Buddhist Poetry - Buddhist Poetry in Asia

Buddhist Poetry in Asia

A typical example of a Buddhist poet is Monk Aśvaghoṣa who used his poetic talent and education in Brahmanic tradition to compose poetry on various Buddhist themes, e.g. the life of the Buddha, the Buddhacarita.

Buddhist poetry – like the bulk of the scriptures produced by Buddhists – is not limited to compositions in Pali and Sanskrit; it has flourished in practically every language that Buddhists speak.

• Notable examples in the Tibetan tradition are works of Milarepa.
• Chinese Buddhist Tradition is particularly rich in poetic expression, e.g. Buddhist poems of Bai Juyi are quite famous. In Bai Juyi's poetry we see a tension between the secular and Buddhist poetic expression: many Buddhists considered poetry as an attachment and advocated against it, despite the fact that the scriptures revered by them were abundant in poetic forms. He is credited with the coinage of the expression kyōgen kigo (狂言綺語, lit. "deranged words and embellished language"), which, to his view, referred to futility of poetic expression in comparison to Buddhist practice. Perhaps, the most successful Chinese Buddhist poet to resolve this paradox was Jiao Ran 皎然 (730-799), who proposed treatment of poetry as an intellectual instrument of Buddhist practice.
• Korean poets wrote mostly in Classical Chinese.
• Japanese poets also contributed to Buddhist poetic tradition in classical Chinese (e.g. the poetic genius of Kūkai inspired many poets of later generations.) Kūkai, in turn was influenced by Jiao Ran's Shi shi 詩式, as the latter is included in Kūkai's magnum opus of poetics, the Bunkyō hifuron 文鏡秘府論.

In medieval Japan, Buddhist poetry was accorded a special status of a separate genre within the corpus of the waka collections.