Fùzǐ xiāngyíng 父子相迎
Father and Son Welcoming Each Other by 向阿 Kōa Shōken (撰)
About the work
The third work of the Kōa sanbu 向阿三部 trilogy by 向阿 Kōa Shōken (1265–1345). Two fascicles. The title — “father and son welcoming each other” — is a Pure-Land metaphor of cardinal importance: the Buddha Amitābha is the father (父 chichi) who, at the moment of the practitioner’s death, comes to welcome the son (子 ko) — the practitioner who has spent the saha world’s long pilgrimage of estrangement as a slave of Māra — back to his true patrimony in the Pure Land. The trope inverts the Confucian xiao (filial piety) motif into a salvific allegory: the prodigal son of the Buddha-nature returns to his Father’s kingdom.
Abstract
The opening of fascicle 1 establishes the doctrinal framework: “The flocks of the four kinds of birth are not despised; all from their origin receive the nature of the Buddha-vehicle. Why should the ten-titled honoured-position [of buddhahood] not be aspired to? Who from the very beginning is not the honoured-son of the Dharma-King? Yet we, having once strayed from our true home and been long held captive in the foreign country [the saha world] — from then onward, as the hereditary slaves of Māra, were driven and used at will in the six realms; our bodies are wretched and our names are forgotten; our minds are dull and we have forgotten our father and mother [in the Pure Land]; we have erroneously erected the prison of fame-and-profit in the realm of delusion, and the bonds of love-and-attachment …” (夫四生ノ群品 … 一タビ自家ヲマドヒイデテ。ナガク他郷ニトラハレテシヨリ …). This prodigal-son narrative — modelled directly on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra) chapter 4 “Adhimukti” parable — is the structural template of the work.
The body proceeds through (i) the prodigal-son narrative as allegory of the practitioner’s pilgrimage through saṃsāra; (ii) the Father-Amitābha’s compassionate raigō (來迎 — welcoming-procession of Amitābha with the Twenty-Five Bodhisattvas at the practitioner’s deathbed); (iii) the doctrinal meaning of sō-gei 相迎 (mutual welcoming) as the meeting-point of practitioner’s kimyō faith and Buddha’s hongan vow; and (iv) closing meditations on the Pure Land’s reception and the practitioner’s jōdo no honyū — entering the original home of buddha-nature.
The text is the most narratively organized of the three Kōa sanbu works and is the principal vehicle for Kōa’s contribution to the medieval raigō-religiosity — the cult of Amitābha’s welcoming descent, made famous by the raigō-zu paintings (Amida raigō scrolls) commissioned by aristocratic patrons from the Heian period onward. Kōa here provides the doctrinal theology underlying the iconography.
Related-texts cross-reference. The CANWWW entry for T83N2617 notes related-text pointers to T79N2515 and T79N2516 — the Anrakushū 安樂集 of Daochuo (T1958 — different vol.) … but those Taishō numbers point into vol. 79, the Tendai-shū tōroku part of the canon, which is the wrong context. The intended references are most plausibly to other Seizan-line Pure-Land texts in the canonical neighbourhood; the CANWWW entry appears to have a typographical error here, and no corresponding KR6t entries can be confidently identified. Within the Seizan tradition, the work is invariably read alongside its companions KR6t0321 and KR6t0322.
Translations and research
No complete Western-language translation has been located. The work is discussed in: Mark L. Blum, The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2002); Andreas F. Bauer, Raigō: The Welcoming Descent of Amida and his Heavenly Host in Japanese Painting and Sculpture (Brill, 2019), pp. 80–110, on the doctrinal background of raigō iconography; Itō Yuishin 伊藤唯眞, Jōdo-shū no seiritsu to tenkai (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1981); critical text in Jōdo-shū zensho 浄土宗全書 vol. 14.
Other points of interest
The work’s title and central metaphor of father-and-son mutual welcoming is one of the most theologically suggestive Pure-Land tropes, and was iconographically realized in countless raigō-zu (welcoming-descent paintings) where Amitābha descends to the dying practitioner accompanied by Kannon (carrying the lotus-throne) and Seishi (in gasshō). Kōa’s work provides the canonical literary text underlying this iconography from the Seizan-line perspective.
Links
- CBETA online
- Companion: KR6t0321 (Kimyō-hongan-shō) and KR6t0322 (Saiyōshō)