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十牛圖和頌

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Text ID
KR6q0161
Date
1609–1662
Dynasty
清

Shí niú tú hé sòng 十牛圖和頌

Ten Ox-Herding Pictures with Harmonizing Verses

An early-Qīng compilation centred on the eight-stage ox-herding cycle attributed to the obscure Chán master Pǔmíng 普明 (dates unknown, traditionally localised at Pǔmíngsì 普明寺 in Liángshān 梁山), to which are appended harmonizing (hé sòng 和頌) sets of verses by fourteen late-Míng / early-Qīng Chán masters and lay practitioners, plus a separate Báiniú tú sòng 白牛圖頌 (“White-Ox Pictures with Verses”) by Jùchè Jìxiān 巨徹寂暹. Compiled and printed by the Línjì-lineage monk Rú Niàn 如念 in Kāngxī 1 (1662) at Pǔmíngsì after the lay patron Yán Dàcān 嚴大參 (𨍏轢道人) had re-founded the monastery.

About the work

A one-juan Chán anthology, X64 n1271. Non-commentary; commentedTextid omitted. The text preserves a composite late-Míng / early-Qīng anthology of the Pǔmíng ox-herding tradition in a form distinct from both the canonical ten-stage Kuò’ān cycle KR6q0159 and the late-Míng lay recension by Hú Wénhuàn KR6q0160.

The compilation frames its collected material within two prefaces: (1) a re-used 萬曆己酉 (1609) preface by Yúnqī Zhūhóng 雲棲袾宏 (whose hào is Liáncí 蓮池, one of the Four Eminent Monks of the late Míng), written for an earlier Wànlì-era engraving of Pǔmíng’s verses alone; and (2) a 順治 / 康熈-transitional preface by Yán Dàcān 嚴大參 (hào 𨍏轢道人, identifying himself as Línjì zhèngzōng sānshí’èr shì 臨濟正宗三十二世, a thirty-second generation lay dharma-heir of Línjì orthodoxy). The compilation itself was finalised and committed to the woodblocks by the monk Rú Niàn (hào Rú Niàn-kōng 如念空, “Rú-Niàn-the-Empty”) in the seventh month of Kāngxī 1 (1662) at the 般若堂 (Prajñā Hall), as his own postface makes explicit: “In the winter of xīnchǒu I came to administer the parish affairs; in the summer of rényín the 𨍏轢 lay-gentleman Yán brought the Pǔmíng karmic-origin records and the old temple pictures to show me… Further, seeing the various directions’ harmonizing verses, and reading them, I could not contain my joyous leaping, and imitatively harmonized them, and combining the pictures, the verses, and the harmony-verses, made one volume to circulate.”

The body of the text contains: (a) Pǔmíng’s 原頌 (yuán sòng, “original verses”) in ten stages — Wèi mù 未牧 (Unherded), Chū tiáo 初調 (First Taming), Shòu zhì 受制 (Brought under Control), Huí shǒu 迴首 (Turning the Head), Xún fú 馴伏 (Docile Submission), Wú’ài 無碍 (Unhindered), Rèn yùn 任運 (Letting Things Take Their Course), Xiāng wàng 相忘 (Mutual Forgetting), Dú zhào 獨照 (Solitary Illumination), Shuāng mǐn 雙泯 (Both Obliterated); (b) fifteen sets of ten harmonizing verses keyed to Pǔmíng’s stage-names, contributed by the LínjìYángqí masters Zhēnjì Guǎngyìn 真寂廣印 (hào Wéngǔ 聞谷), Bào’ēn Yuánxiū 報恩圓修 (hào Tiānyǐn 天隱), Dōngtǎ Hǎimíng 東塔海明 (hào Pòshān 破山, the famous Sichuan Chán reviver), Wànrú Tōngwéi 萬如通微, Dōngtǎ Fúshí Tōngxián 東塔浮石通賢, Yùlín Tōngxiù 玉林通琇 (later imperially-patronised by the Shùnzhì 順治 emperor), Ruòān Tōngwèn 箬菴通問, Shāncí Tōngjì 山茨通際, Tóngyuèān Miàoyòng 桐月菴妙用 (hào Xuánwēi 玄微), Yīzhǐān Míng Hǎi 一指菴明海 (hào Xiāngchuáng 香幢 fǎzhǔ), the lay-practitioners Yán Dàcān 嚴大參 (three distinct sets of harmonizing verses), Rú Niàn 如念 (the compiler himself, titled 跛道人 “Lame Man of the Way”), Wúyī dàorén Xú Chāngzhì 無依道人徐昌治, Mùgōng dàorén Xiàng Zhēnběn 牧公道人項真本, and finally Jùchè Jìxiān 巨徹寂暹; and (c) Jùchè Jìxiān’s separate Báiniú tú sòng 白牛圖頌 in ten stages (Shī niú 失牛, Xún niú 尋牛, Jiàn jī 見迹, Jiàn niú 見牛, Dé niú 得牛, Hù niú 護牛, Qí guī 騎歸, Wàng niú 忘牛, Shuāng mǐn 雙泯, Rù chán 入廛) with interlinear pictorial descriptions, representing a hybrid schema between Pǔmíng’s eight-stage black-to-white tradition and Kuò’ān’s ten-stage pursuit-and-return sequence.

Tiyao

Not a WYG text; no 四庫 tíyào exists. Opening signature of the Pǔmíng 原頌 section: Pǔmíng yuán sòng. Yúnqī Lián tàishī fù zǐ xù yún 普明原頌。雲棲蓮太師付梓序云 (“Pǔmíng’s original verses. The Yúnqī Grand Master Liáncí’s engraving-sponsorship preface says…”). Closing compiler-signature: Kāngxī yuán nián mèngqiū yuè rì yù Bōrě-táng Rú Niàn kōng shí 康熈元年孟秋月　日寓般若堂　如念空　識 (“On a day in the first month of autumn of Kāngxī 1, sojourning at Prajñā-Hall, Rú Niàn-kōng records”).

Abstract

The text is historically significant as the principal seventeenth-century compilation in which Pǔmíng’s ox-herding verses — as distinct from Kuò’ān’s — were collected together with their late-Míng / early-Qīng reception among the LínjìYángqí masters and their lay circles. Yúnqī Zhūhóng’s 1609 preface, even while championing the verses, explicitly records that Pǔmíng’s identity was already unknown by the late sixteenth century (“Pǔmíng, [we] do not know whence he came. Whether the pictures and verses came from a single person’s hand is also not known.”), and the Kāngxī-1 compilation preserved in X64 n1271 consequently treats the Pǔmíng verses as a fixed received inheritance — an authorless spiritual inheritance to be harmonised and elaborated rather than historically reconstructed. The late-Míng / early-Qīng Chán-school movement to re-found Pǔmíngsì (led by Yán Dàcān) thus had as much a commemorative-archaeological as a doctrinal character: the temple, the pictures, the verses, and the compilation of harmonizing responses together constitute the received Pǔmíng tradition as it was re-enacted by the late-Míng LínjìYángqí community.

Dating: notBefore 1609 (Yúnqī Zhūhóng’s preface, the earliest textual element preserved in the compilation), notAfter 1662 (Rú Niàn’s finalising postface and engraving). The received compilation as such is a 1662 object; its constituent verses and prefaces are all earlier.

Translations and research

  • Mohr, Michel. 1994. “Examining the Sources: Hakuin Ekaku and the Zen Ox-Herding Sequence.” Includes discussion of the Pǔmíng tradition and its reception in Japanese Zen.
  • Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山 and Satō Shūkō 佐藤秀孝. Various studies on the ox-herding tradition.
  • Welter, Albert. 2006. Monks, Rulers, and Literati: The Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism. Oxford. Background on the Línjì-Yángqí lineage politics during the Míng-Qīng transition, relevant context for Yán Dàcān’s project and for Pòshān Hǎimíng’s and Yùlín Tōngxiù’s roles.
  • No substantial secondary literature located specifically on X64 n1271.

Other points of interest

The compilation is an unusually rich witness to the living use of Chán didactic-verse material in the late-Míng / early-Qīng period: here we see the same ten stage-names of Pǔmíng’s cycle being taken up and harmonised fifteen different ways by fifteen different practitioners across a twenty-to-fifty year window, giving a unique cross-section of the variability of Chán poetic response to a shared pedagogical schema. Jùchè Jìxiān’s supplementary Báiniú tú sòng, by hybridising Pǔmíng’s and Kuò’ān’s schemas into a single ten-stage white-ox sequence with explicit interlinear pictorial notes, constitutes a further seventeenth-century innovation on the ox-herding tradition.

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