École française d’Extrême-Orient EFEO
Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University


ANNA SEIDEL MEMORIAL LECTURE 2017

Wednesday, July 12th, 18:00h

This lecture will be held at the Kyoto University, Institute for Research in Humanities,
Center for Informatics in East Asian Studies
Kitashirakawa Higashi-ogura-cho 47, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265
(THIS IS NOT THE VENUE OF THE KYOTO LECTURES)




Jien’s Poetry, Dogmatics and Politics:
The Naniwa-hyakushu and the Gukan-shō

Speaker: Jean-Noël Robert
Collège de France


Although Jien (1155-1225) is arguably the most influential personality in Japanese culture at the turn of the thirteenth century, his work has mostly been studied under separate categories as if the poet, the monk and the historian had been wholly independent entities. This lecture will attempt to demonstrate how the three aspects of Jien’s activity are closely interlocked and that a comprehensive study bearing on the three together is the most rewarding way of gaining access to his thought. Following on the footsteps of Professor Ishikawa Hajime and the Jien-waka-kenkyû-kai which published the Naniwa-hyakushu, I will show how the Hundred Poems on the Shitennô-ji at Naniwa closely echoes not only the themes treated in the famous Essay on Japanese History (Gukan-shô), but also its vocabulary, both works being deeply rooted in Tendai dogmatics. By bringing into light the underlying scholastic thought reflected in Jien’s poems and essay, we will get a better understanding of the final purpose of his literary enterprise, which can be defined as one of the most thorough attempts to explain the course of history according to the Buddhist teaching.

Jean-Noël Robert, PhD École Pratique des Hautes Études (1987),  is professor at the Collège de France (“Philology of Japanese Civilisation”) and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Under the guidance of Bernard Frank, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Gishin, the first Patriarch of the Japanese Tendai school. After having published a French translation of Kumârajîva’s version of the Lotus Sutra (1997), he concentrated on the study of Japanese poetry on Buddhist themes and on the tradition of debate in the Tendai school. He is the author of four short treatises on Tendai : Quatre courts traités sur la Terrasse Céleste (2007), and of a translation and commentary on Jien’s Buddhist poems, La Centurie du Lotus de Jien (2008).


EFEO
Phone: 075-701-0882
Fax: 075-701-0883
e-mail: efeo.kyoto@gmail.com




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