Jìngtǔ èrzàng èrjiào lüèsòng 淨土二藏二教略頌
Abbreviated Verses on the Two Stores and Two Teachings of the Pure Land by 聖冏 Ryōyo Shōgyō (撰)
About the work
A doctrinal compendium in 166 verse-couplets (one hundred sixty-six song 頌) by Ryōyo Shōgyō 了譽聖冏 (1341–1420), the seventh Chinzei-line patriarch of Jōdoshū. The work is the verse digest of Shōgyō’s Goji hachiyaku and Nizōnikyō doctrinal scheme — the standard scholastic classification of Buddhist teaching from a Jōdoshū perspective — and was used through the Edo period as the primary memorization-text for Jōdoshū novices, mastered before the student could progress to the doctrinal treatises proper.
Abstract
The text is composed as a single sustained sequence of seven-character verses, each verse encoding a doctrinal proposition; the title’s enumeration (“一百六十六”) is exact, with the total count fixed at 166 verses. The doctrinal scheme classifies the entire Buddhist canon under two stores (二藏 ni-zō): the Hearer Store 聲聞藏 (the canon-of-Hearers, with its three vehicles, four fruits, seven sages, seven worthies, four kinds-of-mindfulness, etc.) and the Bodhisattva Store 菩薩藏 (the canon-of-Bodhisattvas, with its six pāramitās, ten bhūmis, etc.); and two teachings (二教 ni-kyō): the Way of the Sages (聖道門) and the Pure Land Way (淨土門), the former subsuming all Mahāyāna scriptures and the latter privileging the Three Pure Land Sūtras and Wǎngshēng lùn 往生論.
The opening verses pay reverence to the Pure-Land patriarchal lineage: “Bowing to Śākya[muni] and Amita-Honored-One; the testimony of the Buddhas of the Ten Directions; Vasubandhu [天親 Tiānqīn], Bodhiruci [流支 Liúzhī], and all the great Bodhisattvas; in pity for the latter age, broadly propagating the true school” (稽首釋迦彌陀尊 / 證明十方恒沙佛 / 天親流支諸大士 / 哀愍遐代弘眞宗). This canonical sequence — beginning with the Buddhas, naming Vasubandhu (author of Wǎngshēng lùn) and Bodhiruci (translator of the Wǎngshēng lùn into Chinese), and concluding with the patriarchal chain — is the standardized Jōdoshū lineage-acknowledgement.
The body verses are organized by tradition (Hearer-store, Bodhisattva-store) and within each by progressive stages, treating in compressed verse-form the breath-counting and impure-contemplation meditations (數息不淨慈悲定 / 因縁念佛 — the five upachittas); the four mindfulnesses (四念住 — kāya, vedanā, citta, dharma); the stages of nimitta-virodha (頂忍世第一); the sixteen aspects of the Four Truths; the noble eightfold path; the bodhisattva stages; and finally the Pure-Land doctrine of exclusive nenbutsu as the crown of the entire Buddhist path in the mappō age. The work thus functions both as a doctrinal summa (analogous to the Abhidharma-kośa in the Indo-Tibetan tradition) and as a Pure-Land apologetic.
Date. No internal date is given. Shōgyō’s mature period (his Kantō teaching at Daijō-ji and his foundation of Denzū-in) falls c. 1370–1420; the verse-digest format and its institutional function as a teaching tool place it within this mature span, conventionally c. 1390–1420.
Textual transmission. The text is appended (as the printer’s postface notes) by a critical edition prepared by Daiun 大雲 of the Enzan ryūgaku-shamon 縁山留學沙門 in Kaei 1 / Bōshen / 11th month = 1848 at Zōjō-ji; Daiun’s edition supersedes an earlier Genroku-era (元祿 = late 17th c.) edition by Ryōshōzan Shōnin 良照山上人 which is described as “the basis with one or two apparent printing errors and many faded kun-doku and pitch-accent marks”. Daiun’s edition is the source-text of the Taishō.
Translations and research
No Western-language translation has been located. The doctrinal scheme is treated in: Mark L. Blum, The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism: A Study and Translation of Gyōnen’s Jōdo Hōmon Genrushō (Oxford UP, 2002), which translates Gyōnen’s parallel scheme and discusses Shōgyō’s Goji-hachiyaku throughout; Itō Yuishin 伊藤唯眞, Jōdo-shū no seiritsu to tenkai (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1981); Ōhashi Shunnō 大橋俊雄, Jōdo-shū no kyōdan-shi (Daizō Shuppan, 1972); critical texts in Jōdo-shū zensho 浄土宗全書 vols. 11–12. Tamura Yoshirō 田村芳朗, Kamakura shin-bukkyō shisō no kenkyū (Heirakuji, 1965), discusses Shōgyō’s place in the maturation of medieval Jōdo-shū scholasticism.
Links
- CBETA online
- By same author, cf. Shōgyō’s Jōdo hōmon genrushō (treated in Blum 2002)