Xīfāng zhízhǐ 西方直指
Direct Pointing to the Western [Pure Land] by 一念 (Xīzhāi Yīniàn, 編)
About the work
A three-juǎn Pure Land doctrinal-practical handbook compiled by the late-Míng monk 一念 Xīzhāi Yīniàn 西齋一念 in the late Wànlì period. The work belongs to the zhízhǐ 直指 (“direct pointing”) genre — Pure Land texts that present the doctrine in compressed, accessible form for the lay-Buddhist reader — alongside the Bǎowáng sānmèi niànfó zhízhǐ KR6p0055 of 妙叶 Miàoxié and the Guīyuán zhízhǐ jí KR6p0061 of 宗本 Yīyuán Zōngběn.
Abstract
The three juǎn cover doctrinal foundations (the Pure Land sūtras and their key passages; the cosmology of Sukhāvatī; the doctrine of xìnyuànxíng 信願行); polemic-apologetic (responses to Chán dismissals of Pure Land devotion; the integration of zìlì and tālì); and practical-devotional (the daily yíguǐ of niànfó; the deathbed practice; biographical exempla of late-Míng and earlier Pure Land devotees). The work is moderately ambitious — larger than the simple anthological collections of the early Míng but smaller and more practical than Yuán Hóngdào’s Hélùn KR6p0057 or Yúnqī’s Shūchāo KR6p0028 — and represents the standard middle-register Pure Land handbook of the late Wànlì.
Yīniàn’s intellectual position is unambiguously within the Yúnqī Zhūhóng synthesis: he draws extensively on Yúnqī’s Yíbiàn KR6p0058, the Dá sìshíbā wèn KR6p0063, and the Xīfāng yuànwén KR6p0064, and presents the late-Míng Chán-Pure Land integration as the doctrinal frame for his anthology. The work is preserved in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 (X1163); no preface fixes a precise composition date, and the bracket adopted (1580–1620) covers the late Wànlì period during which Yīniàn was active.
Translations and research
- Yü, Chün-fang. The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis. New York: Columbia, 1981 — for the broader late-Míng Pure Land context within which Yīniàn is working.
- Eichman, Jennifer. A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship. Leiden: Brill, 2016.