Flavors of Monks’ Poetry: On a Witty Disparagement and Its Influences

This essay focuses on a humorous metaphor that appears prominently in critiques of Buddhist monks’ poetry, from the eleventh century onward. Alluding to the monastic vegetarian diet, critics leveled that monks’ poetry had “a whiff of vegetables” (cai qi 菜氣), “the flavor of cabbage and bamboo shoo…