Knowledge Bank

The onset of the Heian period (794–1185 C.E.) saw a proliferation of vernacular glossing (kunten) on Buddhist texts written in Chinese indicating how they were rendered into Japanese. Many of these sutras and commentaries have been fragmented or lost, but an extant Golden Light Sutra glossed at Saidaiji ca. 830 C.E. provides a clear example of how the shifting narrative perspectives of the sutra were presented in Japanese. This paper examines the transitivity, lexical aspect, and narrative function of every finite predicate outside of quotations governed by the Early Middle Japanese tense, aspect, and modality auxiliaries -ki, -keri, -nu, -tsu, -ari, and -tari throughout the sutra. By utilizing quantitative data and qualitative analyses, it presents conclusive evidence on the relationship between predicate morphology and narrative structure in one of the earliest Buddhist kundokubun narratives.