A Tang-Dynasty Manual of Governance and the East Asian Vernaculars

Abstract

For most parts of East Asia except Tibet, the earliest encounters with texts were with those from China, the only society with a writing system and a textual tradition they had so far come into contact with. By the end of the Tang dynasty we can be sure that huge quantities of texts in the form of paper manuscripts had reached China’s neighbours, but the only hard evidence of the enormous scale of this flow of texts comes from Japan, in the form of the Catalogue of Books Extant in Japan ( Nihonkoku genzai shomokuroku 日本國見在書目録 ), which was compiled in the 890s by Fujiwara no Sukeyo 藤原佐世 (847-898). The Catalogue lists a bewildering variety of texts that had reached Japan, many of them now lost. And yet it does not list some texts known to be in Japan by that time, such as Buddhist scriptures and commentaries and medical texts. For medical and scientific texts, an edict issued in 757 gives us the curriculum of the University in seven fields of study (Classics, Histories, Medicine, Acupuncture, Astronomy, Yinyang divination, and Calendrical science) and thus provides some information about the medical and scientific books that had reached Japan by this time, but a later source, the Essentials of Medicine ( Ishinpo ˉ 醫心方 ) by Tanba no Yasuyori 丹波康頼 (912-995), provides much more detailed information (Bender and Zhao 2010). This text was compiled in 984 after the fall of the Tang and it contains extracts from large numbers of Chinese and a few Korean medical works mentioned by name, showing that these too had reached Japan. Since all these texts were available in Japan, the overwhelming probability is that they were already available on the Korean It circulated widely throughout East Asia but unlike many other texts that emanated from China it was often approached via the vernacular: there were translations into the Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Japanese languages, but not into Korean. This article explores its reception in various East Asian societies and suggests that the use of the vernacular was determined by the role of this work as a practical manual.