Jūshì fēndēng lù 居士分燈錄
Branch-Lamp Record of Householders
compiled by 朱時恩 Zhū Shí’ēn, late Míng (preface 1631)
About the work
A two-juan late-Míng compilation devoted exclusively to lay (jūshì 居士) Chán practitioners — the title means “Branch-Lamp Record of Householders” — covering laymen (and a small number of laywomen) of substantive Chán attainment from the Táng through the Míng.
Abstract
A focused supplement to the lamp-record literature, abstracting the lay-practitioner material from the standard genealogical compilations and presenting it as an independent register. The work testifies both to the maturity of late-Míng lay Chán practice and to the increasing readiness of monastic compilers to grant lay practitioners formal recognition within Chán genealogical schemes.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
No English translation. Treated within scholarship on Sòng-Míng lay Buddhism: Beata Grant, Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China (UH Press, 2009), draws on this and related lay-practitioner records.
Other points of interest
The work’s exclusive focus on lay practitioners is unusual within the lamp-record genre and makes it a particularly useful concentrated source for the social and intellectual history of late-imperial Chinese lay Chán.