Āpídámó Jùshě Lùn Jīgǔ 阿毘達磨倶舍論稽古
Investigating Antiquity on the Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya by 法幢 (撰)
About the work
The Āpídámó Jùshě Lùn Jīgǔ 阿毘達磨倶舍論稽古 (Jp. Abidatsuma Kusharon keiko; CBETA T64n2252) is a two-fascicle Japanese Edo-period (江戶時代) philological-critical sub-treatise on Xuánzàng’s translation of the Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya (KR6l0023, T1558), composed in 1763 by the young Shingon-trained scholar-monk Hōdō 法幢 (法幢, b. 1740). Although short, the work is the most original and the most distinctively philological-critical of the Edo Kusha-gaku 倶舎學 commentaries. Its method is to ignore the traditional Tang sub-commentaries entirely and instead to identify the canonical locus classicus of every scriptural citation in the Kośa’s prose — overwhelmingly in the Madhyama- and Saṃyukta-Āgamas — and to evaluate the parent-text and its predecessors on philological evidence drawn from the Āgamas, the four-Vinayas, the Mahāvibhāṣā and the Nyāyānusāra (KR6l0031).
Prefaces
The work carries two paratexts.
(i) A preface by Kaiben 快辨 (快辨) of the Kongōsanmai-in 金剛三昧院 on Kōyasan, dated Hōreki 13 (寶曆十三年, 1763), 9th month. Kaiben — Hōdō’s host at the Kongōsanmai-in’s student-monks’ hall — reports that Hōdō was a Mino-province (Nō-shū 濃州) man, surname Sugawara 菅原, who had taken the tonsure as a child, had studied for some ten years in Kyoto, and had now come to Kōyasan; that he had read the Nyāyānusāra, the Mahāvibhāṣā and the Jñānaprasthāna with its six “feet,” then moved on to the Tripiṭaka proper — the four Āgamas — and had achieved a critical insight no previous master since Puguang (普光) had managed.
(ii) Hōdō’s own author-preface in eight numbered points (題言八則): (1) the long Edo dependence on Yuanhui 圓暉’s Sòng-shū (KR6l0036) has produced commentators who are “merely the slaves of Puguang and Fabao”; (2) the Āgamas are organized by school — the Madhyama and Saṃyukta belong to the Sarvāstivāda bhāṇaka, the Ekottara to the Mahāsāṅghika, the Dīrgha to the Mahīśāsaka — and any quotation must be referred to the proper school’s recension; (3) the surviving Chinese small-vehicle sūtra corpus is textually corrupt, and emendation against parallels is required; (4) “this work covers sūtra and vinaya only — Abhidharma citations have to wait for a separate treatise”; (5) “the Kośa has two translations [Chen and Tang] — neither is necessarily superior; later Chinese authors have followed Xuanzang’s school’s polemic in dismissing Paramārtha’s old translation, but Paramārtha must be read”; (6) “of the new-translation commentaries, only Puguang’s and Fabao’s survive in any completeness — Yuanhui is a minor figure; I single out Puguang because his commentary set the pattern and because it conceals the Xuanzang school’s polemical bias”; (7) “Mahāyāna citations are bracketed as outside this work’s scope — for that one should consult Yuanxin’s 對倶舍 [= Yuánxìn 源信 (源信)‘s Sòngshū zhèngwén KR6l0043], though even that work is imperfect”; (8) “duplicate citations are given only once.”
The colophon at the close of fascicle 2 (T64 p. 466c) is precisely datable: “Kōwa Hōreki guǐwèi (1763), autumn, 9th month — Hōdō of Mino, age 24, wrote this at the Kongōsanmai Henjō Mitsu-in lecture-hall of the Kongōbu-ji on Kōyasan.” The block-print edition is dated Meiwa 6 (明和六己丑年, 1769), 11th month.
Abstract
Hōdō (b. 1740, suì 24 in 1763 = birth-year 1740) was the most precocious Japanese Buddhist philologist of his generation. His self-designation 學一切乘沙門 (“the śramaṇa who studies all vehicles”) signals his deliberate withdrawal from sectarian dogmatics. The two fascicles cover the entire Kośa in order, taking each scriptural quotation in turn and identifying its Āgama or Vinaya original. Hōdō’s identification of Āgama recensions to school of recitation (Saṃyukta and Madhyama to Sarvāstivāda, Ekottara to Mahāsāṅghika, Dīrgha to Mahīśāsaka) anticipates the central nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Buddhological insight by more than a century, and his explicit attack on the Kuījī 窺基 (窺基)-derived practice of treating all four Āgamas as Mahāsāṅghika is correct.
The work is also notable for its polemical attack on the Tang Xuanzang school. Hōdō observes — accurately — that the standard charge made by Puguang’s school against the older Paramārtha translation was driven by school-loyalty rather than philological substance, and notes that Xuanzang himself had advocated (unsuccessfully) for the suppression of pre-Tang sūtra translations. Hōdō reads this as evidence of bad faith and accordingly refuses to grant the Tang school’s commentaries automatic authority. His own working principle is that the Kośa must be read against its Mahāvibhāṣā substrate, against the Āgamas, and only then against the Tang sub-commentaries — a methodological priority that became standard only with European philological Buddhology in the late nineteenth century.
Hōdō was, on the evidence of his colophon and Kaiben’s preface, in his early twenties when the work was composed, residing in the Kongōsanmai Henjō Mitsu-in (an annexe of the great Kongōbu-ji on Kōyasan). The death date is unknown — he must have been alive in late 1769 (publication date) but no later attestation survives. He is not, despite some online suggestions, the homonymous Higo Pure-Land Shinshū 法幢 of Kōkō-ji 光行寺 (purged for iyanjin in 1807): the present figure is a Kōyasan Shingon-trained polymath. The work appears to be his only surviving piece; an announced longer treatise Gǎiguān 改觀 (“Changing the View” — covering Abhidharma citations) is mentioned in the preface as “still in draft” and is not extant.
Translations and research
- Kimura Senshō 木村宣彰. Edo-jidai Kushagaku no kenkyū 江戸時代倶舎学の研究. Kyōto: Hōzōkan, 1992. Standard treatment of Edo Abhidharma scholarship.
- The work has not been translated into a Western language; it is, however, occasionally cited as the first Japanese Buddhist scholar to identify the Sarvāstivāda recension of Madhyama- and Saṃyukta-Āgamas — a finding rediscovered independently by Anesaki and the Marburg/Tübingen schools in the early twentieth century.
Other points of interest
The cross-reference at point (7) of Hōdō’s own preface — to Yuánxìn 源信’s Sòngshū zhèngwén (KR6l0043) as the only available work bridging Kuṣa-Abhidharma to the Mahāyāna — is itself the earliest Edo critical recognition of Genshin’s much-neglected Heian-period Kośa sub-commentary.