ABSTRACT
For nearly two millennia calligraphers in Japan have honed their brushwriting skills through copying Chinese models. Already by the Nara period (710-784), the emerging Japanese aristocracy and Buddhist clergy were sponsoring the transcription of religious texts and governmental documents on an impressive scale. To better understand the early transfer of scribal practices from the Continent to Japanese court circles we must therefore familiarize ourselves with the models of Chinese handwriting most prevalent in each era and with the means used to reproduce and disseminate them. Whether for religious or secular purposes, brush-writing styles evolved within aesthetic systems that prioritized certain models over others and in environments – scriptoria or literary salons – that encouraged peer evaluation of a person’s mastery of those models. We may also note that in ancient East Asian capitals, calligraphy came to be recognized along with poetry composition and music as one of the ‘performance arts’ highly esteemed by elite society.
