Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn jí jiě 因明入正理論集解
Collected Explanations of the Treatise on Entering Correct Reasoning of Hetuvidyā by 王肯堂 (Wáng Kěntáng, 集釋)
About the work
A one-juǎn “collected commentary” (集解 jí jiě) on the Rù lùn KR6o0003 by the late-Míng polymath 王肯堂 (Wáng Kěntáng, 1549–1613) — better known as the author of the great medical compendium Liùkē zhǔnshéng 六科準繩 but also a serious lay Buddhist scholar. The work compiles glosses from earlier commentaries (especially Zhēnjiè’s Jiě KR6o0026 and the surviving citations from Kuījī’s Dàshū) into a portable single-volume reference. The author’s preface is one of the most informative documents we have on the social setting of late-Míng yīnmíng studies.
Structural Division
The Xuzangjing recension is not in CANWWW. The work comments on the Rù lùn KR6o0003.
Abstract
The Xuzangjing prefixes the author’s own preface (因明入正理論集解自序), dated to the Wànlì 萬曆 yǐyǒu 乙酉 cycle, i.e. Wànlì 13 (1585). Wáng Kěntáng narrates how he and the painter-scholar Dǒng Qíchāng 董其昌 (玄宰, 1555–1636) had been studying with the master Zǐbǎizūnzhě 紫柏尊者 (Zhēnkě 真可, 1543–1603) at Shèshān 攝山 in Jīnlíng 金陵 (Nánjīng); they discussed Buddhist philosophy at length and were urged by Zǐbǎi to “deeply enter the ocean of teachings” (深汎教海); on a subsequent day, at the studio of Dharma-master Sù’ān 素庵 above Mount Shè, they were given a “small Sanskritic booklet” (小梵冊) — a copy of the Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn — with the recommendation that this would be the “ship and oars” of their voyage. From this beginning grew Wáng’s own commentary. The work was completed in the early years of Wànlì but circulated for some decades thereafter; the dating range 1585–1612 brackets the composition (Wáng died in 1613). The text is much more accessible than the fragmentary Cí’ēn corpus had been, and helped popularize yīnmíng among lay Buddhist intellectuals in the late Míng. The Xuzangjing prints it from a late-Míng edition.
Translations and research
- Shen Jianying 沈剣英. Wáng Kěntáng yīnmíng yánjiū 王肯堂因明研究. Shanghai, 2002.
- Eichman, Jennifer. A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections. Leiden: Brill, 2016. — Contextualises Wáng Kěntáng within the late-Míng Buddhist literati network.
Other points of interest
Wáng Kěntáng’s preface is one of the best-known documents of late-Míng lay Buddhist scholarship. Its narrative of an yīnmíng booklet circulating among Zǐbǎi, Dǒng Qíchāng, and Wáng himself at Mount Shè captures the social setting in which the Míng yīnmíng revival took shape: a network of gentry scholars, painters, and high-profile Chán masters in the Jiāngnán region, who took up Indian Buddhist logic as part of a broader effort to recover the technical depth of Tang Buddhist scholarship.