The Japanese Hōjōki Transmission and Its Buddhist Apocalyptic Framing

Record summary

Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki describes disasters, displacement and impermanence through a compact Buddhist literary form. Although not apocryphal scripture, it is a useful comparison lead for religiously framed catastrophe narratives and later manuscript transmission. The text circulated in variant manuscript traditions, and its relationship to eyewitness experience, literary convention and retrospective editing requires care. Its opening disasters are often detached from their medieval genre and reused as quasi-documentary evidence, even though the work is structured as moral and contemplative prose.