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Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Tom Mazanek
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Jessica Zhu
Welcome everyone. This is Jessica Zhu. I am an assistant professor of religion at University of Southern California at Donsife and the New Books Network host in Buddhist Studies. Today. We are very lucky to have Professor Tom Mazanek from University of Santa Barbara to talk with us about his new book, Poet Monks, the Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China that's published by Cornell University 20. So Professor Thomas Mazanek, Chinese name Yu Taiming, is associate professor of University of California, Santa Barbara. His research is pre modern Chinese literature and religion as well as their dialogue with other cultures. He's also interested in world literature, politics, digital humanities and translation studies. His publications cover a broad range of topics from the problem of translating rhythm to to the evolution of a Sanskrit literary term in medieval China, to the potential contributions of network analysis to literary history. He is especially fond of art of literary translation, maintaining a collection of bizarre and obscure translations of classical Chinese poetry into English and co editing an online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation. So you can find all these links on this online bibliography in our blog post on New Books Network for this interview. So welcome. Tom, thank you so much for writing this amazing book and super grateful for making the book open access. For me, it's a totally different take on politics and history of literature, especially Buddhist literature in Medieval China. Personally, I find this book a perfect example of how we combine large scale quantitative analysis such as social network analysis and also traditional humanistic method of close reading. And by paying close attention to these overlooked Buddhist poets, your book enables me to look at Buddhist practices or spiritual practices and writing poetry in mutually illuminating light. So, Tom, I'd like to start our interview with the traditional New Books Network question. Could you please tell us a bit more about yourself, especially how you came to write about this poet monks, their social life, their poetics and their spirituality in such kind of a mutually enriched reaching entanglement.
- [03:40]
Tom Mazanek
Thank you for that very kind and generous introduction, Jessica. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [03:45]
Marshall Po
Yeah.
- [03:46]
Tom Mazanek
How did I get into the field and all that? Well, I basically, I grew up in suburban Ohio and really did almost no traveling internationally until I was an adult. And so I went to a small school called Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the summer before I started, I received a letter in the mail from that school saying we're one of the schools, only schools of our size or type that has a full Chinese and Japanese major that you could take, so why not consider taking one of these languages for your foreign language requirement? And I figured, hey, what the heck, why not? I don't know anything about China, I don't know anything about this stuff. So it was really a whim that brought me into studying Chinese. Once I started studying the language, I just kept at it. I did a semester abroad in Capital Normal University in Beijing. I ended up double majoring in English and Chinese and then taught a little bit English over in Harbin for a while after I graduated and eventually found my way back to grad school to study Comparative literature as a master's student. And I did that at Colorado in Boulder under Paul Kroll. And then from there it was off to Princeton and my interest. I realized if I wanted to say anything interesting comparatively, I had to know I had to go really deep into the Chinese tradition and try to understand it on its own terms. And so, yeah, that led to getting into the field generally of Chinese literature and pre modern Chinese literature in general. And from there, yeah, there was another fortuitous accident. I believe it was my second summer doing my PhD at Princeton that I had a lot of time on my hands that summer and I would just be, you know, flipping through. I knew I was interested in Tang poetry, so I'd be. Sometimes I'd spend afternoons flipping through Qian Tang Shi just looking at stuff. And I, I found towards the back, of course, a bunch of Buddhist monks. Right. And I found some really interesting poems that were doing things that were just not stuff I saw in other poetry that I was familiar with from the Tang dynasty, such as repeating a character three times in a row. We'll get to that later. I just tried to figure out, okay, what the heck is going on here? And that's pretty much it. And so from there, I just decided to figure out what's going on here. And I should add too, that myself growing up in a kind of religious household, a Protestant Christian one, but a religious household nonetheless, I was keenly aware of the importance that religion generally plays in many people's lives. And yet a lot of the scholarship I had seen on Tang poetry was very much done almost in isolation from the scholarship on Tang religion. And very little was not very often that these two fields spoke to each other. Just having grown up in a religious household myself, I figured, well, why aren't these two fields speaking to each other? And shouldn't someone. Yeah. Try to bring these together?
- [07:09]
Jessica Zhu
Oh, thank you for sharing. Especially the combination, I don't know of like personal history, but also serendipitous moments in life. Right. That nobody could have predicted. But then the outcome is this amazing book. So the structured book is kind of unconventional. It's an introduction, but has two parts. Part one is history. Right. Part two is poetics, but each part has three chapters, and then you also have a conclusion. So I don't really typically see a history and poetics combined in one book, but yours is a perfect combination. So let me start our interview with introduction. This one, you opens it with a poem written by one of the poet monks, Qiqiyi, his poem. And then, you know, Qi Ji is seen as the very embodiment of this kind of a both end identity, kind of a. Both a monk and a poet. Hence poet monk raised this religion and the so called secular practice of writing poetry. Right. Combining one. But his poems on life, right. You wrote on page three reflected a shared vision. Let me just quote you. A shared vision of fundamental unity between two great culture traditions. They inherited Buddhism and Confucian classism, unquote. And their vision. So means they're just poet monks, Right. Their vision, who sought to break the mainstream dichotomy at the time that saw Buddhism as something private, assigned to the religious specialists like the monks, but also saw poetry as an art practiced almost exclusively by Confucian literati. But these poets just made this radical claim that both are one and the same. And you wrote in the same paragraph, let me Just quote you again, they propose nothing less than a tonsuring of the classical literary tradition. So for me, this is the radicalness of your book. You take them very seriously as literary actors and innovators. And the whole book is both a history of how they forged their new identity of poet monk, but also forge a new literary tradition. And you also do a close reading or close kind of literary analysis of their unique ways of writing poetry, their unique logic in making Chinese Buddhist poetry. So for me, that's just the best of both words. But for the benefits of listeners, could you please maybe say a bit more about who they are, maybe read one of their poems to just give us a taste what's to come and give us, our listeners, a sense of their Buddhist poetics practice, and that set them apart, but also in relation to this Confucian classism of poetry writing. Thank you.
- [10:04]
Tom Mazanek
Yeah, thanks for that question. Yeah. Basically, one of the things I discovered early in the research is that, right, this term shisang for poet monk has a history and that Buddhism and. Well, I guess one thing I say in the introduction is that Buddhism entered China around the same time that the classical lyric poetry tradition became its own thing. Right. So I'm talking post Shijing here, post Book of Songs, where poetry was seen as an expressive art of the individual. Generally, that's thought to have begun around sometime in the first century ce. And Buddhism similarly arrived in China in the first century ce. Thereabouts, there's debates about exactly when, in what capacity. But so it's interesting to me that poetry was so strongly associated with Confucian classics, and yet these two great cultural traditions can be seen some way as twins separated at birth in some cases. Yeah. And of course, they related to each other many different ways through those first six or seven centuries or so. But this idea of the poet monk only really emerged in the 8th century, and I believe we'll get into that a little bit later. But yeah, so, and so what we see in the Tang Dynasty, especially starting in the post an Lushan period, so this is the late 8th century and going up through the end of the Tang Dynasty and into the period disunion that followed it, we see very much a new kind of reinvention of what it means to try to do poetry in a kind of uniquely Buddhist way. And so the poem that I opened the book with, I guess I'll just read that my translation of it to get a sense, maybe explain a few ideas that are in it. So this is stirred by a whim in mid spring By Qi Ji Zhong Chun Ganxin Spring, wind, day after day and rain from time to time, the winter power subtly declines with the warmth. The single breath, unspeaking, contains true forms. Where then could the 10,000 spirits think its impartiality? Poetry penetrates the orders of things, can be gathered while walking. The way in tune with heaven's workings can be glimpsed while sitting. So it should be the right man who upholds creation, driving all the hidden subtleties into his forge. So what's really interesting about this to me is that we have on the one hand poetry in parallel with Dao or the way in the middle couplets, right? And so in some ways these seem to be kind of set in parallel with each other and seem to have two ways of approaching the same thing. What's interesting to me here is that we have this idea of the underlying pattern, the Li, the ultimate reality, and being accessed kind of in two different ways, both through poetry and through religious methods, religious cultivation. And we see this in the blend of the language of poetics, of Confucianism, of Taoism and of Buddhism. And for example, the. The. The right man, Zheng Ren can refer to Taoist transcendence, can refer to accomplished Buddhists. It can also refer to upholder of Confucian classicism. So yeah, so what's interesting, and then some of these examples, like the single breath is kind of Taoistic term, but also can refer to genru or ta ta ta, the ultimate reality in Buddhist contexts. So there's very much seemed to me, from my perspective, how I interpret this poem is a kind of a playful blending of these different discourses and these different views on cosmological concerns.
- [14:20]
Jessica Zhu
Thank you. This is just so fascinating. What I heard is actually the blending or creation of very synthetic Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in the making. But it feels so natural when you read it. Let's take into part one. Part one is mostly about history of the people and the term poit monk itself. From mittang to the Five Dynasties from 760 to 9 16, chapter one, introducing poet monks, History, Geography and sociality employs primarily digital tools to combine decent reading with traditionally humanistic method of close reading to give our listeners a taste of this combinatory method, this both end method in your book. The chapter opens with a poem dated to the year 775 by Monk Jiaoren in reply to another poet, Mark Shi Song Shaowei. So please maybe tell us a bit more about this poem by Jiaoran, how it reveals this formation of a group identity. It's not A personal one that is poet monk, something about their literary traditions, as well as some of the main historical forces that had led to their emergence as a bounded, recognizable, even thriving literary network with certain pageant densities of relations and with poet monks as their central innovators and actors.
- [15:52]
Tom Mazanek
Yeah, that's a good question. So basically, this chapter, I'm trying to sort of give the broad outlines of the poet monk identity and history and sort of. Yeah, as you say, locate the much broader picture and locate where poet monks fit into the literary historical picture here. So what we can see is that the poet monks emerged in the late 8th century after the An Lushan rebellion, kind of this massive rebellion that millions, tens of millions, perhaps even more than that, died by some estimates, even as much as a third of the population at a time. So it's this massive disruptive events. And following it, we see also this mass migration of educated people, of literati, moving from the north to the south, what we call the Jiangnan area today, located near Hangzhou, Suzhou, that area. And it's during this time, among some of these literati circles, led by people like Yan Jianxing, the famous calligrapher and statesman, that Jiaoran and a few other poet monks first start to appear. And so we see this kind of merging of the literary tradition. Trends are happening in literature. On the one hand, these people, literati moving to the southeast, the sort of cultural renewal after very destructive events. And we also see at this time as well, there's developments in Buddhism that are happening. There are strict requirements for monks, for example, for education and all that. And we also. There's a great long tradition of Buddhism in the Jiangnan area as well. And we see these sort of two kind of come together at this point and give us the poet monk as a figure, this area. And so the first use, the term poet monk specifically refers to this. This group of monks, specific group of monks in the southeast at this time. And as I talk about later in the book, only later becomes generalizable to monks of any spot. So first, specifically, this group of monks associated with Jiaoran and with Yan Zhengqing and some of these other people, this group also was kind of foundational to the establishment of tea as a kind of popular beverage for not just something that's medicinal or something like that. So they were also associated with Luyu, the famous author of the Cha Jing, the classic of tea. Some of the first tea poetry we see comes from this circle as well. Yeah, and so it's a very fascinating group that we see these kind of broader patterns and forces in history coming together to at just the right time for this, this first group, first generation of poet monks to emerge.
- [18:52]
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- [19:23]
Jessica Zhu
Awesome. Thank you so much for such an eye opening kind of a chapter on this overlooked literary tradition and it's multiple connections, connections with the tea culture, the rise of tea culture. But also I want to prime our listeners because this is open access book, just you know, download it, take a look at the graphs and many of the details about the connectivities geographical spread of this point monks only became apparent when you just take a look at all those graphs generated through social network analysis. And then I also want to prime our readers. Right? These kind of analysis do reveal certain kind of surprises, such as the unexpected high connectivity of Shang Yang, who left us only about 34 points in this literary tradition. But somehow he just got connected all these main figures. But in the interest of time, let's move to chapter two, inventing Poit months the first generation and their reception 760 to 810 so this chapter reviews the rich intellectual and spiritual social lives of those inventors of this Chinese Buddhist poetry. On page 48 you wrote they were a kind of secondary elite, not fully integrated to mainstream Confucian classicism, but they managed to carve out a so called discursive space for themselves together with literati partners. This chapter focuses on three central figures. The founder which is Ling Yi, and the figure height is Jiaoran that we talked about. And then also this kind of a framework, Lin Che. Right, and their immediate reception. For some reason I felt most touched by Lin Chi's life and then what the mainstream literati site wrote about him. So for example, on page 68 you wrote. I'll just quote the whole paragraph. So Quan De's description of Lingchu is similar to Duguji's description of Lin Yin, right? They admire these monks and write about them in positive terms. However, they keep the poet monks at a distance from themselves even as they praise them. The monks are visitors from another inscrutable realm who descends to our social world, act in a different manner, adopt poet writing to serve different goals and then disappear. They can never be fully integrated into the mainstream. A lead word of the literati. They are not in fact poets, but monks or poet monks, unquote. So I was reading this, I was just like, oh, that's such a damning phrase. Reminds me of very similar passive aggressive things said and done to me quite frequently, like, not bad for women, your English is suppressing me. Good for Chinese, it's great that you're working so hard, etc. Etc. So it's like, oh, that's not kind of a unique American phenomenon. We Chinese, especially the Chinese literatis, are pretty good at being passive aggressive as well. So maybe please share with your listeners a bit more about Ling Chi and maybe the other two as well, if you want to, and explain a bit more how come mainstream literacy see these poet monks as a paradox or oxymoron that you mentioned on page 18.
- [22:54]
Tom Mazanek
Yeah, great. I mean, thank you for that analysis and kind of getting what I was trying to. Some of the parallels that I was seeing as well when I was reading some of the primary documents. Yeah. In this first kind of generation or so of poet monks, it's interesting because first you see Ling Yi, who's by all accounts the first poet monk or first one labeled as such, and you see praises and descriptions of him. He's included in one of these midtong anthologies and it's all like his nature poetry and the biographies written about him and stuff like that all describe him as kind of this person who's very. What's called the Zhuangzi Feng Wai, beyond the realm. Right. It's someone who is outside of normal. He's kind of this reclusive bond sort of figure, someone who's not. It was hard for a normal literatus or somebody to understand. He sort of depicted as being kind of exotic in that way. And then what's interesting when you get to Jaoran Jiao Ran himself has so much surviving writing, including a poetics handbook, hundreds of poems, which is a lot more than many of the other monks, that we see how he presents himself in different ways in different contexts. And so we see how he didn't think of himself in just a single way. His opinions, his ideas changed over time. They're very diverse, sometimes contradictory. And yet when we compare that to other people's descriptions of him, especially literati, they often reduce him to that same image that we associate with Ling Yi and we see a similar thing With Ling Ch as well. Who you asked about who. He kind of. He's a little bit younger than Jiaran and Ling Yi, so he's kind of one of the younger members of this circle. He is. He, Jiaran actually writes a recommendation letter for him and emphasizes his versatility. Right. And this is another really interesting thing about, you know, what were the poet monks values themselves versus what were the values that literati put upon them? Right? So Jaran saying, look, he's a poet, he's a monk, he can be useful in all these different situations. You can take him out on excursions to write poetry. He can do these religious things as well. You know, this is really. You can write about all these different. About Buddhist history and all this kind of stuff. And yet when we see again literati essays and prefaces and such about him, whether when they're. There's a whole bunch of them actually of poems that are written on one of his trips when he departs. And the literati again, very much puts him in this category of poet monk and again describes in a very funglite kind of exotic sort of way. And this, you know, there's one of the things I try to make this nuance in the book that this is not just completely Confucian literati looking down on them or doing something. This actually for them, this is praise, right? They're praising these monks, but in these. In this way that still keeps them at a distance. Right. And also there's some degree of agency in the poet monks themselves as well, that they're willing to go along with this. They're willing to use this and use it for their own benefit as well, to fall into this role, even if it's one that reduces their actual complexity when you read how they describe themselves in their own works. So yeah, there's a little bit of agency as well in the poet monk's part and especially for Lingyi's description that kind of exoticizes in that very first one, its source is originally from a stupa epitaph which must have been sponsored at least by a monastery, a monastic source, a Buddhist source. So in some ways, right, the Buddhist monks themselves also participate in this construction of a kind of exoticized image of the poet monk.
- [27:05]
Jessica Zhu
Thank you so much for showing on such complexity of the issue. Right. How do you make yourself legible to the of mainstream culture? But at the same time, being visible also means being seen in a particular way, even distorted or reduced way. But then it's still better than invisible. So it's just like A really a complex kind of push and pull. But in the interest of time, let's move on to chapter three. Becoming poised marks the formation of a tradition. 8, 10 to 9, 16. I'm actually quite excited to read this chapter, even though by this time I already know mainstream literati. You don't really didn't really change their mind about these employed monks as oxymorons, but they did manage, you know, these monks, right? They did manage to create a tradition of their own and get recognized as a type of literary actor that on page 82 you mentioned, @ least for a while, right? Your chapters marks out this multiplicity for eight identities, right? Multiple level of existence of point monk as a role. Some. Some point monks even served as court ritual specialists. Around 8, as on page 86, we also point monk can be positioned. That's a respected label that celebrates a person who mastered both Buddhist and Confucian traditions. And then it can also exist poit monk as a tradition, meaning you build lineage. It can also be an identity, right? Insider's term. So for such a complex and phenomenon summarized with one umbrella term, Pokemon, I find your both and approach one that offers multiple angles to understand point mark that resist any easily. This angle for me is truly refreshing and enriching and worthy of emulating any historical and literary analysis. But in the interest of time, could you please share a bit more about one of the aspects I'm debating about, like whether we should focus on a traditional identity. But you are the author. You decide which aspect among this multiplicity that you want to.
- [29:19]
Tom Mazanek
Share. Sure, yeah. I mean, this to me was the real heart of the historical aspect of this study. In fact, in the dissertation version, I really only focused on this generation or these couple generations into 9th and into the 10th century. And those parts about Ling Yi, Ming Chu and Jiaoran were added in the revision process because I needed a better origin story and I wanted to tell the full story. But yeah, so what's really interesting is over the course of the 9th century, right, we see poet monk Shizung go from being this term that kind of marginalizes or labels people that gets applied to monks, to being something that's. And just one particular group of monks associated with in the southeast, in the Jiangnan area, around Yanjianqing and Jiaoran Circle. And then we start seeing it starting with the early 9th century, more or less it being applied to monks that have nothing to do with that particular social group. So it becomes generalizable. And as you mentioned in your summary there it goes from being the sort of generalizable term which then becomes a of kind, kind of role you can play in the society as, as a whole literary world as a whole to being something that then you have these building of lineages and you start seeing literati describing how, you know, a poet monk is, you know, inheriting the tradition that Li Bai and other Li and other people established in writing song style poetry, this kind of a certain genre of poetry and saying, okay, now these monks who are taking it over and really perpetuating this style of writing. And then from there, yeah, towards the end of the chapter I focus on how the monks themselves then sort of reclaim this term poet monk and talked about themselves. And by the end of it you see kind of the sort of most, the monks whose poetry survives in the most abundance. Cizi and Guanxiu really being these kind of central figures who they seem to seek out other monks to write poetry and try to connect to them and try to, and write to them and exchange poems with them. And we see really this, this sort of self conscious identity then. And they're used and they very much playfully in the way that the first poem I mentioned in this interview, the one written by Czi that opens the book, they're very much playfully putting poetry and their religious terminology and Buddhist terminology in parallel with each other as a way of highlighting this thing about them which is that they're both full time monastics who don't get married and don't have families and they're also practicing this Confucian literati art, art that is very much associated with families and Confucianism and upholding the classics and all this kind of stuff. And so what's interesting then is that yeah, the literati seem to be much more into it and accepting of it and sort of at times praising them. You have famous literati writing biographies of some of these monks sometimes, and sometimes they'll highlight more of their Buddhists practices. But other times, like Guanxiu, the first preface to his poetry collection is written by a literatist named Wu Rong who says almost nothing about the religious stuff he talks about. Okay, poetry is this thing that, you know, that praises the good and condemns the bad and very much talking these whole Shijing poetics kind of mode and praises Guangxi for doing that. And apparently this was. He did such a poor job of addressing the religious stuff that after Guanxiu dies, the second edition of his poem comes out and his disciple Tan Yu writes his own preface to it, which much more talks about okay. No. Guanxiu also recited the Lotus Sutra and memorized a bunch of an early age and he gave lectures on this text and you know, these were his friends. And all this gives us much more of the complete picture as well. So. Yeah, so it's just really interesting. It was really interesting to me to look through the primary sources and that can be everything from prose texts to poems to incidental remarks and exchange poetry or whatever. To see this formation of what shisang meant and how it changed over time and how it became this kind of established term that poet monks themselves used as well as the literati to describe what they were.
- [34:09]
Jessica Zhu
Doing. Thank you Tom for this amazing chapter. For me this is just like historical study at its best. But again, my dear listeners, I'm skipping over quite a bit of important details. Just pick up this open access book and find what interests you the most and read that part. So now segue into part two, Politics. I have to say that all three chapters here are my favorite. They just open up a whole new world for me of how you po. How can poetry and philosophy be done in such surprising ways? Right. So chapter four is repetition, retriblication and negation. For me, this is poetic philosophy in its best possible manifestation. Although repetition as a method of intensification is widely used in pre Buddhist poetry. But re triplication means like three. Using things three times, right. Is both in a using to actually detail. There's a simple form, there's also complex forms. This kind of re triplication seems a quite unique technique among the poet monks. But in this chapter I just really want to focus on negation and its connection with the so called Siji Katushkoti in Sanskrit, that's Nagarjuna's famous negation of all four possible logical positions is A, not a, both A and not a, neither ao, neither not A nor not a. All four positions are negated. So for the philosophical significance of Katush Koti, you can check out my interview with Raphael Stepien on his book of Buddhism between religion philosophy. But here Tom, you convincingly show us that. Let me just quote you the very practice of reasoning by using the Katushkoti which reaches big in the Tianhai Master Guan.
- [36:03]
Tom Mazanek
Di.
- [36:04]
Jessica Zhu
Right. Who is the student of Tian Tai, Patriarch Zhi. Right. Interested listeners could also definitely check out this mind bending commentary on page 136. Let me just read one sentence. I have trouble like Duanju to figure out where I should pause a little bit to give you the meaning. But anyway, I just Want to give our listeners a taste of this passage and how mind bending it is and how this reason main confirmation method of for negations. Let me just quote you, combined with the logographic Chinese script, open up possibilities for repetitious language. That's on page 137. So Tom, could you please just maybe read the verse at the end of this chapter, that one is called Traveling is Hard and give us give some listeners some taste of how these mind bending philosophical politics works. Yeah, thank.
- [37:10]
Tom Mazanek
You. Sure. Yeah. No, that finding, that commentary that shows this kind of extreme application of the Chhattushkothi was quite satisfying and really interesting to me and very illustrative. So I'm glad that you enjoyed it too. The other thing just before I get to that poem is that what's interesting about this format is that it also not only shaped the poetry well, of course. And the repetition, all this sort of stuff, which as I mentioned earlier, was the whole thing that kind of sucked me into this project in the first place, that it also. In one of the poetics texts by. I think this is by. Let me look at this. Yeah. Shen Yu, one of his texts on poetics, the Shi. He also puts this idea of the, the inner and outer meaning of a poem, like its allegorical meaning, its literal meaning, and the different ways that it reaches and one reaches but the other one doesn't. And that's in exactly the same structure as the Chhattishkoti. Right. So they're definitely learning this stuff and applying it, taking it from philosophy and putting it into poetry and poetics. But yeah, and then that last text I quote, not actually, actually definitively written by a poet monk. It survives amongst other Buddhist documents from the Dunhuang manuscripts and it predates the kind of poet monk movement. But I include it because it kind of illustrates some of the same things they're doing poetically and how the same similar conditions of Buddhist education and philosophical environments can influence poetry as well. And so what we have great evidence for, the monks, the named monks that we know from historical sources who survive through Trin Tangshi and all this stuff, who we know a lot more about what they were doing, we see similar things being done by an anonymous author included in this Dunhuang poem. So this is the 16th poem in a series that is written to the Yufu title Xing Lunan. So it's one of these old titles that many people write, wrote different words to. Presumably it initially was a melody or something like that, which probably by this time in the Tang Dynasty was lost. But a lot of the literati versions of this describe the literal hardships of travel from one place to another. There's also a long Buddhist tradition of writing to Shinglunan in using it as a more metaphorical sense and sort of allegory of religious cultivation. So here's the the poem, do you not see no mind's great wisdom, bare and broad, Bare and broad is without bounds or borders without obstacle. It interfuses detached from being a non subtly it pervades containing each and all. Each and all it pervades forgetting this and that. But as thus, thusness is equal. One can discuss denying, affirming, denying affirming and affirming. Affirming are labeled empty emptiness, Empty. Emptiness is itself empty. For all dharmas it is so. For all dharmas it is so empty. Emptiness is without other self. The wisdom eye reflects brightly forever. Not dualizing, not dualizing is without knowing and without not knowing, non knowing, not knowing, knowing. Call this great knowledge. Great knowledge is not brightness and it is not not bright. Not bright is not brightness is not bright without bright brightness. The reflecting of not brightness does not reflect reflections. The reflecting of not reflecting is without arising. Traveling's hard. Traveling's hard. No mind is truly pure and tranquil, showing no concern for nirvana, Nirvana and samsara. It is a vast, vast as emptiness and without impediments. And then so just like a few of those lines, just to give you a sense of them in Chinese, like the third line of the second stanza, third and fourth lines, right? That's denying, affirming and affirming for me, are labeled empty. Emptiness, empty. Emptiness is itself empty for all dharmas is so, right? That's like fei shi, shi shi hao kong kong kong kong, ikong knife FA are. And so you have a lot of. And so I try to convey that in the translation. Whereas if I was just trying to tease out the philosophical significance of each of these terms, I might translate a little more transparently, that would tease out that meaning and what it's trying to do from that perspective. And that's fine. People have analyzed lots of Dunhuang poems like this for their philosophical content, to study the development of Chan, for example, and the different schools and all that kind of. Of stuff. And that's great. But as a poetics person, as a poetry scholar, I'm really trying to get across what's happening linguistically and what's unique there, right? How this philosophical discourse then creates new possibilities for what people can do in poetry on just a simple Verbal level. I think that's one of the really interesting things about the poet monks is that they likely had a much deeper familiarity with some of these kinds of texts, these philosophical Buddhist texts, than the literati did. And thus this kind of repetition was there, surrounding them in their daily practices, in their education, and it's another resource they could draw on to do new things in.
- [42:41]
Jessica Zhu
Poetry. Yeah, thank you. This is amazing because if you just look at Chen Tangshi, what's kind of canonized and anthologized without using the Dunhuang manuscript, you would think those monks may be unique. But you do see, like, there's just like, probably many more monks educated and then experimenting with this kind of a new Chinese language and then. But this interesting, very fascinating philosophy. Right. Trying to combine them. So just like, amazing chapter. Thank you so much. Chapter five is another amazing, amazing chapter. Incantation, Sonority and Foreignness. Another of my favorite chapters, of course, but this one is about these incantatory patterns, often borrowed from spells of the armies. So, Tom, you dig up quite a bit of evidence showing that not only poet monks consider sonority and foreignness, since, you know, it's originate from another realm, feminine means like, I don't know, more like heavenly writings, heavenly sun as poetics to accrue spiritual power. But also some of the points were actually included in ritual manuscripts, as you shown, because of its inconsistency patterns was perceived to be able to act upon its listeners not as words, but actually has sung with power from another word. So again, this chapter is rich with analysis of amazing poems, and it's very hard to pick up one over the other. But my trouble may be to read reads some of the translations on the Chinese of Qiji's poem given to the sutra Minding Monk. That's on page 179 to page 182, maybe a few stanza, just to give us, our listeners, a sense of what's going on and then, you know, share with our listeners your insight into this.
- [44:42]
Tom Mazanek
One. Sure, yeah. This is a really fascinating poem. Yeah. So, I mean, first in the chapter overall. Yeah, absolutely. I'm trying to show kind of. I define incantation kind of capaciously as being. Yeah, the ritual chanting of texts that contain a kind of spiritual power. And that's the kind of two main things I'm referring to are the spells or dar, as you're saying, and also recitations of scriptures. Right. Like especially Lotus Sutra is the most common one mentioned. And so I kind of bookend the chapter with poems by Two different monks, one by Guai Xiu, about a Lotus Sutra reciting monk, and then one by Cizi at the end. That's much longer. I'll quote from a little bit here in a minute. And yeah, the Guanxi one was found on this Dunhuang document, which include a lot of other ritual texts. And so I sort of of hypothesized that it was likely part of a ritual toolbox is kind of what I called it. And fortunately, as I was publishing this, another study came out by a different scholar that sort of also had a similar conclusion about this manuscript. So kind of independently confirmed what I had hypothesized. But, yeah, the Tziti poem is fascinating. I see it as one place where he really emphasizes the ways that the Chinese poetic tradition and the Buddhist tradition kind of merged together and become something different. And he sees it in this. In this recitation of the Lotus Sutra and this, this monk who's adept at reciting the Lotus Sutra. So that starts. Let's see, the first stanza is minding, minding, minding. Hey, it is easy to enter into evil. Minding, minding, minding. Hey, is it hard to enter into goodness, this by minding the sutra and minding the Buddha, one is capable of everything. When the river of desire is dried up, a building wave comes forth. In Chinese. That's. And then probably. Let me look through this again. Oh, yeah. The one that I feel like really drives home is kind of the third to last stanza, I would say, where he talks about. Right. He talks about the chanting and everything of the Lotus Sutra. Well, so first he then goes on and talks about, describes the monk reciting the Lotus Sutra in these kind of elevated terms. Terms. Right. His. He says at the root of his teeth and the root of his tongue, water drops, chill coral beaten by a red gemstone jade. So it's basically, you know, when he's reciting, his body sort of transforms into these precious objects. Yeah. He describes it as being subtle, esoteric. And then he turns to. You can also chant it into Darani. When tongue sounds and baramic sounds are mixed together. Shun strings harmonize sweet airs blow. And the strings of King Wen and King Wu are all the more plaintive. And that is, sorry, Let's see. Wen wang wu, wang xiang bay. And then. Yeah, then it kind of concludes by talking about all the sort of heavenly creatures that come and listen and sort of get converted. And that, you know, it ends with this image of the white ox carts which, you know, if, you know, purloda Sutra is this very famous from this very famous parable. But so for, for me, like, that's, you know, even though what CG is describing is recitation of the Lotus Sutra, you know, which was translated to Chinese, but also contains passages of Dharani that are transliterated Sanskrit. And the monk apparently is switching between these two languages very well and very fluidly. And he sees this as this harmonious combination of sort of Indic Buddhist culture and sort of Tang classical Chinese culture mixing together, becoming some other third elevated thing. And to me, this is precisely what is going on in their vision of what poetry could be. So they have this vision of that the poetic tradition can itself become Buddhist in certain contexts. And what's interesting to me is that in other East Asian countries, centuries, poetry such as Japan, poetry is much more associated with Buddhism. And this doesn't seem to be a paradox that this classical tradition of poetry and the Buddhist tradition are fundamentally at odds with each other as the way a lot of Tang people saw it. But these monks are saying, no, no, it doesn't have to be. It too can be elevated to this third thing. And so that really is. And the way that happens is not just in allusions to scriptures or whatever, all this kind of stuff, but it's in the very sound, right? It's in the very patterns and structures of sound. And a lot of this is stuff that we might miss if we're not paying attention to, say, reconstructions of Middle Chinese sonic patterns that are happening, internal rhymes that are going on, the way that the monks talk about sound itself. And so for me, this is very exciting to start to be reading these texts and discover this and sort of see a kind of coherent vision over.
- [50:40]
Jessica Zhu
It. Yeah, I very much appreciate this insight, this rich insight, and also feels like almost the miraculous materiality of the sun that just came through in their vision, right? So, you know, so you can't just really, you know, prioritize this kind of poetry, right? Just like something goes through your mind. No, there's something miraculously, and it's material seriously manifested. Anyways, now I think we are ready to move on to chapter six, Meditation, Effort and Absorption, which provocatively opens with this sentence. Poetry is meditation and meditation is poetry. This statement has since became the norm, as you said, is at least the 13th century, and now sounds like a cliche to contemporary years. But back in the second half of Tang Dynasty, when the idea first appeared, this, at least the Tang song poise, right, held profoundly different attitude toward poetry and meditation. So this chapter actually traces several Strands in literary and Buddhist discourses in the late 9th century that later gave rise to this new understanding of poetry is meditation. And meditation is poetry. So one key factor as you wrote, is queen, right? This concept of painstaking couplet as a kind of ascetic practice with intense devotion and then the process of Ku Yin quite resembles kind of meditative absorption, even though they come from a different lineage. And this is kind of a new trend co emerged with the formations of poet monks, but later was adopted by actual poet monks like Qi Ji Guanxiu we talked about. And then the two gates of poetic concentration, Buddhist meditation, somehow became one again. For the benefits of listeners, could you just please maybe pick one of those many points that you wrote and then show us how those, you know, these Po monks themselves explicitly mention these two gates and then merge them together? Yeah, just show us their.
- [52:52]
Tom Mazanek
Vision. Yeah, sure, yeah. This is an interesting chapter to write because this, this equation between poetry and meditation had been a common sort of metaphor that was used in later criticism. And the purpose I was trying to show this chapter is that, well, if you actually look through the poet monks and take their claims seriously, to them it wasn't a metaphor. It was in fact something much more. This identity was something that's much more real than a mere metaphor, as we see in say later literary critical works from the late Song period or even Mingqing period. And actually this insight is something I got from reading part of Tan Yi Lu by the great essays on Arts and Letters by Tian zhongshu, the great 20th century writer who talked about how this difference between the Tang and Song ideas towards poetry and Buddhism. And so I was just sort of following up on something that Tian Zongsu kind of off handedly mentions this for anyone, if anyone's listening here who's working on dissertation in Chinese literature, you could often just take one sentence of Tian Zhongshu and expand it into a whole dissertation. It's a good, good approach because he says things so concisely and there's so much there. Anyway, yeah, so I saw this. As you said, there's a trend in poetics over the 9th century in which the ideal of being this really hard working poets who really pays attention to craft requires this kind of absorption and concentration. And that was, became a very widespread idea especially by the end of the 9th century. And there are some people, people who are connecting it then to its similarity to meditation. And at the same time from the Buddhist side of things, you have people like the Hongzhou school that's emerging at this Time, which then says, meditation isn't something you just do when you're sitting at a monastery, but meditation is something you can be absorbed in while you're sitting, walking, standing, lying down, whatever, in throughout every aspect of your life, basically. And so if you're a poet, then you can then similarly do poetry even while meditating and all this sorts of things, and meditate even while writing poetry and all this stuff. And so I think one that encapsulates this pretty well is this poem by CG Senta director Jungkook. He has a couple of poems that are titled this because Jungkook was one of his friends and one of his teachers in poetry. But this quatrain, I think encapsulates some of these ideas pretty well. The translation reads, I have recently come across a craftsman of poetry in the human realm. I once met a mind stamp master. Beyond the birds, beyond the birds being high up in the mountains There is nothing so significantly marvelous besides these two gates beneath the riverside pine I trace my thoughts along alone. So in Chinese that's ren jian qin yu feng shaojiang. And so here what I posit that CG means is that he's really emphasized the two gates. Poetry and meditation are two gates to the same thing. If you think about the metaphor, if you think about a room, it'll have maybe a door on one side and a door on the other, but the room's the same. And so there's two ways of entering into the same thing. And at least as I interpret it, this is kind of a type of concentration and attention to the physical world and the larger truths contained in it. And then so poetry is one way of accessing that, and meditation is another way of accessing that. And yeah, the phrase two gates itself in Buddhist writings is often used to describe seemingly contradictory approaches to a single thing. So we see it, for example, to describe the lesser and greater vehicles in Buddhist historical discourses. We see it to describe samsara and general true thusness. He himself, in one of poet C's poetic manuals, uses the term men gates. He borrows it from the religious context to describe different approaches to writing poetry. So we know this is a kind of well wrought term. And so we see in the first two lines, then he talks about his influences then, and he talks about, you know, in the human realm. I came across a craftsman of poetry. Poetry, right. And so that probably refers to Jungkook himself and says, okay, I learned some of this from a poetry teacher. And then he says in the next one, I Also met a mind stamp master. Right. In this idea.
- [57:59]
Marshall Po
That.
- [58:00]
Tom Mazanek
Right. That means it's a mind that has the seal of, you know, a lineage of being enlightened, of being having a Chan lineage associated with them. As I said, I also learned this basically from a Buddhist teacher as well. Right. So he's putting these two things directly in parallel with each other in a way that I think is very meaningful to him and tries to assert this sort of homology between poetry and meditation. And we see this in lots of other poems as well that he wrote. I think I quote from five or six of TDs poems and probably another four or five Guan Shiu or something throughout this chapter. And it's not just them. There's also a few other monks who have much smaller Slur Ravi collections that also make similar assertions. So, yeah, to me, this is kind of where it all comes together. This was published separately as an article too, before it came in this book. And I think what it does for me is it historicizes this kind of claim that people either if they're very like a modern practitioner of poetry or Buddhism or something like that, may think is just kind of universal claim, or if they are a historian of Tang Chinese literature, may think is something that's merely a metaphor, that is just one of these kind of fancy ways of describing what's happening.
- [59:25]
Jessica Zhu
Poetry. Yeah. Thank you. This is just amazing for me. Right. They really just truly speak their own lived experience as both poet and monk. They probably did both very intensively in a very kind of absorbed way. So I just feel very moved by their devotions and the effort they put into there. But, you know, every party has to end. The conclusion of your book is a bit sad to me, because here you lay out how later literati like Ouyan Xiu erased whatever these poet monks have achieved. But then on page 226, he also wrote, let me just quote you, the modern Protestant assumptions about what religion is. Right. Also function to reproduce these kind of Confucian literatisi richer of these poet monks from the literary history of China. I don't really have a question for this conclusion. I just feel like I'm so sad, but I really want to just really move by the last page that you wrote that you conclude your book wins on page 227. If you don't mind, could you please I ask you to read the last paragraph here that reads like if, as scholars, we do not break down the normal.
- [60:46]
Tom Mazanek
Barriers. Sure, yeah. And this is kind of just before I read it, this is part of the methodological thing I was trying to do with the book, as I mentioned earlier, trying to bring together the insights of literary and religious studies and not being these sort of disciplinary silos. So if as scholars, we do not break down the normal barriers between literary and religious studies, between the Tang and the Five Dynasties, between principle and phenomenal phenomena, between poet and monk, we will continue to overlook such figures as the late medieval poet monks, and we will keep reifying our old categories of understanding Chinese cultural history. But those categories cannot hold to regard the true as true, and the false is false is not ultimately real poetry is meditation. For Confucians, Tong sounds and Brahmic sounds do mix together. Those who would uphold creation and its religious and literary guises must drive all its subtleties into their.
- [61:48]
Jessica Zhu
Forge. Thank you. And I guess for junior scholars, we need to pay attention to whatever you wrote here and then to continue to think about how we continue to break down the boundaries and then, you know, enable new kind of scholarship. So, Tom, we've taken a lot of your time, since we have only about an hour, and your book is really very rich. Is there anything else in the book that we didn't have time to talk about, but you'd like to highlight or prime for listeners and.
- [62:20]
Tom Mazanek
Readers? I guess maybe two small things. So one is, as we already mentioned, there is a lot of statistical and sort of digital analysis that goes into this book and that the doesn't read very well out loud in an interview. So I just encourage people who are interested in that aspect of it, go check it out. There's a GitHub page with all my code and stuff in there. So feel free to check my work and criticize it or build on it and do new things with it. The other thing I just mentioned is that one of the other conversations I was trying to hook this book into was was there's a whole field in the United States, mostly in English departments, called Religion and Literature, and there's journals with this title to it, and there's a whole discourse around it. And it's very much, if you look at all those spaces, includes very little outside of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, mostly modern, mostly associated with Europe and North America. So I was hoping, despite that, there is interesting work going on about other things. So there's really interesting work, say, going on in South Asian studies about the ways religion and literature mix. There's really interesting things going on in Near Eastern studies as well, and other Japanese studies and all these sorts of things. So I was really try. And one of the goals of this book was to address that crowd of the religion and literature people in English departments saying you should be reading our work too, and that we have something else to contribute to the conversation. And if you do that, a lot of assumptions about what this field should look like should change. And so I'm not convinced that I've reached many people in that crowd yet. But hopefully enough of us keep writing these kinds of, of books. That's something that can change methodologically because I really would find it interesting for someone to say, do a much broader comparative study of say, the way that poetry either summarizes or expands upon sacred texts. For example, so for example, you have from late antiquity in the west, you have these epics written about the Gospels, right? And that's a way of taking a sacred text, a sacred story, turning it into a different literary form and expanding it immensely. And the same time I've written about in other contexts, poems from Dunhuang that summarize key stories in the Lotus Sutra. And they do that by just referring to a whole anecdote with one line of poetry. And it's a way of compressing a sacred text. So I think that would be really interesting. A study say on the poetics of praise, right? There's not a lot that's usually done on praise, but that's a huge thing in say Stotras in both Hindu and Buddhist stuff in South Asia, but also Dan in Chinese and other sorts of things like that. So I think there's a lot of possibilities to put a lot more of the religion and literature conversation from different literary and cultural traditions in conversation with each.
- [65:37]
Jessica Zhu
Other. Other. I just totally agree. We have so many, you know, just as you're speaking, I just like so many sparks start to show up in my mind. Like Mani Mukaila is one of the Tamil Buddhist classic written in poetry, but it's about a consort turned Buddhist nun and did so many grateful, I mean amazing things. There's also these South Asian saint Kabir that later on turned into, I don't know, informed Umbedekerite movements and Bedekar himself. And of course if you go check these on the ground, kind of people's take on Ambedaka rights kind of anti caste Buddhist movement. There's so many songs, so many new poetries and films. So religion, literature, like outside these kind of Christianity traditions are just so much more to be done. I totally agree with you. Hopefully you can train some PhD students, push those boundaries further and also whoever is listening, try to look into those Fields. So, last question before we part our race again, the traditional New Books Network. What keeps you busy.
- [66:53]
Tom Mazanek
Now? Well, what keeps me busy most day to day is I'm also the East Asia editor for jos which is changing to named to jaspa. Jaspa. So it's one of the oldest journals in the field, founded in 1842. And so I'm responsible for publishing four issues a year in my section, about 150 pages in manuscript per section. So 600 pages per year of peer reviewed stuff. So that takes up time. But it's a service to the field and it's a way of promoting exciting new scholarship, some by established figures, some by emerging figures. And so just being able to really help that aspect of the field takes a lot of time. But for my own research, I am currently working on a new translation of of the most famous anthology of Tang poetry, 300 Tang poems, Tang Shi Sambai Shou. And what I'm doing with that is including not just the poetry, but also selections from different commentaries from the imperial period to these poems to show not just what a modern reader might enjoy about them, but what they have meant to the tradition and how we can kind of predict, appreciate what different readers thought about it and how different interpreters debated over these things. So there's a very famous poem called Mooring at Night by Maple Bridge. You know Maple Bridge located out of Hanshanzi, outside of Hangzhou or Suzhou. Suzhou, yeah, it's Gusu, but. And so. So he claims in the poem to hear a bell struck at midnight. And then there's a song commentary that comes along and says they don't strike bells at midnight. I served in Suzhou. And then someone comes later and says, no, actually if you look at Bai Jui also has a poem where he talks about hearing a bell at midnight in Suzhou. And then finally, interpreter comes from the Qing dynasty and says, guys, it's just a poem. It doesn't matter if it's exactly midnight or not. And so you can see how you can trace what was valuable to different readers over different times and their terms of debate about what made a good poem. And so another project I'm working, and the other thing I'm doing with that in the introduction is looking at this not just as a representative of Tang poetry, but actually how this anthology particular came to be the one that everybody knows, right? Because there are hundreds of anthologies of Tang poetry that were compiled over centuries. And so why this particular one? And so my introduction also tells that story. And so on the one hand, I'm working on very good poetry and some of the best of the tradition. And the other project I'm involved in actually working on right now is I'm editing with some of my colleagues here, an anthology called the Worst Chinese Poetry Poetry, a critical anthology. So we held, we have contributions from roughly 30 to 40 contributors from all the way back, starting with the shooting, all the way up to contemporary Internet poetry. Entries of, you know, 4,000 words or so with translations of these poems. And the idea is we're not calling these things bad. It's what have people in the Chinese literary tradition called bad for different reasons. So it's a way of looking, looking at how literary values have changed over time and context. And so we got everything in there, from the licentious songs of Zheng in the Shijing to poetry written by political traders in the Song dynasty, to doggerel written by military generals that's mocked in Shihua, to every, you know, futurists, early 20th century poetry, poets experimenting with avant garde European forms and et cetera, et cetera. So trying to take these negative examples of literary judgment and see what can it tell us about Chinese literary history. So that one's, you know, can be pretty fun to work on because, you know, bad poetry is something that's, I think we can all relate to, relate to. All of us have probably written bad poetry at some point. And so. Yeah, so I hope that would be a good teaching material in the.
- [71:36]
Jessica Zhu
Future. Sounds really fun. But Tom, thank you so much for your time here and for writing this amazing book and for sharing many of your insights and unforgettable quotes. And my favorite quote actually is this one. Poetry's meditation for Confucians, Tan Sans and Brahman. Exactly. Sounds do mix together. And also because the book is so readable, the translation just so amazing. And it's also open access. So I highly recommend this book to all those teaching in giant courses. If you only have to teach, like, you can only have time to teach one lecture on Chinese culture, poetry, whatever. Please consider some of Tom's translations. And also, Tom, I'm looking forward to reading your new translations of Tang Shi San Baishou and your study about it and also about the poetry that sounds just like so amazing and so teachable. Thank you so.
- [72:29]
Tom Mazanek
Much. Well, thank you very much. It's very kind and I appreciate your time.