Yīnmíng dàshū lǐshū 因明大疏裏書
Reverse-Side Glosses on the Great Commentary on the Hetuvidyā Treatise by 明詮 (Míngquán / Myōsen, 著)
About the work
A six-fascicle interleaved-page gloss-collection by the early-Heian Kōfuku-ji 興福寺 Hossō scholar 明詮 (Myōsen, 789–868), serving as a companion text to his Dàoshō KR6o0012; both are sub-commentaries on KR6o0008 Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn shū 因明入正理論疏 (T44n1840) by 窺基 (Kuījī). Preserved in Taishō vol. 69 (no. 2274). The Japanese title is Inmyō Daishō rishogaki. The genre-marker 裏書 (rishogaki, “reverse-side writings”) refers to the medieval Japanese scholastic convention of writing supplementary glosses on the verso pages of the master manuscript — short notes, alternative readings, references, and queries that did not fit the body of the main commentary.
Prefaces
The Taishō text has no formal authorial preface; it opens directly with the title “因明大疏裏書上本” and proceeds through interleaved glosses keyed to the Dàshū’s lemmata.
Abstract
The Lǐshū is structurally distinct from Myōsen’s Dàoshō KR6o0012: it consists of short marginal-note entries arranged in the order in which they would have appeared on the verso pages of a manuscript codex of Kuījī’s Dàshū. The content is consequently miscellaneous — phonetic glosses, alternative variant readings, lineage notes (citing teachers and disciples by name), and queries about contested points. The work documents Heian-era Hossō scholastic-pedagogical practice, in which the master’s marginal annotations on his own teaching copy of the parent text were a primary form of intellectual production. The fact that both this work and the Dàoshō survive in independent transmission lines indicates that they functioned as two complementary genres of master-notes: the dō as the substantive interpretation and the rishogaki as the marginalia.
Composition window: as for the Dàoshō, c. 820–868. The Taishō print is based on the same Edo-end Buzan editorial recension by 快道林常 Kaidō Rinjō (1751–1810) that produced the Dàoshō (cf. KR6o0012).
Translations and research
- Takemura Shōhō 武邑尚邦. Inmyōgaku — sono genri to tenkai 因明學――その原理と展開. Kyoto: Hyakkaen, 1986.
- Iida Yūei 飯田祐英, Hossō-shū inmyō-gaku no kenkyū 法相宗因明學の研究, Kyoto: Hyakkaen, 1975.
Other points of interest
The rishogaki genre — marginalia transmitted in their own right rather than copied into the body of the parent commentary — is a distinctive feature of Heian-period Japanese scholastic Buddhism. The Lǐshū is one of the earliest surviving instances. The genre as a whole is documented in the late-Heian Kōfuku-ji and Tōdai-ji manuscript traditions, where multiple successive generations of teachers left their own rishogaki on master texts; the surviving Kōfuku-ji kanazawa-bunko and Daigo-ji isho collections include comparable productions for the Yogācārabhūmi, the Cheng weishi lun, and the major Hossō ritual manuals.