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五家參祥要路門

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Text ID
KR6t0282
Date
1788–1827
Dynasty
日本

Wǔjiā cānxiáng yāolù mén 五家參祥要路門

Gates of the Essential Roads of the Five Houses Examined Auspiciously by 圓慈 Tōrei Enji (撰)

About the work

A five-fascicle (plus appendix) comparative treatise on the Five Houses of Chinese Chan (Línjì, Yúnmén, Cáodòng, Wéiyǎng, Fǎyǎn), by 圓慈 Tōrei Enji (1721–1792), composed at Hachiman Enpuku-ji 八幡圓福寺 in Tenmei 8 / 1788 (天明戊申歳) and published with a 1827 appendix by Daikan-sō 大觀叟 of Abikutsu 阿鼻窟. The companion text to Tōrei’s KR6t0281 Mujin tō-ron: the Mujin tō-ron lays out the curriculum; the Goke sanshō yōro-mon analyses the kōan style of each of the Five Houses.

Abstract

Tōrei opens with a programmatic statement of the work’s aim:

“The essence (shū 宗) of the Five Houses is simply to transmit the Above-the-Self Great Matter (kōjō no daiji 向上大事) of our school. However, in the way that they explain words and letters circulating in the world, they mistakenly take the means for the essential. Therefore the patriarch-founders, each in his way, instructed his school’s essential roads and divided into separate gates, becoming each one of the Five House-styles. One must understand: the root is only the Above-the-Self Great Matter; the Five Houses are the differentiated essential gates. … Now, in each: the Línjì house’s battle-machine-pointed-edge (戰機鋒) has the distinction of full vs half presentation. The Yúnmén house’s word-and-line selection has the distinction of full vs half presentation. The Cáodòng house’s investigation-of-the-mind-ground (究心地) has the distinction of full vs half presentation. The Wéiyǎng house’s clarification-of-the-active-function (明作用) has the distinction of full vs half presentation. The Fǎyǎn house’s first-aid-with-benefit (先利濟) has the distinction of full vs half presentation.”

He then frames the autobiographical setting: “Thirty years ago, although I heard my master [Hakuin]‘s command — at the Five-Become-Great Matter (五之大事), and the Yúnmén-words the old monk today thoroughly wanders in the words-and-line forest — I gradually came to hear, believe, and accept, yet had not yet penetrated. The investigation has now gone on more than thirty frosty seasons, and I have at last more or less obtained its essentials. In Tenmei 8 / 1788, I was selected for Hachiman Enpuku-ji. On the day the summer-binding opened, I told the assembly…” The opening of the work is dated precisely: Tenmei 8 / 5 / 16 (1788-06-19 NS, summer-binding past-mid), the day Tōrei composed the encapsulating verse: “Last year today I first spoke about it; this year at this time it enters the gate by itself. Mid-summer past-mid passes from chen to si: the Five Houses’ essential road is a chain of conditions.”

The five-fascicle table is organised by house, with the Linji and Yunmen treatments by far the longest (Tōrei’s argument being that they are the principal living lines). The Wéiyǎng and Fǎyǎn houses get one fascicle each. The work closes with two appendices dated Bunsei 10 / 9 (文政丁亥之秋九月 = 1827-09 NS), by Daikan-sō 大觀叟 of Abikutsu 阿鼻窟, who explicitly identifies the work as a Hakuin-Tōrei-school jakugo (capping-phrase) treasury and supplements it with two “precepts for the Zen-practitioner’s seat-side” passages.

The dating bracket runs from composition (1788) to editio princeps with appendix (1827).

The work has been one of the principal theoretical texts of post-Hakuin Rinzai-Zen on the Five-Houses doctrine, and it remains a standard reading in Rinzai monastic curricula on cross-house comparative kōan study.

Translations and research

No book-length translation located. For Tōrei’s comparative-Chan thought and the Five Houses problem in Hakuin-Rinzai pedagogy, see Michel Mohr, Traité sur l’inépuisable lampe du Zen: Tōrei (1721–1792) et sa vision de l’éveil (Brussels: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 1997). For the Chinese-Chan Five-Houses classification, see Albert Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy (Oxford UP, 2008), and Welter, Yongming Yanshou’s Conception of Chan in the Zongjing lu (Oxford UP, 2011).

Other points of interest

The “full vs half presentation” (zentei 全提 / hantei 半提) distinction Tōrei applies uniformly across the Five Houses is his own systematising contribution: in the Sòng sources the terminology is house-specific (e.g. Línjì’s zentei-hantei terminology, originally about the Sun-Moon mountain dialogue, is generalised by Tōrei to all five schools). This is regularly cited in modern scholarship as evidence of Tōrei’s role as a theoretician of Sòng-Chan reception in Edo Japan, as distinct from Hakuin’s more practical curriculum-building.

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