Bussokuseki-kahi

The Bussokuseki-kahi (仏足石歌碑) is a well-known monument in the Yakushi Temple in Nara, consisting of a traditional Buddha footprint inscribed with twenty-one poems, known as bussokusekika (also known as Bussokuseki no Uta).

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Numbering twenty one poems in total, they are divided into two sections:

Seventeen poems praising the virtue of Buddha.
Four poems warning against the impermanence of life and preaching the Buddhist path.

Part of the stone monument has worn away making the eleventh poem of the first section and the fourth poem of the second section partially unreadable.

The Buddha Foot monument at Yakushi Temple was constructed in 753 and the poems are viewed as being composed around that time. The author is unknown.

The poems are written in Man'yōgana, a precursor to kana where Chinese characters are used for their phonetic value, and in Bussokuseki-style. Named after the poems, Bussokuseki-style is an archaic poetic device in which lines are written in a 5-7-5-7-7-7 mora pattern. It is seen during the Nara period but greatly diminishes by the Heian period. It is an early form of waka.

The poems are a valuable inscriptional witness to Old Japanese, otherwise mainly known through later copies of 8th-century manuscripts.

Buddhist poetry

Tsuchihashi, Yutaka; Konishi, Jin'ichi (1957). Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 3: Kodai Kayōshū. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 4-00-060003-6.

Manuscript scan (1752) at Waseda University Library

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. (August 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:仏足跡歌碑]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|ja|仏足跡歌碑}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Numbering twenty one poems in total, they are divided into two sections:

Seventeen poems praising the virtue of Buddha.
Four poems warning against the impermanence of life and preaching the Buddhist path.

Part of the stone monument has worn away making the eleventh poem of the first section and the fourth poem of the second section partially unreadable.

The Buddha Foot monument at Yakushi Temple was constructed in 753 and the poems are viewed as being composed around that time. The author is unknown.

The poems are a valuable inscriptional witness to Old Japanese, otherwise mainly known through later copies of 8th-century manuscripts.

Buddhist poetry

Tsuchihashi, Yutaka; Konishi, Jin'ichi (1957). Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 3: Kodai Kayōshū. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 4-00-060003-6.

Manuscript scan (1752) at Waseda University Library

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See also

References

External links