Waka Workshop 2013

The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University hosted a "Waka Workshop" (seventh in the series started at the University of British Columbia and continued at Columbia, UCLA, Stanford, and Yale in previous years) on March 1 and 2, 2013. Readings and discussions at the 2013 workshop focused on Shakkyōka (釈教歌) of the Heian and Kamakura periods as found in the Imperial anthologies (chokusenshū 勅撰集) and elsewhere—in independent devotional series, in personal anthologies, etc. We considered the problem of how best to define Shakkyōka—as a form, a sub-genre, a practice?—and how to understand it in relationship to other devotional uta, other Buddhist devotional practices, and to waka in general. The program included one and a half full days of readings discussed as a group and related presentations given by American, Japanese, and European scholars: they included (in alphabetical order) Araki Hiroshi (Nichibunken), Hirano Tae (Jūmonji Gakuen Joshi Daigaku), Stephen Miller (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Jean-Nöel Robert (Collège de France) and Takeshi Watanabe (Connecticut College/Wesleyan University). The workshop was in both English and Japanese. There was also a viewing of artifacts related to waka and Buddhist studies in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.