Workshop: Ganmon Liturgies in Premodern East Asia

Composed by specially trained practitioners (often university-trained scholars) and couched in elaborate Chinese-style parallel prose, ganmon ??were read out loud at religious services (primarily Buddhist in orientation, although there are ganmon addressing non-Buddhist deities). Because they explain the motivations of the sponsors of temples and pagodas, Buddhist images and sutra copies, and also rituals related to funerals, births, illnesses, and so on, they provide important information about the sociality of premodern elites. Although they fall outside the modern Japanese literary canon, they were one of the most prestigious genres of Heian period (27 examples are collected in the mid-11th century Honcho monzui anthology), and as texts intended to be orally intoned they raise crucial questions about reading practices and intersections of vernacular (Japanese) and cosmopolitan (literary Chinese) registers. This international workshop will gather scholars of language, history, religion, and literature working on Japanese ganmon and their Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese antecedents/ counterparts to discuss the significance of this understudied but crucial premodern genre.