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 ǑuyìChéngshí 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
- 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.