Composed by specially trained practitioners (often university-trained scholars) and couched in elaborate Chinese-style parallel prose, ganmon were read out loud at religious services (primarily Buddhist in orientation, although there are ganmon addressing non-Buddhist deities).
Columbia University's Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture will be hosting an international workshop on October 12-13, 2018, to gather scholars of language, history, religion, and literature working on Japanese ganmon and their Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese antecedents/counterparts to discuss the significance of this understudied but crucial premodern genre.
Find more information at http://www.keenecenter.org/download_files/ganmon-workshop-web-1.jpg and the full schedule at http://www.keenecenter.org/download_files/ganmon-workshop-web-2.jpg.
The workshop is sponsored by:
- Department of Linguistics, Cornell University
- Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
- Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Columbia University
- The Confucius Institute at Columbia University
- The Laboratory Program for Korean Studies, Ministry of Education of Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-LAB-225004)