The armoring power of sacred language

February 23, 2022 7:04 PM

In the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable, akin to how the emoji sequence 👁 🅰️ ◀️ 🚍 approximates the phonetics of “I read a rebus” (I + “red A” + “re” + “bus”)...the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death.

Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate

Previously from The Public Domain Review on Metafilter:

W. E. B. Du Bois' Infographics from 1900: on Du Bois' hand-drawn infographics of African-American life for the Paris Exposition from Kattullus

The Mexican...is familiar with death, jokes about it...celebrates it: on José Guadalupe Posada’s La Catrina and other calaveras from flithy light thief

Crossed Wires and Community in 19th-Century Dreams: on a curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War from sapagan

And many more worth revisiting for your #DoublesJubilee pleasure.

posted by youarenothere (13 comments total)

Interesting that they appear to be using yokai for some of the picture elements.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:44 PM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

That was great thanks for posting. The heart sutra is dense and wordy, and writing it for the illiterate while also attempting the verbal cutting through running in parallel is quite a task.

The article itself was a vocabulary treat too:
Apotropaic
palimpsests
calques

Thanks for posting!
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:24 PM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Beautiful. As a typophile and a former designer I love this stuff.

But would it upset anybody if I took issue with the OP's example of how this works? The example of using emoji to get a point across is a great example of how it actually *fails*. It's exclusionary. I have no idea what that string of emojis meant. You have to be on the inside to read it. Sure, I got "eye". That's because of the sound it makes. In English. And then the first problem: the second emoji is supposed to be a "red A"? Really? Why is it red and not, say, square? In fact, it's a *white* A. Not a "red A". And here is another: I also see a calculator button with A on it, or a "keyboard button A" . And the left-aiming arrow = "re"? Uh... how? Rewind? How would i know if I never used a tape machine? It's also pointing "left".

I don't need to go on. You get the point.

Emoji and pictograms are exclusionary. They slow down communication. This idea that it's "really simple" is kinda naive in my opinion.
posted by engelgrafik at 6:08 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nicheren Buddhism places great importance on the recitation of the name of the Lotus Sutra, the Daomoku. My wife, who studies this sort of thing, has described the Lotus Sutra as a chain letter (I think of it as a very effective self perpetuating meme in the Dawkins sense, (although I now want to see a "I can has enlightenment" meme)), as it explicitly calls for its copying and replication as a means to earn merit. There are copies buried all over Japan from the Heian period to hold back the tide when the dharma declines during mappou.

Anyway, this fits perfectly with this idea. I've seen annotated Kanbun (classical Chinese written for Japanese) that followed the Chinese grammar. In order for a Japanese speaker to read it, they would read the words out of order. If they were lucky, there would be little numbers by the words to help indicate the real order. I suspect that not many copies of the Sutras did this.

For anyone who is interested in statistics, the rebus material seems well chosen, given the negative correlation between agricultural focus and literacy through the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods.
posted by Hactar at 7:23 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for this. And Public Domain Review is so damn solid. I look forward to their mailings.
posted by the sobsister at 8:01 AM on February 24, 2022

Yeah, Nichiren was a huge proponent of making spiritual enlightenment available for those who were illiterate. A lot of what we know about him is from his letters. He wrote a lot of those letters in the Japanese phonetic alphabet rather than in Chinese characters, which made them much easier for someone less educated to read. Sad to say, many years later it was decided that those letters were a disgrace and they were destroyed.
posted by Quonab at 8:02 AM on February 24, 2022

Emoji and pictograms are exclusionary.

Pictograms were the beginning of human literacy, as far as we know, antedating ideograms, and far antedating alphabets. Being able to decipher some pictograms millennia later was a big help to deciphering some ancient texts. I'd argue that attempting to ascribe phonemes or syllables to arbitrary squiggles that may or may have been developed to convey those particular phonemes (that is, alphabets) is much more exclusionary. Can't speak to emojis, though.
posted by praemunire at 9:27 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

And Public Domain Review is so damn solid.

Thank you for this, sobsister. A passing observation like yours opens up such riches. I had never heard of PDR. Just been checking it out, thanks to you, and it looks amazing - damn solid indeed!!
posted by dutchrick at 10:28 AM on February 24, 2022

For what it's worth, most of the Buddhist sutras in Chinese are just Sanskrit sounds written in Chinese form. It has no discernable meaning in Chinese.

The famous Om mani padme hum is in Chinese either 唵嘛呢叭咪吽 or 唵麼抳缽訥銘吽. None of these characters are in common use and are used for their sound only.
posted by kschang at 11:38 AM on February 24, 2022

In no way are "most of the Buddhist sutras in Chinese...just Sanskrit sounds written in Chinese form". Kumārajīva was a renowned translator of sutras into Chinese, most notably because instead of being one person who wrote a translation, he managed a team that worked together at finding the best translation. In the fourth century.
posted by Quonab at 12:52 PM on February 24, 2022

Guess that didn't come out right. What I meant to say is a lot of the commonly recited sutra in Chinese Buddism are left in Sanskrit.
posted by kschang at 12:56 PM on February 24, 2022

Delightful post, youarenothere, that it also introduced me to The Public Domain Review is a great bonus!
posted by dutchrick at 3:12 AM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing, so beautiful to look at.
posted by 15L06 at 6:04 AM on February 25, 2022