Conference Schedule

The history of the book in India follows a path that is markedly different from what is typically seen in other major literate cultures of the ancient world. First of all, we have no direct evidence as to the very existence of books as material objects before the first century BCE at the earliest. Then, even as books become somewhat more common in the following centuries (though surviving early examples remain quite rare), they still do not attain the central role that they enjoyed in, for example, contemporary China. For in classical India the physical book was typically thought of as a secondary imitation, a shadow as it were, of the oral text, which tended to be considered the primary representation. With this background in mind, I will trace the early development of books in the Indian/South Asian world by showing rare examples of early birch-bark scrolls and palm-leaf poṭhīs (unbound stacked leaves).

In this brief presentation I will focus on the development of the codex form in Kashmir. While Kashmiri birchbark manuscripts have long been prized by philologists for their preservation of separate, often divergent, recensions of Sanskrit texts, they have rarely been studied as objects in histories of technological exchange and innovation. Although the earliest codices from the Himalayan Valley are written in Sanskrit and show deep intellectual, literary, and religious ties with the Indian Subcontinent, the material instantiation of these codices is markedly different than other Sanskrit manuscript traditions. While Sanskrit texts from elsewhere in South Asia tend to be written on palm leaves tied together in bundles called pothi, Kashmiri manuscripts are written on birchbark sheets and bound together in codex form. While the unique mountain ecology of Kashmir accounts for the prevalence of birchbark as a writing substrate, the construction of a Kashmiri birchbark codex speaks to technological borrowings and innovations distinct from the rest of the Indian Subcontinent with ties to Central and West Asia. This presentation will be a brief introduction to the birchbark codices of Kashmir and suggest future directions for the conceptualization of these codices both as objects speaking to connected histories in Central Asia (specifically with forms of the Manichean codex) as well as a specifically grounded to the Kashmiri material and social world. 

This paper explores the significance of archaeologically recovered wooden slips, known as mokkan, for understanding the early written cultures of Japan and the southern kingdoms of Korea. These objects have received a great amount of attention in recent years due to the great numbers with which they have been recovered in Japanese contexts, and the remarkable insights they bring to the study of early Korea due to the lack of any substantial transmitted textual tradition. While they have no doubt been a boon to early historical studies, to what extent they were a significant or marginal piece of an overall written culture that utilized multiple writing surfaces remains questionable. The archaeological record is biased toward durability, and mokkan were probably used most in contexts where inscriptions needed to endure harsh conditions, being passed among many hands, perhaps somewhere far from “civilization.” However, these objects hint at one further important function they fulfilled in textual culture, as surfaces for drafting and practice. This paper will examine examples of mokkan which clearly were utilized multiple times in the process of practicing or composing, highlighting the ways in which these wooden inscriptions formed an important part of a larger written culture by serving as a space for students to learn/practice their writing, and for more advanced scribes to pen initial drafts of important documents or compositions. 

My illustrated talk will survey the development of books in the lands of Islam from its beginnings to the advent of printing. The Qur’an had been revealed aurally to the Prophet Muhammad, but the revelations were collected and compiled as parchment books almost immediately. When Muslims encountered paper in Central Asia in the early eighth century, however, they quickly began to use this relatively cheap writing material to supply their empire’s vast bureaucracy. Although conservative scribes continued to copy the holy text on parchment for several more centuries, the availability of paper quickly encouraged authors and writers to produce texts on every imaginable subject from theology to cookery. Indeed, it has been argued that for the first time in human history an individual could earn his living as a writer, without an independent income, a supporting institution. or a wealthy patron. The physical characteristics of paper encouraged calligraphers to develop new and more legible scripts for an expanding reading public, in not only Arabic but also Persian and Turkish, and discerning patrons developed a taste for beautifully calligraphed and finely-bound books, which became one of, if not the most characteristic and enduring art forms in all the lands of Islam.

With the publication of Seuils (Thresholds) in 1987, Gérard Genette coined the term “paratext” to refer to the textual elements enveloping the main text of modern print publications, such as the title, author’s name, and preface. In this monograph, Genette frequently commented on the notable absence of such paratextual elements from manuscript writing, at one point describing texts before the advent of print as circulating in an “almost raw (presque brut) condition,” without any paratextual packaging. In this paper, I treat the absence of conventional paratext (e.g., the absence of title or author’s name) as a type of information, rather than merely an indication that something is lost and needing to be recovered. The introduction of elements such as titles, author’s names, and prefaces, I suggest, tends to reflect an attempt to dictate the identity and interpretation of a text by privileged textual producers, whereas the absence of such elements is more strongly associated with non-hierarchal forms of textual production and circulation. I will illustrate this hypothesis by examining different degrees of paratextual packaging in early Chinese manuscript and received texts.

Many titles in early Chinese texts function as mere names rather than performing other functions that we tend to take for granted, such as indicating the theme or the genre of the text. Investigating how and why titles came to perform functions aiding interpretation can enhance our understanding of the cultural role that written texts have played in early China (mid. 5th c. BCE–2 c. CE). In this paper, I argue that the interpretive relationship between the title and the text underpins the unity of a complex work. The early Chinese text Zhuangzi exemplifies how interpretive titles enable the thematic coherence of the heterogeneous compilation on the one hand, and how the coherence effects the sense of authority on the other.

The Zhuangzi, a large heterogeneous compilation comprising 33 chapters, was divided into three parts named “inner chapters,” “outer chapters,” and “miscellaneous chapters.” In this paper, I show that among these three categories, only the inner chapters bear titles that consistently indicate the themes of their texts. In contrast, most of the titles in other groups only function as identifiers. The division between the three groups as well as the different functions of titles reveal the compiler’s intent of influencing the reader in interpreting the texts. The Zhuangzi exemplifies a shift in textual production in Early China: the interpretation of written texts comes to rely less on a direct transmission from teacher to student, moving towards less context bound author-reader communication.

Until the 1960’s, the Man’yōshū, a collection compiled c. 780, was thought to be the oldest extant record of poetry in Japanese. This changed with the discovery of mokkan, inscribed wooden tablets used across Japan for bureaucratic and economic records, and occasionally for poetry, between the 7^th and 10^th centuries CE.  Through comparing the types of poetry inscribed on mokkan, and that found in the Man’yōshū, we can better understand how the poetry compiled in the anthology circulated prior to its anthologization. In particular, this paper aims to look at an object bearing a fragment similar to a poem found in Man’yōshū Book VII, which consists of anonymous and undated poetry organized by topic. Given the uses of mokkan as temporary surfaces for inscription, could the appearance of poetry similar to that in Book VII hint that the book, with its unorthodox format, is actually an encyclopedia for poetic tropes, rather than a record of exemplary poetry? This paper aims to explore the question of the relationship between the object and Man’yōshū Book VII, and through doing so, propose new ways to understand both works, and more broadly, the relationship between literary production on manuscript texts and on disposable surfaces in early Japan. 

Writers competent in literary Chinese or literary Sinitic functioned as a prerequisite for the development of book culture in medieval East Asia (ca. 317–907). Prior to Silla’s 新羅 unification of the three peninsular Korean kingdoms by conquest, in alliance with Tang China in the mid-seventh century, the quality of literary Sinitic as preserved in its epigraphy varied. Silla’s sixth-century epigraphy typically included examples of “abnormal literary Sinitic” (pyŏn’gyŏk hanmun 變格漢文), or “literary Sinitic following non-standard rules and grammar.” Silla king Sinmun 神文 (r. 681–692) founded the State Academy (kukhak 國學) in 682 to deliver a curriculum based on the Confucian classics and modeled after the imperially-sponsored schools of the Tang capital. Building on his royal predecessor’s efforts to promote Confucian learning, Sinmun further acquired written materials serving as good models of writing.  Extant Silla epigraphy from the late seventh and early eighth centuries demonstrates a significant increase in the proficiency of what may be termed “standard literary Sinitic” (chŏnggyŏk hanmun 正格漢文), or “literary Sinitic following correct rules.” This paper examines several examples of Silla epigraphy from the late seventh and early eighth centuries to analyze the evidence regarding the development of proficiency in literary Sinitic.

The Japanese treasure house known as the Shōsōin is seldom, if ever, mentioned in global histories of the book. While Dunhuang manuscripts are now well-known throughout the world, a roughly contemporaneous collection of manuscripts from the Shōsōin in Nara, Japan offers an arguably denser and more coherent picture of East Asian manuscript cultures. The Shōsōin archive includes roughly 10,000 documents covering a fifty-year period in the middle of the eighth-century, with the vast majority of materials originating from a single institution: an office for copying Buddhist scripture. Dunhuang manuscripts, in contrast, number around 60,000, but cover around six hundred years of materials that were produced in diverse settings. The Dunhuang manuscripts are, in other words, a comparatively sprawling and mysterious collection with unclear origins and materials that cover centuries in diverse languages. The Shōsōin, in comparison, is a tightly focused archive centered primarily on the day-to-day record keeping of book production. In this presentation, I compare the two archives with one another and other examples from outside of Asia to show how the Shōsōin can provide unparalleled insights into the labor and materiality of book production in the eighth-century.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a group of Japanese literati embarked on an unprecedented project. Under the leadership of Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), the charismatic and at times ruthless ruler of Mito domain, they set out to write a comprehensive history of the country following the example of Sima Qian’s (c. 145–87 BCE) Shiji (Records of the Historian). This project took over two centuries to complete and resulted in the gargantuan Dainihonshi (History of Great Japan) in 397 fascicles.

Mitsukuni’s ambitions were not confined to historiography, and, during its heyday, the Mito literati group comprised dozens of scholars engaged in research and writing on subjects as diverse as history, literature, philology, religion and ritual, and the natural sciences. What brought these people together? Why did they choose to write under Mitsukuni’s patronage and what rules, both stated and assumed, governed their literary production? How did ideas become texts (and often also books) in this environment?

This paper aims to answer these questions by utilizing a new conceptual tool—“community of textual practice,” or CTP for short. It treats the early Mito group of literati as a community united by the shared practice of literary production and avoids the pitfalls of labeling them a “school,” as is customarily done in Japanese and Anglophone scholarship. This approach allows us to look at these people and the texts they wrote from a new perspective and showcases the advantages of the CTP concept in studying premodern and early modern textual production.

This paper offers a little-known case study in the transmission of material culture and technical knowledge. A specific type of dice divination book, whose method customarily employs a distinctive four-sided cuboid (rectangular) die known as a pāśaka, spread across Eurasia from approximately the first half of the first millennium CE to the first half of the second millennium. There are examples in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Old Turkish, Sogdian, Persian, and Arabic. The books, in paper or birchbark, have been found in Dunhuang, Turfan, Kucha, and as far west as Istanbul. These divination books share some interesting formal features in terms of their layouts, their propensity to appear alongside other texts, and their preference for the codex or booklet format. These formal continuities mirror in significant ways the functional continuities in how these various texts arrange their 64 oracular responses. These and other details furnish some glimpses into the practice contexts of these divination texts and how they were adapted to their users’ aesthetics, pantheons, and traditions.

This paper investigates the manuscript production and circulation of unofficial history in the late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) through an examination of the manuscript copies of Hong Manjong’s 洪萬宗 (1643–1725) Overview and Lessons of the Generations of the Eastern Country (Tongguk yŏktae ch’ongmok 東國歷代總目) and Yi Kŭngik’s 李肯翊 (1736–1806) Narratives of Yŏllyŏsil (Yŏllyŏsil kisul 燃藜室記述). I argue that the medium of manuscript, conjoined with the chronological and episodic structure of the selected works, invited readers to not just emend but contribute to the writing of these unofficial histories, creating scribal communities of those readers who also wrote—a form of participatory history writing where authorship was increasingly collaborative as time went by. While movable type and woodblock printing were available as methods of producing the material text, manuscript flourished as a method of book production for books both acceptable and clandestine. In this media ecology, official, state-approved histories were printed, whereas unofficial histories rarely made it to print and circulated in manuscript format. Hong’s Overview and Lessons, printed covertly in 1705 with the Chosŏn court’s movable type, was embroiled in a call for censorship and was never printed again. However, manuscript copies of Hong’s work circulated widely for the remainder of the dynasty, and subsequent readers continued the chronicle by adding events that occurred after Hong’s death either by annotation, or additions when producing a new manuscript copy. Likewise, Yi’s Narratives also fostered participation by leaving space for contemporary and future readers to add information in circulating copies. Both works demonstrate readerly contributions to writing and illuminate the nature of a form participatory unofficial history writing that contrasted with the reception of official histories.

Keywords: manuscript, marginalia, unofficial history

The presence of variants within the textual tradition of Kalīla wa-Dimna highlights the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of semi-popular Arabic literature from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Intriguingly, Kalīla wa-Dimna, despite its textual fluidity retains its distinct identity as a “book” and indeed the changes occurred through writing. Key to this process were the copyists who both preserve and transmit the text and kept constantly adapting it.

The substantial changes Kalīla wa-Dimna undergoes in its Arabic versions are among the most drastic. These differ from invasive translations into other languages or versifications (among other aspects) in that the latter adaptations are attached to the name of the person doing so, re-attributing authorship to him. Inversely, those responsible for the incremental rewriting or structural interference in the Arabic versions are allegedly anonymous or obscure copyists.

Kalīla wa-Dimna evolves in a sort of transmission that can be regarded as a parallel to the established scholarly way of transmitting texts, which was sophisticated and strongly conventionalized since the eighth century. Traces of those conventions of transmission can be found in some Arabic versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna, such as collation marks and comments on variants. But their attitude to the text was different. Those copyist-redactors engaged with transmitting and adapting Kalīla wa-Dimna might best be described as “scholars of the practice,” i.e., self-taught or literate in ways different from specialist scholars in the established disciplines (tafsīr, hadīṭh, balāgha etc.). This parallel type of scholarly practice needs to be acknowledged and investigated for its own sake.

In our previous research, we have made advances in defining groups of versions and the ways in which various groups interlock or overlap. Meanwhile, copyists and readers leave sparse explicit statements in colophons and on margins. Here our objective is to analyze the correlation between the rewriting and restructuring documented in specific versions of the main text in manuscripts and the perspectives of copyists and readers, contained in the paratexts of those same witnesses.

This paper investigates a significant topic in the study of both early Chinese administrative and textual history: information management in the early imperial era. As the number of writings increased enormously under the imperial administrations, the practical issue of how to handle the huge number of texts became more urgent. Driven by this pragmatic concern, a series of navigational devices for knowledge management came to the fore: more explicit and standardized layouts, uniformity of titles, and, most importantly, multiple tables of contents were found among several early imperial corpora such as the Yinqueshan 銀雀山, Hujia caochang 胡家草場, and Haihunhou 海昏侯 manuscripts, all unseen in the pre-imperial corpora. The author demonstrates that the appearance of tables of contents and nested lists during the early empire was not merely a new custom that the Qin-Han people suddenly adopted—it signifies a clear attempt to navigate the growing number of texts, to visualize colossal amounts of information, and to create new possibilities for reading and learning practices. These early tables of contents, for instance, can be seen as a prototype of a “search engine”—a paratextual device to help the reader locate and relocate certain passages in the middle of long texts. The adoption and renovation of information technologies bespeaks a pressing goal and corresponding practices for the scribes and scholars in early imperial China: they had to find ways to control and utilize their information, much as we do today.

From the 13^th to the 18^th century, head principal monks who administered daily lectures, called Shōgakutō 正学頭, at Amanosan Kongōji in Osaka, Japan, curated one of the largest extant medieval Buddhist temple libraries. More than 8,000 separate manuscripts and printed books from this one library, which were cataloged as sacred teachings documents (shōgyō 聖教), are copies of books once held at important temple libraries across Japan, now lost. In this paper I introduce four examples of some of the books we know were carefully copied using phrases like by the “august hand” (onhitsu 御筆), “true hand” (shinpitsu 真筆), and other key phrases found in colophons including “true book” (shōhon 正本 or 証本) or “august book” (gohon 御本), to illustrate how much we know about the librarians and their books from this important collection. I focus on two librarians, Zenne 禅恵 (alt. Zen’e, 1284–1364) and Shunne 舜恵 (alt. Shun’e, n.d.), who curated hundreds of books and used them as instructional manuals for the school that trained students in the curriculum for the Dharma Transmission Assembly (Denbō’e, alt. Denpō’e 伝法会) at Kongōji or other Shingon temples in the Kansai region. The four examples discussed here are: (a) a 13^th century edition of Kiyomizudera kana engi-e 清水寺仮名縁起絵 (Illustrated Origin History using Kana of Kiyomizu Temple); (b) a copy of Besson zakki 別尊雑記 (Miscellaneous Record of Classified Sacred Images) with 58—rather than the usual 57—rolls copied between 1329–1330 from an exemplar dated to 1308; (c) Youxianku 遊仙窟 (Yūsenkutsu, Journey to the Immortals’ Grotto) copied in 1322; and (d) a rare, 1433 edition of Dōjōkan 道場観 (Visualizations at the Practice Ground). Finally, I address how we should reconsider how we present book history in East Asian history to highlight the key role played by librarians and their educational curricula in Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit languages.

In June 1900, a large hoard of Buddhist manuscripts was discovered in a sealed shrine room—the so-called “library cave”—at the Mogao cave site near the old Silk Road town of Dunhuang in what is now Gansu province, China. Dating from the fourth to the early eleventh centuries, the Dunhuang finds suddenly added tens of thousands of physical books to the archives of Central Asian and Buddhist codicology. The evidence from Dunhuang suggests that three new book forms emerged in Tibetan-period (ca. 760-848) Dunhuang: the folded and leaf-based book forms referred to as the concertina and pothi, respectively, together with the stitched booklet or codex. While there is widespread agreement that the Tibetan period witnessed dramatic changes in Dunhuang’s manuscript culture, and while there is evidence that these new book forms were further adapted in the post-Tibetan period of the late ninth and tenth centuries, additional inquiry into the provenance, manufacture, and uses of these early Buddhist books is required. This talk will focus on representative samples of these new book forms, including Chinese, Tibetan, and multilingual examples from Dunhuang, to try and paint a picture of an emerging Buddhist book culture that, while fully part of the connected book histories of eastern Eurasia, retained local features through the late tenth century.

In the life cycle of an Arabic manuscript book, the disintegration of the codex into fragments is a crossroads at which the codex's owner or caretaker has three choices. They can invest time, money, and effort into restoring the codex; they can sell the fragments to a warrāq (a seller of books and their components) to be reused as, for example, bindings for other books; or they can kick the can down the road by storing the fragments for possible restoration in the future. The accumulation resulting from the third option has given rise to dedicated fragment depositories in Arabic manuscript libraries (called khurūm or dushūt). Although they are generally not accessible or cataloged in the way that a library's other holdings are, these fragment caches often contain old and rare literary materials. My paper explores these depositories, which have hitherto been neither studied or theorized in scholarship on the Arabic book and considers their curious role in between a library and an archive.