Zhōngyuànliú dàshì wénshū 中院流大事聞書
Heard-Notes on the Great Matters of the Chū’in Lineage by 宥快; recorded by 成雄 (記)
About the work
A single-fascicle Shingon kuden compendium preserving the great-matter (daiji 大事 — i.e. most senior-level esoteric) teachings of the Chū’in-ryū 中院流, transmitted by Yūkai 宥快 (1345–1416) and recorded by his disciple Jōyū 成雄. The work is the companion to KR6t0211 Chū’in-ryū-ji; together they form a two-volume set documenting Yūkai’s mature codification of the Kōyasan Chū’in-ryū. The genre-marker wénshū 聞書 (Jp. kikigaki) — “heard-and-noted record” — explicitly identifies the work as a transcription of orally-delivered teaching.
Abstract
Authorship and dating: composition window ca. 1380–1416. The opening attribution reads: “Yūkai’s oral teachings; Jōyū has recorded them — Chū’in-ryū oral transmission; Jōyū recorded.” Two later copyists’ colophons date subsequent transmissions: a manuscript transmission from “Hōshō-in Jōyū Hōin’s record, with Yūkai’s oral teachings” — copied by Shūnin 秀任; and the principal Edo-period copyist Seiken 清賢 (the “final-leaf of the Chū’in [lineage], age 49”), copying on the Bunkyū 1 / Genji 1 — 1864, 8th month.
Doctrinal content: the work opens with the Chū’in-ryū lineage history — a particularly valuable source on the school’s medieval institutional position:
The present school is the dharma-flow of the three immediate disciples of the Ono master Seizon Sōzu — Yoshinori, Hannin, and Akisaru — and of the law-flow of Akisaru in particular. Therefore, the permission (kyoka) of the pre- dharma-transmission is to be undertaken: the procedure of this is to be learned. In general, the receiving of the permission before the dharma-transmission is the Ono-ryū’s pattern. The Great Master in Tang received the dharma three times — in the sixth, seventh, and eighth months. The Ono [school] understands that the sixth and seventh months were the permission, and the eighth month was the proper dharma-transmission abhiṣeka. The Hirosawa school holds that the sixth and seventh months were directly the dharma-transmission abhiṣeka, so before the dharma-transmission there is no permission. These distinctions are the very heart of the dharma-flow. Rural mantra-masters and the people of side-lineages do not preserve them.
The closing portion warns against syncretist tendencies: “Some hold that [the transmission] is to be received directly from Mahāvairocana, or [some say there is] the so-called Indian-transmission method etc. Such things are absolutely not to be permitted.”
The work is the principal late-medieval Kōyasan witness to the Ono-vs-Hirosawa institutional dispute over the relationship of kyoka (permission) and denbō kanjō (dharma-transmission). The narrative is consistent with the Tsuiki of Shukaku Shinnō (KR6t0200) two centuries earlier on the institutional importance of these distinctions.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.