心要鈔

Xīnyào chāo 心要鈔

Essentials of the Mind by 貞慶 (撰)

About the work

A single-fascicle Yogācāra contemplative manual focused on the practice-aspect of Hossō doctrine, by the major Kamakura-era Hossō patriarch Jōkei 貞慶 / Gedatsu Shōnin 解脫上人 (1155–1213). Where the bulk of the medieval Japanese Hossō canonical output is technical-scholastic — addressed to monks engaged in the doctrinal dispute culture of the Yuima-e — Xīn-yào chāo is in contrast a contemplative work: it specifically addresses guān-xīn 觀心 (“mind-contemplation”) as the yāo (essential) practice of the Yogācāra tradition, distilling the doctrinal apparatus to the practical injunction “the gate of consciousness-only mid-Way of meaning-realised teaching is announced in the Saṃdhinirmocana; the Avataṃsaka, Laṅkāvatāra, and Śūraṅgama doctrines on the divisions of consciousness are all contained therein.”

Abstract

Authorship and dating: The catalog meta and CANWWW give Jōkei (DILA: not present; but well-documented under his common name; Wikidata Q11518127) as author. The opening preface — an anonymous later voice praising the work — uses Jōkei’s honorific Gedatsu Shōnin 解脫上人 and explicitly attributes the text to him: “Gedatsu Shōnin was a man of the age, of profound learning and lofty conduct… This book specifically points out the essentials of consciousness-only mind-contemplation, for the use of later students.” The preface goes on to integrate the guānxīn practice with the Esoteric (mìmì yīchéng 密一乘) tradition, identifying the Yogācāra mind-contemplation with the āzì bùshēng 阿字不生 (“the unborn syllable A”) meditation of Shingon — a characteristic late-Heian / early-Kamakura HossōMikkyō synthesis.

Jōkei (1155–1213) was the principal Kōfuku-ji Hossō reformer of his generation. He withdrew from Kōfuku-ji to Kasagi-dera in 1193 and there established a more austere, contemplative Hossō practice — and Xīnyào chāo is most plausibly the literary product of that contemplative reorientation. The composition window is therefore Jōkei’s mature life: notBefore = 1180, notAfter = 1213 (his death). No more precise date is recoverable from the text.

Doctrinal content: the work expounds the zhǒng-zǐ (seed) doctrine, the èr-zhuǎn 二轉 (the “two transformations” of āśrayaparāvṛtti — the conversion of the basis of consciousness, by means of which the deluded mind is replaced by the awakened mind), and the zhǒng-shū (maturation of seeds) within the hùo-lòu shí-tián 有漏識田 (the field of defiled consciousness-seeds). The text is methodologically tightly bound to the Chéng wéishí lùn KR6n0025 vocabulary, but in its practical orientation aligns with the parallel Kegon-Shingon synthesis that Myōe 明惠 (高辨) was developing in the same decades — making Xīn-yào chāo and Myōe’s Mantra-of-Light literature (KR6j0192) parallel witnesses to the early-Kamakura Yogācāra-Esoteric rapprochement.

The Taishō edition is the unique witness. CBETA T71n2311.

Translations and research

• James L. Ford, Jōkei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan (Oxford University Press, 2006). The principal Western-language monograph on Jōkei, with substantial discussion of his Yogācāra-Esoteric synthesis.
• Robert E. Morrell, Early Kamakura Buddhism: A Minority Report (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1987). Contains translations of selected Jōkei works.
• Tomimura Takafumi 富村孝文 and others, Gedatsu Shōnin Jōkei no kenkyū 解脫上人貞慶の研究 — standard Japanese reference.
• The text appears in Mochizuki, Bukkyō daijiten, s.v. Jōkei 貞慶; Xīn-yào chāo 心要鈔.

Other points of interest

The work is a unique witness to Jōkei’s contemplative Yogācāra — the practical, meditation-oriented dimension of his scholastic output that is otherwise less well represented in the Taishō canon (his major preserved canonical work being the polemic Kōfuku-ji sōjō 興福寺奏狀 of 1205 and the doctrinal Hokke kaiji shō KR6d0045). It is also one of the earliest medieval Japanese Hossō works to make the Yogācāra-Esoteric integration explicit, identifying the guānxīn practice with the Shingon a-ji kan 阿字觀 — an integration that was foundational to the later medieval and Edo Hossō tradition.

Links

• CBETA: T71n2311
• Wikidata: Q11518127 (貞慶)
• Other major Jōkei works in the Taishō: KR6d0045 Hokke kaiji shō 法華開示抄 (T2195).