Liánbāng xiāoxī 蓮邦消息
Tidings from the Lotus Country by 妙空子 (述)
About the work
A single-juǎn Pure Land doctrinal-pastoral treatise composed (shù 述) by the late-Qīng lay-Buddhist practitioner 妙空子 Miàokōngzǐ 妙空子. The title Liánbāng 蓮邦 (“Lotus Country”) is a standard literary periphrasis for the Xīfāng jílè 西方極樂 (Western Pure Land); xiāoxī 消息 (“tidings, news, dispatches”) frames the text as a series of pastoral communications to the practitioner from the Pure Land.
Abstract
The colophon of the principal preface is signed Tóngzhì shí nián dōng 同治十年冬 (winter of Tóngzhì 10 = late 1871 or early 1872), at Bǎichéng yānshuǐ zhī jū 百城煙水之居 (“the Hundred-Cities-Mist-and-Water Dwelling”), the studio of Miàokōngzǐ. The body of the text is organised into ten thematic pǐn 品 (chapters):
- Xìngxiàng guāngmíng pǐn 性相光明品 — on the radiant clarity of essence-and-mark;
- Bèi jué hé chén pǐn 背覺合塵品 — on the soteriological inversion of “turning-against-awakening, conjoining-with-defilement”;
- Xiāo-xī lún-huí pǐn 消息輪回品 — on the tidings of saṃsāra;
- Jìngtǔ yīnyuán pǐn 淨土因緣品 — on the karmic conditions for Pure Land rebirth;
- Jīngjìn wúkuī pǐn 精進無虧品 — on uninterrupted vīrya;
- Dìng-huì xiāng-suí pǐn 定慧相隨品 — on samādhi and prajñā in mutual accompaniment; and four further chapters in the same vein, culminating in the soteriological description of the jiǔpǐn 九品 ranks of rebirth.
The doctrinal frame is the zhēn-xīn běn-tǐ 真心本體 / yī niàn wú-míng 一念無明 dialectic of the Dà-shèng qǐ-xìn lùn 大乘起信論, applied to a Pure Land soteriology: the originally pure and round-bright (qīng-jìng yuán-míng 清淨圓明) consciousness has, through one ignorant moment of thought, generated the entire phenomenal cosmos of the liù-dào sì-shēng 六道四生; niàn-fó practice, conceived as the recollective return to the originally pure substrate, is therefore the soteriologically efficacious practice for traversing the manifested saṃsāra and entering the Lotus Country.
Preserved in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 as X1193. The dating bracket adopted (1860–1875) covers the Tóng-zhì-era horizon of composition.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.