Buddhist monks and Chinese poems [electronic resource] : song dynasty monastic literary culture
Keywords: Religious Studies.

This dissertation analyzes participation by Buddhist monks in the shi 詩 poetic tradition during China's Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960-1127; 1127-1279). This work shows the intersecting contexts in which monks composed and exchanged formal poetry. By focusing on monastic literary cultures, I demonstrate the limits of modern conceptions of poetry that are anachronistic to pre-modern Chinese Buddhism, and I offer an alternate set of interpretive strategies. Poems by monks were mostly social or occasional works written at particular events during regular monastic life. Rather than search for poems that fulfill modern ideals of Buddhist or religious poetry, this dissertation centers on the kinds of poems that were typically written, exchanged, and preserved. Throughout this work, I read individual poems against prescriptive monastic rules, scripture and Song era scriptural commentaries, and contemporaneous literary criticism. These competing contexts are integral to a robust understanding of monks' poetry as part of monastic literary culture rather than as Buddhist poetry. This monastic literary culture was marked by anxiety over the production of poetry. Chinese monks expressed concern regarding tensions between Buddhist monastic ideals of equanimity and emotion-suffused literary conventions. I compare texts from prescriptive genres, including legislation against poetry in monastic legal codes (lü 律 and qinggui 清規) and prohibitions on poetry in meditation manuals, to demonstrate a pervasive unease about the power of poetry in the monastic community. This monastic anxiety manifests in poetic topoi such as the "poetry demons" (shimo 詩魔) that interfere with progress on the monastic path. Despite prohibitions in prescriptive literature, monks wrote prodigious amounts of poetry. Song era literary critics recorded comments on "monastic poetry" (sengshi 僧詩). This native category locates monks' poems at the margins of the Chinese literary tradition. The traditional disparagements expressed in Song era "remarks on poetry" (shihua 詩話) texts and in colophons to collections of monks' poetry have been uncritically perpetuated in modern studies of Chinese literature. Such biases distort our ability to understand the ways that monks used poetry. The category of 'monastic category' is important for understanding historical reception, but is unreliable as a term for critical analysis. By contrast, I focus on monks' poems in terms of function, genre, and rhetoric. Poems written by monks in the farewell mode (songbie 送別) are among the most numerous. Using the set of parting poems in the Yifanfeng 一帆風 as an example, I explore how monks used wit and iconoclastic allusions to Buddhist sūtra in order to subvert the normal expectations that farewell poetry be sorrowful. These transgressions against genre norms are visible traces of a monastic culture using literary techniques to creatively negotiate religious impulses and rituals. Monks also wrote floridly emotional funeral songs (wange 挽歌), which contrasted sharply with monastic funeral liturgies and etiquette, and were the subject of debate. My research shows that religious poetry as it was actually written was a vibrant site for lived religion that was simultaneously informed by, and at odds with, the norms expressed in prescriptive texts. By approaching monks' poetry as part of such a complex monastic literary culture, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of religious poetry from within and without historical China.