Jiātài pǔdēng lù 嘉泰普燈錄
Jiātài-Era Universal Record of the Lamp
compiled by 正受 (Zhèngshòu, sobriquet Léi’ān 雷庵), completed 1204 (Sòng Jiātài 嘉泰 4)
About the work
The fifth of the canonical Sòng Chán lamp records, in 30 juan, compiled by the Chán monk Zhèngshòu. Takes the genealogy past the Dàhuì generation that the Liándēng huìyào had treated and extends it to the early Southern Sòng. Distinctive among the lamp records for its more expansive inclusion of laypeople (jūshì 居士) alongside monastic figures — Zhèngshòu’s compilation reflects an already well-established twelfth-century tradition of lay Chán participation.
Abstract
Zhèngshòu was a Dharma heir of 拙庵德光 Zhuó’ān Déguāng (1121–1203) in the Línjì — Yángqí — Dàhuì branch, and his choice of emphasis reflects the religious geography of the late twelfth-century Southern Sòng: the Dàhuì line had by this point produced a broad penumbra of lay adherents, and the lamp-record genre had expanded to accommodate them. The title — “Lamp Record of the All-Encompassing Illumination of the Jiātài Era” — announces this expansion.
The work was presented to the throne, incorporated into subsequent canonical collections, and formed part of the five-lamp-record corpus synthesised in the Wǔdēng huìyuán 五燈會元 of 1252 (KR6q0012).
Translations and research
No complete English translation. The work’s lay-practitioner entries have been mined in scholarship on Sòng Chán lay religion; see Morten Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen (UH Press, 2008), and Miriam Levering’s studies of Sòng women Chán practitioners. No dedicated critical edition has been located in Western or Sinophone scholarship.
Other points of interest
The expansion of the genre to include substantial lay figures — both male literati and, notably, a few women — makes the Jiātài pǔdēng lù a particularly valuable source for studies of non-monastic Chán practice in the Southern Sòng.