Xīguī xíngyí 西歸行儀
Liturgical Handbook for the Westward Return [to the Pure Land] by 古崑 (Gǔkūn lǎorén, 錄輯)
About the work
A short single-juǎn Pure Land liturgical handbook compiled by the late-Qīng Pure Land monk 古崑 Gǔkūn lǎorén 古崑老人 of Hángzhōu 杭州 in the second half of the nineteenth century. The title — xīguī xíngyí 西歸行儀 — uses the standard late-imperial idiom for Pure Land rebirth (xīguī 西歸, “westward return”) to identify the work as a practical handbook for the Pure Land devotional life.
Abstract
The handbook gathers the standard liturgical apparatus of late-Qīng Pure Land devotional practice: the daily zǎokè 早課 (morning service) and wǎnkè 晚課 (evening service) chants; the deathbed zhìniàn 至念 practice; the funerary sānshí xìniàn observance; the standard repentance liturgy in compressed form; the daily huíxiàng dedication; selected zàn and jié for personal devotion. The work is practical and pastoral — designed to provide a single accessible volume of Pure Land liturgy for the daily devotional life of lay-Buddhist practitioners and small monastic communities — rather than scholastic-doctrinal.
Gǔkūn’s Pure Land programme is firmly within the late-Qīng Pure Land revival descending through 彭際清 Péng Jìqīng (1740–1796) and his lay-Buddhist circle. The institutional context is the post-Tàipíng-rebellion reconstruction of Buddhist establishments in the Lower Yangzi region, in which late-Qīng monastic and lay-Buddhist circles were actively rebuilding the devotional culture that had been disrupted by the mid-century catastrophe. The Xīguī xíngyí and Gǔkūn’s other two surviving works (the Jìngtǔ suíxué KR6p0106 and Jìngtǔ bìqiú KR6p0107) belong to this reconstruction effort.
The text is preserved in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 (X1468). No preface fixes a precise composition date; the bracket adopted (1860–1890) covers the most plausible late-Tóng-zhì / Guāngxù period during which Gǔkūn was active.
Translations and research
- Goossaert, Vincent. “Late Qing Buddhist Lay Movements.” In Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850–2015, ed. Goossaert, Kiely, and Lagerwey. Leiden: Brill, 2016 — for the late-Qīng Pure Land context.
- Welch, Holmes. The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1967 — for the institutional successor to Gǔkūn’s late-Qīng Pure Land culture.
- Jones, Charles B. Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660–1990. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999.