Luóhú yělù 羅湖野錄
Wilderness Records of Net Lake
compiled by 曉瑩 (Xiǎoyíng / Yúnwò Xiǎoyíng, fl. 12th c., 集)
About the work
A 2-juan Southern-Sòng Línjì-school anecdote-anthology composed at Luóhú 羅湖 (“Net Lake”) in Línchuān 臨川 (Jiāngxī) in Shàoxīng 紹興 25 (1155) by Yúnwò Xiǎoyíng 雲臥曉瑩, dharma-heir of the great Línjì master Dàhuì Zōnggǎo 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163). The work is one of the so-called “seven books of the Chán gate” (chánmén qībù shū 禪門七部書) — the standard reading-curriculum of medieval Chinese Chán education — alongside the Bìyán lù 碧巖錄, the Wúménguān 無門關, the Cóngróng lù 從容錄, and others.
Abstract
The Luóhú yělù assembles miscellaneous sermon-extracts, dialogue-fragments, occasional inscriptions, and prose-anecdote concerning the Chán masters of the late Northern Sòng and early Southern Sòng — i.e., the establishment-figures of Xiǎoyíng’s own time and acquaintance. Many of the entries are first-hand reports drawn from Xiǎoyíng’s years of travel through the Chán monasteries of the Yangtze region; others derive from documentary sources (cánbēi dùjiǎn 殘碑蠹簡, “fragmentary inscriptions and worm-eaten manuscripts”) that Xiǎoyíng accessed in his retirement at Luóhú. The entries are not formally organised — hence the yělù 野錄 (“wilderness records”) title — but range freely across topical clusters as Xiǎoyíng’s memory and document-pile suggest.
The work’s principal value is its prosopographical intimacy: Xiǎoyíng knew personally many of the Línjì masters whose lives and words he records, and his Luóhú yělù is one of the two principal canonical sources (the other is his own KR6r0093 Yúnwò jìtán) for the late-Northern-Sòng / early-Southern-Sòng Línjì establishment during the period of the Jīn invasion (1125–1142) and the subsequent Southern-Sòng consolidation. The work is also notable for preserving substantial verse and jì 偈 material composed by Chán masters for specific occasions — material otherwise lost.
The Luóhú yělù was incorporated into the Sìkùquánshū (子部·釋家類) — one of the relatively few Buddhist-canonical works that crossed into the Confucian-bibliographic establishment, on the strength of its literary register — and is preserved in the Manji Xuzangjing (X83 no. 1577) and the Taishō. The Sòng-Yuán-Míng-Korean transmission is uniform.
Tiyao
The work is included in WYG (子部·釋家類) but the underlying mandoku source-files do not transmit the canonical tíyào in _000.txt form. No tiyao reproduced in source files.
Translations and research
- No substantial English-language complete translation located. The work is treated extensively in:
- Albert Welter, The Linji Lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy (Oxford, 2008).
- Morten Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008) — uses the Luó-hú yě-lù as a source for the Línjì–Cáo-dòng polemic.
- 西尾賢隆 (Nishio Kenryū), 《中世禪宗史叢説》 (Tokyo, 1995).
Other points of interest
The work’s title — yělù 野錄, “wilderness records” — is a literary-modesty trope, but it also signals the non-official character of the compendium: Xiǎoyíng explicitly distinguishes his work from the official yǔlù and dēnglù literature, presenting it as a personal archive of materials too informal or fragmentary for canonical inclusion. This documentary self-consciousness is itself an important index to the Sòng Chán bibliographic culture, in which the boundaries between official, semi-official, and personal documents were subjects of editorial reflection.
Links
- CBETA: X83n1577