Yánfú jí 閻浮集
Jambudvīpa Collection by 德濟 Tesshū Tokusai (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle literary-religious collection by 德濟 Tesshū Tokusai (d. 1366), Nanbokuchō Japanese Rinzai-Zen master, ink-painter, and Gozan-literature poet. The title Enbu (S. Jambu, Jambudvīpa — the southern continent of Buddhist cosmography, conventionally designating “the human world”) is the standard Buddhist designation for the present-world realm.
Abstract
Tesshū Tokusai was active in the mid-fourteenth-century Kyoto Gozan establishment, primarily at Tenryū-ji 天龍寺 and related Musō-line temples. His sole Taishō-canonical work, the Enbu-shū, preserves a single-fascicle collection of his religious-literary output: dharma-poems, occasion-verses, prefaces, and inscriptions.
Tesshū is principally remembered as a Zen-painter — one of the foundational masters of the bokuga 墨畫 (ink-painting) tradition, especially of orchids and bamboo. The Enbu-shū thus complements his pictorial corpus by preserving the literary-textual side of his output. Listed in Nihon Bukkyō zensho 日佛 vols. 103 (p. 20) and 108 (p. 323).
Significance: a primary Gozan-literature collection of the mid-fourteenth century; an important documentary source for the integrated poet-painter-monk Zen-cultural ideal of the early Musō-school period.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located.
- For Tesshū’s painting see standard Japanese-art-history reference works on bokuga and Gozan ink-painting.
- Pollack, David, The Fracture of Meaning (1986).
Links
- CBETA: T80n2557