Wèijué dájué 未決答決
Resolutions to the Unresolved Questions by 房覺 (記)
About the work
A short single-fascicle Hossō / esoteric doctrinal-debate compendium in which Bōkaku 房覺, an otherwise obscure late-Heian Shingon monk, takes up the famous Míjué 未決 (“unresolved questions”) posed by the Hossō scholar Tokuitsu 德一 (ca. 781–842) against the early Shingon teachings — and supplies his own resolutions (dá 答 = “answer”, and the further specifier jué 決 = “decisive resolution”). It thus forms the companion piece to its successor KR6t0166 Déyī míjué dáshì by Gōhō 杲寶 (1306–1362), which re-examines the same Tokuitsu questions in more elaborate exegesis. Bōkaku’s Wèijué dájué is the first systematic Shingon response to Tokuitsu’s challenges and an important document in the long history of the Hossō-vs.-Shingon polemic.
Abstract
Authorship and dating: the closing colophon (ōku-gaki) is unusually explicit. It records that the work was “抄之 (extracted) at Tsubosaka 壺坂 [-dera] in the first month of Hōgen 2 = 1157” — i.e. the wood-ox year (丁丑) of the Hōgen era. The signature is Shingon mappa Bōkaku 眞言末葉房覺 (“a late-leaf [follower] of the Shingon school, Bōkaku records this”). Three further sub-colophons date subsequent copying campaigns: Genkō 1 (1321) at the Shion-in 四恩院, sub-temple of Kōfuku-ji 興福寺, by the copyist Raikaku 賴覺 (age 46); Gentoku 2 (1330) at the Ninnaji 仁和寺 Chūro 中路 nyohō dōjō, by Yūken 融賢; and Jōji 4 (1365) by Kanshō 寛紹 the jari 闍梨 at the instruction of Kenpō 賢寶 (age 33). A final Edo-period Hōreki 5 (1755) notice records the repair of the manuscript by Kenga 賢賀 (age 72), librarian of the Kangaku-in 勸學院, who also signed the 1743 (寛保 3) repair of KR6t0166. notBefore = notAfter = 1157 is the original composition date.
Doctrinal content: Bōkaku takes up Tokuitsu’s famous catalog of questions on the Shingon teachings — the so-called Shingonshū mikessbun 眞言宗未決文, in which the Hossō master (writing perhaps shortly after Kūkai’s death) posed thirty-some objections from a Yogācāra standpoint to the new esoteric school then taking root in Japan. The opening section addresses the First Council (jié-jí 結集) and the transmission to Nāgārjuna 龍猛 from Vajrasattva 金剛薩埵, citing Kūkai’s Fù-fǎ zhuàn 付法傳 (T77n2456 = KR6t0162), the Sānzàng Biǎo-zhì jí 三藏表製集 of the Tang esoteric translator Amoghavajra’s circle, and the Hǎi-yún Zhuàn-fǎ cì-dì jì 海雲傳法次第記. Subsequent sections address: (a) the iron-stupa (tiě-tǎ 鐵塔) transmission location, citing the Jīn-gāng-dǐng yì jué 金剛頂義決 (T39n1798); (b) the question whether the Mahāvairocana-sūtra was preached by the Dharma-body Buddha; (c) the scriptural-count problem (how many fascicles in the original 100,000-verse text); and (d) the practitioner’s location (zhù-chù 住處) — i.e. on what level of attainment can ordinary beings receive the esoteric teaching. Bōkaku closes the section by quoting Dà-rì jīng shū 大日經疏 (T39n1796 = KR6t0044) on the nature of “self-realized anuttara-saṃyak-saṃbodhi” — implicitly arguing that the bujutsu of practice is itself the answer to Tokuitsu’s objections.
The structure throughout is míjué (Tokuitsu’s question) → catena of Shingon scriptural and commentarial citations → sī yún 私云 (“my response says”) in which Bōkaku gives his own resolution. The text is a primary witness to mid-12th-century Shingon scholastic practice at the Tsubosaka-dera 壺坂寺 — the Minami Hossō 南法相 stronghold which, paradoxically, by this point housed an active Shingon faculty.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
- The Tokuitsu Mikessbun corpus is treated in Japanese scholarship as part of the late-Heian Hossō-Shingon controversy; standard references are the Mochizuki Bukkyō daijiten s.v. Tokuitsu 德一 and the various Shingon-shū zensho volumes.
Other points of interest
The colophons trace an unbroken chain of Nara / Kōfuku-ji and Ninnaji transmission, demonstrating that Bōkaku’s text — composed at a Hossō centre — circulated equally among the eastern (Tōji) and southern (Nara) wings of Shingon scholarship.