Abstrakt
In this paper I will present a short introduction into the Five Mountains literature (Gozan Bungaku) and I will focus on the literary produce of two prominent poets, Zekkai Chūshin and Gidō Shūshin. The Five Mountains literature is a corpus of literary works written by Japanese Zen monks belonging to the Five Mountains monasteries.
This literature was predominantly written in classical Chinese, thus making it not so easily accessible. Zekkai and Gidō were two important poets who also became powerful religious dignitaries later in their life and were chosen as a topic of this paper because of the fact that they were contemporaries and colleagues and because only Zekkai went to China to study at the important Zen centers of of the Chinese coast, and Gidō never left Japan.
This makes them ideal for comparison as Zekkai should exhibit new influence from China and Gidō should be more conservative. It has appeared that it indeed is the case, but the differences do not end here.
I will discuss the differences their literary works exhibit in the choice of genres (traditional genres of the Chinese shi poetry) and in the sources of influence they took from older Chinese poets. I will put an emphasis on the way they worked with the scenes in their poetry, which will be accompanied with an analysis of two of their poems.
They will serve as an example of the prevalent tendency of Zekkai to employ concrete places and to proceed from one point to another jumping in the space-time continuum (both in time and space) and of Gidō's greater emphasis on movement from the outside world into the storyteller persona's inner thoughts. The gradual secularization of the Five Mountains literature will be also discussed along with the way it influences Zekkai's writing style and his choice of topics.