Böcker av Edward Kamens

When the young Princess Sonshi became a Buddhist nun in the year 984, a scholar-official of the royal court was commissioned to create a guide to the Buddhist religion that would be accessible for her. He did so in the form of the illustrated works of fiction (monogatari) that appealed to women readers of her time and class. The text has survived in later manuscripts; the illustrations, if they ever existed, have not. This revised translation recreates Sonshi's experience of receiving this multimedia presentation, with illustrations selected to help contemporary readers visualize its content and essays that provide context on the religious and cultural experience of the author. The Three Treasures is a unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience--especially for women--in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji.

A unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience - especially for women - in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji.

Senshi was born in 964 and died in 1035, in the Heian period of Japanese history (794-1185). Most of the poems discussed here are what may loosely be called Buddhist poems, since they deal with Buddhist scriptures, practices, and ideas.

A challenging study offering a new perspective on classical Japanese poems and how they interact with and are part of material culture

A central feature of traditional Japanese poetry is the use of "utamakura", a category of poetic words, to cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems. This text analyzes a wide selection of poems to show how "utamakura" came to wield special powers within Japanese poetry.