This sixth year of lectures has been devoted to a character whose role appears to be essential in the historical development of the phenomenon we have been pursuing relentlessly in our philological investigation, and which we have called "hieroglossia". Jien is no stranger to those of us who have been following these lectures from the outset. Almost every year, we've called on him to shed light on some point of importance by reading his poems or writings on the Japanese language.
If we have made him a kind of constant point of reference in our investigation, the yardstick against which we compare the writings of the Japanese classical age, it is because of the unique triple conjuncture he represents in Japanese culture: as the title of the lecture reminds us, he was a very great monk, a prelate who attained the highest hieratic offices of his age. He was also a great poet; although posterity has relegated him to second place among the illustrious poets of his time, which saw the end of the Heian Golden Age with such prestigious names as Saigyô, Shunzei and Teika, he nevertheless remains almost invariably the fourth in line after this trinity. While he may be considered the last Heian poet, he was also the leading thinker of the Kamakura era, thanks to his reflections on history. What's more, the three facets of his work - that of monk, poet and thinker-historian - are united by his constant concern for the language he used. He was undoubtedly one of the first in Japan to express a sustained reflection on the linguistic relationships between the three levels of Japanese hieroglossia: the Chinese source, its Japanese reflection, and the mediating third party: the language of India, the Brahmic language(bongo), which he used to raise the language of the archipelago to the level of the language of the continent.
At the risk of over-simplifying almost four centuries of Japanese thought, we might say that he brought to the level of the language of his country the thinking that Kûkai (774-835) had developed from the Brahmic language as an expression of the metaphysical archetypes of the plane of Law(hokkai = dharmadhâtu), thinking admirably synthesized in his Notes on the reality of phonemes and graphemes (Shôji-jissô-gi; we adopt this translation of the title here), which we studied in 2013-2014.