Shí bùèr mén zhǐyào chāo 十不二門指要鈔
Pointing-the-Essentials Notes on the Ten Non-Dual Gates by 知禮 (Zhīlǐ / Sìmíng Zhīlǐ / Fǎzhì dàshī, 述)
About the work
A two-juan (上 / 下) Northern-Sòng commentary by Sìmíng Zhīlǐ 四明知禮 (960–1028) on Zhànrán’s Shí bùèr mén (KR6d0157, T1927). The work is the central polemical-doctrinal manifesto of the Sòng shānjiā 山家 Tiāntái lineage and one of the most influential single texts of Sòng Buddhist intellectual culture: it establishes the xìngjùè 性具惡 doctrine (buddha-nature inherently includes evil) as the orthodox Tiāntái position and provides the foundational textual apparatus for the shānjiā / shānwài 山家山外 controversy that dominated Sòng Tiāntái scholastic activity.
Prefaces
The text opens with the Zhǐyào chāo xù 指要鈔序 by Zūnshì 遵式 (遵式, 964–1032), Zhīlǐ’s contemporary and the Tiāntái-Pure Land synthetic master at Hángzhōu Tiānzhúsì. Zūnshì’s preface — one of the most important pre-modern Sòng Buddhist documents — frames the Zhǐyào chāo’s significance: “The great teaching’s flourishing-and-deviating depends on the man. The various patriarchs already gone, the profound transformation almost extinguished. The time cannot be left to long-substituted. Necessarily, [there] must be world-spaced [exemplars] who emerge. The Sìmíng [master Zhīlǐ] transmitted-the-teaching and led…”
Abstract
Zhīlǐ’s Zhǐyào chāo is the most institutionally significant single text of Sòng Tiāntái scholastic culture. Its principal doctrinal claims include: (1) the strict identity of xìng 性 (nature) and xíng 行 (cultivation), against the shānwài tradition’s tendency to separate them; (2) the xìngjùè 性具惡 doctrine that buddha-nature inherently includes the capacity for evil as well as for good; (3) the strict identity of the meditator’s deluded mind (wàngxīn 妄心) with the buddha-nature, against the shānwài tradition’s tendency to dissolve the deluded mind into the true mind; and (4) the strict identity of the yuánjiào 圓教 (perfect teaching) with all other doctrinal teachings.
These doctrinal commitments — the foundational shānjiā positions — became the orthodox Sòng Tiāntái scholastic apparatus and informed all subsequent Tiāntái productive activity through the medieval period. The Zhǐyào chāo is consequently the central polemical-doctrinal manifesto of the Sòng Tiāntái revival.
The composition is bracketed within Zhīlǐ’s mature productive period at the Yánqìngsì 延慶寺 in Sìmíng, c. 996–1028.
Translations and research
- Getz, Daniel A. “T’ien-t’ai Pure Land Societies and the Creation of the Pure Land Patriarchate.” In Buddhism in the Sung, eds. Peter N. Gregory and Daniel A. Getz, 477–523. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999.
- Andō Toshio 安藤俊雄. Tendaigaku — kompon shisō to sono tenkai. Kyoto: Heirakuji Shoten, 1968.
- Brose, Benjamin. Patrons and Patriarchs: Regional Rulers and Chan Monks during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.
- Ziporyn, Brook. Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000. (Standard study of the xìng-è doctrine in Tiāntái Buddhism, with detailed treatment of Zhīlǐ.)
- Penkower, Linda L. “Making and Remaking Tradition: Chan-jan’s Strategies toward a T’ang T’ien-t’ai Agenda.” In Tendai Daishi kenkyū 天台大師研究, 1338–1289. Tokyo: Tendai gakkai, 1997.
- Hibi Senshō 日比宣正. Tōdai Tendaigaku kenkyū 唐代天台学研究. Tokyo: Sankibō, 1975.
Other points of interest
The Zhǐyào chāo is one of the few single texts of pre-modern Chinese Buddhist intellectual culture that achieved comparable status to the foundational treatises of Zhìyǐ and Zhànrán: its institutional centrality in the Sòng Tiāntái scholastic apparatus, its polemical force against the shānwài tradition, and its enduring doctrinal influence through the medieval and early-modern periods together establish it as one of the principal documents of pre-modern East-Asian Mahāyāna intellectual history.