Réntiān bǎojiàn 人天寶鑑
Precious Mirror of Humans and Gods
compiled by 曇秀 (Tánxiù / Liánquán Tánxiù, fl. late Sòng, 輯)
About the work
A 1-juan Sòng-period Buddhist edifying-anecdote anthology — a didactic mirror-text (bǎo-jiàn 寶鑑, “precious mirror”) drawing canonical and miscellaneous Buddhist materials together for moral instruction of “humans and gods” (rén-tiān 人天 = the upper rebirth-destinations of saṃsāra, but also figuratively the entire audience of moral exhortation). The compiler Lián-quán Tán-xiù 廉泉曇秀 was a Línjì-Huáng-lóng dharma-heir of Huáng-lóng Huì-nán 黃龍慧南 (1002–1069); the catalog assignment of the work to Tán-xiù is questioned in the secondary literature, with some scholars dating the composition to the Southern Sòng (the bracket 1230–1280 reflects this later attribution).
Abstract
The work draws on the canonical gāosēng zhuàn tradition (KR6r0052 – KR6r0054), on Sòng-period anecdote collections including KR6r0092 / KR6r0093 / KR6r0094, on the Chán dēnglù and yǔlù literature, and on the Confucian xiàozǐ zhuàn 孝子傳 (“biographies of filial sons”) tradition, organising its c. 150 anecdotes by moral-thematic clusters: xiào 孝 (filial piety), cí 慈 (compassion), jièshā 戒殺 (refraining from killing), bùtān 不貪 (renouncing desire), yīnyīng 因應 (cause and effect), and so on. The work is thus a moral handbook in the cǎijí 採集 tradition, with explicit thematic organisation around the standard Chinese-Buddhist virtue-categories.
The targeted readership is broader than the strictly clerical: the title’s “humans and gods” implies a lay-and-monastic audience, and the editorial register is correspondingly accessible. The text was used as a moral-instructional handbook in late-Sòng / Yuán Buddhist establishments and circulated alongside the more famous Confucian moral-instructional compendia of the Sòng (Sīmǎ Guāng’s Jiāfàn 家範, the Èrshísì xiào 二十四孝 anthology, etc.). The Manji Xuzangjing (X87 no. 1612) preserves the text on the basis of the Jiāxìng 嘉興 canon (J).
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary monograph located. The work is treated briefly in:
- 釋見曄, 《明代高僧叢林與佛教史學》 (Taipei, 2007).
- John Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk (Honolulu, 1997) — for the broader edifying-anecdote tradition.
Other points of interest
The work’s title — Réntiān bǎojiàn — and its trans-religious material (Buddhist anecdote interleaved with Confucian filial-piety stories) place it in the late-Sòng / Yuán sānjiào 三教 (“three teachings”) synthetic tradition that integrated Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist moral teaching into a single edifying corpus. The work is therefore an important index to the inter-traditional moral teaching of late-imperial China, paralleling the famous Tàishàng gǎnyìng piān 太上感應篇 (Daoist-lay) and the Buddhist Liùzháirì kāijiè wén 六齋日開戒文 in the same broad genre.
Links
- CBETA: X87n1612