Bōrě xīnjīng yīguàn shū 般若心經一貫疏
“Single-Thread” Subcommentary on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra by 益證 (疏, courtesy name Zìxīn 自新)
About the work
A one-fascicle Heart Sūtra commentary by 益證 Yìzhèng Zìxīn (DILA A000943, floruit mid-seventeenth century) of Bǎohuá-shān Hùguó Shènghuà Lóngchāng-sì in Nánjīng, composed in autumn 1648 at Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 in Nagasaki, Japan. Preserved in the Wàn xù-zàng / Manji zoku-zō as X557. The signature reads 「明南都勅建寶華山護國聖化隆昌寺末法比丘益證自新謹識」 — “Respectfully recorded by the bhikkhu of the latter dharma Yìzhèng Zìxīn of Imperially-Established Bǎohuá Mountain Hùguó Shènghuà Lóngchāng-sì in the Southern Capital of the Míng”.
The genre marker — yī-guàn “single-thread” — alludes to Lúnyǔ 4.15 (孔子 yǐ yī yǐ guàn zhī — “I thread it with one [thing]”), the Confucian topos for unifying-all-things-by-a-single-thread; Yìzhèng’s title-allusion frames his Heart Sūtra commentary as a “single-thread” unification of the sūtra’s diverse formulations. One fascicle.
Prefaces
The work opens with Yìzhèng’s own self-preface (No. 557-A), one of the more vivid and self-aware late-Míng commentary prefaces:
- “Aiya — mind! It is the seed of becoming Buddha and the root-stalk of producing karma. When opened, the ten thousand images densely arrayed; when grasped, not a single dust-mote stands. We labour our Śākyamuni Old-Fellow, who for forty-nine years pointed-East-and-talked-West and yet never said a single word — soundless, scentless, neither form nor emptiness. When 菩提達摩 Bodhidharma was questioned, [the answer was] ‘Don’t know!’ (不識), and he sat facing the wall as if foolish. The successive patriarchs put-out-and-pulled-back-the-head, said true and said false — but ultimately dragon-head-and-snake-tail, doubting to death so many heroes and burying many bright spirits. Suddenly bumping into [it], the eyes are still horizontal and the nose still straight.”
- “At that moment in the Prajñā Assembly, that yellow-faced old fellow [the Buddha] was made to talk into seven-blossoms-and-eight-cracks, saying what about the five aggregates, six entrances, twelve sense-fields, eighteen elements — the entanglement-vines that cannot be cut off — and yet there are six hundred fascicles. From the side appeared an unjust-spirited person called Avalokiteśvara, who said to Śāriputra a few ‘no’ characters; happily this swept away all traces. Transmitted to Middle Florescence (China), there is therefore the Heart Sūtra remaining in the world. Our Tài-zǔ Gāo Huángdì [= Hóngwǔ, 朱元璋] composed an imperial preface for it.”
- “Now because Master 存空 Cúnkōng asked, I cannot avoid making a small detour to thread out a structural-outline and notes for him, named the ‘Single-Thread Subcommentary’. I further trouble Master Cún to dot in the Wō (Japanese) characters, to be carved-and-printed and circulated in this country, to instruct beginning students. Should those of bright eyes notice it, no harm in laughing — Yi! But indeed do not let it go past, only then does the writing arrive. Hence this preface.”
- Dated and signed: 「正保戊子之秋書於長崎興福左寮客寓 ／ 明南都勅建寶華山護國聖化隆昌寺末法比丘益證自新謹識」 — “Written in autumn of Shōhō wù-zǐ (= 1648) at the West Wing guest-residence of Kōfuku-ji in Nagasaki / Respectfully recorded by Bhikkhu of the Latter Dharma Yìzhèng Zìxīn of Imperially-Established Bǎohuá Mountain Hùguó Shènghuà Lóngchāng-sì in the Southern Capital of the Míng.”
This is one of the most personally-revealing late-Míng Buddhist commentary prefaces. The mood is poignant: Yìzhèng was at Nagasaki as a refugee-monk in 1648 — four years after the fall of Beijing to the Qīng (1644), with the Southern Míng court under Lóngwǔ collapsing and the new Yǒnglì court only just established. His self-designation as mòfǎ bǐqiū “bhikkhu of the latter dharma” reflects the apocalyptic late-Míng / early-Qīng sense that Buddhism had entered its final degenerate age. The reference to the Hóngwǔ emperor’s Yùzhì xīnjīng xù (Imperial Preface to the Heart Sūtra, cf. KR6c0141) is a poignant invocation of Míng dynastic legitimacy at the moment of the dynasty’s loss; Yìzhèng’s commentary is in some sense a continuation of the Hóngwǔ-era state-Buddhist project from the diasporic position of a refugee monk in Nagasaki.
The body of the commentary then proceeds line-by-line through the Heart Sūtra in clear Chan-style exposition with strong Línjì rhetorical influence (the zhuāng-zhe 撞著 [“bumping into it”] and qī-huā bā-liè [“seven-blossoms-eight-cracks”] idioms in the preface are characteristic).
Abstract
X557 is the only Heart Sūtra commentary in the canon known to have been composed in Nagasaki, and the only one composed by a Chinese refugee-monk in Tokugawa Japan during the Míng-Qīng transition. Its scholarly value lies in: (i) documenting the Sino-Japanese monastic exchange at Nagasaki’s Kōfuku-ji during the immediate prelude to the 隱元隆琦 Yǐnyuán Lóngqí emigration of 1654 that founded the Japanese Ōbaku school; (ii) preserving the voice of a refugee-monk in a moment of Chinese Buddhist crisis; and (iii) showing the practical Chinese-Japanese bilingual textual production (Yìzhèng wrote, the Japanese host Cúnkōng kunten-annotated) that characterised pre-Ōbaku Sino-Japanese Buddhist contact.
The Cúnkōng fǎzhǔ 存空 mentioned as the work’s instigator was almost certainly the contemporary Japanese abbot of Nagasaki Kōfuku-ji; the temple, founded c. 1620 by Chinese refugees, was the principal Sino-Japanese Buddhist contact point during the Míng-Qīng transition. The 1648 dating places the work six years before Yǐnyuán’s 1654 arrival in Nagasaki, in the immediate Yǐnyuán-precursor period.
Composition date: autumn 1648 (Shōhō 5 = Shùnzhì 5), per the dated self-preface. Both notBefore and notAfter are 1648.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located of X557 specifically.
- For the Sino-Japanese monastic exchange at Nagasaki and the Ōbaku-precursor period, Helen J. Baroni, Obaku Zen: The Emergence of the Third Sect of Zen in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2000) — fundamental.
- Jiang Wu, Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia (Oxford: OUP, 2015) — recent monograph on the Yǐnyuán emigration; addresses the immediate pre-Yǐnyuán Nagasaki context that includes Yìzhèng.
- Modern Japanese-language scholarship on Nagasaki Kōfuku-ji and the Tang-temple (唐寺) culture of Tokugawa-era Nagasaki.
Other points of interest
The reference to the Hóngwǔ emperor’s Yùzhì xīnjīng xù in the preface is one of the more historically resonant moments in the late-Míng commentarial tradition: by invoking the founder of the Míng dynasty’s imperial preface from the diasporic position of refugee-monk in Tokugawa Nagasaki four years after the dynasty’s fall, Yìzhèng implicitly registers his commentary as a continuation of Míng dynastic Buddhist legitimacy from beyond the dynasty’s geographical and political end.
The Sino-Japanese bilingual production process documented in the preface — Chinese composition, Japanese kunten annotation — was the standard Sino-Japanese Buddhist textual production model that would be elaborated at full scale by the Yǐnyuán-led Ōbaku school after 1654, and is here visible in its early-stage form.