A while ago I wrote an introduction to the setsuyōshū 節用集 genre and promised to write more detailed posts about the various content of such books. This is the first post in what I hope to become a running series of sorts. As will be the case for most of these posts, the majority of the examples used will come from the Eitai Setsuyō Mujinzō, the same as was used in the introduction.
In this installment we will look at the content of a double page at the beginning of the Eitai Setsuyō Mujinzō which gives information about some cosmological beliefs in the Edo period. I am not saying that this represents the dominant cosmological world view of the period, but the fact that it appears within such a popular work as the Eitai Setsuyō Mujinzō makes it worth it to have a closer look. Below the image I will provide the complete translation along with some comments. I can't say that I'm satisfied with my translation, it doesn't read very well and I struggled to find good translations for some of the terms. If you have any suggestions that would improve the translations, please tell me in the comments.
In this installment we will look at the content of a double page at the beginning of the Eitai Setsuyō Mujinzō which gives information about some cosmological beliefs in the Edo period. I am not saying that this represents the dominant cosmological world view of the period, but the fact that it appears within such a popular work as the Eitai Setsuyō Mujinzō makes it worth it to have a closer look. Below the image I will provide the complete translation along with some comments. I can't say that I'm satisfied with my translation, it doesn't read very well and I struggled to find good translations for some of the terms. If you have any suggestions that would improve the translations, please tell me in the comments.
RSS Feed
