Xiànguǒ suílù 現果隨錄
Casual Records of Karmic Fruition Manifest in This Life
written by 戒顯 (Jièxiǎn / Huìshān 晦山 / Bàwēng 罷翁, 1610–1672, 筆記)
About the work
A 4-juan late-Míng / early-Qīng suíbǐ compendium of karmic-fruition tales witnessed in the present life (xiànguǒ 現果, as opposed to the sùyīn hòubào 宿因後報 / “deeds in former lives, retribution in later lives” mode), assembled by the late-Míng / early-Qīng LínjìYángqí Chán master Huìshān Jièxiǎn 晦山戒顯 (1610–1672) — colophonically self-styled here under the hào Bàwēng 罷翁 (“Resting Old Man”). The work’s distinguishing methodological feature is its strict restriction to cases in which the karmic act and its retribution occur within a single lifetime, with the actor still alive or with the retribution observable to named contemporary witnesses — as the editor’s preface puts it: “The whole compilation contains only [tales] of present deeds occasioning present fruition that the author has personally heard or seen; matters of past causes producing later retribution, or of vipāka across rebirth, are not what is taken up here.” Transmitted in the Xùzàngjīng as X1642.
Prefaces
The preface (dated 戊寅 = 1638 if Wànlì 戊寅 = 1638, but the editor’s preface internally suggests a Qīng or post-1644 date — most plausibly Shùnzhì 戊戌 = 1658 or a misprint for that gānzhī) is by the layman Jièshí Jìngshòu 介石淨壽, who reports that he received the manuscript at Huángbò shū 黃檗書 from a Japanese (??) layman of the Téng 藤 surname who was contemplating engraving and circulating it. The preface frames the work in the gōngguò gé / morality-book mode: “Cause and fruit are like form and shadow. Where the form is, the shadow must follow. If you wish to straighten the shadow, first straighten the form. If the form is straight and the shadow is not, that is impossible. To wish for a straight shadow without straightening the form is like raising the boiling water without taking away the fire — to wish it cool is impossible. This is the general teaching of our [Buddhist] gate. The secular classics also have it: they call it ‘hidden virtue’ (yīndé 陰德) and ‘manifest retribution’ (yángbào 陽報). Are these not what we mean by cause-and-fruit?”
The preface also identifies Jièxiǎn’s lineage affiliation (a disciple of Jùdé Héshàng 具德和尚 of the Tiāntóng 天童 school) and groups the present work with Yúnqī Zhūhóng’s Zìzhī lù 自知錄 and the popular Yīnzhì wén 陰騭文 / Tàishàng gǎnyìng piān tradition of moral-bookkeeping literature.
Abstract
The work’s four juan contain approximately one hundred and twenty contemporary anecdotes of karmic retribution, each headed by a four-to-six-character title summarising the moral exemplum. A representative sampling from juan 1:
- 陳益修以力護關廟大士賜目 (“Chén Yìxiū, by [his] forceful defence of a Guānyīn shrine in a Guāndì temple, was granted [restoration of his] eyesight”)
- 趙志清挂冠修行先幾免禍 (“Zhào Zhìqīng, hanging up his official cap to cultivate, escaped disaster by foreknowledge”)
- 徐成民身理陰司刊行冥判 (“Xú Chéngmín, in his bodily form, managed the underworld bureau and printed the underworld judgments”)
- 圓通師稟受大戒頓脫無常 (“Master Yuántōng, having received the great precepts, suddenly freed [himself] from impermanence”)
- 碧璠毀如來衣鉢頓縮一臂 (“Bìfán, having destroyed a Tathāgata-robe-and-bowl, suddenly shrank by one arm”)
- 吳澆燭以念佛作福剋期善逝 (“Wú the candle-pourer, by reciting the Buddha-name and accumulating merit, departed in peace at his predicted time”)
The tales draw on named contemporary informants drawn from Jièxiǎn’s own monastic-pastoral and literati network — including identifiable late-Míng / early-Qīng officials, scholars, monks, and lay devotees of Jiāngnán. The third juan in particular preserves a notable account of the author’s own teacher Fèizǔ 費祖 (= Fèiyǐn Tōngróng 費隱通容, 1593–1661) and the Jìngshān relic-anomaly that occurred at his cremation — a tale that the editor cites as evidence of the work’s first-person reliability.
The work is the principal early-Qīng successor to the moral-bookkeeping tradition descending from Zhūhóng’s Zìzhī lù and Yuán Liǎofán’s Liǎofán sìxùn 了凡四訓, and supplies an important window into the early-Qīng Buddhist appropriation of the gǎnyìng / morality-book mode for monastic-pastoral instruction. Like Zhìxù’s KR6r0163 Jiànwén lù, it is part of the late-Míng / early-Qīng Buddhist personal-witness anthology genre, but is more methodologically systematic in its restriction to xiànguǒ cases.
The dating bracket — 1638 to 1672 — accommodates both the early 戊寅 preface-date reading (= 1638) and the post-Ming-fall reference profile of the contents; the work as preserved is plausibly a long-accumulating set of jottings completed during Jièxiǎn’s late life at Yúnjūshān.
Translations and research
- 廖肇亨, 〈晦山戒顯與《禪門鍛鍊說》〉, Zhōng-yāng Yán-jiù-yuàn Wén-zhé suǒ tōng-xùn 12.1 (2002): 167–184 — biographical and contextual study of Jiè-xiǎn.
- Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008) — places Jiè-xiǎn in the late-Míng / early-Qīng Línjì controversies.
- Cynthia Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991) — places the Xiàn-guǒ suí-lù in the late-imperial morality-book tradition.
- 釋見一, 《漢月法藏的禪法研究》(Táiběi: Fǎ-gǔ wén-huà, 2009).
- No dedicated monographic study of the Xiàn-guǒ suí-lù has been located.
Other points of interest
The work was reprinted in Tokugawa Japan (the editor’s preface refers to a Japanese Téng 藤 layman bringing the manuscript to Huángbò 黃檗 — the great Ōbaku-Zen monastery founded in Japan by Yǐnyuán Lóngqí 隱元隆琦 in 1654) and entered the Japanese Buddhist morality-book tradition through this Ōbaku channel — an example of the Sino-Japanese transmission of late-imperial Chinese Buddhist popular literature through the Ōbaku publishing network of late-17th-century Nagasaki / Kyōto.
Links
- CBETA: X88n1642