Genji chapter 2 meta narrative11/11/2023 At this point the potential validity of Kato’s claim should start to become evident. His reading might be useful in understanding how certain members of Edo Period Japan viewed the tale, but he ignores too much obvious proof that would refute his dismissal of Buddhist readings of the tale and thus one can conclude he was reading too much into the tale for his own purposes.Īfter examining some claims and ideas of Confucianists and Kokugaku scholars regarding the tale we are left with one last major school of thought: the Buddhists. Norinaga’s dismissal of Buddhist readings leads one to conclude his analysis was a bit too distorted to really be taken seriously. Norinaga ignores critical passages – such as the one in which Genji reacts to the birth of Kaoru – where characters reflect on their sukuse, or Buddhistic sense of fate.” “his extreme reaction to ‘foreign’ elements led him to distort the text, particularly those sections with Buddhistic overtones. This brings into question how he is able to make such a claim when such an enormous amount of Buddhist ideas and practices are described throughout the tale. This will be discussed later.Īs noted above it was not only Confucians who saw the Genji in a different light, but also the Kokugaku scholars of which Moto’ori Norinaga was most notable as he insisted that the Genji not be read as any kind of moral parable, but rather to be read as mono no aware or a kind of “native aesthetic that transcends the notion of good and evil” and going so far as to dismiss Confucian and Buddhist readings as foreign values. If anything, the tale is a depository of thoughts and ideas on Buddhist ideas that survive in the form of fiction. If one merely acknowledges the scarcity of Confucian ideas and elements within the Tale of Genji, it is clear that any attempt to label it as a source or representation of Confucianism is really untenable and just simple idealization. He notes, “Naturally, the influence of Confucian morality can also be detected but it is by no means as noticeable as in the case of the Tale of Ochikubo and very sparse indeed compared with The Tale of the Hollow Tree.” While the Confucian elements are there, it would hardly warrant declaring the tale a storehouse of Confucian virtue and thus Caddeau’s assertion of it being a highly subjective view is most appropriate. Kato does indeed acknowledge the Confucian elements. Caddeau notes it “provides us with a clear picture of Banzan’s understanding of Confucianism at the time,” but justifiably describes it as “a highly subjective view of Genji.” Banzan’s work does in a sense reflect the Confucian elements, scarce as they are that are present within the text. He objected to annotation which touched on immoral acts found within the tale seeing these as deviations from what he perceived to be Murasaki Shikibu’s original intention. 1673) painted the tale as a kind of storehouse of Confucian virtue not unlike the classical Chinese texts which idealized and glorified China’s ancient past. Kumazawa Banzan (1619-1691), a neo-Confucian scholar, in his work Genji Gaiden (ca. Some Neo-Confucians for example saw the tale as something entirely else. There were indeed readings that did not see the tale in a Buddhist light. I assert that Kato’s claim is accurate and that a Buddhist reading of the Genji is not only suitable, but that Murasaki Shikibu wrote it from a Buddhist perspective. Upon examination of such evidence the truth of the original claim will be validated, but before that one should examine the alternative views which challenge the claim. Hence, for someone to outright declare that the work is based on Buddhist philosophy requires not only justification, but also evidence to make such an argument. This reveals to us that the Genji was by no means universally interpreted in the same light, much less did everyone ever agree that it was based on Buddhist philosophy. Akiyama notes that at the end of the Heian period there were various interpretations of the Genji from a Buddhist perspective, but from the end of the Kamakura period a Confucian view was propagated which ultimately was to be dismissed along with the Buddhist view by Kokugaku scholars such as Moto’ori Norinaga in the Edo period who focused on mono no aware as a kind of literary and moral value liberated from both Confucian and Buddhist models. This is by no means axiomatic and the modern reader might be initially perplexed when they consider the myriad interpretations and literary dissections the tale has been subjected to over the course of ten centuries by numerous schools of thought. Considering the culture and times that Murasaki Shikibu lived in, one might ask to what degree did Buddhist thought influence her writing of fiction? Kato makes the following claim: “ Buddhism provides the philosophical background to The Tale of Genji”.
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