Hòu zào zhǐ 厚造紙
The Thick-Made Paper [Notebook] by 元海 (記)
About the work
A single-fascicle Shingon ritual notebook compiled by Genkai 元海 (1093–1156), the late-Heian master of the Daigo-ji Hannya-ji transmission line. The casual title — Kōzōshi, “thick-paper [notebook]” — is characteristic of the late-Heian working-notebook genre; the contents are a topical compendium of ritual ingredients, procedures, and personal-experience records of high-imperial-grade Shingon practice.
Abstract
Authorship and dating: Genkai (CANWWW AUT01119) recorded his own dated experiences within the text, fixing the composition window with unusual precision. Internal dates include Eikyū 5 (1117), 6th month, 14th day (“beginning to perform this method [the 17-day ritual]”); Tenshō 1 (1131), 4th month, 10th day (receiving an abhiṣeka from a Sōzu); Chōshō 2 (1133), 2nd month; Kyūan 3 (1147), 10th month, at the Shirakawa Izumi-no-dono Palace; and Kyūan 3 (1147), 1st month, long-star [comet] prayer. notBefore = 1117, notAfter = 1156 brackets the documented compositional period.
Doctrinal content: the work opens with the ingredient-table for the seven principal ritual-elements categories — seven jewels, five jewels, five medicines, five fragrances, five grains, seven grains, and fragrance-flower offering contemplations. The body proceeds through a series of specific bessen-hō procedures: the Cakravartin (一字金輪), Buddhalocanā (佛眼), Samantabhadra-Aparimitāyus longevity (普賢延命), Eight-syllable Mañjuśrī (八字文殊), the ordinary Mañjuśrī and Bhaiṣajya-guru methods, the Six-syllable Sūtra method, the Mahāmāyūrī and Renwang methods, the Rain-prayer Sūtra method day-by-day diary (祈雨法日記) — a specific record of Genkai’s performance of the rain-rite — and the Rain-stopping method (止雨法), the Lotus-sūtra and Uṣṇīṣa-vijayā methods, the iconographic prescriptions for the Mahā-Vajra-Vidyā image (大勝金剛像) and Rāgarāja, the abbreviated Five-Ākāśagarbha sequence, the Mantra-Palace [Shingon-in] dark-morning recitation (眞言院晦御念誦), the 18th-day Kannon offering, the Subsequent Seven-Day Imperial Ritual (後七日御修法 — the great annual Tōji Shingon-in mishihō), the Northern Dipper homa, the Mantra of Light method (光言法 = 光明眞言), and the Jewel-Pavilion method (寶樓閣法).
The dated diary-entries embedded in the text make this work an exceptional documentary witness to the actual practice of imperial-house Shingon ritual in the period 1117–1147, a generation before Mongaku and Myōe. It is one of the most concrete records of how Daigo-ji kōke on-inori 公家御祈 was performed in the Toba-Sutoku-Konoe period.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
- Genkai and the late-Heian Hannya-ji transmission are treated in the Mikkyō daijiten s.v. Genkai 元海; Daigo-ji shi.
- The rain-prayer ritual specifically is treated in Brian Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan (2000).