Date of Kojiki
Ross Bender
Avery M.
lecture notes on the Nihon Shoki, Kōnin Shiki 弘仁私記, written by Ō no
Hitonaga in 813. There was a regular series of lectures on the Nihon
Shoki in Heian times.
That gives us a range of just over 100 years. So, can the preface's
711 date be believed?
Herman Ooms concluded that it can, because of circumstantial evidence.
He claims to observe a slow shift from the Kojiki to Nihon Shoki in
the mid-8th century, including a general cleanup of genealogies and
erasure of "Kojiki-based political nomenclature". For this reason,
Ooms says, even Shoku Nihongi was eventually purged of references to
the Kojiki. There was a mess of competing court genealogies still
present in the 9th century and have records of orders to clean them
up. Besides the Kojiki, Nihon Shoki, and Sendai Kuji Hongi, there was
a text called Teiō Keizu which claimed that the emperors of Korea were
descended from Amaterasu; all copies of this text were ordered burned
in the late 8th century. The Nihon Kōki reports that in 809, the
Emperor attempted to confiscate all copies of Wakan Sōrekitei Fuzu,
which claimed that Ame no Minakanushi was the ancestor of the kings of
Goguryeo and Gaozu of Han, among others.
However, there are other Japanese people who believe that the Kojiki
is a forgery, or that the preface in particular is a forgery. You can
see some of their arguments summarized at the following link.
http://miuras-tiger.la.coocan.jp/jyo-wo-utagau.html
While I quite like Ooms' historical placement of the Kojiki body text
in the early 8th century, the idea that the preface was forged is
interesting to consider, because the preface does have a markedly
different tone from the body text. This would be a forgery to add
prefatory material to an unfinished manuscript, which is also what
Ooms (after John Bentley) believes happened to the Sendai Kuji Hongi.
Sadly, I don't have a lot to offer here beyond what Wikipedia says;
Japanese classicists don't really entertain these theories, because
they have inherited an orthodoxy from Motoori Norinaga.
A funny alternative to consider is that the preface may have been
forged by an early Heian lecture series participant who knew that the
text really was presented in 712, so he emphasized the date for that
reason.
Avery Morrow
Brown University
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John Bentley
Dear Ross and All,
I agree with what Avery has said but let me add a little context to this interesting topic. Kamo no Mabuchi appears to be the first to cast doubts on Kojiki, writing two letters to Motoori Norinaga in 1768 expressing his doubts. In Kojiki-den (二之巻) Norinaga defends the Chinese nature of the preface by saying this was how official documents were written in that era. He does not entertain Mabuchi’s doubts. Fast forward to 1975 and Ōwa Iwao (大和岩雄) put forth a superficially convincing argument that the Kojiki and its preface were a later production (cf. Kojiki seiritsukō). He updated this argument again in 1979, before the discovery of Yasumaro’s epitaph (cf. Kojiki gishosetsu no shūhen). A number of scholars, mainly linguists and philologists, put forth strenuously argued evidence that the text of Kojiki was authentic, and Ōwa’s idea of “forgery” was a hard-sell. Later Ōwa altered his stance, accepting Kojiki as authentic, but he doubled down on his argument the preface was a later creation. It is true that the evidence for and against the preface itself is more nuanced. To me, as a philologist, the compelling evidence for the authenticity of the preface is (admittedly) the circumstantial fact that Ō no Yasumaro’s name and title in the preface matches his epitaph, aside from the change in rank. The epitaph was fortuitously discovered back in January of 1979.
The Kojiki preface ends with Yasumaro’s signature:
正五位上勲五等太朝臣安萬侶
Compare that with the epitaph:
従四位下勲五等太朝臣安萬侶
Notice the perfect match with the spelling of the name, even down to the idiosyncratic use of 萬侶, not 麻呂. The only difference is the epitaph records Yasumaro had advanced in rank from Senior Fifth Upper Rank to Junior Fourth Lower Rank (granted in 716?). To this evidence consider that Shoku Nihongi consistently records Yasumaro’s name as 太朝臣安麻呂.
The problem with putting forth any kind of argument about a forgery (and its many nuanced iterations) is the difficult-to-defend stance that the forger/creator who perhaps lived a century later in time had earlier information that in almost all cases is impossible for anyone to have access to convincingly project some artifact accurately back in time. That is why science continues to discover forgeries. The philological rule seems to be that a perfect forgery is nearly impossible to achieve, as long as later generations have sufficient data to tease truth from fabrication.
That’s my three cents,
John Bentley
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2023 10:48 PM
To: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [PMJS] Date of Kojiki
Robert F Wittkamp
2023/07/28 11:34、Ross Bender <rosslyn...@gmail.com>のメール:
Raji Steineck
- The text of the Kojiki existed at the time of the redaction of the Nihon shoki and was known to the editors of the Nihon shoki.
- The preface of the Kojiki was written after the Nihon shoki, and attributed to Ō no Yasumaro, perhaps in order to enhance the status of the Kojiki and "prove" its compatibility with the official narrative stated in the Nihon shoki.
- The variants recorded in the Nihon shoki were included to account for the competition between the mythologies put forth by various factions at court, and to delineate the bandwith of acceptable variation from the standard narrative.
Gesendet: Freitag, 28. Juli 2023 05:48
An: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
Betreff: Re: [PMJS] Date of Kojiki
Ross Bender
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/ZRAP278MB07396CC8FB8BDC226791E02BC706A%40ZRAP278MB0739.CHEP278.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM.
Ross Bender
“The question of the author and date of Kojiki has given rise to much discussion among Japanese scholars. It is extremely important to them because of the traditional view that Kojiki was Japan’s first book…A survey of scholarship in 1977 by Tokumitsu Kyūya lists 60 publications on the date of composition of Kojiki from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The flow of publications continues. However, despite an abundance of ingenious approaches, there is no clear consensus that Kojiki ought to be assigned a date of composition other than 712…A review of scholarship on the subject is little to our point, since it is inconclusive.”
Ross Bender
Robert F Wittkamp
2023/07/28 23:47、John Bentley <jben...@niu.edu>のメール:
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/DM6PR04MB48411D0990A7D7C92DCC9F2AE406A%40DM6PR04MB4841.namprd04.prod.outlook.com.