Fǎhuá lüèchāo 法華略抄
Brief Excerpts on the Lotus Sūtra (J. Hokke ryakushō) by 明一 (Míngyī / Myōichi, 撰)
About the work
A single-juan abridged commentary-anthology on Kumārajīva’s Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng 妙法蓮華經 (KR6d0001, T262), composed by the Nara-period Hossō 法相 monk 明一 Myōichi (conventionally 728–798) of Daian-ji 大安寺. The work is preserved in the Taishō at T56n2188 as part of the Japanese Buddhist commentarial corpus. As its title — lüèchāo 略抄 (“brief excerpts”) — suggests, the work is a selective gloss rather than a comprehensive kēpàn 科判 commentary: it extracts and explicates particularly difficult passages and key doctrinal points across the Lotus chapters rather than proceeding chapter-by-chapter through the entire text.
Prefaces
The Taishō recension carries no separate preface and opens directly with the gloss-by-gloss exegesis. A short head-note in the canonical recension identifies the work as composed at Daian-ji and gives the author as bǐqiū Míngyī 比丘明一 (“the bhikṣu Myōichi”).
Abstract
The Hokke ryakushō represents one of the earliest preserved Japanese Buddhist exegetical works on the Lotus, dating from the late-Nara consolidation of the Hossō (East Asian Yogācāra) tradition at Daian-ji and Tōdai-ji. Its doctrinal lineage is the Hossō / Faxiang 法相 reading of the Lotus — the Yogācāra-tradition reading that emphasises the trayāṇa / yīshèng 一乘 hermeneutic with particular attention to the question of whether all sentient beings (including the icchantika 一闡提) ultimately attain Buddhahood. This is in contrast to the Tiāntái 天台 reading inaugurated by Zhìyǐ 智顗 and to the Sānlùn 三論 reading of the Hokke gisho (KR6d0033, T2187).
The Ryakushō is doctrinally important as one of the few Lotus commentaries within the Hossō tradition that has been preserved (the principal Tang Chinese Faxiang Lotus commentary, by Kuiji 窺基, is the Fǎhuá xuánzàn 法華玄贊 KR6d0030, T1723). Myōichi’s text glosses key passages from the fāngbiàn pǐn 方便品 (chapter 2) — the principal locus of the ekayāna doctrine — through the zhǔlèi pǐn 囑累品 (chapter 22, the entrustment chapter) and provides Hossō-style doctrinal definitions of the Lotus’s principal technical terms.
The dating of the work is uncertain. The traditional Nara attribution to Myōichi (728–798) places it in the second half of the eighth century. Some modern scholarship has questioned the attribution; Mochizuki’s Bukkyō Daijiten notes that the work is sometimes assigned to a different Heian-era monk of the same name, and that the question is unresolved. The catalog meta gives the bare attribution to 明一 without dates, consistent with this uncertainty.
Translations and research
- Saichō and the Daian-ji Hossō tradition are surveyed in: Groner, Paul. Saichō: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984; reprinted 2000.
- Bussho kaisetsu daijiten 佛書解説大辭典, ed. Mochizuki Shinkō 望月信亨. Tokyo: Daitō Shuppansha, 1933–1936. — Standard Japanese-language bibliographic dictionary; contains the principal scholarly entry for the Hokke ryakushō and the discussion of the Myōichi attribution.
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
Links
- CBETA online: https://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/zh/T2188
- Kanseki DB