Keisei (monk)

Keisei (1189–1268) was a Japanese Buddhist priest of the Tendai sect. He was a son of the regent Kujō Yoshitsune of the Fujiwara clan. His spine was permanently injured in infancy when he was dropped by his wet nurse, which probably influenced his decision to become a priest. He studied under the monk Myōe and then established a hermitage west of Kyōto. In 1217, he travelled to China, where he stayed about a year before returning to Japan. In China, he commissioned a nanban ("southern barbarian", i.e., a Persian) to write an inscription in Persian for Myōe.[1]

Keisei's autograph manuscript of Hyōtō Ryūkyū no kuni no ki, now in the Imperial Household Agency

In 1222, Keisei composed a collection of setsuwa entitled Kankyo no Tomo (Companion of a Quiet Life, or Companion in Solitude).[1][2] It was formerly attributed to Jien.[3] To Keisei has also been attributed the Hyōtō Ryūkyū no kuni no ki, an account of a voyage to the Ryūkyū Kingdom in 1244.[4]

References
  1. Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 768–770.
  2. Rajyashree Pandey, "Women, Sexuality, and Enlightenment: Kankyo no Tomo", Monumenta Nipponica 50.3 (1995), pp. 325–356. JSTOR 2385548
  3. Earl Miner, Hiroko Odagiri and Robert E. Morrell (eds.), The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 347.
  4. Herbert Plutschow, "Medieval Travel Diaries", in Steven D. Carter (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 203: Medieval Japanese Writers (Gale Group, 1999), p. 177.
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