expressed their religious and philosophic doctrines in Chinese poetry. In the late Tokugawa Period many patriots who found that they could not adequately voice their burning thoughts within the tiny compass of a Japanese poem turned to poetry in Chinese. The function of Chinese poetry, from the time of the “Kaifūsō” almost until the present, has been principally to convey thoughts either too difficult or too extended for the standard Japanese verse forms—when, of course, it was not merely an instrument for the display of erudition.
Some of the early poetry in Chinese was devoted to Buddhist subjects[1]—which was less often true of poetry in Japanese. The Buddhism of the early period was an optimistic religion marked by pageantry and the lavish patronage of the great temples of Nara. With the Heian Period, particularly as a result of the activities of such men as Kūkai (774–835), Buddhism became the study of many of the best minds of the age. The Buddhism taught by Kūkai was essentially an aristocratic religion, or at least restricted to those people who had the intellectual capacity to understand its profundities and the taste to appreciate its aesthetic manifestations. Toward the end of the Heian Period, however, greater attention was given to spreading Buddhist teaching to all classes of the people, and it is in the light of this development that we should read such works as “Tales from the Uji Collection,” which was designed to communicate in simple and interesting language some of the Buddhist doctrine. It was from about this time too that the invocation to Amida Buddha, a seven-syllabled prayer, came to be considered a certain means of gaining salvation.
Buddhism is to be found to a greater or lesser degree in most of the famous writings of the Heian Period. When in the novels—and indeed in real life—a situation was reached for which no other solution was immediately apparent, the person involved would usually “abandon the world,” an act accompanied by the ritual gesture of shaving the head or at least trimming the hair, a moment accompanied by great lamentations. It was not, however, considered to be in very good taste for someone still “in the world” to show unusual piety. In the “Kagerō Nikki,” for example, the husband of the author
- ↑ See page 162.
