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  • Emptiness and Temporality: Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Poetics
  • Brian Ruppert (bio)
Emptiness and Temporality: Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Poetics. By Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008. xi, 208 pages. $55.00.

This study treats a very important question—what is the character of the relationship between Buddhism and medieval Japanese poetics?—by examining the poetics of Shinkei (1406-75), a Tendai monk known for his waka [End Page 132] and, especially, renga (linked verse). For Ramirez-Christensen, Shinkei's poetics, exemplified in his treatise Sasamegoto (1463), is representative of the "aesthetic philosophy" that medieval renga, waka, and drama "all shared" (p. 1). Ramirez-Christensen, moreover, is not content to merely investigate the discursive context of medieval Japanese poetics. She emphasizes that her project is also to "draw medieval Japanese poetry and poetics into the contemporary Western discourse of poststructuralism, in particular the Derridean concepts of différance and deconstruction" (p. 1) because she sees a resonance in connection with the spacing in renga along with the "affinity" between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and deconstruction (p. 2).

Part 1 of the work, "The Poetics of Renga" (Chapters 1-6), concerns the significance of renga structure more broadly. Ramirez-Christensen argues that the tsukeku (linking verse) can be appropriately interpreted as a "dynamic instance of dependent origination," the arising of phenomena seen here via the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of emptiness (J. kū; p. 29). She connects this point to the indeterminacy or incomplete quality of linguistic units described as the key to meaning in Ferdinand de Saussure's theory and in the work on language by figures such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, which have since the linguistic turn "come to resemble the basic concepts of Buddhist philosophy" (p. 31). At the same time, Ramirez-Christensen argues, first, that Buddhism and the linguistic turn—recognition that language is not merely a medium for thought—part in their ends: Buddhism has a soteriological goal whereas poststructuralism attempts simply to give free rein to the "play of signifiers." She emphasizes that, for Shinkei and the poets who were "his predecessors," the latter view would constitute a misunderstanding of the goal of poetic practice (p. 35).

Ramirez-Christensen emphasizes that the act of "linking" in renga is a "hermeneutical process," always an interpretation of a prior text, the maeku (immediately preceding verse). Linking turns within the established poetic system shared by the renga participants effect a "'fusion of horizons,'" a circle of understanding envisioned by Hans Georg Gadamer in his interpretive theory (pp. 37-46). This poetic process, however, is not an "'endless play of signifiers'" since Shinkei's poetics, "Mahayana-inspired," identifies it "as the transparent transmission of mind through and despite language, a description that places the most weight on the quality of mind that a poet brings to the session" (p. 47).

Indeed, the author notes, Shinkei directly compares the basic metaphorical "shift" in the process of renga signification—constituted in the hen-jo-dai-kyoku-ryū structure (prelude-beginning-topic-statement-dissolve)—to the structure of Buddhist sutras, the latter of which take a pattern called "introduction-proper teaching-propagation [jo-shō-ruzū]" (pp. 53-54). Ramirez-Christensen points out that Shinkei's listing of "equivalences" [End Page 133] also includes the "'prelude-break-climax [jo-ha-kyū] structure of the myriad arts'" (p. 54); she devotes a short chapter to a discussion of the relationship between différance and that structure, which she notes signified for Shinkei the structure of renga but also of drama, "the performing art with which it is historically closely allied" (p. 56). Ramirez-Christensen sees renga and as appropriating the same cultural mechanism: "In both cases, we have the key to the Japanese way of making the foreign object, whether Chinese or, later, Western, signify by translating it into the local context" (p. 58).

In part 2, "Kokoro, or the Emptiness of the Sign" (chapters 7-15), Ramirez-Christensen turns to what is arguably the most ambitious part of her project: the effort to further clarify the connection between Buddhist discourse and fundamental elements of Shinkei's understanding of renga. She sees Shinkei's...

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