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25-467: The Shoku Nihongi records that in 741, as the country recovered from a major smallpox epidemic , Emperor Shōmu ordered that a monastery and nunnery be established in every province , the kokubunji ( 国分寺 ) . These temples were built to a semi-standardized template, and served both to spread Buddhist orthodoxy to the provinces, and to emphasize the power of the Nara period centralized government under

50-594: A "perfectly frozen, ' dead ' " language that was continuously used from the late Heian period (794–1185) until after World War II: Classical Chinese, which, as we have seen, had long since ceased to be a spoken language on the mainland (if indeed it had ever been), has been in use in the Japanese archipelago longer than the Japanese language itself. The oldest written remnants found in Japan are all in Chinese, though it

75-469: A Japanese form of Classical Chinese , as was normal for formal Japanese texts at the time. However, a number of senmyō ( 宣命 ) or "imperial edicts" contained within the text are written in a script known as "senmyō-gaki", which preserves particles and verb endings phonographically. This article about a non-fiction book on Japanese history is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Kanbun Kanbun ( 漢文 ' Han writing')

100-465: A genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language . Its grammatical relations are identified in subject–verb–object (SVO) order and through the use of particles similar to English prepositions . Inflection plays no role in

125-453: A kind of lazy schoolboy's trot to a classical text; at its best, it has preserved the analysis and interpretation of large body of literary Chinese texts which would otherwise have been completely lost; hence, the kanbun tradition can often be of great value for an understanding of early Chinese literature. William C. Hannas points out the linguistic hurdles involved in kanbun transformation. Kanbun , literally "Chinese writing," refers to

150-420: Is a matter of considerable debate whether traces of the Japanese vernacular are to be found in them. Taking both languages together until the end of the nineteenth century, and taking into account all the monastic documents, literature in the widest sense of the term, and texts in 'near-Chinese' ( hentai-kanbun ), it is entirely possible that the sheer volume of texts written in Chinese in Japan slightly exceed what

175-496: Is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of

200-604: Is still much unknown about the layout of the temple and the extent of its original grounds. Numerous roof tiles have also been recovered from the site. Shoku Nihongi The Shoku Nihongi ( 続日本紀 ) is an imperially-commissioned Japanese history text. Completed in 797, it is the second of the Six National Histories , coming directly after the Nihon Shoki and followed by Nihon Kōki . Fujiwara no Tsugutada and Sugano no Mamichi served as

225-568: The Ritsuryō system. The Suō Kokubun-ji is located at the southern foot of Mount Tatara in the eastern part of the Hōfu Plain in southern Yamaguchi Prefecture. The location was near the kokufu or provincial capital of Suō Province, and the route of the ancient Sanyōdō highway, which connected the Kinai region with Kyushu passed east–west in front of the temple's South Gate. The exact date of

250-409: The レ reten ( レ点 , '[katakana] re mark') denotes 'reverse marks'. The rest are kanji commonly used in numbering and ordering systems: As an analogy for kanbun changing the word order from Chinese sentences with subject–verb–object (SVO) into Japanese subject–object–verb (SOV), John DeFrancis gives this example of using a literal English translation—another SVO language—of the opening of

275-407: The Japanese kanbun reading tradition a Chinese text is simultaneously punctuated, analyzed, and translated into classical Japanese. It operates according to a limited canon of Japanese forms and syntactic structures which are treated as existing in a one-to-one alignment with the vocabulary and structures of classical Chinese. At its worst, this system for reading Chinese as if it were Japanese became

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300-573: The Latin-language Commentarii de Bello Gallico . DeFrancis adds, "A better analogy would be the reverse situation–Caesar rendering an English text in his native language and adding Latin case endings." Two English textbooks for students of kanbun are An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, reviewed by Marian Ury in 1990, and An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Komai and Rohlich, reviewed by Andrew Markus in 1990 and Wixted in 1998. The illustration to

325-604: The Main Hall is built on foundation stones reused from the original Nara period structure. This is a unique example of a kokubunji temple which has not only survived to the present day, but has a Main Hall of the same size and on the same location as the original construction. During earlier archaeological excavations conducted from 1953 to 1955 and 1980–1990, the foundations of a Five-story pagoda , middle gate, south gate, and back gate, and cloister have been discovered, but there

350-426: The characters, and finding suitable equivalents for Chinese function words . According to John Timothy Wixted, scholars have disregarded kanbun . In terms of its size, often its quality, and certainly its importance both at the time it was written and cumulatively in the cultural tradition, kanbun is arguably the biggest and most important area of Japanese literary study that has been ignored in recent times, and

375-566: The grammar. Morphemes are typically one syllable in length and combine to form words without modification to their phonetic structures (tone excepted). Conversely, the basic structure of a transitive Japanese sentence is SOV , with the usual syntactic features associated with languages of this typology, including post positions, that is, grammar particles that appear after the words and phrases to which they apply. He lists four major Japanese problems: word order , parsing which Chinese characters should be read together, deciding how to pronounce

400-613: The indigenous Japanese word meaning 'road'. Kanbun implemented two particular types of kana . One was okurigana 'accompanying script', kana suffixes added to kanji stems to show their Japanese readings; the other was furigana 'brandishing script', smaller kana syllables written alongside kanji to indicate pronunciation. These were used primarily as reinforcements to writing in kanbun . Kanbun —as opposed to Wabun ( 和文 , ' Wa writing') , Japanese text with Japanese syntax and predominately kun'yomi readings—is divided into several types: Jean-Noël Robert describes kanbun as

425-822: The one least properly represented as part of the canon. A new development in kanbun studies is the Web-accessible database being developed by scholars at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo. The Japanese word kanbun originally meant ' Literary Chinese writings'—or, the Chinese classics . Kanbun compositions used two common types of Japanese kanji readings: Sino-Japanese on'yomi ('pronunciation readings') borrowed from Chinese pronunciations and native Japanese kun'yomi 'explanation readings' from Japanese equivalents. For example, 道 can be read as dō adapted from Middle Chinese /dấw/ or as michi from

450-701: The original. The Japanese writing system originated through adoption and adaptation of written Chinese . Some of Japan's oldest books (e.g. the Nihon Shoki ) and dictionaries (e.g. the Tenrei Banshō Meigi and Wamyō Ruijushō ) were written in kanbun . Other Japanese literary genres have parallels; the Kaifūsō is the oldest collection of kanshi ( 漢詩 , 'Chinese poetry') . Burton Watson 's English translations of kanbun compositions provide an introduction to this literary field. Samuel Martin coined

475-410: The primary editors. It is one of the most important primary historical sources for information about Japan's Nara period . The work covers the 95-year period from the beginning of Emperor Monmu 's reign in 697 until the 10th year of Emperor Kanmu 's reign in 791, spanning nine imperial reigns. It was completed in 797 AD. The text is forty volumes in length. It is primarily written in kanbun ,

500-528: The rebuilding of the great temple of Tōdai-ji and the monk Chōgen came to supervise its reconstruction. At the end of the Kamakura period, it was donated to Saidai-ji and was extensively reconstructed in 1325. During the Muromachi period , the temple came under the protection of the shugo of Suō, the Ōuchi clan , who granted it estates for its upkeep. In 1417, it was completely destroyed by fire, and

525-591: The right exemplifies kanbun . These eight words comprise the well-known first line in the Han Feizi story (ch. 36) that first coined the term máodùn (Japanese mujun , 矛盾 'contradiction, inconsistency', lit. "spear-shield" ), illustrating the irresistible force paradox . Debating with a Confucianist about the legendary Chinese sage rulers Yao and Shun , the Legalist Han Fei argues that one cannot praise them both because that would be making

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550-587: The temple's foundation is unknown; but per Edo period records it was completed by 747 AD. It is listed in the Nara period Tenpyo Shoho of 756, so it is certain to have been completed by the 750s. The original temple declined in the middle Heian period with the decline of the power and influence of the Imperial Court, but at the beginning of the Kamakura period , the revenues of Suō Province were assigned to

575-415: The term Sino-Xenic in 1953 to describe Chinese as written in Japan, Korea, and other foreign (hence -xenic ) zones on China's periphery. Roy Andrew Miller notes that although Japanese kanbun conventions have Sino-Xenic parallels with other traditions for reading Literary Chinese like Korean hanmun and Vietnamese Hán Văn , only kanbun has survived to the present day. He explains how in

600-515: Was soon rebuilt. It is believed that the honzon of the current temple, a statue of Yakushi Nyōrai dates from this reconstruction. After the fall of the Ōuchi clan, the Mōri clan took over as protectors of the temple. The current Main Hall of the temple was reconstructed or rebuilt by the Mōri in 1779 or 1780. During a large-scale conservation repair from 1997 to 2004, archaeological excavations found that

625-414: Was written in Japanese. As Literary Chinese originally lacked punctuation, the kanbun tradition developed various conventional reading punctuation, diacritical, and syntactic markers. Kaeriten grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order. Two are syntactic symbols, the | tatesen ( 縦線 , 'vertical bar') —linking mark that denotes phrases composed of more than one character, and

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