Mid-Tang Exchange Poetry, the Kingdom of Parhae, and the Reception of Bai Juyi in Early Heian Japan, Part 1: Parhae Envoys and the Yuan-Bai Style of Exchange Poetry

Abstract

Introduction

The two texts quoted above are the opening lines of two banquet prefaces composed in the Heian 平安 period (794–1185) by the tenth-century kidendō 紀伝道 scholars Ki no Tadana 紀斉名 (957–99) and Fujiwara no Atsushige 藤原篤茂 (fl. mid-tenth century). The historical contexts for these texts, namely the occasion on which the poetic banquets were held, are, unfortunately, unknown.¹ The kidendō scholars—that is, individuals trained in the kidendō (Way of Annals and Biographies) curriculum in the Bureau of High Education (daigakuryō 大学寮)—constituted the literate elite of the Heian court and were often pivotal in the reception, circulation, and transmission of continental texts and erudition.²

Of interest here is the appearance of the mid-Tang-period poets Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) and Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831) as sources of literary authority. Notably, both of the banquet prefaces hold up the work of these two poets to authoritative texts from the past. Tadana claims that the season of the “end of the third month” (三月尽) is conspicuously absent from such classic reference texts as the Shangshu 尚書 (Book of Documents) and the Jingchu suishi ji 荊楚歲時記 (Record of Festival and Annual Customs of the Jing-Chu region).³ However, this seasonal time frame for poetic composition in fact begins to appear during the Tang period (618–907) and is particularly prominent in the poetry of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen.⁴ Atsushige couples a verse from a poem included in Bai Juyi's collected works, Hakushi monjū, or bunshū (Ch. Baishi wenji) 白氏文集, with a verse from an unidentified “old poem,” suggesting that Bai's poetry stands in continuity with earlier poetic traditions.⁵ Thus, on the one hand, Atsushige's preface legitimizes Bai Juyi's poetry as a source of poetic imagery and diction by virtue of its association with a past tradition, while, on the other, Tadana's preface introduces the poetry of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen as the authoritative origin of a type of poetic seasonal imagery that purportedly did not exist before the Tang period.⁶ In short, by the mid-tenth century, more and more texts composed by Heian scholars and poets suggested that Bai Juyi was by then considered (together with his friend Yuan Zhen) a source of literary authority, often in connection with specific forms of imagery and vocabulary that complement or contrast with already established textual authorities.

By the mid-tenth century, when the kidendō scholars Tadana and Atsushige composed these banquet prefaces, various configurations of Bai Juyi's textual corpus had been circulating in Japan for more than a century. Also during this period, manuscripts of Bai's seventy-volume collected works served as the most complete source of his poetry and prose in early Heian Japan. This version of Bai's work first entered Japan in 844 in the form of a copy that the monk Egaku 恵萼 (fl. 835–64) made of the original version deposited by Bai Juyi himself at the Nanchan Temple in Suzhou in 839.⁷ However, the earliest documentary evidence for the arrival of Bai Juyi's works in Japan appears in the biography of an official named Fujiwara no Takemori 藤原岳守 (808–51) included in the historiographical work Nihon Montoku tennō jitsuroku 日本文徳天皇実録 (Veritable Chronicles of Emperor Montoku of Japan, 879) that reads:

At the time narrated in the above passage, Takemori was the assistant governor of Dazaifu in modern-day Kyūshū, the primary entry point for trade with the continent. While the specifics of his find are a matter of speculation, the story is particularly significant in indicating that Bai Juyi's works arrived in Japan through multiple routes and in various forms. In particular, the collection found by Takemori reflects the reality that Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen were often paired together and that their poetry often circulated jointly. Therefore, although the seventy-volume collection comprising Bai's collected works became the standard configuration for the corpus of his poetry and prose by the mid-tenth century, Takemori's biography shows that other forms of his texts were also in circulation at roughly the time this version entered Japan.⁹ In fact, evidence from the poetry of ninth-century kidendō graduates suggests that these variant configurations of Bai Juyi's (and Yuan Zhen's) texts profoundly influenced the way in which their poetry and prose were read, quoted, and used creatively to generate new possibilities for imagery and diction in the wider practice of early Heian Sinitic poetry.

By the end of the ninth century, then, Bai Juyi's poetry was exceptionally popular among the professional class of kidendō graduates. During the tenth century, this popularity gradually extended to the imperial household and the broader aristocracy. The Jōwa 承和 era (834–48), during which Bai Juyi's texts were distributed in Japan by multiple paths and in multiple forms, came to be referred to as a sort of watershed in discussions of the development of poetic composition in the Heian period, so much so that even later Heian authors show awareness of a distinction between a pre- and post-Bai period.¹⁰ Among modern scholars, Kojima Noriyuki (1976: 176–87) has stressed the significance of this shift in poetic style.¹¹ As a matter of fact, there has long been puzzlement as to why Bai Juyi's collected works enjoyed such an impressive degree of enthusiasm among the aristocratic elites of Heian Japan, especially since the poetry of other Tang literati known to have reached Japan received relatively little attention.

Scholars have tentatively suggested a number of possible reasons as to why Bai Juyi became so popular in Heian Japan, which include the fact that Bai Juyi was already incredibly popular in mid-Tang China, the supposed simplicity of his poetic language, and the fact that his poetry might have given Heian period literati a model for exploring new themes and expressing possibilities (Smits 1997). However, any attempt to explain Bai Juyi's poetry in Heian Japan as a novelty inevitably collides with the empirical observation of available sources, which suggests that for the most part Bai Juyi's poetry was rapidly subsumed by early Heian poets within the established modalities of reception, circulation, and use of continental literary sources for poetic composition that were already in place.¹²

In this essay, I trace the popularity of Bai Juyi to two aspects of early Heian culture. On the one hand, the circulation of variant configurations of Bai Juyi's poetry (as opposed to the standard seventy-volume collection that gradually became the standard modality of reception) emphasized the connection between him and other poets, such as Yuan Zhen, along with the poems exchanged among them as well as the productivity of the exchange poetry that early Heian poets composed based on the formal model of such poetic exchanges. On the other hand, the practice of poetry exchanges between early Heian kidendō scholars and the envoys dispatched from the kingdom of Parhae 渤海 (698–926) became a cultural institution at the Heian court in the ninth century.¹³ These poetic exchanges, I argue, were the contexts in which exchange poetry in the style of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen was performed regularly, thereby creating momentum for the expansion of exchange poetry among early Heian poets as well as dictating a specific modality for reading Bai Juyi's corpus in early Heian Japan. This essay not only reconsiders the origins of Bai Juyi's popularity in Heian Japan but also uncovers the leading role of the kingdom of Parhae as the driving force that shaped the Japanese reception of continental texts such as Bai's. Furthermore, the arguments presented here constitute a springboard for reconsidering the position of Parhae within the broader contemporary cultural ecosystem of East Asia.

Why Bai Juyi? Exchange Poetry and the Yuan-Bai Style

In the mid-Tang period, exchange poetry became the dominant form of poetic composition in China. At least one modern scholar (Jia 2001: 6–12) has described the tremendous expansion of exchange poetry beginning in the last decades of the eighth century as a new modality of social interaction following the dismantling of earlier forms of imperially driven and aristocracy-centered modes of poetic production in the wake of the An Lushan rebellion. From settings that emphasized the formation of a collectivity harmonized around the ruler, poetry was gradually decentered from the court and developed as a transregional means of personal communication, fostering the formation of new social networks that extended across the land.¹⁴ The fact that mid-Tang exchange poetry almost invariably followed the prosodic patterns of “regulated verse” (lüshi 律詩), which had become the dominant form for poetic composition at the Tang court, reinforced the significance of exchange poetry as an alternative and equally legitimate means to craft sociopolitical identities outside the imperial palace. As a matter of fact, from the late eighth to the early ninth centuries (roughly from 790 to 830) exchange poetry became a productive site to articulate feelings of friendship and social bonding in environments decentered from court settings and relationships of patronage, highlighting the mid-Tang literati's impulse to create new forms of social interactions and establish new identities (Shields 2015: 131–32). More generally, poetry was at that time but one prominent literary genre within a broader trend toward writing about personal life that extended onto various textual categories such as letters, prefaces, records, and prayer texts (9). Exchange poetry was thus particularly productive in the first half of the ninth century, the period when Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen were active. It also provided significant support for these networks in the face of the increased territorial mobility and political uncertainty that characterized the transition from the late Tang period to the politically heterogeneous tenth century, prior to the Song unification in 960 (Mazanec 2018).

Already by the early ninth century, this type of exchange poetry had developed various formal requirements. In particular, from the second half of the eighth century, the manner in which one poem harmonized (和) with another in the context of a poetic exchange gradually shifted from content matching (和意) to rhyme matching (和韻). Although rhyme-matching poetry existed prior to the Tang period, it was hardly the consistent and systematic genre it would eventually grow to be in the mid-Tang period from the late eighth century. It has been argued (Zhao 2009) that the extensive use of rhyme-matching patterns by Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen in their exchanges may indicate that this kind of harmonization poetry (changheshi 唱和詩) represents a generic innovation promoted by these two poets. In any case, the centrality of rhyme-matching harmonization in the corpus of exchange poetry between Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen vis-à-vis the variety of forms of poetic sociality performed in the mid-Tang period, which also included linked verses (連句) and poetic competitions on the same topic (競作), have resulted in Tang rhyme-matching exchange poetry being normally labeled, both historically and by modern scholars, as the “Yuan-Bai style” in recognition of the centrality of these figures in mid-Tang period poetic production (Tachibana 2008).¹⁵ The Yuan-Bai style is alternatively called the Yuanhe 元和 style, from the Yuanhe era (806–820) when Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen became acquainted and began to exchange poetry. Bai and Yuan knew each other from at least 803, when they were both in service as editors at the Imperial Palace Library (jiaoshulang 校書郎), and their poetic exchanges continued until Yuan's death in 831 (Hanafusa 1960: 321–22). The significance of rhyme-matching exchange poetry in Bai Juyi's collected works is explicitly emphasized in the preface that Yuan Zhen composed and attached to the fifty-volume collection of Bai's poetry and prose that he himself put together in the fourth year of the Changqing 長慶 era (824) with the title Baishi changqing ji 白氏長慶集 (Collected Works of Master Bai of the Changqing era). The growing Yuan-Bai corpus of exchange poetry reached its final configuration with the no longer extant Yuanbai changhe yinji ji 元白唱和因繼集 (Collection of Yuan-Bai Continued Matching Poems), which circulated independently from the larger collected works as mentioned by Bai Juyi in a later postface to the Changqing-era collection.¹⁶ After Yuan Zhen's death, Liu Yuxi became Bai Juyi's primary poetic partner, and the two also engaged with different forms of poetic exchange, adding to a body of poems that were gradually put together in a collection titled Liu-Bai changhe ji 劉白唱和集 (Collection of Liu-Bai Harmonizing Poetry), which counted five volumes in its final configuration. In recognition of its broad scope and variety of content, the scholar Tachibana Hidenori (2008) places the Liu-Bai exchange poetry collection at the cusp of the mid-Tang phenomenon of exchange poetry.

In addition to the Yuan-Bai and Liu-Bai collections of exchange poems, other works were also in circulation, such as the Pengyang changhe ji 彭陽唱和集 (Collection of Harmonizing Poetry from Pengyang), that included poems exchanged between Liu Yuxi and Linghu Chu 令狐楚 (766–837), and the Wushu ji 呉蜀集 (Collection from Wu and Shu), which included poems exchanged between Liu Yuxi and Li Deyu 李德裕 (787–850). Thus, the time between the Changqing (821–24) and the Kaicheng 開成 (836–40) eras was arguably one in which exchange poetry flourished, with a number of collections in circulation. The modern scholar Hanafusa Hideki, who has reconstructed a possible form of the original collections of exchange poetry between Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen and between Bai Juyi and Liu Yuxi from these poets’ personal collections, has pointed to the peculiar deployment of a number of rhyme patterns in these exchanges. In particular, the “following the rhyme” (次韻) and the “following the original rhyme” (本韻) patterns appear to have been used extensively in these authors’ exchange poetry and is thus regarded as a main feature of the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme-matching exchange poetry (Hanafusa 1960: 312–22).¹⁷

In early ninth-century Japan, harmonizing (和) poetry was a particularly significant genre and well represented in extant sources.¹⁸ For Sinitic poetry, all three literary collections that were compiled in rapid sequence during the reigns of Emperors Saga 嵯峨 (r. 809–23) and Junna 淳和 (r. 823–33), and under ostensible imperial superintendence, namely the Ryōunshū 凌雲集 (Collection Soaring above the Clouds, 814) in one volume, the Bunka shūreishū 文華秀麗集 (Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Talent, 818) in three volumes, and the Keikokushū 経国集 (Collection for Binding the Realm, 827) in twenty volumes (only six extant), include a conspicuous number of harmonizing poems. In the three collections, harmonizing poetry is content-driven and never involves any form of rhyme matching. Most harmonizing poetry sequences in these collections are formed by poems by sovereigns followed by the poems composed by kidendō scholars in harmonization with the imperial poems, though some examples of the reverse configuration, that is, the sovereign producing a harmonizing poem, are recorded. Tellingly, the kidendō graduates involved in poetic harmonization with imperial poems are primarily individuals who were or had been in service as imperial tutors, or highly trained Confucian scholars appointed to academic offices at the Bureau of High Education. For example, virtually all the harmonizing poems in the Ryōunshū are the product of the poetic interaction between Emperor Saga and his former tutors from his time as crown prince (806–9). Emphasis on this kind of relationship in the three collections suggests that in the early ninth century, poetic harmonization, in addition to reaffirming and negotiating social hierarchies (Webb 2005: 174), also performed a significant role within the system of education and cultural legitimation of the early Heian imperial household (Minguzzi 2024).

In the realm of vernacular poetry (uta 歌), too, harmonizing poetry (waka 和歌) became a significant form of sociopolitical interaction with the sovereign in the early Heian period (Heldt 2008: 30–59). Although actual poetic material from this period is scant, historiographical works such as the ninth-century imperial histories (kokushi 国史) document the practice of harmonizing with an imperial uta at the request of the sovereign, suggesting that in early Heian official discourse the term “waka” was primarily used to mark a specific hierarchical configuration of poetic activity. Interestingly, later ceremonial manuals such as the Shingishiki 新儀式 (New Ritual Procedures, mid-tenth century) document a somewhat conservative use of waka in the meaning of “harmonizing poetry” at least until the second half of the tenth century, against a growing trend of using the term as an equivalent of Yamato uta (Japanese song).¹⁹

The composition of poetry in response, or in harmonization, to other poems thus enjoyed a firm place within the literary landscape of early Heian Japan. Exchange poetry in the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme matching, however, is only documented in Japan beginning from the Jōwa era (834–48), that is, from the time when the presence of poetry and prose by Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen is first attested in the Heian capital. Thus, extended sequences of rhyme-matching poems were being composed widely in Japan from the mid-ninth century. The first instance of this type of poetic exchange can be attributed to the poems by kidendō scholars Ono no Takamura 小野篁 (802–853) and Korenaga no Harumichi 惟良春道 (?–?), which are dated around the mid-Jōwa era (early 840s). Their poems, preserved in the surviving portion of the mid-Heian collection Fusōshū, also incorporate Bai Juyi's poetic vocabulary to some extent (Kaneko 1952). In the second half of the ninth century, which witnessed the activity of renowned kidendō-trained poets such as Sugawara no Michizane and his poetic tutor Shimada no Tadaomi 島田忠臣 (828–892), the reliance on the Yuan-Bai style model of rhyme matching became ubiquitous. The following sequence of three poem titles from the three-volume personal collection of Shimada no Tadaomi, Denshi kashū 田氏家集 (House Collection of the Shimada Clan) exemplifies the preference of early Heian poets for the Yuan-Bai style of poetic exchange:

The poems, sent by Tadaomi to an individual, presumably from the Ono 小野 or the Sugano 菅野 clan, identified here only by his academic degree of “flourishing talent” (shūsai 秀才)—meaning that he had been selected as a candidate for the highest examination at the Bureau of High Education—all feature the indication that they were composed following the rhyme scheme of the previous poem or of the poem that originated the exchange.²⁰ Probably the best example of exchange poetry in the Yuan-Bai style between two individuals extant from Heian Japan is the twenty-three-poem exchange between the early tenth-century kidendō graduates Minamoto no Fusaakira 源英明 (?–939) and Tachibana no Aritsura 橘在列 (?–953?). Included in Ki no Tadana's Fusōshū, all twenty-three poems strictly adhere to the same rhyme scheme (Tasaka 1985: 33–50).

The popularity of the Yuan-Bai style in early Heian Japan provides a precious window into the circulation of Bai Juyi's corpus. In fact, the corpus of exchange poetry between Bai Juyi and his friends can be thought of as the primary context in which his work was read in Japan during the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Significantly, other configurations of Bai Juyi's poetry circulated in early Heian Japan at the same time as the seventy-volume collection was becoming the standard version of his corpus. The catalog of continental volumes in one imperial library compiled by the Confucian scholar Fujiwara no Sukeyo 藤原佐世 (847–898) in 891, Nihonkoku genzaisho mokuroku 日本国見在書目録 (Catalog of the Books Currently Present in the Realm of Japan), lists a collection of Yuan-Bai and Liu-Bai exchange poetry in addition to these poets’ individual collections.²¹ The corpus of Bai Juyi's exchange poetry thus existed and circulated in Japan in the form of independent collections alongside his personal collected works. I therefore suggest that the early circulation of these collections of exchange poetry is connected with the popularity of the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme matching in early Heian Japan. The Yuan-Bai style should, accordingly, be considered the catalyst for the enthusiasm for Bai Juyi at the Heian court. Furthermore, I argue that the popularity of the practice of exchange poetry in the Yuan-Bai style in Heian Japan was likely connected to one specific consistent outlet of rhyme-matching poetic exchanges during the ninth and early tenth centuries, that between Heian kidendō scholars and envoys from the kingdom of Parhae.

Exchange Poetry and the Kingdom of Parhae

After invading Parhae and installing the puppet kingdom of Dongdan 東丹 in its former territories—the southeast region of present-day Manchuria—in 926, the Khitan 契丹 Liao 遼 dynasty (907–1125) sent an embassy to Japan toward the end of 929. The expedition was led by the former Parhae official Pae Ku 裵璆 (?–?), who had already served as Parhae envoy to the Heian court on two prior occasions, in 908 and 919. The imperial court, however, refused to grant the embassy entry in the Heian capital soon after learning about the regime change in Parhae. Thus, the embassy was stationed in Tango 丹後 province at least until the end of the third month of 930. Before his return journey, ambassador Pae Ku supposedly composed a poem to which one Fujiwara no Masakazu 藤原雅量 (?–951), who sometime after the return of Dongdan embassy was possibly serving in a governmental capacity in the same province, replied with two rhyme-matching poems. Masakazu's poems are as follows:

Although Pae Ku's original poem about “speaking his mind” (言志) is no longer extant, both of Masakazu's poems employ its rhyme scheme (the ending characters in the first couplet and the last characters of subsequent even verses: 微 and 依, 歸, 飛, 衣), thereby conforming to the most significant feature of the mid-Tang Yuan-Bai style of exchange poetry.

Masakazu's poems arguably exhibit several features that, by the early ninth century, had come to identify Heian-Parhae exchange poems (at least those composed by Heian poets), such as a careful and balanced representation of Parhae envoys as subordinates to the Heian court yet as equals to and friends with the latter's poetizing representatives—and a celebration of the literary talent of Parhae. Although the poem per se leans on a depiction of the Parhae ambassador as repeatedly journeying to Japan drawn by the virtue of the Heian sovereign, the title of Masakazu's first poem makes explicit reference to the quality of Ambassador Pae Ku's composition, which in turn prompts Masakazu to produce a matching poem in response. Moreover, the interlinear comment attached to the closing couplet, while emphasizing the mutual feeling of friendship between Masakazu and Pae Ku, also hints at the reality that such bonds of friendship between Heian and Parhae poets were also predicated upon the prestige that the former obtained by participating in poetic exchanges with the latter, testifying to the significance of Parhae embassies for early Heian poetry-driven kidendō scholars.²⁴ In this light, it is all the more significant that Masakazu, in all likelihood, produced his poems to match a composition that Pae Ku had left behind, as if he was part of the poetic exchange that might have taken place had the Dongdan ambassador still been stationed in the province.

Fujiwara no Masakazu's two rhyme-matching poems, preserved in one of the two surviving volumes of the late tenth-century poetry collection Fusōshū 扶桑集 (Collection from Fusang), are the last available evidence of a poetic exchange by a Heian poet with an envoy from Parhae, thus making the Liao embassy of 929 the last occasion on which Heian-Parhae exchange poetry was composed.²⁵ However, poetry exchanges in the rhyme-matching Yuan-Bai style between Heian poets and Parhae envoys had been a consistent feature of the literary culture of the early Heian period, with more than thirty poems composed by Heian poets for Parhae envoys, spanning from the late ninth to the early tenth centuries, still extant today.

The kingdom of Parhae, which flourished from 698 to 926 over a vast territory from the northern Korean peninsula to southern Manchuria, surprisingly left virtually no written legacy.²⁶ Many aspects of Parhae's history, society, economy, and culture must, therefore, be reconstructed indirectly from archeological evidence or from textual sources about Parhae produced in neighboring cultures. One significant aspect of Parhae's history and culture is its consistently tight connection with early Heian Japan. Thus, from 727 until its demise in 926, Parhae sent a total of thirty-four embassies to the Nara 奈良 (710–84) and Heian courts.²⁷ Embassies to and from Parhae constituted an important site of cultural exchange with the continent from the early Nara period.²⁸ After the Heian embassy to Tang China in 838, however, the kingdom of Parhae became in effect the primary mediator between the Heian court and continental Asia.²⁹ Precisely around this time (the mid-ninth century), the reception of embassies from Parhae developed into an important ceremonial event at the Heian court, and the frequency of these embassies promoted the establishment of a set of tight regulations at the beginning of the Jōwa era (Hamada 2011: 129–32). In the late eighth century, Parhae began to send highly literate envoys, perhaps reflecting a reconfiguration of its bureaucracy along the Tang model and a shift in their diplomatic strategies from the late eighth century. Hints at their erudition are found, for examples, in the poetry by these envoys preserved in such early Heian sources as the early ninth-century collections Bunka shūreishū 文華秀麗集 (Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Talent, 818) and Keikokushū 経国集 (Collection for Binding the Realm, 827).³⁰ By the mid-ninth century, the exchanges of Sinitic poetry between Heian kidendō graduates and envoys from Parhae had become a significant feature of the reception of the embassies, although they were never an official part of the court rituals of diplomatic reception that were standardized roughly in the same period, always remaining a central part of the diplomatic experience yet invariably an institutionally marginal by-product of it. Accordingly, beginning in the mid-ninth century, literate governmental officials with poetic expertise, normally selected from among the pool of kidendō graduates, were recruited to welcome the delegates and exchange poems with them. Thus, for example, the kidendō graduate Shimada no Tadaomi was promoted in the spring of 859 and sent to Kaga Province to welcome the envoys:

These poetic exchanges with the envoys were conducted in the Yuan-Bai style, that is, following the same rhyme scheme of the original poems. Unfortunately, no poem by a writer from Parhae survives dating later than the early ninth century, but the Heian sources transmit more than thirty poems exchanged with the envoys by early Heian kidendō scholars. The mid-Heian collection Fusōshū, for example, includes poems exchanged in the context of the 871 embassy (Tasaka 1985: 52), and the personal collections of Shimada no Tadaomi and Sugawara no Michizane, Denshi kashū and Kanke bunsō, respectively, contain sequences of poems from the 882 embassy (in Nakamura and Shimada 1993: 198–210, and Kawaguchi 1966: 190–96, respectively). Michizane's Kanke bunsō further includes poetry exchanged during the 894 embassy (Kawaguchi 1966: 431–36). Lastly, Fusōshū further preserves poems composed on the occasion of the embassies in 908 and 919 and the two poems quoted above from the embassy of 929 (Tasaka 1985: 56–64).

Virtually all of these surviving poems are composed in the “following the rhyme” (次韻) pattern, suggesting that the adoption of the Yuan-Bai style was a significant part of the Heian-Parhae poetic relationship. As a matter of fact, other sources in the available archive of early Heian Sinitic poetry reveal important connections between Heian Sinitic poetry, Bai Juyi, and the Parhae envoys. Sugawara no Michizane's personal collection Kanke bunsō, for example, includes a poem with an interlinear comment in which he seems to suggest a strong connection between the Sinitic erudition of the educated elites of Parhae and the Yuan-Bai style of exchange poetry. This poem is the second of a two-poem set that was sent by Michizane in response to two poems that he had previously received from a friend, the Confucian scholar Sugano no Koresue 菅野惟肖 (842?–888), after he had sent him a twenty-line old-style poem (that is, without adherence to Tang-style prosodic patterns in each verse) in which he lamented his personal circumstances. The third couplet (the fifth and sixth verses in a total of eight lines), in particular, reads as follows:

In the above couplet, Michizane affirms proudly that he occupied three bureaucratic offices concurrently (the “three seals”) and that he had recently participated in the poetic exchanges with the delegates from Parhae, for which he presented nine poems (all of which are included in his personal collection, the Kanke bunsō). In the comment, he quotes the couplet by Koresue to which he is responding. The occasion for the exchange between Michizane and Koresue—Koresue replied to Michizane's poems with another two poems (not transmitted), to which Michizane composed two additional poems, all using the rhyme scheme of Koresue's original poem—was apparently the former's lament that he had been falsely identified as the composer of an anonymous (and, apparently, well-crafted) poem inscribed on a wall that criticized the current Minister of the Right (udaijin 右大臣).³⁴ The “blue flies” in Koresue's verse are a metaphor for those who spread calumnies (in this case, wrongly accusing Michizane of being the author of the offending anonymous poem). Of more interest here, however, is the comment attached to the couplet (presumably also from Koresue) stating that an ambassador from Parhae, Pae Chŏng 裴頲 (?–?), admired Michizane's mastery of the “style of Master Bai.” Koresue's quotation of Pae Chŏng's comment is likely used here as a source of legitimation for Michizane's poetic prowess. At the same time, it is suggestive of the degree to which early Heian literati granted Parhae's literate elites recognition and authority regarding things poetic and, more specifically, regarding Bai Juyi's style.

Although Michizane's poem strongly suggests that Parhae could be conjured as a source of poetic legitimacy by early Heian poetizing literati, and specifically as a source of authority on matters regarding Bai Juyi's poetic style, it remains somewhat unclear what Pae Chŏng's reference to the “style of Master Bai” signifies. To be sure, most commentators of early Heian Sinitic poetry have measured the adherence of a given poem to Bai Juyi's poetry by means of the degree to which vocabulary, expressions, and imagery from Bai's poetry are identifiable. However, this methodology appears to be particularly problematic in the case of rhyme-matching exchange poetry between Heian poets and Parhae envoys. As a matter of fact, the scholar Kōno Kimiko (2016) has carefully analyzed the body of extant poems exchanged by Shimada no Tadaomi and Sugawara no Michizane with Parhae envoys on the occasion of the 882 embassy and demonstrated that although Tadaomi's poems show some vocabulary that is traceable to Bai Juyi's poetry, Michizane's poems are instead conspicuously lacking in this regard.³⁵ In like manner, the three extant exchange poems by the Parhae ambassador Wang Hyoryŏm 王孝廉 (?–815) from the 814–15 embassy, which are recorded in the “exchange” (贈答) section of the early ninth-century poetry collection Bunka shūreishū 文華秀麗集 (Collection of Masterpieces of Literary Talent, 818), are devoid of any traceable reference to Bai's poetry. The available evidence, thus, suggests that the adoption of a “Bai Juyi style” must have been predicated upon different poetic features. Kōno suggests that the “Bai Juyi style” could be identified in Michizane's poetry with a language devoid of hierarchical language as it would fit a poetic correspondence between friends. Here, I will instead move away from an understanding of the adherence to Bai Juyi's style either in terms of the extent to which Heian poems feature his vocabulary and expressions or to the way Heian poems conform to the language of mid-Tang amicable poetic exchanges, to instead shift the focus onto the formal qualities of the poetry that was judged conforming to the “style of Master Bai.” I suggest, in other words, that the “style of Master Bai” celebrated by Parhae ambassador Pae Chŏng should be equated with the rhyme-matching pattern that invariably defined Yuan-Bai exchange poetry and, in like manner, is arguably the most prominent and objectively observable formal feature of the Heian-Parhae poetic interactions.³⁶

Rhyming was of course a paramount feature of Sinitic poetry, yet its impact on the composition of a poem beyond its formal and aesthetic qualities is often overlooked. It has been argued (Vedal 2015) that the use of continental rhyme categories (which included a variable number of characters) in the Tang-regulated verse (lüshi 律詩) significantly limited the vocabulary available to poets. The use of a fixed rhyme scheme, imposed by the rhyme-matching model of the Yuan-Bai style, would result in an even more pronounced restraint in terms of the characters and vocabulary available. In other words, rhyming in general and rhyme matching more specifically exerted a severe constraint on the expressive possibilities of poets, especially in the environment of Heian-Parhae poetic exchanges that at times required that poems be composed extemporaneously.³⁷ In other words, I believe it is more appropriate to posit that what was identified as Bai Juyi's style by Parhae and early Heian poets alike was in fact the rhyme-matching style of exchange poetry that was so prominent in the mid-Tang poet's poetic corpus. In sum, not only is Koresue's comment precious evidence of the recognition by the Heian poets of the familiarity of Parhae poets with Bai Juyi; it can also be thought of as an acknowledgment of the authority of Parhae over the Yuan-Bai style of exchange poetry, as well as the reliance of early Heian poets on such authority as a means of literary legitimation.

Parhae at the Center: An Ecology of Exchange Poetry in Early Heian Japan

The passage in Sugawara no Michizane's collection quoted above draws attention to a shared aspect of Heian and Parhae literati. In turn, it suggests that Bai Juyi's corpus of exchange poetry plausibly circulated in ninth-century Parhae and that the educated elites there were familiar with the Yuan-Bai style of exchange poetry. As a matter of fact, although Parhae consistently sent embassies to the Tang almost every year during its existence (Sakayori 2010), it is precisely from the mid-Tang period that Parhae literati began to enjoy a more direct and continued access to contemporary Tang culture, insofar as starting from the late eighth century and particularly during the ninth century students from Parhae increasingly traveled to the Tang to receive education and pass the prestigious jinshi 進士 (“presented scholar”) examination as foreigners (bingong 賓貢).³⁸ The Parhae ambassador to the Heian court in 814–815, Wang Hyoryŏm 王孝廉, is known to have resided in the Tang capital Chang'an 長安 at least sometime during the period 804–806, possibly as a student (Morley 2016: 354n60). Thus, Parhae embassies to Heian Japan from the early ninth century increasingly became a privileged channel of cultural and material transmission from the continent to the archipelago, one that could even bypass direct connection with the Tang. For example, it has been recently noted how the couplets extrapolated from poems by the mid-Tang jinshi scholar Yang Juyuan 楊巨源 (?–?) that are included in Ōe no Koretoki's 大江維時 (888–963) early tenth-century couplet collection Senzai kaku 千載佳句 (Splendid Verses of a Thousand Years) do not seem to be part of this poet's extant body of poetry that is known to have circulated after the Tang. Rather, some evidence about the possibility that a personal collection by Yang Juyuan circulated in ninth-century Parhae suggests that the couplets in Senzai kaku originated from a lost source of Yang's poems that could possibly have been transmitted to Japan via Parhae (Liu 2015: 88–111).

In like manner, there is a possibility that at least some of Bai Juyi's poems might have been transmitted to Japan through Parhae as soon as the early ninth century. Specifically, two poems by Emperor Saga and Ono no Minemori 小野岑守 (778–830) composed at an imperially sponsored banquet on the topic “poem on the falling flowers” (rakkahen 落花篇), preserved in the Ryōunshū imperial collection of 814, display to some degree expressions and vocabulary that might have originated from a poem by Bai Juyi in the “New Ballad” (shingafu, Ch. xinyuefu 新楽府) style titled “The fragrant peony” (牡丹芳). Thus, though debatable, this evidence could be used to argue in favor of an earlier reception of Bai Juyi than previously assumed, though in the form of individual poems.³⁹ If this is accepted, because Bai Juyi composed the peony ballad in 809 and the last two embassies to the Tang were sent in 804 and in 838, it is therefore likely that Bai's poem reached Japan through the Parhae embassies that arrived in 809 and 810, or through the last Heian embassy to Parhae in 811 (Liu 2015: 103). In other words, during the ninth century Parhae became increasingly exposed to and conversant with mid-Tang poetic culture, and there is evidence that Parhae's own interactions with mid-Tang poetry also had an impact on the reception thereof in Heian Japan. However, the faint traces of the degree to which Bai Juyi's poetry was used as a source of vocabulary and expression in early ninth-century Heian poetry mirror the lack of consistent evidence for the adoption of Bai Juyi's language in the poetry that later scholars such as Shimada no Tadaomi and Sugawara no Michizane exchanged with Parhae envoys until the early tenth century. Here, again moving away from the adoption of imagery and vocabulary as the primary criteria to measure adherence to Bai Juyi's poetry, I examine the earliest evidence of Heian-Parhae poetic exchanges to show that the form and style of mid-Tang exchange poetry in the rhyme-matching Yuan-Bai style can be first observed in Heian Japan in the poetry of a Parhae ambassador in the early ninth century.

The poems in question were composed by Parhae ambassador Wang Hyoryŏm during the embassy that took place in 814–15.⁴⁰ Three of his exchange poems, together with those by the Heian poets that interacted with the Parhae envoys (seven poems in total), were included in the Bunka shūreishū collection of 818, specifically in the second half of the “exchanges” (贈答) thematic section. Insofar as they share the same rhyme characters, two apparently unrelated poems in this section are in fact particularly revealing of both Parhae's familiarity with the Yuan-Bai style and the significance of the latter in the poetic ecology of the early ninth-century Heian court:

The first poem was composed by the kidendō graduate Shigeno no Sadanushi 滋野貞主 (785–852), who by that time occupied a junior position as a scribe (naiki 内記) at the Ministry of Inner Affairs (nakatsukasa-shō 中務省). In the early ninth century, the Shigeno clan produced a number of kidendō-trained individuals who also enjoyed recognition as poets by the imperial clan, and whose poetry is preserved in the early Heian anthologies. Because there is no evidence that Sadanushi was operating in any institutional capacity as escort for the Parhae envoys, it is likely that he was summoned unofficially to perform as a poet. The title situates the poem temporally in spring and spatially in the official lodge for foreign guests in the Heian capital, the Kōrokan. As Wang Hyoryŏm's embassy left Japan in the fifth month of 815, this poem was plausibly sent to the Parhae ambassador while the latter was still residing in the capital. The second poem was instead presumably composed by Wang Hyoryŏm during his stay in Izumo 出雲 province (where the embassy landed and whence it would depart) before sailing back to Parhae. Because it uses the words “composing on a topic” (fude 賦得), the poem was likely composed at a banquet setting organized with the appointed Heian escorts who had accompanied Hyoryŏm to the province.

Although composed in two different settings, the two poems are closely interconnected in theme and form. On the one hand, Wang Hyoryŏm's poem seems to engage with the banquet topic of mountain flowers in a way that also allowed him to craft a reply to Sadanushi's poem. As has been seen with Fujiwara no Masakazu's poems discussed earlier, poetic exchange in a diplomatic context such as the Parhae embassies could happen in various ways and a reply was often crafted many months after the original poem was received. This would also partly explain why Hyoryŏm employs the term “playfully” (戯) to refer to his sending the poem to his escorts as well as to Sadanushi, who was probably not there in person. Moreover, the two poems are formally aligned, as they are both regulated quatrains (zekku, Ch. jueju 絶句) and share the same rhyme scheme (with the characters 聲 and 情). Thus, it is apparent that the Parhae ambassador composed his banquet poem as a rhyme-matching reply to the poem that Sadanushi had sent him some time before when he was still in the capital. There is, however, a significant difference in the language the two poets use to mark their poems as “exchange poems.” Whereas the character 簡 in Sadanushi's poem, whose original meaning was connected to the dispatch of written documents, is commonly found in the archive of early Heian Sinitic poetry with the meaning of sending one's poem to other people, and is in fact used in other poems in the same “exchanges” section in the Bunka shūreishū collection (see table 1), the character 寄 in Wang Hyoryŏm's poem is virtually absent from the poetry of early ninth-century Japan as it is closely aligned with the jargon of mid-Tang poetic exchange, and with the Yuan-Bai corpus of exchange poetry in particular. In addition, the way Hyoryŏm refers to Sadanushi in his poem's headline (“third son”), that is, associating a numeral to someone's name to indicate their hierarchical position within their clan, is also a typical mid-Tang trend that is also particularly associated with Bai Juyi's exchange poetry (Kaneko 1952). This particular feature, too, is conspicuously absent in the early ninth-century archive of Sinitic poetry. In sum, whereas Sadanushi's poem to Wang Hyoryŏm appears to be firmly situated within the ecology of poetic exchange practice at the beginning of the Heian period, Wang Hyoryŏm's reply is crafted following the tenets of rhyme-matching poetry in the mid-Tang Yuan-Bai style. As such, Hyoryŏm's poem is de facto the first poem composed in such a fashion within the poetic corpus of early Heian Japan. For this reason, and based on available evidence, I would argue that the poetic literacy of Parhae individuals, which by the early ninth century was profoundly informed by mid-Tang literary culture, should be considered the entry point of the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme-matching poetry into Heian Japan.

Conclusions

Scholarship on Sinitic poetry in Heian Japan has increased substantially in the last twenty years, so much so that it is almost safe now to say that this genre has finally acquired a firm place in the academic study of Japanese literature.⁴¹ Moreover, efforts have been made recently in Western scholarship to complement the treatment of Japanese Sinitic poetry by incorporating traditionally neglected field of studies such as the Sinitic poetry of premodern Korea and Vietnam (Denecke, Li, and Tian 2017). Although this essay is primarily concerned with the formation of poetic culture in Heian Japan, it also attempts to discuss the evolution of Sinitic poetry in Japan by emphasizing the impact of transregional connections. Thus, I have interpreted the practice of exchange poetry in the Yuan-Bai style as the catalyst for the enthusiastic reception of Bai Juyi in early Heian Japan. Insofar as exchange poetry was primarily performed in the context of the reception of the embassies from Parhae, I have posited that contact with the poetic literacy cultivated in that kingdom and actively deployed in its interactions with Japan shaped the subsequent development of Heian literature.

Various explanations for the popularity of Bai Juyi in Heian Japan have been proposed over the years, ranging from his popularity in Tang China to the supposed simplicity of his poetic language and breadth of his topics. Recently, Brian Steininger (2016) has aptly suggested that the practice of interlinear self-comments that is common in Bai Juyi's poetry may have facilitated the circulation of his collected works in preference to other Tang-era personal collections in the early Heian hermeneutic environment, which was already fine-tuned to the reception of continental texts that often reached Japan already augmented with a commentary. Although Steininger's argument holds explanatory power, I suggest that the reasons for Bai Juyi's popularity in Heian Japan are embedded in complex and overlapping cultural dynamics. Thus, I have discussed one path of the transmission of material culture, such as the Hakushi monjū manuscripts and collections of Yuan-Bai exchange poetry, from continental Asia to Heian Japan. Viewed in this way, Bai Juyi's poetry serves as a precious site for exploring the possibilities of cultural transmission from the continent to Heian Japan and the continued historical role of the Korean peninsula and Koreanic kingdoms in this process of transmission. Furthermore, it also constitutes a point of entry into the virtually unknown literary culture of Parhae. Just as it is possible to posit that the Parhae-Heian context of exchange poetry in the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme matching was the form of poetic practice from which the Heian enthusiasm for Bai Juyi initially developed, it is also possible to describe the same literary contexts as a by-product of Parhae's lost poetic culture. By suggesting a significant role for Parhae in the dissemination of poetic erudition and practice based on Bai Juyi, I also hint at the necessity to recenter the kingdom of Parhae as a site of cultural authority within the East Asian literary ecosystem.⁴²

By focusing on the lived practice of Sinitic poetry in early Heian Japan in the specific configuration of Heian-Parhae poetic exchanges, I have modeled one way to map the interactions of two cultural agents in the East Asian cultural sphere. Recently, cultural contacts and interactions in East Asia have been described primarily in terms of the shared “Literary Sinitic” and sinographic writing and their complex relationship with vernacular modes of inscription and recitation, thereby articulating the concept of the so-called sinographic sphere or sinographic cosmopolis.⁴³ Furthermore, recent contributions have conceptualized the “Sinosphere” as a model for describing the circulation of texts, people, and ideas, and therefore as a way to construe a broader East Asian geographical, political, and cultural ecosystem (Kornicki 2018; Qian, Smith, and Zhang 2020a, 2020b). Thus, the Parhae-Heian interactions may be thought of as a decentered site within the Tang-centered East Asian sphere of cultural interaction and transmission, in which a distinct and innovative literary culture developed during the ninth and early tenth centuries. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this cultural development was never completely independent from the events that shaped the “Tang ecumene” from the second half of the eighth century: thus, the Bai Juyi–based practice of Heian-Parhae exchange poetry was inherently rooted in the sociopolitical and cultural dynamics of the aftermath of the An Lushan rebellion that precipitated the decentralization of poetic activity from the Tang imperial court and the rise of exchange poetry as a significant means of social affirmation, which in turn formed the prerequisite for the affirmation of the Yuan-Bai style of rhyme-matching poetic exchanges from the early ninth century. Appreciating the significant role of the Parhae kingdom as a site of mediation and negotiation at the core of Japan's access to Tang culture, as well as to Parhae's configurations thereof, also enriches our understanding of Japan's relationship with the continent. By directing the attention toward the local (i.e., the Heian-Parhae sphere of cultural and material exchange) responses to a specific product of continental Sinitic culture (i.e., mid-Tang exchange poetry and Bai Juyi's poetic corpus), I have developed a model for describing cultural transmission and generation within a specific geographical region of East Asia that can complement and augment the growing body of scholarship about the Sinographic Cosmopolis.

Notes

References