Zhōngguān lùn èrshíqī pǐn biéshì 中觀論二十七品別釋
Separate Exegesis of the Twenty-Seven Chapters of the Madhyamaka Treatise by 快憲 (Kaiken, 撰)
About the work
A late-Muromachi Japanese Sanron 三論 lecture-record on the twenty-seven chapters (pǐn 品) of Nāgārjuna’s Zhōng lùn 中論 (T30n1564 = KR6m0001). Each chapter is treated under the standard “three gates” (三門 sānmén) of Sanron-school hermeneutics — láiyì 來意 (why the chapter follows where it does in the sequence), tímù 題目 (analysis of the chapter title), and rùwén pànshì 入文判釋 (clause-by-clause structural division of the verses) — drawing throughout on 吉藏 Jízàng’s Zhōngguān lùn shū 中觀論疏 (T42n1824 = KR6m0006) as the basic exegetical scaffolding. The text concludes with two long colophons that securely date both the original kōshaku lecture-notes (Daiei 7 / 1527) and the clean-copy redaction (Tenbun 6 / 1537), and supplies one of the more detailed self-attestations of Tōdaiji Sanron scholastic life in the early sixteenth century.
Structural Division
CANWWW lists this text without a sub-toc block. Related text per CANWWW: KR6m0001 Zhōng lùn 中論 (T30n1564).
The internal sequence follows the 27 pǐn of the Zhōng lùn exactly: Guān yīnyuán 觀因縁, Guān qùlái 觀去來, Guān liùqíng 觀六情, Guān wǔyīn 觀五陰, Guān liùzhǒng 觀六種, Guān rǎnrǎnzhě 觀染染者, Guān sānxiàng 觀三相, Guān zuòzuòzhě 觀作作者, Guān běnzhù 觀本住, Guān ránkěrán 觀燃可燃, Guān běnjì 觀本際, Guān kǔ 觀苦, Guān xíng 觀行, Guān hé 觀合, Guān yǒuwú 觀有無, Guān fújiě 觀縛解, Guān yè 觀業, Guān fǎ 觀法, Guān shí 觀時, Guān yīnguǒ 觀因果, Guān chénghuài 觀成壞, Guān rúlái 觀如來, Guān diāndào 觀顛倒, Guān sìdì 觀四諦, Guān nièpán 觀涅槃, Guān shí’èryīnyuán 觀十二因緣, Guān xiéjiàn 觀邪見.
Abstract
The work is a single-fascicle classroom-style biéshì 別釋 (“separate / chapter-by-chapter exegesis”) produced by the Tōdaiji 東大寺 Sanron 三論 scholar 快憲 Kaiken. Two interlocking colophons preserved at the close of T65n2256 establish the work’s dates and circumstances with unusual precision:
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The first colophon (T65, 0257a) is dated Daiei 7 / cyclical dīnghài 丁亥 / 11.11 — i.e. 11 November 1527. Kaiken records that he began the lecture-notes in the second month of that year (“從去二月頃始記之”) and completed them on the night of 11.11 (“今月今日功訖”). He gives his age as 47 (“快憲四十七歳”), establishing a birth year of c. 1480/1481. The colophon dedicates the merit to the seventh memorial year (第七年忌) of his deceased mother 妙祐 Myōyū, identifying her death year as c. 1521 (Daiei 1). His title at the time was gikō 擬講 (“lecture-candidate”) of the Sanron Engshū Myō-mon 三論圓宗妙門, a Tōdaiji Sanron academic rank.
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The second colophon (T65, 0257a–b) is dated Tenbun 6 / cyclical dīngyǒu 丁酉 / 6.8 = 8 June 1537, when Kaiken finally executed the clean copy (“清書”) at the Hachiman shrine 八幡宮 xīnzàowū 新造屋, with subsequent kiritē 切點 marks added on 6.14 and red marks on 6.27 at Konzōin 金藏院. Kaiken was now 57. He laments having “no one to whom to transmit the Dharma” (“可傳法器無之”), and dedicates the work to the spiritual welfare of Tōdaiji’s tutelary deities, Hachiman of Tōdaiji and Iwashimizu, Nikkō-Futarayama, and Kiyotaki, together with the spirit of 聖武皇帝 Emperor Shōmu (the founder of Tōdaiji), confirming the Tōdaiji setting.
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A final third colophon (T65, 0257b) by the Edo-period copyist 法印公祥 Hōin Kōshō, aged 52 in his 41st year of monastic ordination, is dated Meiwa 6 / 1.15 = 22 February 1769. Kōshō notes that his exemplar (Kaiken’s autograph) lacked the first folio (“原本闕初葉故”), which he reconstructed from “the general meaning of the Sanron synoptic exegesis” (以三論總釋之大意補其闕) and from worm-eaten passages compared against Jízàng’s běnshū 本疏 (T1824 = KR6m0006).
Doctrinally the text is a direct paraphrase-cum-summary of Jízàng’s monumental Zhōngguān lùn shū (T1824), repeatedly cited as 本疏 (“the source commentary”); Kaiken makes no original doctrinal moves but provides a uniquely clear pedagogical condensation of Jízàng’s sānmén analysis for each chapter, suited to the early-modern Tōdaiji classroom. Internal cross-references to “fascicle 4 běn” (疏四本), “fascicle 5 mò” (疏五末) of T1824 are systematic and tightly indexed.
The composition date 1527 is securely fixed by the colophon and need not be inferred. The work is a Muromachi-era continuation of the Sanronshū 三論宗 scholastic tradition that flourished at Tōdaiji from the time of 安澄 Anchō (763–814) through 凝然 Gyōnen (1240–1321) and into the late medieval period, a tradition that by the sixteenth century survived primarily as an academic specialism within Tōdaiji rather than as a living sectarian institution.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located in Western languages. Modern Japanese reference works (e.g. Bukkyō daijiten 佛教大辭典, Sanron-shū daijiten) catalogue the text under T2256 with bibliographic notes only. The 1527/1537 colophons have been quoted in passing in surveys of late-medieval Tōdaiji scholasticism (e.g. Hirai Shun’ei 平井俊榮, Sanron-kyōgaku no kenkyū 三論教學の研究, 1990) but no monograph-level treatment is known.
Other points of interest
The colophons preserve, with rare precision, a self-portrait of the Tōdaiji gikō lecture-candidate as a personal-memorial scholar: Kaiken’s lectures were undertaken explicitly for the merit of his deceased mother in the seventh memorial year, and the clean copy ten years later was dedicated to Emperor Shōmu and the tutelary kami of Tōdaiji. The work is therefore important not only as a witness to the survival of Jízàng’s Sanron exegesis in early-modern Japan but as social evidence for how Sanron classroom labour was integrated into Tōdaiji’s memorial-rite economy.