Sānlùn xuányì chāo 三論玄義鈔
Notes-Extracts on the Three-Treatise Profundity-Treatise by 貞海 (Jōkai, 撰)
About the work
A three-fascicle Japanese sub-commentary on 吉藏 Jízàng’s 吉藏 Sānlùn xuányì 三論玄義 (T45n1852 = KR6m0026) by the lecturer-priest Jōkai 貞海 (Zhēnhǎi), styled in the colophon “Dúshī Zhēnhǎi héshàng 讀師貞海和尚” — “Lecturer-Master Jōkaioshō”. The title’s chāo 鈔 (“notes-extracts”) marks the genre as a classroom commonplace-book: each Jízàng phrase is extracted, glossed, and supplied with cross-references to the standard Sanron 三論 commentarial literature.
Structural Division
CANWWW lists this text without an internal sub-toc block. Related texts per CANWWW: KR6m0026 Sānlùn xuányì 三論玄義 (T45n1852); KR6m0030 Sānlùn xuányì yòuméng 三論玄義誘蒙 (T70n2302).
Abstract
The author Jōkai 貞海 is identified by DILA A000875 as a Japanese Sanron monk; no dates are securely recorded. The honorific title dúshī 讀師 (“lecturer”, lit. “reader of the canonical text”) was a specific Tōdaiji Sanron academic rank below yi-kō 已講 (post-lecturer), so Jōkai was a working classroom instructor at the time of composition. He is not the same individual as the homophonous Sanron painter-monk 珍海 Chinkai (DILA A000858, 1092–1152), though their names share the -海 element typical of the Tōdaiji Sanron lineage.
The work proceeds in classroom-paraphrase style. The opening of fascicle 1 (T70, 0499a) sets out the title-analysis (“三論玄義” = the principle, the implementation; the three + the profundity, the meaning with full lexicographical apparatus from the Lǎozǐ 老子 — xuán yǒu xuán zhòngmiào zhī mén 玄又玄衆妙之門 — and the Yìshū 義疏) and then begins working through Jízàng’s zǒng xù zōng yào 總序宗要 introduction. The exegesis is dense with internal citations to:
- the Sānlùn shū 三論疏 corpus (i.e. Jízàng’s commentaries on the three treatises);
- the Korean-Japanese transmission line through 安澄 Anchō (T2255 = KR6m0007);
- the Lùnjì yì 論迹義 of Jízàng’s Dàchéng xuánlùn 大乘玄論 (T1853 = KR6m0031);
- the Sānlùnzōng 三論宗 Xìnghuáng dàshī 興皇大師 (Xìnghuáng Fǎlǎng 興皇法朗, 507–581) tradition, recorded as the immediate predecessor of Jízàng.
The composition date is not securely fixed. The work is conventionally placed in the post-Kamakura phase of Japanese Sanron continuity (14th–17th century), but the prose register and the citation profile (including some commentarial sources first systematized in the Muromachi period) suggest a window c. 14th–17th century. The Taishō edition was prepared from late-Edo manuscript witnesses.
The text is signed “Dúshī Zhēnhǎi héshàng 讀師貞海和尚” on the front-matter of fascicle 1 (T70, 0499a). It bears no internal date. The work is preserved in Bukkyō zenshō 佛教全書 (Tōdaiji volumes) and was the standard auxiliary commentary on T1852 in the late-Edo Sanron-revival movement led by Shogyō.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The work is referenced in Hirai Shun’ei 平井俊榮, Sanron-kyōgaku no kenkyū 三論教學の研究 (1990) under Edo-period Sanron transmission but has not received monograph-level treatment. Its principal modern use is as a tertiary reference for Kamakura-Edo Sanron readings of Jízàng.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the rare dúshī-rank Sanron classroom productions to enter the modern canon. Its existence shows that mid-late-medieval Tōdaiji Sanron continued to mount classroom lectures on T1852 even after the school’s institutional decline; the work testifies to the continuity of Sanron textual culture in Japan as a scholarly specialism rather than a living sect.