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法華開示抄

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Text ID
KR6d0045
Date
1190–1213
Dynasty
日本

Fǎhuá kāishìchāo 法華開示抄

Excerpts on the Opening and Showing of the Lotus (J. Hokke kaiji shō) by 貞慶 (Zhēnqìng / Jōkei, 撰)

About the work

A substantial twenty-eight-fascicle Japanese Hossō-school commentarial compilation on Kumārajīva’s Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng 妙法蓮華經 (KR6d0001, T262) by the late-Heian / early-Kamakura Hossō master 貞慶 Jōkei (Gedatsu Shōnin 解脫上人, 1155–1213). The work is preserved in the Taishō at T56n2195 and is one of the most extensive single Japanese Lotus commentaries in the canon. The title — kāishì 開示 (“opening and showing”) — is taken from the canonical Lotus formula kāishì wùrù 開示悟入 (chapter 2: “the Buddhas have come into the world for one great purpose: to open / show / awaken / cause-to-enter sentient beings to the Buddha-knowledge-and-vision”); the chāo 抄 (“excerpts”) indicates the work’s character as an excerpting-and-commentarial chāo-genre text rather than a continuous kēpàn 科判 commentary.

Prefaces

The Taishō recension carries Jōkei’s autograph framing-statement at the head of fascicle 1, identifying the work’s program: to gather (chāo) and explicate (shì 釋) the doctrinally significant passages of the Lotus as they bear on the central Hossō Yogācāra doctrinal questions — the trayāṇa / yīshèng 一乘 question (whether the Lotus’s ekayāna doctrine implies that all sentient beings, including the icchantika, ultimately attain Buddhahood), the seed-nature (zhǒngxìng 種性, gotra) question, and the question of the relation of the Lotus to the standard Yogācāra scriptural corpus.

Abstract

The Hokke kaiji shō is the principal Japanese Hossō contribution to the Lotus commentarial tradition and presents Jōkei’s distinctive Hossō reading of the Lotus ekayāna doctrine. Where the Tiāntái 天台 tradition (and after it the medieval Japanese Tendai 天台 and Nichiren-school traditions) reads the Lotus’s ekayāna as positively asserting that all sentient beings attain Buddhahood — including those of the supposedly definitively-fallen icchantika class — the YogācāraHossō tradition has historically taken a more cautious position, holding that the ekayāna is a soteriological-rhetorical device (upāya / 方便) intended to encourage practitioners rather than a literal metaphysical-doctrinal claim about all beings.

Jōkei’s Kaiji shō develops this Hossō reading at length, drawing on the Tang-Chinese Faxiang Lotus commentaries — principally Kuiji’s 窺基 (632–682) Fǎhuá xuánzàn 法華玄贊 (KR6d0030, T1723) and Huizhao’s 慧沼 Fǎhuá xuánzàn yìjué 法華玄贊義決 (KR6d0031, T1724) — which are the foundational Yogācāra-tradition Lotus commentaries in the East Asian canon. Jōkei integrates these Tang-Faxiang positions with the late-Heian-Japanese Hossō scholastic tradition of Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 in which he was trained.

The work is doctrinally important within the early-Kamakura Buddhist context for its role in the Hossō response to the Tendai-school ekayāna doctrine that was being mobilised in the contemporary radical-reform Buddhist movements (Nichiren’s Lotus-fundamentalism, the Pure Land movement’s universalist claims of all-beings-attain-Pure-Land, etc.). Jōkei’s Kaiji shō is the principal Hossō scholarly response to this Tendai-Lotus-universalism and represents the conservative-reformist Hossō position within the early-Kamakura sectarian landscape.

The dating of the work is conventionally placed in Jōkei’s mature late-Heian and Kamakura period (broadly 1190–1213), the period of his Kasagi-dera retreat and his polemical-doctrinal engagement with the rising radical-reform Buddhist movements. The work was widely transmitted within the Japanese Hossō scholarly tradition at Kōfuku-ji and its branch temples and remained a standard reference for Hossō Lotus interpretation into the Tokugawa period.

Translations and research

  • Ford, James L. Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. — The principal Western-language monograph on Jōkei; includes treatment of his Lotus exegesis.
  • Morrell, Robert E. Early Kamakura Buddhism: A Minority Report. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1987. — Includes English translations of several Jōkei works.
  • Yasutomi Shinya 安富信哉. Jōkei no kenkyū 貞慶の研究. Tokyo: Daitō Shuppansha, 1999. — Standard Japanese-language scholarly study.
  • Stone, Jacqueline I. Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. — Treats the early-Kamakura Lotus interpretive landscape, including the Hossō response to Tendai-school universalism.

Other points of interest

The Hokke kaiji shō’s 28-fascicle extent makes it one of the largest single-author Japanese Buddhist commentarial works of the early-Kamakura period and a major scholarly product of the Kōfuku-ji Hossō tradition’s late-Heian intellectual flowering. Together with Jōkei’s Yuima-kyō shogishō 維摩經疏義抄 (commentary on the Vimalakīrti), his Shin-yō shō 心要鈔 (Yogācāra doctrinal manual), and his polemical Kōfuku-ji sōjō of 1205, the Kaiji shō represents the apex of late-Heian / early-Kamakura Hossō scholarship.

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