Bunkyo Hibu Theory

Bunkyō Hifuron: Kūkai's Manual of Chinese Poetics on Mount Kōya

On Mount Kōya, at a temple founded in memory of the mother of the monk who carried the book to Japan, six folded booklets hold one of the oldest surviving copies of the Bunkyō Hifuron. The book is a manual of how to write Chinese poetry and prose, compiled in the early ninth century by Kūkai (774–835), the priest known posthumously as Kōbō Daishi and the founder of Shingon Buddhism in Japan. The manuscript at Sanbō-in was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1959.

What makes the work remarkable is where its contents came from. Almost none of the writing in it is Kūkai's own. He gathered passages from Chinese critics and handbooks of the Six Dynasties and Tang periods and stitched them together, adding little beyond a short preface to each section. Many of those Chinese sources have since vanished in China itself. Read carefully, the Bunkyō Hifuron lets scholars recover the words of Tang theorists whose books no longer exist anywhere else.

A scholar's harvest from Chang'an

Kūkai sailed to Tang China in 804 as part of a diplomatic mission and spent roughly two years there, much of it in the capital Chang'an. He went to study esoteric Buddhism under the master Huiguo, and he returned in 806 with the doctrines and ritual implements that would become the foundation of Shingon. He also returned steeped in the literary culture of the Tang court, where mastery of poetic form was a measure of an educated person.

Back in Japan, sometime during the Kōnin era (810–823), he assembled the Bunkyō Hifuron. Scholars debate the exact years; some place its completion around 819 to 820. The aim was practical. Japanese writers of the day composed in literary Chinese, and they needed guidance on the rules that governed it: the tonal patterns that gave a poem its music, the parallelism of paired lines, the faults a writer was supposed to avoid, the formal categories of verse.

Kūkai arranged the material into six volumes and named them after Heaven, Earth, and the four directions, East, South, West, and North. Each volume collects writings on a different aspect of composition. Because he quoted his sources directly, often word for word, the book reads less like an essay and more like a carefully ordered archive of Chinese critical thought.

Why these six booklets matter

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the Sanbō-in copy as six jō, the term for a folded codex bound in the accordion style common to old Buddhist texts. It dates from the Heian period, which places it among the earliest copies of the work to survive. The designation in December 1959 recognized both its age and its textual value.

That textual value is unusual. Several of the Chinese books Kūkai drew from, including the critic Yuan Jing's writings on prosody and a number of handbooks on poetic faults and forms, were lost in China within a few centuries. The passages he copied are sometimes the only record that those works ever existed. A few texts long dismissed in China as later forgeries were shown to be genuine once their wording turned up, intact, inside the Bunkyō Hifuron. For historians of Chinese literature, a Heian manuscript on a Japanese mountain is a primary source for the Tang.

The manuscript also matters for the study of Kūkai himself. He is counted among the sanpitsu, the three great calligraphers of his age, and his interest in the craft of writing ran from brushwork to the theory of language. The Bunkyō Hifuron shows the literary side of a figure better known for founding a religious order.

What to look for

The six directional volumes

The naming scheme is worth pausing over. Rather than numbering his volumes one through six, Kūkai mapped them onto Heaven, Earth, and the compass points. The Heaven volume opens the collection, and the arrangement reflects a habit of mind in which the parts of a body of knowledge were felt to correspond to the structure of the cosmos. The categories inside each volume cover tonal rules, rhyme, the matching of paired lines, and a long catalogue of stylistic faults that a poet was taught to recognize and remove.

A book made of other books

Reading the work, or reading about it, the strange thing is how little of Kūkai's own voice appears. He selected, ordered, and abridged, and he wrote the prefaces, but the body belongs to writers he never met. His later Bunpitsu Ganshinshō condensed the same material further still. The two together let scholars see how he weighed his sources and decided what a Japanese student of poetry most needed to keep.

The setting at Sanbō-in

The manuscript belongs to Sanbō-in, a working temple and pilgrim lodging on Mount Kōya. The temple traces its beginning to Tamayori-gozen, Kūkai's mother. Women were barred from the mountain in those centuries, so she settled at Jison-in on the lower slopes, where her son is said to have visited her. After her death the hermitage associated with her was moved up to the Renge valley near the Okunoin cemetery, and the present buildings date from a rebuilding in 1695.

Visiting Sanbō-in and Mount Kōya

The manuscript is not on permanent display. Like most of the treasures held by the temples of Mount Kōya, it is cared for and occasionally shown through the Reihōkan, the mountain's museum, which mounts special exhibitions every few years drawing on the collections of Kongōbu-ji and the subtemples. Anyone hoping to see the actual booklets should check the Reihōkan's exhibition schedule before traveling.

Sanbō-in itself is open to guests as a shukubo, a temple lodging. Visitors can join the morning service, try seated ajikan meditation or sutra copying under a priest's guidance, and eat the vegetarian temple cuisine. The temple keeps a striking modern stupa, the Mani Hōtō, raised for soldiers who died on the Burma front in the Second World War, with an underground passage that pilgrims walk in darkness. A standing image of Kūkai attributed to the sculptor Unkei is shown only during the morning service.

Mount Kōya sits roughly 800 meters up in the mountains of Wakayama and is reached from Osaka by train and a short cable car. The whole monastic town is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes of the Kii mountain range.

Nearby

Most visitors to Mount Kōya begin at Okunoin, the forested cemetery leading to Kūkai's mausoleum, where he is believed to remain in eternal meditation. The Danjō Garan, the temple complex Kūkai laid out at the founding of the mountain, and Kongōbu-ji, the head temple of the Kōyasan Shingon school, fill out a day on foot. The Reihōkan stands close by and is the single best place to understand the art and texts the mountain has guarded.

For those drawn to the story behind Sanbō-in, the lower town of Kudoyama holds Jison-in, the temple where Kūkai's mother stayed, and marks the start of the old Chōishi-michi pilgrimage path that climbs to the mountain past stone markers set one chō apart.