Session 10: Mujōkan / mono no aware I: Introductory comments; transience as expressed in the Kokinshū's five books of love

Topics

❖ Some brief comments on love and Confucianism, love and Buddhism
❖ Koi (恋, "longing"): as connectedness
❖ Mujōkan and mujōkan in a romantic context: Episode 24 of The Tales of Ise, the five books of love in the Kokinshū

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

While our primary topic over the next several sessions will be mujōkan and mono no aware, we will be situating these within narratives and an important aspect of Genji's narrative is romance and so, in order to make sense of the narrative itself, I need to make some introductory comments about romantic love as portrayed in Heian onnade texts.

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Read the entry on the terms page for mujōkan.

✓ Kokinshu love poems (bSpace, PDF). Read these ahead of class and be ready to suggest how each of the five books is different. (There is now an optional, other, version of this document that includes my brief comments about the general thrust of each poem. It was developed for a different class so some of the vocabular comments are more or less meaningless, but you can take a look at it for the summary comments, if interested: Kokinshu love poems with notes for J130 students.pdf)

✓ Read in McCullough, Tales of Ise "Introduction", "Episode 24" and any other episode you find interesting. Read a few. I discuss Episode 24 in terms of "about to expire" as a romantic frame of mind. I also use it to introduce Tales of Ise in general and discuss Heian-style love more generally.

✓ Reread this (from McCullough 155, the final paragraph of the first part of The Gossamer Journal). A good example of time slipping away in a disappointing fashion:

"So time passes, but the advent of a new year brings no joy to one who is sunk in grief, her life far from what she would have desired. When I reflect on the perpetual uncertainty [mono-hakanaki] in which I exist, it seems to me that this had been the journal of a woman whose fortunes are as evanescent [aru ka naki ka] as the gossamer shimmer of a heat wave in the sky."

かく年月はつもれど思ふやうにもあらぬみをしなげゝばこゑあらたまるもよろこぼしからず猶ものはかなきをおもへばあるかなきかの心ちするかげろふのにきといふべし。

Multimedia notes

⇢ None.

Links

⇢ None.

Other

Terms and such mentioned this day that are not otherwise in an obvious place on the web site, the powerpoints, the assigned reading, etc. (to help with capturing items mentioned, perhaps quickly, in class, not for test purposes)

Fall 2011

mujōkan = 無常感 (feeling of uncertainty, fleetingness)・無常観 (objective recognition of the truth of transcience), mono no aware = もののあはれ, Tales of Ise is in McCullough and I read from Section 24, which is also in McCullough. I also mentioned koi （こひ）恋 and its manyogana rendition of 孤悲 (lonely-sadness). I also mentioned おもふ omou, to think / to think about one's lover.

I also mentioned the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:

1. Life is suffering (dukkha)
2. Suffering is caused by craving/desire (tanha)
3. Craving can be stopped
4. The way to stop craving is through right opinion, right activity, right means of existence, right effort, right attention, right concentration