"A significant contribution to our ongoing reevaluation of Heian literature and society. . . . a most informative and enjoyable book."
--Robert E. Morrell in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

"[A] superb new translation and study . . . that also deepens our understanding of the reading strategies involved in approaching a body of literature of this kind. Kamens's Hosshin wakashû is thus by all counts a splendid contribution to both literary and religious scholarship."
--H. Mack Horton in the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

"This is an exquisite book, rich in insight and founded on good material. In an elegant way it spins an expanding web of interpretation wherein the poems lie like jewels."
--Sonja Arntzen in Monumenta Nipponica

"This slim volume . . . raises an impressive number of thought-provoking questions and issues relating to poetry, religion, and the status of women in the mid-Heian period."
--Joshua S. Mostow in The Journal of Asian Studies

"As good a book on Buddhist literature as I can recall reading."
--Marian Ury, University of California-Davis

"A penetrating new book. A sensitive translation and elegant analysis of Senshi's fifty-five-poem cycle."
--Barbara Ruch, Columbia University

"The Hosshin wakashû is a unique poetry collection that offers a great deal to both scholars of Japanese Buddhism and waka specialists. It is another piece of the mid-Heian puzzle."
--Robert N. Huey, University of Hawaii

This is a study of a unique body of poems composed by Senshi, "The Great Kamo Priestess," a distinguished figure of the mid-Heian period. In the middle of her extraordinarily long services as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine, Senshi (964-1035) wrote Hosshin wakashû, a cycle of Japanese poems paired with and responding to quotations from selected Buddhist scriptures.