Scholars have long been puzzled as to why the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi (772-846) achieved exceptional popularity among the literate elites of Heian Japan (794-1185), while the literary collections of other Tang literati that are known to have reached Japan were largely disregarded. This project aims to situate the origin of the Heian appreciation of Bai Juyi in the context of the so-called "Yuan-Bai style" that was disseminated across East Asia through the corpus of the poetic exchanges between Bai Juyi and his intimate friend Yuan Zhen (779-831). In particular, the hypothesis underlying this project is that the popularity of this specific corpus among Heian poets in ninth- and early tenth-century Japan should be put in connection with their poetic exchanges involving the envoys who were regularly dispatched by the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926). The main goal of the project is to make the case that the educated elites of Balhae were the driving force behind the reception and the appreciation of specific continental texts, such as Bai's collected works, in Heian Japan. Secondly, I argue that this connection can help to indirectly reconstruct one aspect of the Sinitic literacy of Balhae, about which very little textual evidence has survived.
This project aims to advance the current knowledge in the field in two ways. First, research findings will be situated within the present discussions about the origin of the popularity of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi in Heian Japan. In recent years, a number of compelling hypotheses have been put forward to explain why Bai Juyi enjoyed such degree of enthusiasm at the Heian court. Among them, the proposition by Steininger (2016) by which Bai Juyi's corpus was read in continuity with the established commentary-based reading of continental texts during the Heian period seems most plausible. However, it is now sufficiently clear that Bai Juyi's popularity can only be explained by a combination of factors. By contributing to the current debate, this project therefore seeks to further our understanding of how, and on account of what factors, Bai Juyi's poetry was read in early Heian Japan.
Second, the project findings will also be relevant with regard to current scholarship about the kingdom of Balhae. Unfortunately, Balhae has left no original textual evidence, and knowledge about it can only be recovered indirectly or by archaeological investigation. Nonetheless, a number of journal articles as well as book-length contributions on the history of Balhae have appeared over the years in Korea and in Japan, among which Song Giho¿s Balhae sahoe munhwasa yeongu ("A Socio-Cultural History of Balhae," 2011) and Furuhata Toru's recently published Bokkaikoku to higashi Ajia ("The Kingdom of Balhae and East Asia," 2021). In Japan, in particular, scholarship about the diplomatic relations between the kingdom of Balhae and the Japanese court have flourished, culminating in Fujii Kazutsugu's Tenpyo no Bokkai koryu ("Balhae exchanges in the Tenpyo era," 2010) and Hamada Kumiko's Nihon kodai no gaiko girei to Bokkai ("Japan's Ancient Diplomatic Rituals and Balhae," 2011).
Recently, a limited number of scholarly outputs have enhanced the understanding of Balhae among anglophone readers. The collection of essays in "A New History of Parhae" (2012), in particular, delineate the political, economic, and cultural contours of the Balhae kingdom and its place within the ecosystem of eighth- and ninth-century East Asia. However, due to the lack of sources, very little has been said about the literary culture of Balhae. A collection of the extant poetry by Balhae poets is in Yu Songjun's Silla wa Balhae hansi ui tangsi ronjeok gochal ("An Investigation on Silla and Balhae Poetry According to the Tang Poetic Discourse," 2009). That Bai Juyi's collection constituted an important asset in the poetic exchanges between Heian poets and Balhae diplomats has already been suggested by Hamada Kumiko ("Nihon to Bokkai to no bunka koryu: Jowa nenkan 'Hakushi bunshu' juyo o chushin ni" [Cultural exchanges between Japan and Balhae: with reference to the reception of Hakushi bunshu in the Jowa era], 2012). This project takes the current understanding one step further by arguing that it is possible to reconstruct in part how Balhae literate elites read Bai Juyi's corpus, and how and to what effects this specific knowledge was transmitted to Heian Japan.
By combining original research on Heian-period primary sources with a reading of secondary sources in English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, this project seeks to advance current knowledge about one specific aspect of the literary culture of Heian Japan as well as about Sinitic literacy in the kingdom of Balhae, by arguing that the two are in fact inextricably tied insofar as the latter can be understood as the driving force that shaped the former¿s reception of one continental text, namely the collected works of Bai Juyi.