Shìmén zìjìng lù 釋門自鏡錄
A Self-Mirror Record for the Buddhist Order
written by 懷信 (Huáixìn / Lángǔ shāmén 藍谷沙門, fl. late 7th – early 8th c., 述)
About the work
A 2-juan early-Táng Buddhist disciplinary-cum-cautionary tale collection, written by the Táng monk Huáixìn 懷信, who in his auto-preface identifies himself as a “shāmén of the Lángǔ” 藍谷沙門 (the Lán Valley) and gives his autobiographical age as “having taken ordination at age 9 and now exceeded 60.” Huáixìn’s lifedates are otherwise not transmitted in CBETA’s Sònggāosēng zhuàn tradition, which assigns the same name to a younger figure of the Wǔzōng persecution era (843–845). The composition is therefore bracketed by Huáixìn’s editorial self-statement (mid-late 7th c.) and the terminus ante quem of its citation in Zhìshēng’s 智昇 Kāiyuán shìjiào lù 開元釋教錄 of Kāiyuán 18 = 730. The dating bracket given here is 660 – 720.
Abstract
The work is structured as a self-mirror (zìjìng 自鏡) — a collection of cautionary biographical-anecdotal materials on Buddhist monks who fell into bad rebirths through breaches of the vinaya, intended as a salutary mirror for the Táng monastic establishment. Huáixìn opens with the explicit autobiographical reflection that he has lived for 60+ years on monastic alms — “tall and at-ease in spacious halls, well-fed at first light by the food of the ten merits, well-dined at noon by the three meritorious dainties, in ignorance of the labours of ploughing and reaping, in ignorance of the toil of the cooking-pot” — and asks to whom the monastic community owes its sustenance, and what becomes of monks who fail to repay that debt.
The body of the work assembles negative biographical exempla — monks who became:
- Animals in the next life (oxen pulling carts, dogs chained to gates, parrots in cages) through specific ritual failures;
- Hungry ghosts through specific moral failures (greed for food, breaches of the vinaya on wealth);
- Hell-beings through grave breaches (theft from the saṅgha, sexual misconduct, false claims of attainment).
Each tale is documented to its source (canonical vinaya, Sònggāosēng tradition, recent witness-testimony) and concludes with an editorial moral. The work is structurally similar to KR6r0116 Míngbào jì but specifically addressed to the monastic audience rather than to lay readers, with a regulatory-disciplinary rather than apologetic intent.
The Japanese reprint of the work, with appended materials, was prepared in Ānyǒng 安永 1 (壬辰 = 1772) by Xuánzhì 玄智 of Píngān Qìngzhèngsì 平安慶證寺.
Translations and research
- Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) — discusses the Shì-mén zì-jìng lù in connection with the Táng Buddhist disciplinary literature.
- 牧田諦亮, 中國佛教史研究 — the standard Japanese-language treatment of the early-Táng Buddhist disciplinary anecdote literature.
- The work also appears in standard surveys of Chinese Buddhist zhì-guài / cautionary-tale literature (Robert Campany, John Kieschnick, et al.).
Other points of interest
The Shìmén zìjìng lù is one of the principal internal-monastic disciplinary documents of the Táng — the rare case of a Buddhist monk producing a sustained reflective document on the economic and social debt of the monastic community to lay society, and arguing that breach of the vinaya incurs not merely karmic but economic-ethical consequences (the unrepaid debt of food and shelter).
Links
- CBETA: T51n2083