Huāyán wǔjiào zhāng wèndá chāo 華嚴五教章問答抄
Question-and-Answer Compendium on Fa-zang’s Avataṃsaka Five-Teachings Treatise by 審乘 (撰)
About the work
A fifteen-fascicle Kegon disputational compendium by Shinjō 審乘 (b. ca. 1258), a Yuánzōng (= Tendai-Kegon) Buddhist scholar who completed the work at Yoshida-ji 吉田寺 in Iga Province on the 24th day of the 8th month of Shōwa 2 = 1313 CE, at the age of 56. The text is organised as a question-and-answer treatment of every contested doctrinal point in Fa-zang’s Wǔ jiào zhāng 華嚴五教章 KR6a0011, with each gate (the One Vehicle, the Three Vehicles, the establishment of the school, etc.) decomposed into a numbered sequence of disputation-questions and their detailed answers.
Abstract
Authorship and dating: The terminal colophon is unusually informative: “Genuine source text says: Shōwa 2 (= 1313), guǐ-chǒu, 8th month, 24th day, at the hour of the boar (亥剋, ca. 10 PM), at Yoshida-ji of Kanbe, Iga Province, in the Western-side bō Scripture Hall, the work was completed. Upper volume: three booklets. Middle volume: two booklets. Lower volume: ten booklets. Beginning and end: fifteen booklets. In this border region the books are hard to obtain; quotations frequently abbreviated. I look to later judgment.” The colophon then signs: “May self and other together plant the karmic seed of seeing-and-hearing [the Dharma]; if not in this life, then certainly in three lives. — Yuán-zōng last-branch śramaṇa Shinjō, secular age 56.” A second colophon records the Bun’an 4 (= 1447) copying by the disciple-amanuensis Kaishun Yūjō 快舜祐乘 at Tōdaiji: “Fifteen volumes copied to the best of my ability, though the paper was not properly prepared. Let those who later see it set it in better order.”
The 1313 composition by Shinjō age 56 implies a birth date around 1258. Shinjō 審乘 (DILA A001656) is documented only by this single canonical work and the dated colophon. The composition is precisely fixed: notBefore = 1313, notAfter = 1313.
Doctrinal content: the work treats Fa-zang’s Wǔ jiào zhāng topic-by-topic in the question-answer mode of the Yuima-e and Kegon-school disputation traditions. The opening of the One-Vehicle section sets out the standard questions: (1) the title’s alternate readings; (2) the work’s title and One-Vehicle ascription; (3) the compilation-attribution; (4) the order of doctrinal-principle in the title; (5) the universal reliance on the Ocean-Seal Samādhi (hǎiyìn sānmèi 海印三昧); (6) whether the fruit-portion is speakable or unspeakable; (7) whether the cause-fruit two-fold division applies across all teachings; (8) whether the Final and Sudden teachings can be vehiculised; (9) whether the Lesser-Vehicle bodhisattva can be vehiculised; and continuing through the entire doctrinal apparatus.
The closing fascicle treats the ten-body doctrine (shí shēn 十身) and the opening-closing of various numerical schemes of the Buddha-body — citing the Buddha-bhūmi-śāstra, the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, the Pán-yè jīng 般若經, the Kōmoku 孔目 (Zhì-yǎn 智儼’s Avataṃsaka commentary), and prior Japanese sub-commentaries. The text is one of the most exhaustive medieval Japanese treatments of the Wǔ jiào zhāng outside Gyōnen’s KR6t0035 Tōng-lù jì, and complements that work by providing the disputational-question version of the same doctrinal material.
Translations and research
- No complete Western-language translation located.
- Mochizuki, Bukkyō daijiten, s.v. Shinjō 審乘 and Kegon gokyōshō mondō shō 華嚴五教章問答抄.
- The work is treated briefly in modern Japanese Kegon-Tendai studies.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the few provincial-monastery Kegon canonical texts in the Taishō — composed not at Tōdaiji or Kōzan-ji but at Yoshida-ji in Iga Province (modern Mie Prefecture), a “border region” (邊土之境) according to Shinjō’s colophon. The text demonstrates the diffusion of Kegon scholarly culture into the provincial Tendai-affiliated monasteries by the early 14th century — a regionalisation of medieval Japanese Buddhist scholarship that the post-Kamakura bakufu policies encouraged.