Jìngtǔ shēng wúshēng lùn qīnwén jì 淨土生無生論親聞記
Personally-Heard Record of [the Lectures on the] Treatise on Birth-as-Non-Birth in the Pure Land by 受教 (Yōuxī Shòujiào, 記)
About the work
A two-juǎn record of the oral lectures delivered by 傳燈 Yōuxī Chuándēng 幽溪傳燈 (1554–1628) on his own Jìngtǔ shēng wúshēng lùn KR6p0056 (T1975), recorded — qīnwén 親聞 (“personally heard”) — by his direct disciple 受教 Yōuxī Shòujiào 幽溪受教 at the Gāomíngsì 高明寺 on Mount Tiāntái. The work belongs to the yǔlù 語錄 / jì 記 genre of Chinese Buddhist lecture-records, and is a primary witness to the authoritative oral exposition of one of the foundational late-Míng Tiāntái Pure Land treatises.
Abstract
Chuándēng’s Lùn is doctrinally compressed; in his lecture cycle on the work — preserved here through Shòujiào’s qīnwén record — he supplies the full doctrinal apparatus that the written text only sketches. The Qīnwén jì therefore stands in a different relationship to the Lùn than do the later commentaries (Zhèngjì’s Zhù KR6p0070, Shíxián’s Zhù KR6p0087, Dámò’s Huìjí KR6p0088): it is not an external scholar’s interpretation but the author’s own oral self-exposition, transmitted through the discipleship lineage. The two juǎn track the structure of the Lùn exactly: each of the ten doctrinal theses receives its corresponding lecture-cycle, with extensive Tiāntái doctrinal exposition (the yī niàn sān qiān, the three contemplations, the four lands), scriptural cross-references, and pastoral applications.
The Qīnwén jì is a particularly valuable text because it preserves Chuándēng’s living teaching at the moment of its delivery — capturing both the doctrinal content and the rhetorical-pastoral shape of his exposition. Chuándēng’s principal disciple 智旭 Ǒuyì Zhìxù (1599–1655) — one of the Four Great Monks of the Late Míng — would have heard substantially the same lectures and developed his own Pure Land doctrine in dialogue with this corpus. Shòujiào’s record is therefore a key intermediate text in the genealogy from Chuándēng to the Ǒuyì-Chéngshí line that produced the Jìngtǔ shíyào KR6p0067.
The text is preserved only in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 (X1168). The dating bracket adopted (1620–1640) covers the period of Chuándēng’s late-life lecturing on the Lùn and Shòujiào’s subsequent textual fixation of the record.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- Yü, Chün-fang. The Renewal of Buddhism in China. New York: Columbia, 1981.
- Shengyan 聖嚴. Míng-mò Fójiào yán-jiū 明末佛教研究. Taipei, 1987 — substantial chapters on Chuándēng’s Tiāntái Pure Land programme.
- Mochizuki Shinkō 望月信亨. Chūgoku jōdo kyōrishi. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1942/1964.