Xiǎo cónglín qīngguī 小叢林清規
Brief Pure Rules for Small Monasteries by 道忠 Mujaku Dōchū (撰)
About the work
A three-fascicle abbreviated monastic-rules manual by 道忠 Mujaku Dōchū (1653–1744/45), the great Myōshin-ji-Rinzai philological scholar. The full title is Shōsōrin ryaku shingi 小叢林略清規 — “Brief Pure Rules for Small Monasteries”. The author’s self-preface dates the composition to Jōkyō 1 / 12 (貞享改元甲子臘月 = 1685-01-05 NS, “written at the Shōhyō chamber in West Kyoto”). One of Dōchū’s earliest works, composed when he was 31 (East Asian count 32), addressing the practical pastoral problem that the great-monastery codices were unwieldy for the small temple-abbot’s daily use.
Abstract
The self-preface explains the motivation candidly:
“From my youth I was fortunate to enter the rich shade of the Hua-yan garden, and have personally seen the rules of the Vinayavāda (Binba 貧婆 = Vinaya-piṭaka) in fullness. Later I myself practised them in the thatch-hut grass-knot circle. Coming to the urgency of straw-sandals, my fingers were dipped in the five flavours. The old-monks of a hundred cities, finding that I came from the higher country [i.e. from Myōshin-ji], expected I would be cooked-and-mature on the adhicāra (威儀進止) protocols, and would therefore bow-and-ask. I bent the knee and bowed-and-asked them — the muddled ones, the rude ones. My memory being lacking, I always feared that my answers would mislead. So I wanted to make a little volume convenient for inquiries. … I divided it into four [sections]: (1) common applications (通用), (2) daily division (日分), (3) monthly division (月分), (4) occasional cases (臨時). That is to say, not to demolish the old halls but to stop the destructive waters.”
The text is explicitly practical-pastoral rather than canonical-comprehensive. Dōchū addresses a hypothetical objector who insists Zen does not need rules:
“A certain person responding said: We should not have Kangen [鑒玄, a notable Zen practitioner of rules] take charge of this matter; he should know it is the way of manifesting brightness under heaven. And if we observe our family-patriarchs, the office-room has no long-thing; all day they sit blocked, while sticks and shouts cross-rush. — That is so. But to take folding-orderly stooping-rising as one’s concern? — I said: Alas, you are using the Du-Dang remote-words (tonji 遯辭) excuse! If you yourself have the patriarchs’ sticks-and-shouts, then I forgive your tabling-and-loafing in the rein-bearing affair. But when I ask a question and you snatch up the staff, hitting and shaking and breathing out odour — then you should run your skull into this little volume here, learning Zhao’s-walk drawing-a-bottle-gourd — only that way will you escape the bystanders’ ugly looks.”
The three fascicles are arranged into the four divisions outlined in the preface:
- Tsūyō 通用 (Common applications): general protocols for daily monastic life — meal-service, sōji 掃地 (sweeping), incense-rite, founder-shrine, etc.
- Nichi-bun 日分 (Daily division): morning, noon, and evening rites.
- Tsuki-bun 月分 (Monthly division): the periodic rites — kyō-shutsu (canon-recitation), Tu-di-tang and so-shi-dō rites, monthly fukyō chants.
- Rinji 臨時 (Occasional cases): special-occasion rites — abbatial installation, funeral protocols, anniversary rites, retreat-opening and -closing.
The dating bracket is narrow: composition completed late 1684 (Jōkyō 1). The Edo-period printing of the Shōsōrin circulated widely and is the basis of the Taishō recension.
The work is the most-used practical-rules manual in Myōshin-ji-line small-temple Rinzai-Zen practice through the Edo period and into the modern. Its compact size and concrete pastoral idiom contrast with the larger-monastery rules codes (KR6t0283 Daikan shingi, KR6t0290 Eihei shingi, etc.) and make it the practical equivalent in Rinzai-Zen of KR6t0284 Sho-ekō shingi in liturgical practice.
Translations and research
No book-length Western-language treatment located. For Mujaku Dōchū’s scholarship more generally, see Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山’s biographical introduction to his ed. of the Zenrin shōkisen 禪林象器箋 (Kyoto: Chūbun, 1979); Iriya Yoshitaka 入矢義高, Mujaku Dōchū to Zenrin shōkisen 無著道忠と禅林象器箋 (Tōhō gakuhō, 1957). The text itself has been re-published in modern annotated form in Sōkō shū 叢規集 (Chūbun shuppan, 1971).
Other points of interest
The text is the earliest of Mujaku’s published works, predating his great encyclopaedic Zenrin shōkisen 禪林象器箋 by some forty years. The pugilistic preface, with its mock-Confucian / mock-Chan back-and-forth dialogues, is in the humanist-monk literary register of the Genroku-era Myōshin-ji circle — a register that Mujaku would mature into the principal Japanese Zen-philological scholarship of the eighteenth century.
Links
- CBETA online
- Related: KR6t0283 (Daikan shingi, the great-monastery counterpart); KR6t0290 (Dōgen’s Eihei shingi)