese Gozan monks) had begun to use the word to refer to what one did in one's “spare time away from work” (the word kung-fu is still used in Chinese to mean “free time,” while in Japanese it appears to have developed along its original lines to mean “devise a plan, project, or scheme”).³¹ Musō's criticism of tea-drinking, along with anything else that smacked of connoisseurship for its own sake, is evident from his complaint in his Instructions for Rinsenji Temple (Rinsen Kakun, 1339) about “monks who do nothing but hold tea-gatherings and chat all day”—an item that precedes in appearance and so in importance the usual injunction against eating meat and drinking alchohol (“even if lay guests are present”).³² The difference, wrote Musō, lay in whether such activities as tea-drinking were part of the context of one's daily religious “work” (kufū here identified with dōshin, “keeping one's mind upon the goal of enlightenment”) or merely performed in the spirit of “connoisseurship” (shiai), “artistic accomplishments” (nōgei), and so forth, To him, the terms shugyō, kufū, and keiko all meant the same thing; he would probably have been appalled at the comparison Seigan Shōtetsu made a century later between the appreciation of waka poetry and connoisseurship in tea, intended to garner for the older poetic tradition something of the glamor of the new fashion in tea.³³

Poetry written in Chinese, too, was in this period coming to be regarded much like any other karamono, or “Chinese object”—such as the tea bowl whose original homely function was to all but disappear in the increasingly stylized ritual and connoisseurship of chanoyu; the Chinese brocade that served to lend an atmosphere of rich ceremony to various sorts of formal display, including the nō stage; calligraphy whose provenance and style rather than content lent a touch of elegance to the new kaisho styles of ornamentation that centered on the focus provided by the emerging space of the tokonoma (display alcove); and the new painting styles, modeled after the Chinese, commissioned to decorate the equally new spaces provided by screens, sliding doors, and wall panels of the new shoin-style architecture of residences of the military elite. In other words, cultural and artistic forms once thoroughly alien to the Japanese were in this period in the process of being emptied of their Chinese content and replaced with entirely Japanese signification. Ironically, Musō himself may even have inadvertently contributed to the growing demand for Chinese goods through his personal sponsorship of the “Tenryūji ship.” Dispatched to China in 1342 in the expectation of trade profits to help underwrite the cost of completing Tenryūji, a temple Musō was building in the western outskirts of Kyoto, this ship represented the first trade mission to China to be officially sanctioned by Japanese authorities since the Mongols' attempted invasion of Japan in 1281.

In much the same fashion that other Chinese cultural artifacts were being subjected to new interpretations within a Japanese context, poems written in Chinese (kanshi), as their composition spread beyond the confines of the temple world, were also becoming objects to be esteemed more for their ceremonial and ornamental qualities than for their traditional functions within an earlier religious context. The traditions of Chinese poetry and ink-painting especially were largely in the keeping of the Gozan monks, along with the most recent information from the mainland on their composition and critical theory. Thus, it was inevitably to the Gozan monks that the creators and consumers of the new cultural tastes had to turn in this period, Nijō Yoshimoto among them, for the poetry itself and the difficult rules that governed its composition. Even more important, they turned to the Gozan monks in order to understand the elements of what men like Yoshimoto thought of as the atmosphere of fūga, “elegance and refinement,” evoked by Chinese poetry.

The practice of wakan-renku poetry seems clearly related to a need, beginning to be felt in the Nambokuchō period and growing acute during the rule of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, to bring an atmosphere of aristocratic refinement to literary gatherings, of the sort that was then generally believed to have permeated the gatherings of the Heian court nobility. It was felt that Chinese cultural artifacts especially lent the desired element of elegance and refinement to all such group cultural activities. At first, the glamour of imported continental culture simply overshadowed the Japanese. It was inevitable, however, that eventually the need would arise to accommodate what was essentially alien to what was essentially Japanese, as an increasing awareness of what was properly “native” provoked a heightened sensitivity to what was “foreign,” and vice versa. The process that appears to have occurred in such cases was that the two elements were at first simply placed side by side in a variety of hit-or-miss attempts at finding harmony between them. We can see this early stage in the gaudy and indiscriminate, or so-called basara, styles of karamono display that were common through 1400. This stage was followed by a gradual assimilation or subordination (wa, harmonization) of the foreign to the native, Japanese (wa) needs determining the ways in which Chinese (kan) forms and materials found expression.

The fondness for karamono that developed in the late Muromachi period to a high point around 1480 in the Higashiyama culture of Ashikaga Yoshimasa (so called after his villa in the Higashiyama, or Eastern Hills, of Kyoto) is a reflection of the Ashikaga Shoguns' yearnings for courtier sensibilities of fūga, “refinement and elegance,” what was “Chinese” serving also to point up by contrast what was peculiarly “Japanese” about the new aesthetic. This development of a new aesthetic is epitomized in the frequent pun that followed the transformation of a taste for imported “Chinese” (kara) elements into a taste for the “withered” or “dry” (kara, kare) that came so completely to dominate late-Muromachi aesthetics.³⁴

In this context, it is not difficult to understand how incorporating lines of Chinese verse written by Zen monks into the Japanese milieu of the linked-verse gathering may have been felt to contribute to the cultivation of an atmosphere of refined elegance, held by contemporaries to have been the classical ideal of such gatherings in Heian times, and now felt to be sadly lacking. The participation in poetry gatherings of such a major figure as Musō had served to mediate within the same society between Chinese and Japanese elements that until then were unacceptable as literary partners, thereby greatly helping to banish much of what even the Chinese called the “smell of pickled vegetables” that emanated from the poetry of monks, and rendering more palatable what Japanese of all periods have considered the indigestible quality of things Chinese in their unmediated state, whether they be food, the written language, or poetry.³⁵ Kokan Shiren's earlier pointed use of the phrase “kana monks” (cf. p. 133) may indicate that Musō's participation in Japanese letters was not to the taste of all Gozan monks; but it was Musō and not Kokan who was more in the mainstream of contemporary medieval Japanese culture. Men like Yoshimoto and Zeami were for their part delighted by the opportunities presented by accommodating and solicitous monks like Gidō, and took pains to cultivate them, a matter that will be considered more fully in chapter six.

It was natural for Yoshimoto, having devoted his life to raising the practice of renga poetry to the level of high art, to be concerned with that aura of elegance and refinement that Chinese poetry might lend the native genre. But the practical question inevitably arose as to exactly how the apparently irreconcilable forms of Chinese and Japanese poetry could meaningfully be brought together. Working from the context of an intense involvement with the traditions of Japanese poetry, Yoshimoto required a collaborator—no one as unacceptably alien as a Chinese who spoke little Japanese and had less sensitivity to the requirements of native Japanese literary concerns, of course, nor even a Japanese monk as uncomfortably “Chinese” in culture as Zekkai Chūshin. Rather, Yoshimoto found his ideal collaborator in Gidō, a fellow Japanese who, having already succeeded in assimilating a great deal of Chinese culture within a Japanese framework, could be uniquely helpful in the task of further assimilation into the mainstream of warrior-aristocrat cultural life. Musō Soseki, who was equally active in both traditions, would have been the perfect choice for such a task, and Musō's interest in waka and renga had clearly opened the way for later experiments such as Yoshimoto's. But Yoshimoto, whose earliest extant critical treatise dates from 1349 when he was only twenty-nine, was still only thirty-one when Musō died in 1351. Nor had the all-important climate of interest in things Chinese among literary and other circles in mid-fourteenth-century Kyoto yet risen to the hothouse levels that were to accompany Ashikaga Yoshimitsu's infatuation from 1378 onward with the luster of mainland culture.

Gidō's return to Kyoto in 1380 coincided with this new climate fostered by Yoshimitsu in the capital. Working from what would be thought of as the “Chinese” side of Japanese cultural concerns, Gidō was primarily committed to the task of involving his new circle (the powerful patrons of Musō's line among the noble and military elite) in Zen, which meant in both the politics and the culture of the Gozan. If they seemed to want the glitter of Chinese culture rather than the more profound understanding of Zen that he held out to them, Gidō was realistic enough to cooperate with them in the hope that some Zen might rub off in the process.

The result of this collaboration can be seen especially in the wakan-renku gatherings of the day. It was, after all, highly unlikely that Gidō as a Zen monk would be invited to gatherings of renga poets, though in the fifteenth century Gozan monks would be deemed appropriate members of such circles. What Yoshimoto thought of wakan-renku gatherings, however, is made clear in his theoretical writings: in the course of the search for a meaningful way to relate Japanese lines of poetry, Japanese poetic thought, to Chinese, a poet would necessarily develop the broader, deeper cultivation that came from having to steep oneself in a more ancient tradition, and at the same time his art would acquire something of the patina of antiquity.

Yoshimoto was quite aware of the paramount and obvious obstacle that lay in the path of any attempt to adapt Chinese forms to Japanese ends: the apparently irreconcilable differencesc[etween Chinese poetic diction on the one hand and the kotoba or diction considered permissible in Japanese poetry on the other. Although the languages of Japanese speech and poetry had always evolved in dialectical response to Chinese, for long centuries the existing corpus of waka poetry was felt to be the only proper “word-hoard” of Japanese sensibility. In the terms of native Japanese poetic discourse, however, a problem involving kotoba necessarily involved its complementary aspect of kokoro, or “heart.” This critical polarity had evolved in theoretical discourse since at least the start of the tenth century, and may even be traced back centuries to the punning use of the word koto in the Kojiki to mean both “things” themselves as well as the “words” that stood for them. Progress in waka poetry had always been motivated by the awareness of successive generations that the words of earlier poets no longer sufficed to represent new realities. In response to this dilemma, poets invariably turned to a “deepening of kokoro” to provide the still deeper well from which fresh kotoba would spring anew.

If there was now a problem with kotoba, then, the proven remedy was to experiment with kokoro, and this is exactly what Yoshimoto did. He felt that if one probed beneath the superficial level of “words,” one would discover the “heart” or realm of underlying ideation from which they came, a realm in which essential similarities became clear as apparent differences disappeared. If one were then to match one's kokoro to that which informed a line of Chinese poetry, one's own kotoba would necessarily “harmonize” with it and at the same time be made more profound by the effort.

This was the goal of what Yoshimoto called “linking by heart” (kokorozuke). In a famous comparison, the later theorist Shinkei was to call linking by heart the “Zen” style in renga. In fact, its operation recalls more closely the Tendai process of mediation that Shunzei had adopted in Kōrai Fūteishō (1197) as part of the theoretical context for the evolution of a new aesthetic, discovering in the operation of this dialectic a means by which the poet could probe beneath the level of the superficial in order to reemerge into a new and more profound synthesis. We saw in chapter three that Teika had appealed to the power of Chinese archetype, embodied in the Heian enshrinement of the poetry of Po Chü-i, to calm the mind, elevate the spirit, and provide the ground against which the true significance of Japanese pattern might best emerge. To Yoshimoto “China” clearly held out much the same possibility for this needed renewal of “depth” that it had to Teika.

To speak of the emergence of design against background is necessarily to be reminded of the important contrast in medieval theory between “ground” (ji) and “design” (mon), a critical concept considered especially important in the composition of hundred-stanza renga sequences. This effect was achieved by placing a few striking “design” verses among a much larger number of intentionally unimpressive “ground” verses so that the full impressiveness of the former might emerge more clearly. The origin of this technique has been attributed, like nearly everything else in later medieval aesthetics, to Teika, who is said to have emphasized the importance of the ground/design contrast in the teachings of his father, Shunzei.³⁶ Whatever the actual origins of this concept, it was clearly of great interest to Yoshimoto in the development of his renga theory. “What requires skill,” he wrote, “is to create a quiet, subdued renga sequence that includes a ‘design’ stanza only every four or five links. This creates a superior style that makes itself felt immediately when one so much as looks at the page, since the stanzas without ‘design’ do not leap to the eye.”³⁷ And again, “It is a sign of great skill when at a single session there are no more than two or three superior stanzas that make one prick up one's ears.”³⁸

The distinction between “heart” and “words” could with some justification be located within the context of Ch'an-influenced Chinese critical theory. The uniquely Japanese contrast between “ground” and “design,” however, had no counterpart in Chinese thought, for it never occurred to the Chinese to find such dialectical contrast inherent in or intrinsic to the creation of meaning, which they regarded to be a purely Chinese matter. But this Chinese indifference to the idea of contrast did not prevent Yoshimoto from drawing on the impressive weight of Chinese archetype to help illustrate his point. In a passage whose moral relativism would surely have bewildered the Chinese, he wrote:

Of old even the time of the Sage Emperors Yao and Shun was not entirely devoid of evil, nor were the reigns of the Wicked Emperors Chieh and Chou entirely devoid of good. Still, on the whole we distinguish between “Sage” and “Wicked” Emperors. In people, too, though good may predominate, we must accept that there will also be some bad—this is not something that is limited to the art of renga alone.³⁹

This was intended as a pragmatic response to the problem that even the most skilled poet might on occasion find himself without resources and, under pressure to create an unobtrusive “ground” stanza, might only create an obtrusive and grating stanza instead. Yoshimoto's more general concern for the problem of ground and design can be seen too in the twenty-four examples of wakan-renku linking he chose for inclusion in his anthology Tsukubashū. In each case a Chinese stanza is followed by a Japanese one, Japanese “design” thus deliberately set off against its Chinese “ground.” This treatment has its visual analogue in the heightened contrast of the graceful and delicate linear flow of the cursive Japanese script set side by side on the page of wakan-renku with the more cumbersome and block-like appearance of the Chinese characters ….⁴⁰ Although contrasting, neither element predominates on the page, each alternating as ground and design much as background and foreground seem to alternate in the familiar modern figure, used to illustrate the principle of gestalt perception in psychology textbooks, of the vase created by the space between two facing profiles of a human head.

At this point the principle of ground/design contrast was still in embryonic form, not to attain its full importance in renga theory and practice until the fifteenth century. Its role in the development of fifteenth-century aesthetics forms part of the discussion of chapter six. Since I shall have more to say about renga too in the following chapter, I have restricted myself here to an exploration of the significance of the intense interest in wakan-renku before 1400, during what has become known as the Kitayama era of Muromachi culture. From his writings, we find that Yoshimoto seems to have developed his clearest idea of what renga was by consciously opposing the Japanese form to what it was not, which is to say Chinese poetry. Although it continued to be practiced well into the sixteenth century whenever Zen monks gathered with other groups of poets to write poetry together, wakan-renku remained an ungainly hybrid form, by its very nature impossible of complete assimilation into the mainstream of Japanese literature. While some of it is actually quite good as poetry, its primary interest for us lies in its significance within the context of the overall development of Muromachi aesthetics.

Like any form, wakan-renku can be thought of as “self-referential,” as a formal sign, that is, that points as much to itself as to any particular content. In this sense, wakan-renku can be understood in semiotic terms as being “about” the age-old imperative of Japan to define itself against and in terms of the “other”—China—and, by establishing itself in dialectical relation to the other, to give expression to a more profound meaning than could otherwise have been achieved.

Notes

1. GBZS, 2:1540.

2. That the Gozan monks often knew their Chinese literature from badly corrupt texts is suggested by a colophon by the most eminent of the Chinese then in Japan, Chu-hsien Fan-hsien, to the collected poetry of a monk named Kotoku, which mentions the popular Yüan dynasty collection Chiang-hu Feng-yüch Chi (compiled by Sung-po Tsung-hsi) containing the poetry of Ch'an monks written between 1260 and 1321 (GBZS, 1:723):

   When I was in China I once saw this Chiang-hu Chi, which monks young and old alike delighted in following as a paragon of clever words and phrases. … The situation here is exactly the same. Day and night the young and old pore over this book instead of busying themselves with their Zen studies. However, nine of every ten words in the book are misprints, and one cannot make out what they mean. Nor can I make out the gist of even one or two in ten of these monks' poems. Alas! … How tragic that men should take up [this text] in their search for poetic subjects. It is for this reason that I have added this colophon.

3. Tsuji Zennosuke, ed., Kūge Nichiyō Kufū Ryakushū (Tokyo: Taiyōsha, 1938), 61, entry for 9/28/1371. Gidō uses the Chinese word t'ien-ti (literally, Heavenly Emperor) for “God”—very unusual diction for a Zen monk.

4. Cf. T, 48: 1036b, “Letter to Chang Tzu-shao”; also Yanagida, Chūgoku Zenshūshi, 98ff.; and Araki Kengo, “Confucianism and Buddhism in the Late Ming,” in William T. de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 54-56.

5. GBZS, 2:1645-46. I should note that Ryūzan seems to have been much more concerned that Gidō was unfamiliar with the latest Chinese styles than that he was writing poetry. The traditional enumeration “Six Arts” (liu-i) includes Rites, Music, Archery, Horsemanship, Calligraphy, and Mathematics; Ryūzan is referring, however, to the “Six Classics,” which include the Book of Changes, Book of Odes, Book of Documents, Spring and Autumn Annuals, Book of Rites, and Book of Music.

6. Ibid., 1349.

7. Ibid., 1432.

8. Ibid., 1466.

9. See David Pollack, “Linked-Verse Poetry in China: A Study of Associative Linking in Lien-chü Poetry with Emphasis on the Poems of Han Yü and His Circle” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1976). For a close study of one Chinese linked-verse poem, see David Pollack, “Han Yü and the ‘Stone Cauldron Linked-Verse Poem,’” Journal of Chinese Studies 1:2 (June 1984), 171-202.

10. The importance of wakan gatherings in this period has been pointed out by Haga, Chūsei Zenrin, 418-22. Haga's work is central to any understanding of the role played by the Gozan monks in the larger context of Japanese literature.

11. Helen C. McCullough, trans., Tales of Ise (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1968), 33-34.

12. Kidō Saizō's chronology of renga developments shows renku-renga (an earlier term for wakan-renku) beginning from 1035. See Rengashi Ronkō, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1973), 862.

13. Kaneko Kinjirō, Tsukubashū no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1965), 756ff.

14. Ibid., 619ff.

15. Ibid., 631. Kaneko asserts that the linking at the 1346 gathering is that of the kotobazuke (word-linking) style, calling it “flat and monotonous,” and finds the linking in the twenty-four examples included in the Tsukubashū little improvement (636ff.). Surprisingly, he finds no subsequent improvement in the linking demonstrated in the examples included in the Shinsen Tsukubashū compiled in 1494 by Sōogi and others.

16. The 1394 dokugin, or “single-author linked-verse poem,” by Go-Komatsu is reproduced in its entirety in Nose Asaji, Renku to Renga (Tokyo: Kaname Shobō, 1950), 168-75, who analyzes the poem on 176-86 and discovers “Bashō's sort of nioizuke [linking by indirection]” (186); see however Kaneko, Tsukubashū no Kenkyū, 538-639, who does not.

17. The preface and poem that follow are cited from Tsuji, ed., Kūge Nichiyō Kufū Ryakushū, 203. See also Kageki Hideo, Kunchū Kūge Nichiyō Kufū Ryakushū (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1982), 324.

18. Taiheiki, NKBT, 14:96-98. See also Morris, Nobility of Failure, 111.

19. Wakan Rōeishū, NKBT, 73:49 and notes.

20. Ibid., 152.

21. NKBT, 66:113.

22. Konishi Jin'ichi, “Yoshimoto to Sōdai Shiron,” Gobun 14 (1968), 1-9; see also 135.

23. GBZS, 2:1642; a convenient compilation of Gozan monks' comments on renku poetry can be found in Ōno Kitarō, “Gozan Shisō no Renku,” in Hattori Sensei Koki Shukuga Kinen Ronbun (Tokyo: Hōzanbō, 1943), 195-202.

24. Tsukuba Mondō, NKBT, 66:81.

25. Ibid., 50-52.

26. NKBT, 20:514-17.

27. Tsukuba Mondō, NKBT, 66:91.

28. Ibid., 90.

29. Cited in Haga, Chūsei Zenrin, 420.

30. Muchū Mondō, ed. Karaki Junzō, Zenka Gorokushū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969), 152-53. Muso's use of the term sansui has sometimes been interpreted as “ink-painting” or even as “appreciation of nature”; that he clearly meant “landscape gardening” can be seen from an earlier part of the same passage in which sansui is described as “building mountains, erecting rocks, planting trees, creating streams” (150-51).

31. The Ch'a Ching, or “Classic of Tea,” by the T'ang author Lu Yü, the most important early work on tea in China, describes “Kung-fu tea” taken in tiny cups, a style of drinking that must indeed have required a certain amount of “free time.”

32. T, 80:501c.

33. Shōtetsu Monogatari, NKBT, 65:230-31.

34. See the interesting study by Nagashima Fukutarō, Ōnin no Ran (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1965), 241-68: “Ōnin no Ran to Higashiyama Bunka”; and the central importance of the wakan dialectic, 262-66: “Wakan no Kon'yū.” See also Haga, Higashiyama Bunka, 73ff., on the term kara-sansui, “Chinese landscape garden,” as a punning near-homophonic equivalent for the term kare-sansui, “dry [waterless] landscape garden,” found for example in an important Gozan text of 1446. Medieval literature contains many similar examples of the word karabu (withered, dry) written as “Chinese.” There is, for example, Zeami's discussion in Fūshikaden of the simplicity of appearing Chinese when acting Chinese roles: “If one simply acts in some ‘Chinese’ manner or other in order to appear to others as Chinese-like [“Karabitaru yō ni yosome ni minaseba”], one will soon seem to be Chinese” (NKBT, 65:356).

35. For the expression “smell of pickled vegetables” in Chinese criticism, see the “Ch'an-lin” section of Shih-jen Yü-hsieh, 443.

36. See KNBT, 66:250, n. 21.

37. Ibid., n. 20.

38. Tsukuba Mondō, ibid., 87.

39. Ibid.

40. Examples of the appearance of wakan in poetry manuscripts can also be seen in John M. Rosenfield and Edwin H. Cranston, The Courtly Tradition in Japanese Art and Literature (Cambridge: Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, 1973), 138-47 and plates 45-47.

Abbreviations

GBSS: Tamamura Takeji, comp., Gozan Bungaku Shinshū

GBZS: Uemura Kankō, comp., Gozan Bungaku Zenshū

MNZ: Ono Susumu, ed., Motoori Norinaga Zenshū

NKBT: Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, Iwanami Shoten

NKBZ: Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū, Shogakkan

NST: Nihon Shisō Taikei, Iwanami Shoten

T: Takakusu and Watanabe, eds., Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō

WWW: Donald Keene, World Within Walls