寶册鈔

Bǎocè chāo 寶册鈔

The Jewelled-Record Compendium

(anonymous, medieval Japanese Shingon)

About the work

A ten-fascicle doctrinal-philological compendium addressing the canonical-textual and transmission-historical questions arising from study of the Vajraśekhara-sūtra and the broader Vajra-Crown tradition. The work is anonymous in the Taishō edition and catalog meta.

Abstract

Authorship. Anonymous. The work’s idiom and topical-organization suggest a late-medieval Tō-ji scholar in the generation following Gōhō (杲寶), but the specific authorship has not been confirmed.

Date. Conventionally mid-Kamakura to early-Muromachi, c. 1200–1400 CE.

Content. The work’s opening mokuroku introduces the principal topical questions addressed:

1. 金剛頂經翻譯事 — On the translation of the Vajraśekhara-sūtra. Treats the Tang translation history of the Vajraśekhara-sūtra and its parallel recensions.
2. 略出經翻譯年記事 — On the chronological record of the Lüè-chū jīng (Abbreviated-Selection Sūtra) translation. The Lüè-chū jīng (= Liúkuò jīng 略出經, the Jīn-gāng-dǐng yú-qiè zhōng lüè-chū niàn-sòng-jīng 金剛頂瑜伽中略出念誦經, T866) is one of the three principal Tang recensions of the Vajraśekhara tradition.
3. 同經略出十八會中何會耶事 — On the question of which of the eighteen assemblies the Lüè-chū jīng is selected from. The medieval eighteen-assembly theory of the Vajraśekhara tradition.
4. 同經具譯四千頌梵本否事 — On the question of whether the Lüèchū jīng is the complete translation of the 4,000-stanza Sanskrit text.
5. (further topics on the textual-philological reconstruction of the Vajraśekhara corpus).

Significance. The work is one of the principal medieval Japanese textual-philological treatises on the Vajraśekhara tradition’s canonical recension and transmission history. It represents the scholarly-philological branch of medieval Shingon scholasticism — concerned not with doctrinal-disputation but with the historical-textual reconstruction of the foundational canon.

The work’s articulation of the eighteen-assembly theory — that the Vajraśekhara-sūtra is one of eighteen related Esoteric assemblies, of which the existing Tang recensions present only selected excerpts — became the canonical Shingon-scholastic position on the Vajraśekhara tradition’s textual-canonical structure.

Translations and research

• No Western-language translation located.
• Rolf W. Giebel, Shingon Texts (BDK English Tripitaka, 2004) — for the broader Vajraśekhara textual context.
• Ryūichi Abé, The Weaving of Mantra (Columbia, 1999).

Links

• CBETA: T77n2453
• Foundational texts: Vajraśekhara-sūtra tradition (KR6j0049 T865, T866, T882, and related).