Montag
16
JAN

18.15 Uhr

Fragments of Handwriting: Buddhist Death Rituals in Japanese Epistolary Culture

Dr. Halle O'Neal, University of Edinburgh, Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor

While a fading practice today, handwritten letters in medieval Japan were the sole form of communication between long-separated lovers, parents unlikely to reunite with their children, and distant friends, artists, and poets. The quality and decoration of the paper itself was of critical importance, and an admirer’s advances could be rejected on the basis of crude paper. Memoirs were punctuated by poignant laments on the long wait for letters that might never arrive. For one diarist, seeing the handwriting of her love summoned unbearable sorrow, and she committed the letters to the fire rather than live with their stark reminder of loss.

In the epistolary culture of medieval Buddhist Japan, handwritten letters, therefore, figured prominently in mourning rituals. This talk explores the creation, materiality, and haptics of letter sutras (shōsokukyō). These textually layered manuscripts are the result of a Buddhist death ritual in which family and friends reused paper bearing the handwriting of a deceased loved one to copy scripture, creating memorial palimpsests. The early fourteenth-century Lotus Sutra copied by the celebrated calligrapher Emperor Fushimi (1265-1317, r. 1287-98) on the back of an astonishing 171 letters from his father, Emperor GoFukakusa (1243-1304, r. 1246-59), provides an excellent illustration of the dynamics of mourning and ritual realised through material expression. They also stand as a prime example of what we can learn from treating palimpsests as layered biographies. By analysing the shifting functions of handwriting in these manuscripts, the talk ties together themes of embodiment, memory, and medieval reuse and recycling within profoundly personal papers steeped in grief and prayers for salvation.

Adresse

CATS – Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Gebäude 4010

CATS Auditorium R.010.01.05

Voßstraße 2

69115 Heidelberg

Veranstalter

Institut für Kunstgeschichte Ostasiens

Homepage Veranstalter

http://iko.uni-hd.de/

Kontakt

Institut für Kunstgeschichte Ostasiens

Kontakt URL

http://iko.uni-hd.de/