Xìngxiàng tōngshuō (xuǎnlù xùwén) 性相通說（選錄序文）
Comprehensive Exposition of the Nature-school and Characteristic-school (Selected Preface only) by 德清 (Hānshān Déqīng, 述)
About the work
A short fragment — only the preface (xùwén 序文) — of 德清 Hānshān Déqīng’s larger ecumenical treatise Xìngxiàng tōngshuō 性相通說 (“Comprehensive Exposition Bringing the Nature-school and the Characteristic-school into Mutual Communication”), included in the Qianlong Edition of the Canon 乾隆藏 (vol. 153, no. 1635) as a single-juan extract. The body of the treatise is preserved separately in Hānshān’s collected writings; the canonical recension here gives only the programmatic preface that frames the project.
Prefaces
The selected preface (signed Sùliù 素六, the studio-name) opens with Hānshān’s famous medical metaphor: the Buddha is the “Three-Realm Medicine-King” (sānjiè yīwáng 三界醫王), the entire canon is his pharmacopoeia, and the xiàngzōng (Yogācāra / Cí’ēn) literature is to that pharmacopoeia what the màijué 脈訣 (pulse-diagnosis manuals) are to the practice of medicine. Just as a physician who dispenses prescriptions without grasping the patient’s pulse may kill rather than cure, so a Chán practitioner who claims direct insight without grounding in xìng (nature) and xiàng (characteristics) is “dispensing pure gold pills with no diagnosis at all” — the great error of late-Míng Chán. Conversely, the doctrinal scholar who masters scripture without the meditative ground (shuō fāng ér bù shí yào 說方而不識藥, “knows the prescription but doesn’t recognise the drug”) is equally mistaken. 馬鳴菩薩 Aśvaghoṣa’s Qǐxìn lùn 起信論 first reconciled the two schools after the Indian split between Xìng and Xiàng exegesis 600 years after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa; in China, Guīfēng 宗密 Zōngmì 圭峯 and especially Yǒngmíng 延壽 Yánshòu’s Zōngjìng lù 宗鏡錄 were the canonical attempts at synthesis. Hānshān positions his own Tōngshuō as a compact “outline of the Zōngjìnglù” (Zōngjìng zhī tígāng 宗鏡之提綱) suitable for beginners. The preface also names the late-Míng Yogācāra revivalists by school: Lǔshān fǎshī 魯山法師 (= 普泰) for the Bāshí guījǔ bǔzhù (= KR6n0131); the Wàn-lì-era teachers Gāoyuán 高原 (= 明昱) and 一雨 Yīyǔ for re-launching the wéishí curriculum; 損菴 Sǔn’ān and the Wáng tàishǐ 王太史 (a Hànlín Wáng) for compiling the Zhèngyì 證義. The preface was composed at Jìngshān 徑山 in response to a request from the abbot 澹居鎧公 Dànjū Kǎigōng.
Abstract
The Xìngxiàng tōngshuō in its full form is one of Hānshān’s principal late doctrinal works, designed to bridge the late-Míng Chán-Yogācāra polarity by reading the standard Cí’ēn bāshí (eight-consciousness) doctrine as a propaedeutic articulation of the same one-mind that Chán points to directly. The Qiánlóng-canon recension preserves only the methodological preface, but the preface alone is independently important as Hānshān’s most concise statement of his ecumenical programme: the “evenly-balanced prescription” (jūntiáo zhī jì 均調之劑) that synthesises the meditative and the scholastic. The text dating-window is set by Hānshān’s mature productive period (1597 onward, after his exile to Léizhōu) and his death in 1623; the reference to Gāoyuán and Yīyǔ as already established Wànlì figures suggests composition in the first decade and a half of the seventeenth century.
Translations and research
- Sung-peng Hsu, A Buddhist Leader in Ming China: The Life and Thought of Han-shan Te-ch’ing. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.
- Shèng-yán 聖嚴, Míng-mò Fó-jiào yán-jiū 明末佛教研究. Tōkyō: Sankibō Busshorin, 1975 (Chinese ed., Taipei: Dōngchū chūbǎnshè, 1987), pp. 192–223 on the late-Míng Yogācāra revival.