Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

Notes

1 9 7 notes introduction 1. This passage appears in the Kōzanji Myōe shōnin gyōjō, an account of Myōe’s deeds focusing on his time at Kōzanji, in the mountains at the edge of the Heian capital. This translation is adapted slightly from George Tanabe, Myōe the Dreamkeeper : Fantasy and Knowledge in Early Kamakura Buddhism, 60. 2. For more on this dream, see Nomura Takumi, “Myōe no shashingyō to kotoba,” 30 ff. For an English-language study of Myōe and his dreams, see Tanabe, Myōe the Dreamkeeper. 3. “The Phrase sa prthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet in the Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna” in Gregory Schopen, Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers, 25–62. I discuss Schopen’s theory in more detail in chapter 1. The basic argument, simplified here for the sake of brevity, is that Mahāyāna distinguished itself by establishing cultic centersorganizedaroundwrittensutrasthatwererecited,worshipped,andcircumambulated . For later qualifications to his original argument, see Schopen’s “On Sending Monks Back to Their Books: Cult and Conservatism in Early Mahāyāna Buddhism,” in the same volume, and his entry on “Mahāyāna” in Robert Buswell, Jr., Encyclopedia of Buddhism, especially his comment that the “cult of the book” was not an “attempt by the ‘new’ [Mahāyāna] movement to substitute one similar cult (the cult of the book) for another similar cult (the cult of relics)” but was likely meantinstead“toshiftthereligiousfocus . . .todoctrine,tosendmonks,nuns,and even laymen quite literally back to their books” (497). 1 9 8 notes to pages 4–6 4. KontaYōzō,NagatomoChiyoji,andMaedaAiareleadingscholars.Forsummative accounts of the state of the field in Japan, see Peter Kornicki and Henry D. Smith II. There is a vast secondary literature in Japanese dealing with issues of calligraphy and the illustration, circulation, and dedication of manuscripts from which I draw freely, and gratefully, in this study. Nevertheless, far more needs to be done, and in a more interdisciplinary manner, before the “history of the book” in pre-Tokugawa Japan becomes clear. 5. For studies of Japan see Peter Kornicki, Henry D. Smith II, and Mary ElizabethBerry .ResearchonChineseprintculturehasbeenmuchmoreactive.SeeCynthia Brokaw, Kai-Wing Chow, Susan Cherniack, John H. Winkleman, and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. Tsien is one of the few scholars working consistently before the twelfth century. 6. Henri-Jean Martin, Lucien Febvre, Roger Chartier, G. Thomas Tanselle, Robert Darnton, and Elizabeth Eisenstein have been among the most active in developing this field. 7. For instance, Roger Chartier wrote in 1995, “More than ever, perhaps, one of the critical tasks of the great libraries is to collect, to protect, to inventory (for example, in the form of collective national catalogues, the first step toward retrospective national bibliographies), and, finally, to make accessible the kinds of books that have been those of men and women who have read since the first centuries of the Christian era, the kinds of books that are still our own. Only by preserving the understanding of our culture of the codex may we wholeheartedly realize the ‘extravagant happiness’ promised by the screen” (Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, 24). Chartier’s linkage of the national bibliography with the history of the book is typical, the field of book history having developed more or less directly out of the Annales school and the Bibliothèque de France project. The connection between book history andthedevelopmentofanationalvernacularmaybeoperativeinEastAsiaaswell. For further discussion, see the conclusion of this book and Victor H. Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages.” 8. Jerome McGann is the leading proponent of this type of textual scholarship, which he terms “the textual condition.” See also D.C. Greetham and, for a separate development of the “sociology of text,” D.F. McKenzie. 9. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition, 21. 10. The key texts here are by F.W. Bateson, René Wellek and Austin Warren, James McLaverty, and Peter Shillingsburg. 11. James McLaverty, “The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum,” 82. 12. Silk screens, lithographs, and woodblock prints offer interesting challenges to this admittedly simplified schema. 13. For models of how to accomplish this, I am indebted to studies of medieval 1 9 9 notes to...