Y a un plan entre elle le prend dans ses bras avec un regard équivoque
For my JPN 361U class, I'm having the students read selections of the Konjaku monogatari shu (Tales of Time Now Past, 12th century?) collection. One of the stories in the collection is a classic mukashi-banashi tale "How Three Beasts Practiced the Bodhisattva Way and How the Rabbit Roasted Himself" (5:13; you can find it in Shirane and Watson's The Demon at Agi Bridge). Tezuka Osamu, one of the manga artists I usually teach, did a nice adaptation of the story (or it could be a variant of a variant -- in the KMS version, we have a monkey + fox + rabbit, but in Tezuka's story, we have bear + fox + rabbit). What's nice about this story -- what opens volume 1 of his eight-volume (in English) Buddha opus -- is that it neatly encapsulates the bodhisattva ideal of sacrifice. (Can't help but be reminded of Miyazawa Kenji's "Ginga tetsudo no yoru," which I've recently been working on, 'natch.)
In the opening of the manga, there is a reference to the Jataka Tale No. 316, The Rabbit in the Moon. There was some differences between the actual story and the one in the manga. The original Jataka has a monkey,a jackal, and an otter instead of a bear, a fox, and a rabbit. It is actually closer to the Japanese folklore story of "The Rabbit in the Moon". In Hindu mythology, the bear and the monkey are often interchangeable as they belong to the same "subhuman" group of vanara and in the Jataka, the bear or the monkey may be used depending on which version it is.
Euh non, j'étudiais le b.a.-ba du japonais, pas les textes du 12eme siècle en vieux japonais littéraire hein.
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Sujet: Shun d'Andromède (Lu 7434 fois)
