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This article uses character n-grams methods to assess the authorship of three religious texts written in medieval Japan, comparing them to the works of Monkan (1278-1357), a Shingon monk active during the first half of the 14th century. Such texts belong to a literary genre called shōgyō that presents many challenges that render the use of traditional authorship attribution methods inappropriate. They were composed in Japanese kanbun (classical Chinese read in Japanese word order), and their contents are closer to cumulative work than to original creations by a single author. This article thus draws on previous research on the translators of the Chinese Buddhist canon, which have proven to be far more effective than traditional methods developed for modern languages for the analysis of this type of literature. Concretely, it proposes a workflow proceeding from the preparation of the corpus (with manuscript edition, encoding,...) to a concrete data analysis using the variable length n-gram method. The last part of the article deals with future perspectives that would further refine the results, such as taking into account the various speaking voices found inside the shōgyō and their relationship to the author, as well as stylistic analysis based on grammatical patterns. As a whole, the experiment succeeded in showing global trends in the texts of the Japanese Shingon schools, finding stylistic differences between the works of Kūkai, of monks from the 12th century, and of Monkan. Combined with a rigorous historical enquiry into the redaction context of the texts and their manuscripts, the data analysis also demonstrates that one of them was almost certainly written by Monkan, and another either by him or by one of his close disciples. Data Mining in the Works of the Shingon Monk Monkan (1278–1357): Using Digital Methods to Assess the Contested Authorship of Three Religious Texts from Medieval Japan Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 3, No. 1, p. 115 During the late Heian and medieval periods in Japan, the esoteric schools of Buddhism produced an extremely large corpus of religious texts, which specialists call “sacred teachings” (shōgyō 聖教). This category includes an extremely diverse array of texts, including doctrinal commentaries on Buddhist texts, ritual manuals, records of oral transmission, and initiation certificates. This little-studied literature presents several challenges when attempting to identify the author of any given text. The first of these challenges is the language. While these texts are based on the Buddhist canon—which is itself written in classical Chinese—they were actually composed in ancient Japanese, using the Chinese way of writing (this form of composition is called kanbun 漢文). This unfortunately makes it nearly impossible to reliably utilize Western word-based methods of authorship attribution. Even character-based methods (see Peng et al. 2003) were designed largely for modern Chinese, and do not take into account the linguistic characteristics of this genre. The second major challenge is stylistic, as these texts often consist of a succession of quotes from previous works, and use a well defined manner of expressing themselves that leaves little room for originality. However, within the last few years, new methods for identifying the translators—rather than the authors—of Chinese Buddhist texts have achieved great success through a careful analysis of recurrent sequences of characters (n-grams) and of their relative frequencies (see Hung, Bingenheimer, and Wiles 2010). Such sophisticated methods have not yet been applied to shōgyō, however. This article will apply these methods in analyzing the work of one monk in particular—who happened to have been largely misunderstood, in a manner that mirrors authorship attributions in an interesting way. * Graduate school of Letters, Nagoya University . On the shōgyō, see in particular the edited volume Abe 2010. . This is partly why a previous experiment presented at the JADH conference in 2016 using the character n-gram methods proposed by Stamatatos (2009) for plagiarism detection was inconclusive. Optimized versions of this method, as in Kuta and Kitowski 2014, could lead to better results, but as this paper demonstrates, the variable length n-gram method appears more suited to the type of texts used here. Moreover, Stamatatos uses a supervised algorithm, which implies training datasets with preclassified samples. This approach can be seen as orienting the data in a certain way. On this issue, see Bingenheimer, Hung, and Hsieh 2017, 4. Data Mining in the Works of the Shingon Monk Monkan (1278–1357): Using Digital Methods to Assess the Contested Authorship of Three Religious Texts from Medieval Japan Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 3, No. 1, p. 116 Monkan (1278–1357), a monk of the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, was a major figure active during the first half of the fourteenth century. Originally from Saidaiji 西 大寺 in Nara, Japan, he moved to Daigoji 醍醐寺 during the 1310s, and became an influential figure at the imperial court. A close advisor to Emperor Go Daigo 後醍醐 (1288– 1339), he retained an influential role in the regime of the southern court, as both a ritual master and a confidant of its sovereigns. However, after his death, Monkan was widely criticized by members of his own school. Sources depict him as a horrible heretic, a member of the sinister Tachikawa lineage (Tachikawa-ryū 立川流), who had seduced the emperor with his mastery of dark, sexual rites. The rediscovery of his work over the last decade has allowed researchers to reevaluate this depiction. These efforts showed that—far from being a heretic—he was actually a follower of the broader doctrinal and ritual trends of the medieval Shingon school, and especially of Daigoji Temple. Monkan’s reputation demonstrates that traditional perceptions of certain historical events often differ from the facts. Similar discrepancies are found in the intellectual history of the esoteric schools in medieval Japan. In fact, aside from a lack of interest until recently, several factors contributed to blurring the image of this particular period of Japanese religion. These include the limited availability of sources—most of which are manuscripts within the custody of difficult-to-access monastic libraries; the later emergence of a sectarian view of Japanese Buddhism that would largely determine how each current viewed its own fabricated past; and last, but not least, the tendency of medieval esoteric monks to attribute their own work to other, more prestigious masters. The main objective of this article is to explore the potential of using digital methods as an auxiliary tool for researchers attempting to recover such history. Concretely, it will use n-gram methods to assess the authorship of three religious texts that are traditionally believed to have been composed by different monks between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. However, at least two of these texts were likely the work of Monkan. After presenting the results of this analysis, I will also suggest possible ways to further refine these results. 1. Previous Research on the Authorship of the Target Texts . See Abe 2013; Quinter 2015, 181–85; and Rappo 2017b. Data Mining in the Works of the Shingon Monk Monkan (1278–1357): Using Digital Methods to Assess the Contested Authorship of Three Religious Texts from Medieval Japan Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 3, No. 1, p. 117 The three target texts of this study were not selected randomly. Previous scholarship has either identified Monkan as their author, or demonstrated that they were produced by people fairly close to him. This attribution is indeed the case with the first text, the Goyuigō hiketsu 御遺告秘 決. It is included in the famous collection of edited Shingon texts called the Zoku Shingonshū zensho (vol. 28) and attributed to the monk Jichiun 実運 (1105–1160). However, the same colophon used as a basis for this claim dates the text to 1162, two years after Jichiun’s death. This has led several researchers to doubt the attribution. Satoshi Itō, in his research on medieval Shintō and its links to Shingon Buddhism, has suggested that the text could have been authored by the little-known Dōjun 道順, Monkan’s master at Daigoji, or by someone close to him (Itō 2011, 275). More recently, Yasurō Abe has—through his familiarity with Monkan’s texts—strongly argued that this attribution was erroneous and that Monkan should be seen as the text’s true author (first in Abe 2006b, but also Abe 2009 and Abe 2013, 244). The second text is the Daijingu honji 大神宮本地 , also known as the Daishi gonyūjōki 大師御入定記. This text contains many similarities to Monkan’s work, especially on the topic of the Joint Ritual of the Three Worthies (Sanzon gōgyōhō 三尊合行法). Three known manuscripts of this text are extant. One conserved in the Hōbodai’in of the Tōji temple includes a colophon by a certain Kōken 光賢, who claims that he copied the text from an earlier source. His identity has been debated, however. Kamakura period texts mention one Kōken, a disciple of the Daigoji monk Kenjin 憲深 (1193–1262) who was active during the mid-thirteenth century. However, Satoshi Itō (2011, 260) has demonstrated that the author was most likely another Kōken, born in 1344. Linked to the esoteric lineage of Mount Miwa, he was a monk of Uchiyama Eikyūji 内山永久寺, a temple known for its links to the southern court and to Monkan. Moreover, Kōken also copied a text called Tenku-ji-sho 天口事書 in 1372, at Amanosan Kongōji temple 天野山 金剛寺, which was for a brief time the capital of the southern court (Nagashima 1942, 253). Kōken enjoyed a strong association with this regime, as he remained close to emperors Chōkei 長慶 and Go-Kameyama 後亀山. All of this points to a powerful connection with Monkan, who himself died at Kongōji in 1358, after having transmi

journal of the japanese association for digital humanities

Data Mining in the Works of the Shingon Monk Monkan (1278–1357): Using Digital Methods to Assess the Contested Authorship of Three Religious Texts from Medieval Japan