, was a

Japanese Buddhist Buddhism has been practiced in Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while exten ...

priest and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

. Little is known of his life except that his

secular name A legal name is the name that identifies a person for legal, administrative and other official purposes. A person's legal birth name generally is the name of the person that was given for the purpose of Civil registry, registration of the birth an ...

was Kasa no Ason Maro. While serving at a temple in the north of

Kyūshū is the third-largest island of Japan's five main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands ( i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as , and . The historical regional name referred to Kyushu and its surround ...

, he was a member of

Ōtomo no Tabito was a Japanese military leader and poet, best known as the father of Ōtomo no Yakamochi, who contributed to the compilation the ''Man'yōshū'' alongside his father. In the year 720, the Hayato Rebellion erupted in Kyushu. Otomo was ordered ...

's literary coterie. His few surviving pieces are collected in the ''

Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...

''.

References

* Steven D. Carter, ''Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology'', Stanford U. 1993
''Our life in this world''
by Sami Mansei
Man'yoshu Book 3 poem 351
Japanese male poets Japanese Buddhist clergy 8th-century clergy 8th-century Japanese poets {{japan-poet-stub