The literature of the Five Mountains is the literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

 produced by the principal Zen

Zen

Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...

 (禅) monastic centers of the Rinzai sect in Kyoto and Kamakura

Kamakura, Kanagawa

is a city located in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, about south-south-west of Tokyo. It used to be also called .Although Kamakura proper is today rather small, it is often described in history books as a former de facto capital of Japan as the seat of the Shogunate and of the Regency during the...

, Japan. The term also refers to five Zen centers in China in Hangzhou

Hangzhou

Hangzhou , formerly transliterated as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. Governed as a sub-provincial city, and as of 2010, its entire administrative division or prefecture had a registered population of 8.7 million people...

 and Ningpo that inspired zen in Japan. The term "mountain" refers to Buddhist monastery

Monastery

Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...

. Five Mountains literature or gozan bungaku (五山文學) is used collectively to refer to the poetry and prose in Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 produced by Japanese monk

Monk

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

s during the 14th and 15th centuries. Included are works by Chinese monks residing in Japan. The period witnessed a widespread importation of cultural influences from Song

Song

In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs...

 and Yuan

Yuan

Yuan may refer to:* Chinese yuan, the basic unit of currency in China** Renminbi, the current currency used in the People's Republic of China, whose basic unit is Yuan...

 period China that in many ways transformed Japan. In the literature of the Five Mountains informality, sense of humor and sympathy with life’s ordinariness were highly prized. A Five Mountains poet might write about anything, in contrast to the proscribed themes of the aristocratic court poets. Kokan Shiren

Kokan Shiren

Kokan Shiren , 1278–1347), Japanese Rinzai Zen patriarch and celebrated poet in Chinese, was the son of an officer of the palace guard and a mother of the aristocratic Minamoto clan. At age eight he was placed in the charge of the Buddhist priest Hōkaku on Mt. Hiei. At age ten he was ordained...

 (d. 1346) for example would write about the humble mosquito

Mosquito

Mosquitoes are members of a family of nematocerid flies: the Culicidae . The word Mosquito is from the Spanish and Portuguese for little fly...

:

Snouts sharp as drill bits!
Buzz like thunder as they circle the room.
They sneak through the folds of my robe,
But they could bloody the back of an ox made of iron!

A courtier might write about the cicada

Cicada

A cicada is an insect of the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha , in the superfamily Cicadoidea, with large eyes wide apart on the head and usually transparent, well-veined wings. There are about 2,500 species of cicada around the world, and many of them remain unclassified...

 and celebrate seasonal associations connected to them. To write about the mosquito would violate the courtier’s strict sense of literary decorum. In a poem entitled “Sailing in the Moonlight” Kokan focuses on the incongruous humor of life:

We monks boat in moonlight, circle through the reeds.
The boatman shouts the tide recedes; we must return.
The village folk mistake us for a fishing boat
And scramble to the beach to buy our catch.

The almost grotesque image in the final line of “Mosquitoes” strikes the reader abruptly and forcefully, reminding one of the custom in Zen establishments of slapping on the head with a stick those practitioners of mediation who have momentarily dozed off. The point of Gozan literature, and particularly of poetry, is often to surprise and to jolt into a heightened awareness

Awareness

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of...

. Five Mountains literature was not entirely concerned with the rustic cloistered world. Often the principal historical events of the day found their way into the works of the monks. Zen clerics themselves often served as advisers to the leading political figures. In a poem, "Written Suddenly While Feeling Remorse Over the Passage of Time" Chugan Engetsu

Chugan Engetsu

, Japanese poet, occupies a prominent place in Japanese Literature of the Five Mountains, literature in Chinese written in Japan. Chugan's achievement was his mastery of this difficult medium, a signal of the ripening of Five Mountains poetry and prose in Japan. He was born in Kamakura of a family...

 (d. 1375) relates his feelings about the fall of the Kamakura shogunate

Kamakura shogunate

The Kamakura shogunate was a military dictatorship in Japan headed by the shoguns from 1185 to 1333. It was based in Kamakura. The Kamakura period draws its name from the capital of the shogunate...

a year earlier:

A year ago today the Kamakura fell.

In the monasteries now, nothing of the old mood remains.

The peddler girl understands nothing of a monk's remorse-

Shouting through the streets, selling firewood, selling vegetables.

BOOKS

• Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan, 1981.
• Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, No 10, 1992.

ARTICLES

• Bruce E. Carpenter, 'Priest-Poets of the Five Mountains in Medieval Japan', in Tezukayama Daigaku ronshū, no. 16, 1977, Nara, Japan, pp. 1-11. ISSN 0385-7743.