Yúqié lùn wèndá 瑜伽論問答
Questions and Answers on the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra by 増賀 (Zōga, 造)
About the work
A seven-fascicle Heian-period Tendai-Hossō scholastic mondō 問答 (question-and-answer) treatise on selected fascicles of the Yúqié shī dì lùn (KR6n0001, T30n1579), composed by 増賀 of Tōnomine 多武峯 in Tengen 4 / 981. Preserved as T2259 (Taishō vol. 65). The body opens with the colophon “多武峯増賀聖造 / 伽第十三 遁倫記第五。第百一條。第四遍造 / 天元四年十一月” — the explicit dating of the fourth recension to the eleventh month of Tengen 4 is one of the earliest precisely datable Hossō study-records preserved in the Taishō. The work systematically pairs problematic lemmas drawn from juǎn 13–28 of the Yúqié with both KR6n0007 Yúqié lùn jì (Dōrin’s commentary, T1828) and Kuījī’s KR6n0008 Yúqié shī dì lùn lüèzuǎn (T1829) commentaries, presenting Zōga’s own dōri 道理 (reasoning) on each disputed point.
Structural Division
CANWWW (T65N2259) lists KR6n0001 Yúqié shī dì lùn 瑜伽師地論 (T30n1579) as the parent text. The seven kan gather mondō on fascicles 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, and 28 of the master text — i.e. the Wǔshí dì 五識地, Yìdì 意地, Yǒuxúnyǒucì 有尋有伺 ground, and the Sānmóhéduōdì 三摩呬多地 sections of the Běndì fēn 本地分.
Abstract
The Yogaron mondō is one of the earliest extant Japanese-composed Yogācāra study-records and the most substantial Hossō-oriented work surviving from a Tendai author. 増賀 (917–1003) was a senior disciple of Ryōgen 良源 (912–985) on Mt Hiei who withdrew to Tōnomine in middle age and became a famous recluse. The text’s heavy use of the Cí’ēn-school commentaries — Dōrin’s KR6n0007 Yogaron-ki (cited as 遁倫記) and Kuījī’s KR6n0008 ryakuzan — testifies to the porous boundary between Tendai and Hossō scholasticism in the late-tenth century: Mt-Hiei-trained monks routinely studied the Hossō curriculum, and the yuima-e 維摩會 of Kōfuku-ji served as a shared academic forum.
The colophon’s dai shi hen zō 第四遍造 (“composed for the fourth time”) indicates that Zōga had been working on the material in successive revisions, of which the Tengen 4 version is the final preserved redaction. The internal dating of the Tengen 4 colophon supplies both notBefore and notAfter for the received text.
The work is one of the foundational documents for reconstructing the Tōnomine scholastic milieu and is repeatedly invoked in modern Tendai scholarship on the early period.
Translations and research
- Paul Groner. Ryōgen and Mount Hiei: Japanese Tendai in the Tenth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002. (Appendix 7, “Zōga as an Eccentric,” and chapters on the Tōnomine scholastic milieu.)
- No dedicated modern study of T2259 itself located. Treated within general studies of tenth-century Tendai-Hossō scholasticism.
Other points of interest
The text is one of the very few canonical works composed in Heian Japan with an explicit internal date (天元4 = 981) in its colophon, making it a fixed point for the dating of Tōnomine-circle textual production.