Hitomaro Brill’s Japanese Studies Library Edited by Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor) Chris Goto-Jones Caroline Rose Kate Wildman-Nakai VOLUME 31 Hitomaro Poet as God By Anne Commons LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009 Cover illustration: Fourteenth-century portrait of Hitomaro (ink and colors on silk, 121.4 × 82.9 cm), Tokyo National Museum. Image: TNM Image Archives. Source: http://TnmArchives.jp/ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Commons, Anne. Hitomaro : poet as god / by Anne Commons. p. cm. — (Brill’s Japanese studies library ; v. 31) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17461-0 (acid-free paper) 1. Kakinomoto, Hitomaro, fl . 689–700. I. Title. II. Series. PL785.Z5C66 2009 895.6’114—dc22 2008055177 ISSN 0925-6512 ISBN 978 90 04 17461 0 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands For Sue and Bernard Commons CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................... ix Map of Japan Showing Sites Mentioned in the Text ............... xi Introduction ................................................................................ 1 Chapter One Hitomaro and the Man’yōshū: The Birth of a Legend ................................................................................. 9 Chapter Two Hitomaro in Heian Texts: A Sage of Poetry ... 39 Chapter Three Worshipping Hitomaro: From Text to Image ...................................................................................... 91 Chapter Four Medieval Reception: Poetic Deities in the Secret Commentaries .............................................................. 127 Chapter Five Hitomaro in the Early Modern Period: Poetic Icon and Popular Deity ............................................... 175 Bibliography ................................................................................ 205 Index ........................................................................................... 213 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without the generous assistance of many friends, colleagues, and teachers, past and present, not all of whom can be mentioned here. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation adviser Haruo Shirane, without whose astute guidance, endless patience, and unfl agging support and encouragement none of this would have been possible. While at Columbia, I was also the recipient of much useful advice and warm encouragement from Ryūichi Abe. In Japan, I was extremely fortunate to benefi t from the incredibly generous and thought- ful guidance of Ii Haruki and Araki Hiroshi at Osaka University. I am very grateful to Stefania Burk, Cheryl Crowley and Christina Laffi n for their constructive criticism of parts of the manuscript, and to David Lurie for his guidance on things Man’yōshū-related. I am particularly indebted to Mikael Adolphson, who gave unstintingly of his time as an insightful reader of the manuscript and an invaluable source of support and advice. Special thanks go to Joshua Mostow for his trenchant editorial advice, and to Patricia Radder at Brill; also to Winifred Olsen, for her clear and careful editing. Finally, I am very grateful to the Shinchō Founda- tion for the Promotion of Literature, whose generous fi nancial support enabled me to carry out two years of research in Japan. I’d like to think that Hitomaro—in his capacity as a deity of learn- ing—has been guiding my endeavors; any errors remaining in the text, however, are entirely mine. 1. Masuda (site of Takatsu Kakinomoto shrine) 2. Akashi 3. Heian-Kyō / Kyoto 4. Heijō-Kyō / Nara 5. Yoshino 6. Sumiyoshi 7. Tamatsushima 8. Edo / Tokyo Map of Japan Showing Sites Mentioned in the Text INTRODUCTION Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (fl . c. 690) is today generally regarded as one of the three greatest poets in the Japanese classical canon, frequently held up alongside the medieval poet-recluse Saigyō (1118–1190) and the early modern haikai poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) as an outstand- ing exponent of premodern Japanese poetry. Most modern Japanese readers know Hitomaro from his poems in the eighth-century anthol- ogy Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, c. 759), and many were introduced to his poems as part of their high school education. However, those living near one of the shrines dedicated to Hitomaro will also know him as a benevolent deity whose favor may be requested for such things as safety in childbirth, safety while traveling, and success in academic endeavors. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly writing produced annually in Japan on Hitomaro’s poetry is enormous, and there is also an enduring interest in his life and legend today, as refl ected in the numerous popular publications available on the subject. Rather than a detailed discussion of Hitomaro’s works, the present study is concerned with what may be better described as his afterlife, the centuries-long process of his reception and canonization as a court poet and as an enshrined deity worshipped for non-poetic purposes. This is a process which begins with Hitomaro’s treatment in the Man’yōshū and continues today. However, this study is primarily concerned with the fi rst thousand years of Hitomaro’s reception, leading up to a major milestone in his canonization, namely his imperially-sponsored recogni- tion as a deity in 1723, when he received the title Great Bright Deity Kakinomoto (Kakinomoto daimyōjin) and a posthumously-awarded court rank. In seeking to illuminate the history of Hitomaro’s reception, this study examines his role as a symbol of the Japanese court-poetic (waka) tradition, whose canonization is carried out under existing cul- tural paradigms but then becomes itself a model for the treatment of poets. The process of Hitomaro’s canonization is considered within both literary and religious contexts, with attention given to the uses he served as a poetic icon and legitimizing symbol of poetry’s antiquity and authority, as well as poetry’s relationship to larger developments in religious thought. These two forms of canonization—literary and 2 introduction religious—are intimately linked, their integration refl ected in the devel- opment of modes of thought in which poets could become deities and poetry itself came to be regarded as sacred, as the equivalent of Bud- dhist incantations (dhāranī). If the story of Hitomaro’s canonization is that of the increasing religious dimension of poetic discourse in medieval Japan, it is also the story of the transmission and authorization of court-poetic orthodoxy. Hitomaro’s elevation in the early part of the Heian period (794–1185) to a quasi-supernatural “sage of poetry” and then to divine status as an ancestral deity of Japanese poetry had from the outset a political element; his potency as a symbolic embodiment of the court-poetic tradition led to his appropriation as a legitimizing fi gure by parties eager to reinforce their own poetic and political authority. Later, in the medieval (1185–1600) and early modern (1600–1868) periods, his presence in the poetic commentaries as a deity of Japanese poetry emphasized the divine nature of poetry in general, and gave further authority in particular to the jealously-guarded secrets enclosed in the teachings passed down by competing poetic houses. This study analyzes the central role played by the court-poetic canon in Hitomaro’s recep- tion, as his canonization as the fi gurehead of Japanese poetry was not only contingent on his valorization in highly-regarded texts such as the Kokinwakashū (Collection of Old and New Japanese Poems, c. 905), but was, paradoxically, accompanied by relatively little interest in his actual poems preserved in the Man’yōshū. A recurring feature of literary canonization in Japan is the construc- tion of a genealogy or line of descent.1 Hitomaro evolved from a great poet of the past (as presented in the in the Man’yōshū and Kokinshū) to an ancestral poetic deity, and fi nally the tutelary deity of the Way of Japanese poetry as a whole. That evolution is directly connected to the development of schools or houses of Japanese poetry, for whom the question of origins—and thus authenticity, authority, and pres- tige—was of central importance. Members of the poetic houses were concerned in this-worldly terms with their descent—by bloodline or scholarship—from great originating fi gures such as Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204) and Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). The derivative titles 1 Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. introduction 3 of the imperially commissioned anthologies compiled in the medieval period—the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Old and New Japanese Poetry, 1205) and Shinshokukokinshū (New Continued Collection of Old and New Japanese Poetry, 1439), for example—refl ect the drive of these poets to