Huāyánzōng suǒlì wǔjiào shízōng dàyì lüèchāo 華嚴宗所立五教十宗大意略抄
Brief Compendium on the Kegon School’s Established Five Teachings and Ten Schools Anonymous
About the work
An anonymous single-fascicle Kegon doctrinal primer on the Avataṃsaka school’s foundational doctrinal-classification scheme: the five teachings (wǔ jiào 五教) and the ten schools (shí zōng 十宗). The five teachings are: (1) Lesser Vehicle (xiǎo-shèng jiào 小乘教 — the Āgamas, Vinaya-piṭaka, Abhidharma); (2) Beginning Mahāyāna (dà-shèng shǐ jiào 大乘始教 — the Prajñāpāramitā and Yogācāra); (3) Final Mahāyāna (dà-shèng zhōng jiào 大乘終教 — the Tathāgatagarbha tradition); (4) Sudden Teaching (dùn jiào 頓教 — Chan and the Sudden tradition); (5) One-Vehicle Complete Teaching (yī-chéng yuán jiào 一乘圓教 — the Avataṃsaka itself).
Abstract
Authorship and dating: The work is anonymous in the canon; no transmission colophon survives. The doctrinal apparatus — directly drawn from Fa-zang’s Wǔ jiào zhāng 華嚴五教章 KR6a0011 and its standard medieval Japanese commentarial tradition — is the Tōdaiji-Kegon curriculum standard. The work’s compact, didactic style places it within the Japanese Kegon-school pedagogical literature, plausibly composed between the late Heian and the early Muromachi periods. notBefore = 1000, notAfter = 1500 is a conservative bracket.
Doctrinal content: the work systematically expounds the Lesser Vehicle’s sān-shēng liù-shí jié (three-life, sixty-kalpa) path of the śrāvaka, with its three stages of shùn jiětuō fēn 順解脱分 (concordant-with-liberation), shùn juédéfēn 順決擇分 (concordant-with-decisive-analysis), and jiàn dào 見道 (path of vision). The treatment of the Beginning Mahāyāna covers the standard Yogācāra five-stages doctrine (zī-liáng wèi → jiā-xíng wèi → jiàn dào wèi → xiū dào wèi → jiū-jìng wèi). The remaining three teachings are treated more briefly in the standard Kegon-sectarian sequence.
The text serves as a memorisation primer for the foundational Kegon teaching-classification doctrine — comparable in pedagogical function to KR6t0030 Huāyánzōng dàyào chāo. Its anonymity is consistent with its functional, didactic character.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
- Mochizuki, Bukkyō daijiten, s.v. Wǔ jiào shí zōng 五教十宗.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the very few anonymous Kegon primers preserved in the Taishō canon. It belongs to the same genre as KR6t0020 Qīshíwǔ fǎ míngmù — both works are anonymous, didactic, and structurally tabular — and is a witness to the medieval Japanese tradition of producing memorisation primers for the foundational doctrinal categories of each school.