Writing Salvation: Chinese Classical Rhetoric in Twelfth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prayers for the Imperial Family
Saeko Shibayama holds degrees from the International Christian University, Tokyo (BA), in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto (MA), and in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University, New York (PhD). Her dissertation, "The Convergence of the 'Ways': The Twilight of Early Chinese Literary Studies and the Rise of Waka Poetics in the Long Twelfth Century in Japan", examines parallel structures in two intellectual movements in early Japan. On the one hand, the history and literature curriculum in the State Academy promoted the rigorous study of the Chinese classics during the ninth through eleventh centuries. Interpretations of individual texts, including methodologies for translating classical Chinese into Japanese, were transmitted within a handful of scholarly families. The composition of waka ("Japanese poems"), on the other hand, poems of thirty-one syllables written in vernacular Japanese, is described in eighth-century records, while the study of waka evolved in the twelfth century. Shibayama's dissertation documents how Japan's indigenous poetic tradition took on the various formalities of early Chinese literary practices, and became both academic and chauvinistic at the dawn of the Japanese Middle Ages. A key figure who made the transition between the two practices was the scholar-official, Ōe Masafusa (1041–1111).
Writing Salvation: Chinese Classical Rhetoric in Twelfth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prayers for the Imperial Family
As a fellow of Zukunftsphilologie, Shibayama will pursue research on the works of Masafusa. She will examine some 120 Buddhist prayers Masafusa composed on behalf of his Japanese imperial patrons in highly stylized Chinese, with frequent borrowing from Chinese writings such as the canonical anthology Wenxuan (6th century). Formerly a student of Yiddish language and literature, Shibayama hopes to explore the relationship between one vernacular language and its more religiously sanctified counterpart (e.g., Hebrew, Latin and Chinese). Inspired by the work of Ernst Robert Curtius and Charles Haskins, she will begin with “the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” in Japan and move on to other cultures.
