Chéng wéishí lùn běnwén chāo 成唯識論本文抄
Topical Extracts from the Sources of the Cheng weishi lun anonymous (Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 Hossō school, Kamakura period)
About the work
An anonymous forty-five-fascicle Kamakura-period Japanese Hossō 法相 compendium of source-passages drawn from across the Yogācāra commentarial corpus to illuminate the Chéng wéishí lùn (KR6n0016, T31n1585). Preserved as T2262 (Taishō vol. 65) without attribution. The first juǎn opens with a topical table of contents — “辨教時段／宗家意立幾時教耶／證果迴心／互執有空…” — listing approximately a hundred discrete doctrinal toi 問 (questions), under each of which the relevant passages are excerpted (hence the title honmon-shō 本文抄 “extracts of the source-passages”) from the Yogācārabhūmi, Saṃdhinirmocana, Mahāyāna-sūtrālaṃkāra, Pramāṇasamuccaya, Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, Daśabhūmika, Vibhāgaśāstra, Yogācāra-viniścaya (Ālambana-parīkṣā), Vimśatikā, Madhyāntavibhāga, Abhidharmasamuccaya, etc.
Structural Division
CANWWW (T65N2262) lists two related texts: the master text KR6n0016 Chéng wéishí lùn 成唯識論 (T31n1585), and KR6n0021 Chéng wéishí lùn lüèshū 成唯識論略疏 (T68n2267, Fujaku). The topical headings of the 45 kan track the doctrinal mondō-structure of the parent Honmon-shō / Dōgakushō curriculum complex at Kōfuku-ji.
Abstract
The Honmon-shō is the source-anthology pendant to KR6n0018 Yuishikiron dōgakushō 唯識論同學鈔 (T2263, 68 fasc.) by 良算: where the Dōgakushō gathers the disputed mondō and discusses each question scholastically, the Honmon-shō assembles, under the same headings, the canonical passages that supplied the textual evidence for the disputes. Together the two works constitute the central scholastic apparatus of mid-Kamakura Kōfuku-ji Hossō learning, in the doctrinal lineage continuing Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213). The two share both topical structure and many citations.
The anonymity of the Honmon-shō is presumably institutional: such Hossō honmon anthologies functioned as faculty-library reference compendia rather than authorial works, and editorial credit was suppressed in favour of curricular utility. The date-bracket adopted here (1200–1300) reflects the conventional thirteenth-century placement of the Kōfuku-ji mondō curriculum that the work supports; a tighter date cannot be defended from internal evidence alone.
The work’s principal modern significance is as a witness to the textual sources Kamakura Hossō scholars actually consulted: the breadth of citation across the Yogācāra corpus (Vasubandhu’s Madhyāntavibhāga commentary, Asaṅga’s Mahāyāna-sūtrālaṃkāra and Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, Dignāga’s Ālambana-parīkṣā, Pramāṇasamuccaya) shows that the Kōfuku-ji curriculum maintained access to the full Cí’ēnzōng commentarial tradition well into the medieval period.
Translations and research
- No substantial dedicated secondary literature located. Studied incidentally in modern Japanese surveys of Kamakura-Hossō scholasticism alongside KR6n0018 Dōgakushō.
Other points of interest
The first character of the title in the CANWWW Hira reading — Jōyuishikuron honmonshō — is given with the older Sino-Japanese spelling 「じょうゆいしくろん」 rather than the modern 「じょうゆいしきろん」, reflecting the Heian-Kamakura reading tradition.