Nihon Ryōiki

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The Nihon Ryōiki ( Japanese 日本 霊 異 記 , dt. "Records of miracles in Japan"), also Nihon Reiiki , with full title: Nippon-koku Gembōzenaku-Ryō-i-ki ( 日本國 現 報 善 悪 霊 異 記 , "Records on miracles of visible retribution for good and evil in the land of Japan ”), is the oldest surviving text of the Japanese setsuwa bungaku . The Buddhist cleric Kyōkai (also: Keikai) put the work together in the early Heian period and completed it before 822. The Nihon Ryōiki contains 116 early Buddhist legends and is written in the classical Kanbun ; Hermann Bohner translated it into German under the title Legends from the Early Period of Japanese Buddhism .

content

The Nihon Ryōiki consists of three fascicles ("books"), which are essentially structured chronologically.

Although it is written in Chinese characters and corresponding diction, it is called the first work of the so-called setsuwa-bungaku , initially passed down orally, then in beautiful form written down "stories" (cf. fabula in its original meaning: short story with a teaching, teaching, edifying intention ). Not only Buddhist, especially Buddhist reporting, is at its peak here, but also that other thing that is difficult to separate from Confucius : the pronounced Chinese, Chinese writing and diction, Chinese hsüeh-wen ( 學 交 , "knowledge; education"). The connoisseur of the Mahayana Sutras reads a whole world from what is quoted in Nihon Ryōiki .

title

The title sums up what the work wants, as if in a summa. Since the individual characters of the title are linguistically so loosely joined to one another that the most diverse readings are conceivable, even set at the same time, it is hardly possible to translate the title. Departure must be the last character ki ( 記 , "report [e]; font" in the sense of our "over; of"). The central symbol is the preceding i ( 異 , "different, different"): The story is told about the world of the totaliter aliter , the "completely different", the miraculous; reports of wondrous, completely different or wondrous reports are given. The character ryō ( 霊 , "spirit [he]") specializes in this. They are reports of demonstrations from that very different, otherwise closed spirit world. The middle characters of the title indicate the content of these statements: The central experience is the inga experience, gembō ( 現 報 , "visible-present retribution"). That means: there is retribution, and it shows itself and is experienced, first of all in this existence; but also from the later existence there are manifestations in this present existence, zen-aku ( 善 悪 , “good-bad”), “good as well as bad” - which, however, can also be related to the following signs. The first characters Nippon-koku ( 日本國 ) indicate that the work is genuinely Japanese and is set in the "land of Japan".

Authorship and time of origin

Little is known about Kyōkai, and most, if not all, we know from him. Nowhere do we learn more about Kyōkai than in the 38th story of Volume 3 of his work. As if awakening, the memory wanders once more over the contemporary history that has been lived through and then, in a second part, turns to the author's own life; what occupied him for a long time oozes out; the motifs that moved him to the work also emerge: youth is over, old age is approaching. And then? In the dream (7th year Enryaku , 788) Kyōkai's soul sees its own corpse burning in a typical occult way. But it is precisely here that the right person Kyōkai shows himself: he does not curse heaven because of it, he does not scold people; he knocks on his own chest. Only now does he fully acknowledge that this is the harvest of one's own seed, one's own karma ( 因 課 , inga ); he repents, repents, turns to something completely new, does good ( 修善 , shūzen ). He had already come into contact with the holy word before, but now great zeal is developing in him; he studies the sutras , he attains that astonishing knowledge of the scriptures that the Nihon Ryōiki shows. At the time of writing, Kyōkai resided in the Yakushiji in Nara , which is why he is attributed to the Hossō .

The work was created in a transitional period when the two Japanese syllable alphabets were just being developed, but the preliminary stage of man'yōgana was quite common. However, it is written in pure Sino-Japanese called Kanbun. Ekisai Kariya ( 狩 谷 掖 齋 ; 1775–1835), the compiler of the great compilation of Japanese literature, Gunsho Ruijū , had, judging by his sources, relocated the work to the Kōnin years 810–823. In the first part of the preface to III, the 6th year Enryaku (787) is expressly mentioned. A compilation of several years, probably between 786 and 805, can be assumed. In all likelihood, Kyōkai lived through the late Konin years and completed his work during those years.

Manuscripts

Four manuscripts of Ryōiki have survived, but none is complete.

  1. The Kofukuji manuscript is the oldest and most accurate (the first fascicle dates from 904); it was first relocated in 1934.
  2. The Shimpukuchi manuscript ( 眞 福 時 ) of the second and third fascicle dates from the Kamakura period and is less corrupted than the following.
  3. The Maeda manuscript of the third fascicle dates from 1236 and was discovered in 1883. A photostatic edition was printed in 1931. Written on the 3rd day of the 3rd month in the 2nd year Katei (1236) by (the cleric) Zen'e ( 禪 惠 ). Only here is the first (ten-line) section to the preface to the third fascicle, about whose authenticity a lively scholarly dispute has broken out.
  4. The Koyā or Sanmaiin manuscript dates from 1214. Although it contained all three fascicles, it is incomplete: the original was lost around 1930/40.

literature

  • Bohner, Hermann; Nippon-koku Gembō Zenaku Ryōiki (Nihon Ryō-i-ki) Legends from the early days of Japanese Buddhism ; Tōkyō 1934; Sert .: Communications of the German Society for Natural and Ethnographic East Asia ; Vol. 27. Reprint: New York, London 1965 (Johnson Reprint), 245, 91 pp
  • Dykstra Yoshiko; A study of the Nippon-koku-gembō-Zenaku-Ryō-i-ki; Ann Arbor 1974 (UMI) [Diss. UCLA 1974]
  • Golay, Jacqueline; A study of Setsuwa Literature with Emphasis on the Nihon ryōiki ["Second part… consists of the [French] translation of nine tales from the Ryōiki"]; Vancouver 1970 (University of British Columbia, Diss.); 120 sheets
  • Nakamura Kyoko Motomochi [Ex., Ed.]; Miraculous stories from the Japanese Buddhist tradition - the Nihon ryōiki of the monk Kyōkai; Cambridge 1973 (Harvard University Press); Richmond (UK) 1997 (Curzon); 322S; ISBN [1997] 0-7007-0449-3
  • Naumann, Nelly and Wolfgang; The most beautiful Japanese stories - The magic bowl; Munich 1973 (Hanser), ISBN 3-446-11773-3 [Contains a few uncommented translations of legends of the first fasc.]
  • Seki Hōzen; Nihon-Ryōiki no Kenkyū, shū shite sono shūjihō ni tsuite; 1928 [Ryūkoku-Univ. Kyoto Diss .; Ms.]
  • Complete translations into Russian exist [Meshcheryakow, Alexander N. {а.н. мещерякова}: 1996], Vietnamese [Nguyễn Thị Oanh et al .: 1999] and one partly in Italian.

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