Ōmi no Mifune

was a Japanese scholar and writer of kanshi (poetry in Classical Chinese) and kanbun (prose in Classical Chinese), who lived in the Nara period of Japanese history.

Biography

Birth and ancestry Mifune was born in 722.

His father was , who was a son of , a son of Emperor Kōbun. He was originally an imperial prince, known as , but in the first month of 751 was made a commoner and given the surname Ōmi and the title Mahito.

Political career He served as , and .

Death He died in 785.

Literary career In 770 he composed the work , an account of the Chinese monk Jianzhen's work in Japan.

It has been theorized that he was the compiler of the oldest extant Japanese collection of kanshi, the Kaifūsō.

Some of his poetry was included in the kanshi anthology Keikokushū.

Scholarship Mifune is credited with determining the canonical Chinese style posthumous names of early emperors who did not have them before his time (they only had Japanese style posthumous names). Between 762 and 764 he set the names of Emperor Jinmu, Emperor Suizei, Emperor Annei and so on.

Based on his research into Buddhist scriptures, in 779 he declared the , a commentary on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna attributed to , to be a forgery.