Míngbào jì jíshū 冥報記輯書
Reconstructed Edition of the Míngbào jì
reconstructed by 佐々木憲德 (Sasaki Kentoku, 1880–1962, 輯)
About the work
A modern Japanese-scholarly textual reconstruction of the Tang miracle-tale anthology 《冥報記》 Míngbào jì (“Records of Numinous Retribution”) by the Tang official-historian Táng Lín 唐臨 (fl. 650–660), in 7 juan. Compiled by the Japanese Tendai scholar Sasaki Kentoku 佐々木憲德 (1880–1962) of Ōtani University in Kyōto. The original Míngbào jì was one of the foundational works of the Chinese Buddhist gǎnyìng / miracle-tale tradition — the first major lay-elite Tang anthology of Buddhist karmic-retribution tales — and circulated widely in the Tang and early Sòng, but was largely lost in the Chinese tradition during the SòngYuán period; only the surviving complete Japanese-transmitted manuscript copies (preserved in major Japanese monastic libraries) preserved the work as a continuous text. Sasaki’s Jíshū reconstruction collates the Japanese manuscript tradition with the substantial citation evidence preserved in Chinese encyclopedic sources — chiefly 《法苑珠林》 KR6s0002 Fǎyuàn zhūlín (Tang) and 《太平廣記》 Tàipíng guǎngjì (Sòng) — to produce the most complete reconstructed text. The catalog entries (citations under each tale title — “Zhūlín 8.3”, “Guǎngjì 129”, etc.) explicitly trace each restored item to its Chinese-source attestation. Transmitted in the Xùzàngjīng as X1648.
Prefaces
The compiler’s preface (in Japanese / kanbun) is preserved in the underlying Japanese edition; the Xùzàngjīng presentation supplies a mùlù (table of contents) of the seven juan, with each restored entry headed by its author-attribution (the original named subject of the tale) and a parenthetical source-citation to the Chinese encyclopedic source(s) from which the tale-text is recovered.
Abstract
The reconstructed text, in seven juan, contains approximately 120 individual miracle-tales, drawn from the Tang court-bureaucratic and lay-Buddhist milieu of the early-to-mid 7th century. Táng Lín himself, the original author, was a dàlǐsī shǎoqīng and held positions in the Tang Dàlǐsī (Court of Judicial Review) and Hùbù (Ministry of Revenue); he assembled the tales from his own personal observation, his colleagues’ first-hand reports, and a network of named informants. The tales document the karmic-retribution patterns for specific moral acts (sūtra-recitation, devotion to the Buddha, observance of vegetarianism, support for monks; as against deception, theft, animal-slaughter, scoffing at the Dharma) — and are the most extensive surviving early-Tang lay-elite documentation of the gǎnyìng worldview as held by Tang government officials.
The reconstruction is structured as follows:
- Juan 1–2: tales from the Jìn through the Suí, organised broadly chronologically.
- Juan 3: the Shíyí (gleanings) — additional tales recovered from secondary citation sources.
- Juan 4–7: tales from the Tang itself (Zhēnguān through Lóngshuò periods, ca. 627–663), the bulk of the original work.
A representative entry (Juan 7): 唐前大理司直河內司馬喬卿 (“Sīmǎ Qiáoqīng of Hénèi, formerly Dàlǐ Sīzhí [Justice-Procurator of the Court of Judicial Review] of the Tang”) — recounting how, in mourning for his mother during the Yǒnghuī era (650–656), Sīmǎ Qiáoqīng pricked his own heart for blood and wrote out one juan of the Diamond Sūtra, after which two stalks of sacred zhī mushroom grew on his lean-to over the grave; the dating, the named informant chain (Sīmǎ’s colleagues to Láng Yúlìng to the Míngbào jì-author), and the geographical specificity are characteristic of Táng Lín’s authorial method.
The Jíshū is the principal modern critical edition of the Míngbào jì, and is the standard reference text used in Western and Chinese scholarship on the Tang miracle-tale tradition. Donald Gjertson’s 1989 monograph (see below) is based on Sasaki’s edition.
The dating bracket — 1900 to 1930 — covers Sasaki’s productive scholarly period; the precise date of the Jíshū publication is not fixed in the present transmission but falls within this window.
Translations and research
- Donald E. Gjertson, Miraculous Retribution: A Study and Translation of T’ang Lin’s Ming-pao chi (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989) — the standard Western-language critical study and complete English translation of the Míng-bào jì, based on Sasaki’s reconstructed text.
- 牧田諦亮, “Tō-rin no Mei-hō ki”, in Bukkyō chūsei kenkyū (Kyōto: Hōzō-kan, 1957) — the principal Japanese-language scholarly study, drawing on Sasaki’s reconstruction.
- Robert Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996) — situates the Míng-bào jì in the wider Chinese anomaly-account tradition.
- Robert Campany, Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2012) — covers the immediate predecessors and successors of the Míng-bào jì in the Six Dynasties / early Tang tradition.
Other points of interest
The Míngbào jì jíshū is the only fully modern-scholarly text in the Xùzàngjīng tradition — its inclusion in the canonical compilation as edited by Sasaki signals the modern textual-philological turn of the early 20th-century Japanese Buddhist scholarly tradition, and the recognition of modern reconstructive philology as a continuation of the canonical-redactorial tradition. The work also represents an important moment in the Japan-as-recovery-archive for lost Chinese Buddhist literature: Japanese manuscript-transmission preserved the Míngbào jì in a form unavailable in the Chinese line, and Sasaki’s Jíshū makes that recovery available to the modern Chinese-Buddhist scholarly community.
Links
- CBETA: X88n1648