In his exciting new study, Thomas Mazanec explores and clarifies the shifting relationship between poetry and religion in late medieval China. The religious commentary, literary criticism, and cultural scholarship of Buddhist and Sinitic East Asia from roughly the tenth century onward have customarily understood religious practice and certain forms of cultural practice as intertwined. Even those with a superficial awareness of popular Japanese art forms such asjūdō (柔道 , “the way of flexibility”) or sadō (茶道 , “the way of tea”) will have encountered the idea that lifelong dedication to a certain artform can constitute a “way” (道 Ch: dao; Jp: michi, dō), a path of self-cultivation that is not only physical or aesthetic, but also spiritual and ethical in nature. At its broadest, Mazanec aims to show when, where, and how this idea of artform as religious practice developed.
More precisely, Mazanec focuses on a small, but culturally important, group of forty-eight Buddhist monks who are specifically referred to as “poet-monks” in sources from the mid-eighth to the mid-tenth centuries. Chief among these are Qiji (864-937? CE) and Guanxiu (832-913 CE), who have the largest extant poetry collections. Drawing on medieval poetry manuals (詩格 , Ch: shige), collections of verse, Buddhist sutras, and ritual manuscripts, Mazanec argues that these men embodied a new kind of figure, that of the “poet-monk” (詩僧 , Ch: shisheng), and, furthermore, that they articulated a cultural view equating poetry with meditation. Mazanec describes how this group of poet-monks developed a “vision of a fundamental unity between the two great cultural traditions they inherited, Buddhism and Confucian classicism” (3). Whereas “most people at the time understood poetry to fall under the domain of Confucian literati, while meditation, incantation, and other spiritual practices fell under the domain of religious professionals,” the religious scholars Mazanec examines here refuted this dichotomy, seeking to synthesize these two traditions in the figure of the poet-monk (3).
The book includes an Introduction, six chapters divided into two parts of three chapters each, and a conclusion. In the Introduction, Mazanec provides an efficient overview of pre-Tang interplay between poetry and Buddhism. On the one hand, he notes that, by at least the third century CE, Buddhist practice was well attested amongst Chinese literati who, by definition, also comprised most of the state bureaucracy. On the other, he recounts the common (but, by his estimation, deeply mistaken) view that late Tang poetry, characterized by a close connection with Buddhism, represents a state of deep aesthetic decline. Accepting neither position as given, Mazanec sets out to “understand the era in its own terms” (8).
In Part I “History,” Mazanec “traces the formation of the poet-monk as a position one could occupy in the late medieval literary world” (14). Chapter 1 contextualizes the emergence of the poet-monk figure, sketching in the historical, geographical, and social milieu in which the first of these poetically inclined monastics began to appear. Mazanec provides close readings of half a dozen poems, tracing the development of the term “poet-monk” from its emergence in the mid-eighth century. He combines this with macroscopic digital analyses (GIS and network mapping) to show how the term “poet-monk” was “invented in southeastern China in the 760s or 770s to describe a specific community of monks” clustered around Hangzhou (20), spreading to the capital by the mid-800s, dispersing across the empire by the end of the century, and “consolidat[ing] in new cultural centers” between 908 and 960 CE (46). Chapter 2 provides more individualized studies of the first generation of poet-monks, including Lingyi (727-766 CE), Jiaoran (720?-797? CE), and Lingche (746?-816 CE). Capping off this section, Chapter 3 describes the poet-monk tradition at its height, from 810 until 960 CE. Here, Mazanec usefully limns the idea of kuyin (苦吟), which can be rendered either as “bitter intoning” or “painful composition.” The key contention of kuyin is that “anyone can become a poet, if only they put in the effort. This included non-literati, such as monks and women” (83). Here, “effort” is understood to entail a long-term, fully embodied, deep absorption in craft: an aesthetic practice comparable to the ascetic practice of meditation which likewise required mental training and resulted in heightened perceptual awareness of internal and external worlds.
In Part II Mazanec shifts from history to poetics. Chapter 4 focuses on how certain markedly Buddhist rhetorical tropes (namely: persistent linguistic habits of repetition and negation) were accommodated in traditional Sinitic poetic forms. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which Buddhist practices of chanting and religious ideas about the power of sacred sound dovetailed with existing Sinitic notions about breath, poetic rhythm, and the musicality of language. Here, Mazanec traces how specific “poet-monks of the ninth and tenth centuries drew on incantatory patterns to lend power to their literary works” (144). The chapter opens with a wonderful exploration of a poem by Guanxiu and its manuscript appearance as part of what Mazanec describes as a “ritual toolbox [that] suggests lines of continuity between incantation, sūtra recitation, and poetry” (149). Following these lines of continuity, Mazanec provides eye-opening close readings of several additional poems, teasing out a fascinating weave of ideas about language, music, sonority, and poetic power. Finally, Mazanec brings his argument to a crescendo in Chapter 6, in which he traces the increasing penchant, in the mid-tenth century, to understand poetry and meditation as two tools for reaching and then displaying transcendent awareness. Returning to the concept of “bitter intoning” (kuyin) first explored in Chapter 3, in this final chapter Mazanec shows how late Tang poet-monks forwarded the idea that poetry and meditation were not merely parallel butequivalent “acts of self-cultivation that reflected privileged insight into the world” (185).
As Mazanec readily observes, “the poet-monks’ particular idea of poetry and meditation’s fundamental unity would not last” (213). The Conclusion outlines the various historical events, ritual developments, and aesthetic vicissitudes that ultimately unraveled a set of ideas that, for a time, “seemed like they were on the verge of restructuring the relationship between literary and religious practices” in Buddhist East Asia (213).
Chapters 5 and 6 comprise the conceptual engine of Poet-Monks. In concert, the two chapters raise several exciting possibilities for rebalancing the heavily European and North American focus of interdisciplinary fields such as sound studies and book history. Simultaneously, these chapters should encourage Asian area studies scholars to engage with more globally comparative and conceptual conversations on, as the Buddhist poet-monk Kūkai (774-835 CE) might phrase it, the “meanings of sound, script, and reality” [1]. Indeed, should you ever find yourself teaching a comparative poetics or premodern theory seminar, I highly encourage you to read Chapter 6 and to explore the primary sources it references, many of which are available in fine translations. There are any number of richly rewarding conversations to be sparked by placing the poet-monks explored in chapters 5 and 6 of Mazanec’s book into dialogue with, say, treatises on poetics and musicality by Plato, al-Ghazālī, Horace, or al-Fārābī.
I offer only one critique, and it pertains to style. Perhaps influenced by the poetry he examines, Mazanec’s prose does tend toward argument from negation and the heavy use of repetition. Enumerating the critical interventions he aims to make, Mazanec begins from the negative: the role of Buddhism in the development of Chinese poetry has been “neglected,” late Tang poetry is not characterized by “stagnation and decadence,” and religion and literature should not be understood “at the level of belief, worldview, or scripture” (3-4). A more ambitious conceptual agenda, and perhaps more inventive prose, would have been welcome. That said, my stylistic critique is minor. After all, the repetitive structure of each chapter and section, the historical outline in the Introduction and its gentle restatement at key points in the body chapters, and similar features does mean that Poet-Monks is a text that should be easily accessible to non-specialists and undergraduates.
In sum, this is a welcome, readable, and interesting study of medieval Chinese poetry, history, and religion. Chapters of the book could certainly be used in undergraduate classes on topics ranging from religious studies to world literature. Finally, Chapters Five and Six are particularly strong and should be of conceptual interest to scholars interested in the comparative study of sacred sound, book history, and the many worlds of medieval poetics.
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Note:
1. See Kūkai’s “The Meanings of Sound, Word, and Reality (Shōji jissō gi)” inKūkai: Major Works, ed. and trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 234-46.