SOURCE: Pollack, David. “Wakan and the Development of Renga Theory in the Late Fourteenth Century: Gidō Shūshin and Nijō Yoshimoto.” In The Fracture of Meaning: Japan's Synthesis of China from the Eighth through the Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 134-57. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Pollack explores Yoshimoto's involvement in promoting the use of Chinese elements in Japanese poetry.

The minor art of poetry isn't worth a copper— Best just to sit silently in Zen meditation: “Wild words and ornate speech” don't cease to violate Buddha's Law Just because he died two thousand years ago.(1) 

So Gidō Shūshin (1325-1388) wrote near the end of his life to the well-known renga theorist Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1388), suggesting, “humorously” as the title of the poem informs us, that in the two millennia that had elapsed since the death of the Buddha, poets were continuing to find...