The Light of the Three Ages

The present research analyzes an early nineteenth-century vernacular Japanese retelling of the final life of the Buddha. By that time, Japanese popular fiction had for hundreds of years been retelling the life of Sakyamuni with entertaining plots increasingly removed from any authoritative sources. This research introduces Kogetsu Sogi (1755?–1832?), a monastic author who explicitly aimed to produce an orthodox retelling of that lifestory, as a way of countering the “distorted” or “popular” literature dominant in the Japan of her own day. Even within the confines of a scholastically informed work of literature, though, Kogetsu innovated. Her masterwork, The Light of the Three Ages, does not merely transpose authoritative Chinese texts into Japanese. Instead, it also adds to and elides these texts. From Kogetsu’s work, the Buddha emerges as no mere literary character, but as a vital authority. Mediated for Kogetsu by word and objects still available in Japan, his presence transcended any single place and time.