Wǔdēng yántǒng 五燈嚴統
Strict Orthodoxy of the Five Lamps
compiled by 通容 (Tōngróng, sobriquet Fèiyǐn 費隱, 1593–1661), completed 1653 (Míng Yǒnglì 永曆 7 / Qīng Shùnzhì 順治 10)
About the work
A 25-juan late-Míng / early-Qīng revision of the Wǔdēng huìyuán 五燈會元 (KR6q0012), updated and re-organised under a strict Línjì-orthodoxy programme. Compiled by 通容 Fèiyǐn Tōngróng, abbot of Tiāntóngshān 天童山 (where his teacher 密雲圓悟 Mìyún Yuánwù had also been abbot) and one of the most polemically active Línjì masters of the late Míng. The work generated immediate and lasting controversy with the Cáodòng line, who saw it as a tendentious re-routing of their own lineage history.
Abstract
Tōngróng updated the Wǔdēng huìyuán template with two innovations: first, he extended the genealogy through the Yuán and Míng down to his own generation; second, and more aggressively, he re-attributed several Sòng-era Cáodòng masters whose lineage placement had previously been settled, arguing that they actually descended from Línjì-line teachers. The Cáodòng response — Wǔdēng yántǒng jiěhuò biān 五燈嚴統解惑編 (KR6q0020), Tōngróng’s own self-defence pamphlet, plus several anti-pamphlets from the Cáodòng side — turned the Yántǒng into the centerpiece of a major mid-seventeenth-century inter-lineage textual dispute. The case is treated at length in modern Chán historiography as a paradigmatic example of late-imperial Chán lineage politics.
The work was printed in the Jiāxīng 嘉興 canon and entered the Xuzangjing through that channel.
Translations and research
No English translation. Substantive Western scholarship: 吳疆 Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (OUP, 2008) — the standard study of the seventeenth-century Línjì-Cáodòng polemics, with the Wǔdēng yántǒng and its surrounding controversy as a central case.
Substantive Sinophone scholarship: 陳垣 Chén Yuán, Shìshì yílǜ 釋氏疑年錄 and Míngjì Diān-Qián fójiào kǎo 明季滇黔佛教考 (1940), and the more recent surveys by 廖肇亨 Liào Zhàohēng and others.
Other points of interest
The lineage-attribution disputes the Yántǒng generated form one of the better-documented seventeenth-century Chán internal controversies and are essential context for the late-imperial Línjì-Cáodòng split.