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1 Introduction Haiku’s popularity is worldwide today, comparable even to the modern Western realistic novel. Indeed, Japanese haiku verses are now translated into many languages, haiku variants are being composed in different tongues on all the major continents, and a quick Internet search on haiku produces more than three million links on the subject. While the general interest in haiku continues to grow, few people outside Japan know about haikai, or comic linked verse, which gave birth to haiku. Even fewer know about the interesting role that Chinese Daoist classics played in its becoming a high art. This book examines an important epoch in the development of haikai—the haikai poets’ adaptation of the Daoist classics, particularly the Zhuangzi, during the seventeenth century, a movement that contributed to haikai’s transformation from an entertaining pastime to a serious art. The latter half of the seventeenth century witnessed an interesting phenomenon in the development of Japanese poetry. When haikai overshadowed the classical waka (Japanese song) and renga (linked verse) to become one of the mainstays of the newly rising popular literature, haikai poets enthusiastically drew upon the Chinese Daoist texts, namely the Zhuangzi. Haikai poets’ interest in the Zhuangzi grew almost simultaneously with the re¶ourishing of the genre in the middle of the century , when the Teimon School prevailed. This interest continued in the succeeding Danrin and Shômon schools in the 1670s and 1680s, and the Daoist classic became one of the cornerstones of haikai theories and its intertextual structure. The impact of the Zhuangzi on haikai is clearly documented in the haikai literature of the time. The Danrin School took Zhuangzi’s gûgen1 as the hallmark of haikai; as its leader, Nishiyama Sôin (1605–1682), declared , “haikai is the gûgen of waka, the kyôgen (eccentric drama or com- 2 Introduction edy) of renga.”2 Matsuo Bashô (1644–1694), the founder of the Shômon School who gained posthumous popularity as Japan’s greatest haikai poet, repeatedly instructed his followers to study the Zhuangzi. According to his disciples, Bashô’s teaching on haikai “encapsulated the quintessence of Zhuangzi’s thought.”3 Although the impact of the Zhuangzi on haikai is remarkable, there has been no systematic study in any Western language on this issue. The absence of Western scholarship is not surprising, because the lack of attention to Daoism in Japan has been a general situation in Japanese studies. Although the presence of Daoism in Japan has never been questioned , the study of it is very limited in both Japanese and Western scholarship . In 1923, Kuroita Katsumi made the ¤rst formal study on Daoism in early Japan,4 but this pioneering work did not inspire immediate interest among Japanese Daoist scholars. The lack of consequential interest has both historical and political dimensions. Since the medieval period, the prevailing emphasis on Confucianism among Japanese scholars more or less stigmatized Daoism, creating a general impression that it was unworthy of serious contemplation because of its magical and folk character.5 In the early modern period, the opinions of the National Learning (kokugaku) scholars further disapproved of the study of Daoism in Japan. Although the intellectual environment of early modern Japan was not entirely hostile to Daoist teaching—even some of the National Learning scholars, such as Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), made favorable comments on the Daoist classics Laozi and Zhuangzi—the National Learning movement as a whole laid the foundation for the elevation of Shintô to a state doctrine, which created a myth of Japanese uniqueness that denied any substantial Chinese in¶uence on early Japanese thought and religious belief.6 Moreover, Japan’s militaristic effort to conquer Asia and control the world in the 1930s and 1940s made the study of any Daoist in¶uence in Japanese culture heretical, for a critical view of Japan’s cultural heritage would be considered a challenge to the uniqueness and supremacy of the “divine imperial state” (kôkoku).7 It is not surprising that until, in the late 1970s, Fukunaga Mitsuji published his extensive studies on the role Daoism played in shaping Japanese culture , Japanese Daoist scholars had primarily focused their studies on China. The lack of Japanese scholarship on this subject no doubt affected Western researchers. Until recently, the number of studies on Daoism in Japan in Western languages remained very small, and many important aspects in this ¤eld are largely unexplored.8 Part of the reason for this lack of Western scholarship has to do...

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