Jǐng shì 警世
Warning to the World
A short exhortatory prose composition by Yǒngmíng Yánshòu 永明延壽 (904–975) on the preciousness and brevity of human rebirth, structured as a series of extended rhetorical-parallel couplets on the difficulties and sufferings of saṃsāra
About the work
A one-juan short prose text, X63 n1230. Non-commentary; commentedTextid omitted.
The text opens: “If one does not realise the Way’s source, one sinks and drowns in saṃsāra, among the wombborn, egg-born, moisture-born, and transformationally-born, among the horizontal and the vertical, the flying and the sinking — all of these. Among these, those who lose the human body are as numerous as the earth’s dust; those who obtain the human body are as a speck on the fingernail.” The exhortation proceeds through a litany of the difficulties of human rebirth: being born in a border region, being born as a woman, being physically impaired, being born in a degenerate age, being subject to disease and misfortune, etc. The text’s rhetorical structure is that of the Chinese pián-wén 駢文 parallel-prose tradition, with deliberately-balanced couplets driving the exhortation.
Tiyao
Not a WYG text; no 四庫 tíyào exists. No editorial preface. The text is anonymous in its opening line but consistently attributed to Yánshòu in the Xù zàng jīng recension.
Abstract
The Jǐng shì belongs to the Chinese Buddhist jǐngshì (“warning-the-world”) exhortatory genre — short emotionally-heightened prose or verse texts aimed at reminding the reader of the impermanence of the present life and the urgency of Buddhist practice. Yánshòu’s specific contribution to the genre is the integration of the Pure Land rebirth-urgency with the Chán dùn wù 頓悟 practice-urgency, within a single unified exhortation.
Dating bracket: notBefore 960, notAfter 975 (as with Yánshòu’s other shorter works).
Translations and research
- 冉雲華 1999. 《永明延壽》. Dōngdà túshū.
- Welter, Albert. 2011. Yongming Yanshou’s Conception of Chan. Oxford.
- Chappell, David W. 1986. “From Dispute to Dual Cultivation.” In Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism.
Other points of interest
The jǐngshì genre within Chinese Buddhist literature has a long history from the Liu-Sòng period onward, typically attributed to major doctrinal authors as supplementary shorter compositions alongside their main treatises. Yánshòu’s Jǐng shì is one of the shorter specimens of the genre and functions as an accessible devotional-literature entry-point to the fuller doctrinal elaboration in the Zōngjìng lù KR6q0092 and Wànshàn tóngguī jí KR6q0093.