Yángqí Fānghuì héshàng hòulù 楊岐方會和尚後錄
Supplementary Record of Reverend Fānghuì of Yángqí
supplementary recorded sayings of Yángqí 方會 Fānghuì (992–1049); compiler not named in the transmitted text
About the work
A one-juan hòulù 後錄 — “subsequent / supplementary record” — paired in the Taishō with the main Yángqí Fānghuì héshàng yǔlù (KR6q0056). No compiler is named in the received text; the catalog meta for KR6q0057 leaves the author field empty. The final section is a set of zhēnzàn 真讚 self-portrait verses in Fānghuì’s voice (“like a donkey, not a donkey; like a horse, not a horse — tsk, Yángqí pulls the plough and drags the rake”), which anchor the ascription of the collection to him.
Abstract
The opening section of the hòulù records an inauguration ceremony whose incense-offering formula situates the speaker as previously resident at Nányuán 南源 and Shíshuāng 石霜 and currently installed as abbot at the Xīnghuà chán sì 興化禪寺 in Tánzhōu 潭州. That three-abbacy sequence — Nányuán → Shíshuāng → Xīnghuà — coincides strikingly with the recorded career of Fānghuì’s teacher 楚圓 Shíshuāng Chǔyuán (d. 1039), whose succession of abbacies per DILA A001439 ran Nányuán Guǎnglì → Dàowú → Shíshuāng → Fúyán → Xīnghuà, and who died at Xīnghuà yuàn. Two readings are possible: (i) the opening sermon records Chǔyuán’s teaching as transcribed by his attendant Fānghuì and preserved here as a supplement to Fānghuì’s own yǔlù, making the hòulù a mixed document combining notes on Chǔyuán with Fānghuì’s own later material; (ii) Fānghuì himself succeeded his teacher at those three sites after Chǔyuán’s death in 1039 — an abbacy sequence not registered in the standard late accounts (which name only Yángqí and Yúngài) but internally consistent with the text. The self-reference “Yángqí will not escape entanglement in word-karma” and the use of “yǐ Fānghuì” 以方會 as the speaker’s self-designation in the opening sermon support reading (ii). Later sections of the hòulù — upper-hall shàngtáng 上堂 sermons, exchanges with the official Sūn Bǐbù 孫比部, and the closing self-portrait verses — are unambiguously in Fānghuì’s voice.
Dating follows the window for the main yǔlù (KR6q0056): terminus post quem 1050 (when 文政 Wénzhèng’s preface attests the first compilation); terminus ante quem 1100 is a conservative upper bracket, since the Yángqí line’s recorded-sayings corpus was well consolidated by the time Yuánwù 克勤 Kèqín (1063–1135) was drawing on it in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The absence of a named compiler for the hòulù suggests it may have been assembled by the same or an adjacent editorial hand to 仁勇 Rényǒng’s main yǔlù.
Translations and research
No complete English translation. Treated in the general literature on the Yángqí pài and on Fānghuì (see entry for KR6q0056). The compositional puzzle noted above does not appear to have been the subject of a dedicated study in English-language scholarship; it is briefly acknowledged in the Iriya Yoshitaka / Yanagida Seizan Japanese apparatus on the yǔlù genre.
Other points of interest
The Sūn Bǐbù 孫比部 dialogue at the end — in which Fānghuì, after converting the official through a verse, is asked “I keep the fast and eat vegetarian daily; do I match with the sages?” and replies with a doggerel jingle “Sūn Bǐbù, Sūn Bǐbù, you don’t foul your bowels with wine and meat, you no longer care for your servants and wife and children — who then is old Śākya?” — is a characteristic specimen of the Yángqí-line mode of addressing official patrons: teasing, metrically informal, and simultaneously demanding and withholding praise.