Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan

Front matter

Writing ‘ands 7 8 Renunciation in Medieval Japan The Works of | the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chómei

Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 21

Contents

Preface Introduction Chapter One “Wild Words and Fancy Phrases”: Debates on the Role of Literature in the Heian and Kamakura Periods Chapter Two Kamo no Chomei: Court Poet and Buddhist Priest Chapter Three The Way of Poetry: Mumyosho Chapter Four Suki and the Attainment of Religious Awakening: Hosshinshü Chapter Five The Sukimono as Recluse: Hojoki Appendix One The Kamo no Chomei Incident (An Excerpt from Minamoto Ienaga nikki) Appendix Two Selected Translations from Hosshinshü Bibliography Index

Oe

184 193

Preface

My first encounter with classical Japanese literature came through a chance reading of Arthur Waley’s translation of Genji monogatari. A student of English and French literature in India, I had hitherto had little contact with other Asian cultures—my formal education bore all the marks of its colonial origins. Waley’s Genji offered me a first and beguiling glimpse of a world that shared something of the Indian religious sensibility but expressed itself in an aesthetic mode quite alien to that found in Indian literary writing. It was with a desire to pursue this newfound “Japan,” from the perspective of an Indian steeped in the Western tradition, that I embarked upon my study of Japanese language and literature. Friedhelm Hardy offered enthusiastic support in the early days of this new venture.

My interest in classical Japanese literature was sustained and encouraged by a number of fine teachers. Dr. James McMullen at Oxford University inspired me with his academic rigor and his knowledge of classical Japanese literature. Subsequently, Professors Robert Morrell and Thomas Rimer, then at Washington University in St. Louis, guided me through a study of a variety of classical Japanese texts. Working with them paved the way for my engagement with popular medieval narratives, particularly those inflected with strong Buddhist overtones.

The idea for this book first germinated when I completed my doctoral dissertation on the works of Kamo no Chomei at the Australian National University in 1989. My decision to focus on Kamo no Chomei was guided by the fact that, although he was a major literary and intellectual figure of the medieval period, he had received surprisingly little systematic attention outside of Japan. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation advisor and friend, x Preface

Dr. Tom Harper, who simultaneously advised, listened, and offered help, while at the same time encouraged me to find my own path. He pointed me to a wide range of medieval literary texts that had been little explored outside of Japan.

In the course of this research, I was struck by the persistence with which the question of the value and legitimacy of writing was debated in medieval Japanese writing, and by the way in which the question of writing came to be formulated and addressed from within a Buddhist epistemic framework. I found that Kamo no Chomei's works acquired greater significance and richness once they were read in conjunction with other medieval texts, many of which were bound by a common thread: the imperative to work out the relationship between writing, a profoundly worldly activity, and renunciation, which was central to the attainment of Buddhist enlightenment.

During a number of research trips to Japan, I had the good fortune to work with Professor Yamada Shozen at Taisho University and Professors Mizuhara Hajime and Yasuaki Nara at Komazawa University. I cannot thank them enough for the generosity with which they gave of their time and their knowledge. Dr. Michael Cooper provided much encouragement and support during my stays in Tokyo. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mrs. Sonoe Matsui and her family, who adopted me into their home and looked after me as one of their own.

There are many friends who have contributed to the making of this book: my thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frieda Freiberg, Leela Gandhi, Aruna Hardy, Iso Mizue, Pauline Nestor, Bee Chin Ng, and Vanita Seth. I would also like to thank Professor Andrew Gerstle for his many useful comments. I am grateful to Dr. Sandra Wilson for her meticulous reading of the manuscript and her many suggestions. My thanks also to an extremely rigorous anonymous referee, whose many suggestions and criticisms I have tried to incorporate. Needless to say, all shortcomings of the work are my responsibility.

I cannot thank Sanjay Seth enough for his companionship and his unstinting generosity in reading successive drafts of the book and refusing to be easily persuaded by its arguments. The good humor and cheerfulness of my son Nishad did much to alleviate the depression of bad writing days.

Finally, I would like to thank the following institutions for their support: the Japan Foundation for a dissertation fellowship, the Australian National University for a dissertation scholarship, and La Trobe University for a semester's sabbaticalleave to complete the

Preface xi manuscript. Chapter three draws upon material previously published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society under the title, “Love, Poetry and Renunciation: Changing Configurations of the Ideal of Suki.” I am grateful to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for permission to use this material.

Introduction

In Japan there was no written literary tradition predating the advent of Buddhism, and the introduction of a written script from China went hand in hand with the encounter with Buddhist canonical writing. The earliest attempts to grapple with the written word took the form of reading Buddhist sutras written in Chinese. Thus, from the beginning, the aesthetic tradition that emerged was already being shaped by Buddhist ideals and practices.

The emergence of this religio-aesthetic tradition, in which aesthetics could not be defined outside of Buddhism, did not take place, however, in an unproblematic and unselfconscious manner. A potential conflict manifested itself when Japanese writers sought to consider what the implications of the act of writing, seen as a fundamentally worldly pursuit, were for the goals of detachment and renunciation central to the experience of Buddhist enlightenment.

Doubts about the value of “worldly” writings, as well as the possibility of the resolution of these doubts, had already been debated by litterateurs in China. Their writings played no small part in the Japanese understanding of the possibilities and limitations of literary endeavor within a predominantly Buddhist context. Thus the history of literary writing in medieval Japan is punctuated by a series of explorations of this tension between writing, which was seen as a form of attachment, and the goal of renunciation. The engagement with this problem, and the conscious attempt to overcome it, generated an aesthetic that could not be understood outside the realm of the religious. However, the reconciliation was never a given and was achieved only through considerable debate regarding the relationship between the two and through theorizing about both their separation and their indivisibility.

In this work I seek to explore one such moment of engagement with the question of the nature, role, and validity of artistic pursuits, posed in relation to an ideal Buddhist vision, through a study of one of the most important literary figures of medieval Japan, Kamo no Chómei (1155-1216). There has thus far not been a monograph-length study of Kamo no Chémei in any Western language; this despite the fact that one of his works, Hojoki (An Account of My Hut), forms part of the Japanese literary canon and is essential reading for all Japanese high school students even today. Thomas Hare’s lengthy article on the works of Kamo no Chómei in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies is an important contribution to an otherwise neglected area of research. !

Chomei has left behind a wide range of writings: his personal collection of poetry, Kamo no Chómei shü; a treatise on poetry called Mumyosho (Nameless Notes); a collection of exemplary Buddhist tales, Hosshinshd (Collection of Tales of Religious Awakening); and a "personal" account of his life as a recluse, Hójoki. Apart from Kamo no Chómei shu, all of Chémei’s major writings were composed after he went to Hino to live the life of a Buddhist recluse. Mumyoshó is believed to have been completed sometime around 1211. There is considerable debate, however, regarding the exact dates of composition of Hosshinshü and Hójoki. Many scholars argue that Hoójoki was completed in 1212 and Hosshinshu in 1214 or 1215. There is also some debate about the variant extant texts of Hojoki. For example, the enlarged version of Hójoki (Kohon Hojoki), which we have used here, and which Chómei signed with his religious name, Ren'in, is believed to have been composed after the shorter version of the text (Ryakuhon Hojoki).? While keeping in mind these textual debates, we have not found it necessary to enter into them. We shall be reading Chómei's texts as engagements with the nature of literary writing and its place in the religious life rather than as providing an intellectual biography, with all its teleological implications of personal growth.

As a person who straddled both the artistic and religious worlds—he spent most of his life at court as a poet and musician but in his later years chose to become a Buddhist priest and to

1. Thomas Blenman Hare, "Reading Kamo no Chomei," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.1 (June 1989): 173-228.

2. Indeed, there is even some disagreement about the authorship of Hosshinshü itself, although most scholars today do treat the work as a text compiled by Chomei.

live as a recluse away from the capital—Chómei was ideally placed to explore the tension between the pursuit of artistic practices and the goal of renunciation. This book does not attempt a textual exegesis of all of Chómei's writings. Rather, his texts are interrogated for what they have to tell us about the complex interaction between Buddhist philosophy and aesthetic practices; the debate regarding aesthetics and renunciation is central in Chomei's works.

In giving expression to this dilemma, Chomei was, of course, not alone. Both those who were first and foremost writers and poets and those who were priests committed to the propagation of the Buddhist faith gave voice to this tension. Indeed, the debates surrounding the legitimacy of literary writing had existed in Japan for at least two centuries before Chomei took up his brush. While the continued presence of these debates suggests an ongoing engagement with what was perceived to be a genuine dilemma, the debate itself became a well-established literary trope and a conventionalized mode of talking about the act of writing. There developed an entire corpus of writing tied together through the bonds of the intertextual exploration of this familiar theme. Kamo no Chomei's engagement with the issue of the meaning and context of literary writing, therefore, cannot be seen simply as the idiosyncratic and individual angst of an exceptional writer. His writings are rooted in a tradition in which such engagement had become part of literary convention. At the same time, the fascination of Chémei’s work lies in part in the fact that he approached this question with considerable intellectual passion and rigor. His writings reflect the attempts of one individual to think through with renewed seriousness issues that were deemed important by many writers of the period.

There has not been sufficient detailed work either in Japanese or in Western languages that examines the process whereby a religio-aesthetic ideal took shape and became central to medieval Japanese writing.? The reasons for this can be traced back to the Tokugawa period, which saw a concerted effort toward the creation of a category of "Japanese literature" through the exclusion and rejection of Chinese influences. The beginnings of this move toward the exclusive study of indigenous literature are as-

3. One important contribution toward opening up this debate among scholars in the English-speaking world was William R. LaFleur's The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

sociated with a group of scholars who came to be called wagakusha (scholars of Japanese). These scholars rejected classical Chinese and became fervent exponents of Shinto and of the national language and literature. Their study of Japanese culture came consciously to exclude Buddhism and Buddhist influences. Their ideological and literary prejudices therefore relegated whatever could be identified as Buddhist in medieval literature to a place either not properly literary or not really Japanese. By the eighteenth century the wagakusha were a formidable intellectual force, including among their numbers distinguished scholars such as Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). During this time Buddhist scholarship, which had always been engaged in the recovery and interpretation of Buddhist texts, continued. This work was undertaken chiefly by scholars who belonged to the priesthood, in the isolation of Buddhist institutions, and in a sense in opposition to the growing scholarly interest in nativist literature and culture.

Thus, during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods there developed what might be called two traditions of scholarship, the one dealing exclusively with “Buddhism” and the other with “literature.” It was inevitable that the rigid division between these two streams of scholarship would be questioned at some later stage. Over the last few decades many scholars of Japanese literature have argued that in order to examine meaningfully the writings of the Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods, it is no longer possible to study “Buddhism” or “literature” in total isolation, even if they had hitherto developed as two mutually exclusive disciplines.

One landmark in this new endeavor was an academic conference held in 1962 called the Bukky6 Bungaku Kai (Conference on Buddhist Literature). However, the combination of the two terms Buddhism (bukkyo) and literature (bungaku) opened up a number of contentious issues. The journal Bukkyo bungaku kenkyü published an issue devoted to the notion of bukkyo bungaku. The major question raised by the majority of the papers in this issue was, What is bukky6 bungaku? Predictably the response was far from unanimous.*

4. There was little agreement on what constituted "literature" and how it was to be distinguished from "Buddhist literature." If every text that had considerable Buddhist words and ideas could be categorized as Buddhist literature, on what basis could a distinction be made between works such as Genji monogatari and, say, the Tannisho (Col-

Despite the subsequent attempts by many scholars from both the “Buddhist” and “literature” sides to work together, there continues to be a very real division between the koku bungakusha (the heirs of the wagakusha) and the bukkyo gakusha.5 Most departments of literature in Japan continue to be dominated by nativist scholars (koku bungakusha). Japanese literature is still generally seen as something distinct from Buddhism, although it may be granted that this literature does on occasion reflect Buddhist themes and ideas. It is not surprising, then, that scholars working on Kamo no Chomei's writings have sought to interpret him either as a major literary figure or as a good Buddhist.

It is ironic that contemporary scholarship frequently compartmentalizes the writings of Heian and Kamakura Japan in this fashion, for what was particularly striking about the literature of these periods in Japan is precisely the absence of this kind of rigid distinction. While today the scholars of Buddhism and scholars of literature are to be found in separate institutional settings, the world of the litterateur and that of the priest overlapped to a considerable degree in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Priests as well as court poets engaged in literary activity. It was an age in which the court poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) composed (among other things) twenty-four poems based on the Lotus Sutra, and the Tendai abbot Jien (Jichin, 1155-1225) composed love poetry.

The literary works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries cannot be read as separate from and outside of their Buddhist epistemological framework. It was within the confines of a Buddhist view of the world that literary activity was conducted, and it lection Inspired by a Concern over Heresy), other than perhaps by quantifying the Buddhist content? See Bukkyó Bungaku Kenkyükai, ed., Bukkyo bungaku kenkyu, vol. 12 (Kyoto: Hózókan, 1973). Or if we are to follow the opinions of another writer in this collection, any work that expresses even an iota of doubt in Buddhism, that is to say, is not premised on unquestioning faith in the precepts of the religion, is not Buddhist even if it may be literature. See Ide Tsuneo, “Bukkyo bungaku to so de nai mono," in Bukkyo bungaku kenkyu, 12:57-70.

5. It is not surprising, then, that in describing the seminar one scholar pointed out that the bulk of the participants were koku bungakusha but that there were a sizeable number of bukkyo gakusha as well. See Abe Akio, "Bozen to shita kitai,” in Bukkyo bungaku kenkyd, 12:78.

was within a Buddhist context that debates regarding the nature and value of writing were conducted. This study seeks to restore the theme of the tension between writing and renunciation that is a central feature of medieval writing and that informs a great deal of Chémei’s writings.

Chapter one is a detailed study of a variety of writings from the Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the ways in which a confrontation between literary traditions and Buddhist ideology is posed, and reflected more widely, in the literary productions of those times. I also try to indicate the diverse resolutions that authors put forward, resolutions that in some instances made it possible for them to continue with their artistic activities while being good Buddhists. The term kyogen kigo (wild words and fancy phrases), the Buddhist proposition shóji soku nehan (samsara is nirvana, i.e., rebirth is extinction), the notion of hóben (expedient means), and the ideal of suki (single-minded devotion to an art) were only some of the many conceptual tools used by Japanese writers in attempting to clarify the place of the arts, and of poetry in particular, within a world increasingly dominated by Buddhism.

Chapter two is a brief biography of Chomei. While little is known about the lives of many well-known writers of the Heian and Kamakura periods, Chómei is something of an exception, for there is a wide range of material that sheds light on his life. By looking at the diaries and literary works of his contemporaries, I attempt to recreate the social and cultural milieu in which he lived and worked. (Appendix one is a translation of an excerpt from the diary of Minamoto no Ienaga, Minamoto no Ienaga nikki, that discusses events in Chémei’s life.) This chapter also focuses on Chómei's activities as a court poet and the particular circumstances that led him to leave the capital and take the tonsure.

Chapter three is a study of Chomei's treatise on poetry, Mumyosho. In Mumyósho Chomei draws upon a wealth of anecdotes and folklore to construct his vision of the ideal poet. To do this, Chomei singles out one aesthetic ideal, suki. In the Heian period, suki signified a commitment to amorous sport and the pursuit of such sport through the refined pastimes of music and poetry. By Chomei’s time, the term had lost its amorous connotations and had come to be redefined as a single-minded dedication to a single artistic discipline. I argue that in Mumygosho the ideal of suki is central to Chémei’s definition of the serious poet committed to the way of poetry. In this work, composed after Chomei took the tonsure, suki is harnessed to the project of creating a well-defined tradition for waka practice, a project shared by many of his contemporaries.

Chapter four is devoted to Chomei’s collection of tales about monks and recluses, Hosshinshü. While much of the work consists of stories about monks who have withdrawn from the world and who grapple with perfecting the prescribed Buddhist practices, there is one section that seeks to establish that certain aspects of courtly culture are inseparable from the conditions necessary for Buddhist enlightenment. It is this section that is the central focus of this chapter. The ideal of suki, which is present in Mumyosho, reappears in Hosshinshü and acquires a different signification in the new context in which it is deployed. Through subtle reworkings of the concept of suki and stretching the range of its semantic possibilities, Chomei is able to validate not only the courtly values of refinement and sensitivity, but more importantly the practices of poetry and music. Chómei's argument in Hosshinshd is that it is precisely the cultivation of these arts, that is to say the pursuit of the ideal of suki, that creates the state of purity and detachment upon which Buddhist salvation is dependent. (Appendix two presents a selection of translations of stories from Hosshinshü.)

The final chapter of this study examines Chómei's best-known work, Hojoki. Hojoki has generally been interpreted as an autobiographical account of Chomei’s life as a recluse, in which he agonizes over his inability to transcend worldly attachment or, conversely, successfully resolves the tension between attachment and renunciation. Hojoki is, of course, much more than a straightforward autobiography. It is first and foremost a literary text that self-consciously models itself upon a variety of religious and literary texts such as the Vimalakirti Sutra and Chiteiki (Record of the Pond Pavilion). It is by alluding to these texts and reworking them that Chomei dramatizes both the harmony of and the potential tensions between the pursuit of music and poetry on the one hand and a firm commitment to the Buddhist path on the other. The chapter deals extensively with the various debates that surround the interpretation of the final section of Hojoki and argues that it is a complex text that, through an elaborate strategy of intertextuality, reworks the well-known theme and places it at the very center of its concerns. This book, then, is a study of the writings of one remarkable writer of the medieval period and of the themes of writing and renunciation that are central to the texts he left behind.

TEXTUAL NOTE

The text that I have used in the study of Mumyosho is the annotated edition that appears in the Nihon koten bungaku taikei series.” This edition is based on a manuscript from the early Edo period, collated with other variant texts. My study of Hosshinshü and Hojoki is based on the annotated text by Miki Sumito in the Shinché Nihon koten shüsei series." Miki has used the Taifukukoji bon text of Hoójoki, which dates from the Kamakura period, and collated it with other texts, such as Ichijo Kanera bon, a variant manuscript of the Muromachi period. Miki's Hosshinshü is based primarily on the printed edition of this work dating from the year 1652.

6. Hisamatsu Sen'ichi and Nishio Minoru, eds., Mumyosho, in Karonshiü, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, no. 65 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961); hereafter MY.

7. Miki Sumito, ed., Hajéki, Hosshinshü, in Shincho Nihon koten shtisei (Tokyo: Shinchésha, 1976); hereafter HK and HS.

Chapter One

“Wild Words and Fancy Phrases”: Debates on the Role of Literature in the Heian and Kamakura Periods

When the Chinese poet Po Chü-i (772-846) dedicated a collection of his poetry, the Loyang anthology, to the Hsiangshan temple in Soochow in 839, he appended to it the following apologia: "May the worldly writings of my present incarnation, all the wanton talk and fine phrases, be changed into a hymn of praise that shall glorify the doctrines of the Buddha in age on age to come, and cause the Wheel of Law forever to turn."?

Po Chü-i could not bave imagined the impact his statement would have, two hundred years later, on litterateurs in Japan. His phrase k'uangyen iyu (wild words and fancy phrases),° which was rendered as kydgen kigo or kyógen kigyo in Japanese, became a popular catchphrase in the Heian and Kamakura periods, encompassing both a censure of creative writing on religious grounds and, paradoxically, a justification of it that was also based on Buddhist doctrine. The phrase provided one way to articulate and resolve the tension between an engagement with “words” and a commitment to the ideals of Buddhism.

The Buddhist attitude toward words, whether written or spoken,!? was marked by a sense of deep ambivalence. Buddhism

8. Arthur Waley, The Life and Times of Po Chü-i, 772-846 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 193-94.

9. I have chosen to translate kyogen kigo as "wild words and fancy phrases" throughout the text.

10. As James Liu has pointed out, the Taoist view of language stands in marked contrast to the phonocentrism or phonologism of Western thought, which favors speech over writing. The Buddhist view of language shares with Taoism a mistrust of both the spoken and the written word. See James J.Y. Liu, Language-Paradox-Poetics: A Chinese Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 15.

placed particular emphasis on the idea that the absolute could not be understood through reasoning but had to be experienced. It was precisely because it could only be intuited through experience that it could never be communicated through words. Thus words were seen as essentially inadequate to the task of capturing the absolute, which was beyond all language and all thought. And yet there was a recognition that, at the level of the phenomenal world, words were all we had and that it was necessary to use them, however unsatisfactory they might be, in order to preach the Buddhist teachings.

At the heart of the Buddhist view of the nature of language, then, lay a paradox. For instance, the story of Buddha Sakyamuni picking a flower for his disciple Kasyapa, who smiled with immediate understanding, was meant to demonstrate the communication of an ultimate truth, one that transcended words. Yet it was only through the use of words that the ultimate inadequacy of words could be communicated to human beings. The same paradox is to be found in the Vimalakirti Sutra, in the famous “silence of Vimalakirti.” When asked to define nonduality by Manjuáéri, Vimalakirti does not utter a word. ManjuSsri applauds him, saying, “Excellent, excellent; can there be true initiation into the non-dual Dharma until words and speech are no longer written or spoken?”!! Again it is by taking recourse to language that the Vimalakirti Sutra attempts to teach the wisdom of Vimalakirti to ordinary men and women.

The Zen sects of Buddhism, which placed particular emphasis on religious practice and spiritual experience, rather than on scholasticism, refused to rely on the canonical texts on the grounds that, since they were based on words, they were in the end only poor representations of the ultimate truth, which was ineffable. However, for the most part it was granted that the sutras were an invaluable expedient means (hoben, Sanskrit upaya) of leading human beings to enlightenment.

Po Chü-i's phrase k’uangyen iyu captured precisely the paradox seen to be inherent in the use of language. The two terms had been used separately in China, and no one before Po had used them in conjunction. K’uangyen was a term used by Chinese writers at least as early as Chuang Tzu to describe any sort

11. Charles Luk, trans. and ed., The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra (Berkeley: Shambala, 1972), 100.

of nonsensical, irrational, or trivial talk.'? The idea that language is inadequate to the expression of the Ultimate and the assertion of this inadequacy through the medium of language were prominent features of Chinese philosophical texts of the Taoist school. For example, Lao Tzu, while claiming that the Tao could not be named, attempted to do so in various ways. Po Chü-i commented on this in his quatrain "On Reading Lao Tzu":

"One who speaks does not know; one who knows is silent": This remark I have heard from the Old Master.

lf you say the Old Master was one who knew,

Wherefore did he himself write his "Five Thousand Words"?!3

The term iyu (fancy phrases) was one of the four sins of the word (kogo) to be found in the list of ten evils (jüaku) proscribed by Buddhists. In the Sukhavati Sutra (Array of the Happy Land Sutra), for example, we find the injunction against iyu listed as one of the four sins of the word, the others being falsehood (mogo), equivocation (ryozetsu), and slander (akkó). The Avatamsaka Sutra (Flower Wreath Sutra) describes how a person who committed any of these sins would be sentenced to hell, to rebirth as an animal, or to life in the world of the hungry ghosts. These sutras inveigh against particular kinds of writing. Ornate words, for example, were seen as having a seductive power that could mislead human beings. For this reason they were criticized together with such sins of the word as falsehood and slander. However, these texts, embroiled as they themselves are in words, do not offer a thoroughgoing critique of the act of writing itself.

The Lotus Sutra, for example, limits itself to condemning specific kinds of writing that go against Buddhist practice; at the same time it endorses writing that praises the Buddhist dharma. Thus in the fourteenth chapter of the sutra, we have the following criticism of writing:

The bodhisattva-mahdsattva does not approach with familiarity kings or princes of realms, nor ministers or senior officials. He does not approach with familiarity the

12. An influential Taoist text attributed to Chuang Tzu in the fourth century B.C. See Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).

13. See Liu, Language-Paradox-Poetics, 7.

followers of external paths, nor Brahmans, nor Nirgranthas, nor those who compose worldly letters, nor those who sing the praises of external writings, nor Lokayatas, nor those who opposed the Lokayatas.!*

In the chapter "Hoben bon" (Expedient Devices), however, art, music, and song are extolled in verse:

If any persons, in stüpas and mausoleums, To jeweled images and painted images With flowered and perfumed banners and canopies And with deferential thoughts make offerings, Or if they cause others to make music, Beating drums and blowing horns and conchs, Or sounding flutes, of many reeds or of only one, and lyres, mounted on stands or not, And lutes and cymbals, Producing many fine sounds like these And holding them all up as offerings; Or if with joyful thought They sing hymns of praise to the excellences of the Buddha, Producing so much as one tiny sound, They have all achieved the Buddha Path.!*