Jiànkāng pǔshuō 建康普説
Public Talks at Kenkō[-zan] by 瑞方 Menzan Zuihō (撰), 本猛 Honmō, 禪胡 Zenko et al. (編)
About the work
A single-fascicle collection of thirteen fushaku (普説 — general talks) by 瑞方 Menzan Zuihō (1683–1769), the principal Edo-period Sōtō scholar-monk. The text was compiled at his late retirement when he was 83 years old (East Asian count). The author’s preface dated Meiwa 2 / autumn (明和乙酉新秋 = autumn 1765 NS): “Eighty-three old-stubborn-direction Menzan, titled.” The full title is Kenkō Menzan Oshō fushaku jūsanshō 建康面山和尚普説十三章 — “Thirteen Chapters of Reverend Menzan’s Public Talks at Kenkō[-zan]” — Kenkō 建康 referring to Mount Kenkō-zan in Wakasa 若狹 province (modern southern Fukui), where Menzan had given the talks during his middle period some thirty years earlier.
Abstract
Menzan’s self-preface frames the recovery of the talks:
“Thirty years ago I was sojourning at Mount Kenkō-zan in Wakasa. Following the four-coming requests, I gave general talks on the Eihei [Dōgen] proper-lineage — I do not know how many rounds. This summer, while sunning the books, I happened to obtain thirteen chapters out of the moth-eaten remainder. — Truly this is speaking dreams within a dream. The disciples requested to lengthen the wood-blocks to fill out the posthumous record. Touched by their earnest aspiration, I have nodded yes.”
The 13 chapters cover the principal topics of Sōtō practice and doctrine. The opening chapter — Daza fushaku 打坐普説 (“General Talk on Striking-Sit / Zazen”) — is one of the most concentrated late-Edo statements of the Sōtō zazen doctrine in the shūshō ichi-nyo (practice-and-realisation-are-one) line:
“The Master said: The ten-directions sit-cut-off, the thousand-eyes suddenly open, body and mind are one-such, the wonderful forgets beginning and end. This is what was properly transmitted by the Twenty-Eight Patriarchs — the very root of the entire Tripiṭaka teaching. … So they say: ‘A single leap directly enters the Tathāgata-stage.’ Just attain the root, do not be anxious about the branch. After Mātaṅga’s entry into Han for over four hundred years, [people] vainly picked the leaves on the sudden-and-gradual and looked for the branches on the provisional-and-real. As to the root they were blank. In the past our patriarchs properly transmitted this root to us — they greatly sat at Shōshitsu [Shaolin]: this is just the direct-person Tathāgata-stage dharma-gate. Therefore the Eihei patriarch said: Striking-sit is the true-dharma-eye-treasury wonderful-mind of Nirvāṇa. — Children-grandchildren, can you not investigate? The Buddha said: If [one] sits in lotus-posture, body-and-mind verify samādhi; the awesome-virtue is respected by the assemblies as the sun-illumination of the world.”
Menzan then proceeds to the detailed posture instruction — at the level of detail of the Fukan zazen-gi but elaborated through Cáodòng-school Five Ranks terminology: the right-foot-on-left-leg half-lotus is the 降伏 conquering (Mañjuśrī’s posture); the left-foot-on-right-leg is the 吉祥 auspicious (Samantabhadra’s posture); the full-lotus is the 圓滿 complete (Tathāgata’s posture); the hokkai-jōin mudrā with ten fingers is the ten dharma-realms united in the Buddha-seal; etc.
The remaining 12 chapters cover other principal topics — jukai (precept-conferral), dengo (post-awakening practice), the relation of doctrinal study to zazen, master-disciple etiquette, and so on.
The dating bracket: composition of the original Wakasa talks c. 1735 (Menzan was abbot at Mount Kenkō-zan in his middle career); recovery and editio princeps by his disciples in his lifetime, completed Meiwa 2 / 1765.
The work is one of the principal late-Menzan Sōtō fushaku collections in the Taishō and is the canonical Sōtō text on zazen-as-realisation (alongside KR6t0286 Dōgen’s Fukan zazen-gi and KR6t0292 Keizan’s Zazen yōjin-ki) — its zazen-instruction in particular is read as the principal Edo-Sōtō development of the foundational doctrine.
Translations and research
No book-length English translation located. For Menzan’s broader doctrinal corpus, see Hisamatsu Hōseki 久松保誠, Edo Sōtō-shū gakushi 江戸曹洞宗学史 (Hōzōkan, 1974); for Sōtō zazen pedagogy in the post-Hakuin / post-Manzan era, see William Bodiford, Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan (Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 1993), final chapter, and Bodiford, “Soto Zen in a Japanese Town,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 21 (1994).
Other points of interest
The opening Daza fushaku exposition of zazen-posture in terms of the Five Ranks (shōhen go-i) is one of the most explicit Edo-Sōtō integrations of the physical-posture and the doctrinal-symbology of the school: a hybridisation that is characteristic of Menzan’s wider scholastic style and that helped make the Five Ranks doctrine institutionally central in late-Edo Sōtō pedagogy.
Links
- CBETA online
- Related: KR6t0286 (Dōgen’s Fukan zazen-gi); KR6t0292 (Keizan’s Zazen yōjin-ki); KR6t0307 (Menzan’s Zenkai-shō)