Déyī wèijué dáshì 徳一未決答釋
Exegetical Replies to Tokuitsu’s Unresolved Questions by 杲寶 (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle Shingon polemical compendium by Gōhō 杲寶 (1306–1362), the great Tōji 東寺 scholastic master, in which he revisits the famous catalog of objections that the Hossō scholar Tokuitsu 德一 (ca. 781–842) had raised against the new Shingon teachings, and supplies elaborate Yogācāra-conversant resolutions to each. The work is essentially a 14th-century expansion of KR6t0165 Wèijué dájué (the earlier 1157 Bōkaku reply), now armed with the full apparatus of post-Kakuban 覺鑁 Shingon doctrine and explicitly engaged with the Faxiang (法相 / Hossō) scholastic refinements of the intervening two centuries.
Abstract
Authorship and dating: the header records “Gōhō” 杲寶 in plain colophon style, without further identification. Gōhō (DILA A000684) was a senior Tōji scholastic monk and the zassu 雜首 of the Tōji Hōbodai-in 寶菩提院; together with his disciple Kenpō 賢寶 (1333–1398) he assembled the foundational Tōji Shingon scholarly library and the Daishi den 大師傳 corpus. notBefore = 1306, notAfter = 1362 correspond to his lifedates; the work likely dates to his mature scholarly career at Tōji (ca. 1340–1360). A terminal colophon dated Kanpō 3 (1743) records the repair of the manuscript by the librarian Kenga 賢賀 (age 60) of the Kangaku-in 勸學院.
Doctrinal content: the work systematically addresses Tokuitsu’s classic Míjué questions on Shingon doctrine. The opening section, “On the doubt of the Ten Bodhisattva Stages” (púsà shídì yí), defends Kūkai’s position that the Shingon practitioner transcends the ten bodhisattva stages of the exoteric vehicles. Gōhō cites the Wǔmìmì jīng 五祕密經 (T18n0975), the Jīngāngdǐng yì jué 金剛頂義決, Kūkai’s own Guàndǐng wén 灌頂文 (= KR6t0167), Nāgārjuna’s Fā pútí xīn lùn 發菩提心論 (T32n1665), the Mìzàng jì 祕藏記 (T86n2710), the Dàrì jīng shū 大日經疏 (T39n1796), Fa-zang’s 法藏 Tànxuán jì 探玄記 (T35n1733), and Annen 安然’s Jiàoshí yì 教時義 (T75n2395) — i.e. the full canonical apparatus of medieval esoteric scholastic argument. He distinguishes two species of “Ten Stages”: the fruition-aspect Ten Stages (guǒfēn shídì 果分十地, the perfected Dharma-body), as taught in the Mahāvairocanasūtra, and the causal-aspect Ten Stages (yīnfēn shídì 因分十地, the progressive cultivation taught in exoteric scriptures); the Shingon practitioner transcends the second precisely because his practice is performed in the mode of the first.
Further sections address: (b) the nature of Sanskrit script (fàn-zì fǎ-rán 梵字法然) — is Sanskrit uncreated and self-existent, neither conditioned nor unconditioned? (c) the iron stūpa and the transmission to Nāgārjuna; (d) the chronology problem posed by the Mahāvairocana-sūtra’s appearance 800 years after Śākyamuni’s parinirvāṇa. Throughout, Gōhō engages directly with the Yogācāra technical vocabulary in which Tokuitsu had cast his challenges, and his resolutions are accordingly more sophisticated than Bōkaku’s earlier replies.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
- Gōhō and his Tōji school are treated in Mochizuki, Bukkyō daijiten, s.v. Gōhō 杲寶; Abe Ryūichi, The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse (1999) treats the broader history of the Hossō-Shingon controversy.
Other points of interest
Together with KR6t0165, this work forms a continuous 6-century tradition (1157–1360+) of Shingon scholastic engagement with Tokuitsu’s polemic, demonstrating both the durability of the Hossō challenge and the Shingon school’s continuous re-articulation of its self-understanding against it.