A Japanese Commentary History of Jianghu fengyue ji

Abstract

The poetic anthology Jianghu fengyue ji 江湖風月集 (Jp. Gōko fūgetsu shū) is a collection of jisong 偈頌 (Jp. geju) verses—a genre of Sinophone Buddhist lyric—by Chan monks of the Southern Song period. Credited to the compilation of Songpo Zongqi 松坡宗憩, also of the Southern Song, in its current form the text contains a total of 270 verses, all of them conforming to the heptasyllabic jueju 絶句 (Jp. zekku) meter. The title is intended symbolically. Thus the word jianghu 江湖 (Jp. gōko), beyond its literal meaning of “river” and “lake,” betokens the physical world as a whole, particularly in its function as setting for the practices of Chan monasticism. Likewise fengyue 風月 (Jp. fūgetsu) signifies not merely “wind” and “moon,” but rather in its fullness the larger world sketched by poetic conception. As such, the anthology’s name might be rendered alternatively as “Collection of [ jisong] verses in which Chan monks express the heights of Chan thought by using the borrowed forms of poetry.” This anthology belongs to that category of works which, lost in China itself, survived only in Japan. First printed in Japan in Karyaku 嘉暦 3 (1328) by the emigrant Chinese monk Qingzhuo Zhengcheng 清拙正澄 (1274–1339; Jp. Seisetsu Shōchō), no copy of this earlier edition survives, the oldest extant text being a printing of the Nanbokuchō period (1336–1392).1 Later in the Muromachi period the text came to be widely read, not only in the Gozan temples as before, but also outside the Gozan system in Rinzai-school 臨済宗 temples attached to the Daitoku-ji 大徳寺 and Myōshin-ji 妙心寺 lines, indeed even in temples of the rival Sōtō School 曹洞宗. Such an environment led Japanese Zen monks to produce a number of commentaries on the work. A Japanese Commentary History of Jianghu fengyue ji : From Medieval to Early-Modern