Nǚyuàn yùshū 女院御書
The Empress-Dowager’s Honoured Book by 證空 Shōkū (記)
About the work
A two-fascicle doctrinal essay in epistolary form, composed by 證空 Shōkū in response to a request from the Shijō-in Nyōgo 四條院女御 — i.e. a nyōgo (imperial consort, “imperial-lady”) of the Shijō era. The Edo-period printer’s preface (dated Bunsei 3 / 1820 spring) describes the text as Shōkū’s response to the nyōgo’s formal request, which “from the kalpa-five reflection of the original vow at the very beginning, unto the one-thought karma-perfected fruit-fulfilment” — i.e. the entire scope of the hongan-nenbutsu doctrine, from Amitābha’s original vows in the bodhisattva-Dharmākara stage to the practitioner’s ichinen go-jō fulfilment.
Abstract
The opening colophon-notice identifies the addressee as a nyōgo of the Shijō era (1232–42) — i.e. the consort of an emperor whose reign-period was Shijō (probably Empress Inshi-Mon’in 隠子門院, or Shijō-in’s mother, the Daini-no-sanmi consort), placing composition in Shōkū’s late period (1232–47). The text’s revealed nature is presented as the doctrinal teaching of Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara (十一面觀自在尊 Jūichimen Kanjizai) — honji (本地, original-ground) of the female-imperial requester — i.e. cast as a Buddhist kannon-no-honji revelation rather than a free philosophical composition, in the manner of medieval gosanze-mon (御三世文) revelatory texts.
The body of the text covers the comprehensive scope of Pure-Land doctrine — from Amitābha’s bodhisattva-Dharmākara kalpa-five contemplation, through the establishment of the Forty-Eight Vows, to the raigō welcoming-descent and the ichinen go-jō (一念業成) doctrine that a single moment of nenbutsu accomplishes the karma of rebirth. The text is unusual in Shōkū’s corpus for its address to a female lay practitioner: the nyōgo genre presupposes a courtly female audience and was an important medieval genre of jisho (女書 jisho — women’s-letter) doctrinal teaching. The work is one of the principal Seizan-line documents of lay-women’s Pure-Land instruction.
Transmission. The Bunsei 3 / 1820 colophon notes that “the old engraving has now perished; a re-collated version is published to the world” — i.e. the current Taishō text is the Edo-period revival of a previously-extant manuscript, and the editio princeps date of 1820 reflects the early-modern printing rather than the medieval composition.
Translations and research
No Western-language translation has been located. Discussed in: Fujimoto Kiyohiko 藤本淨彦, Seizan jōdokyō no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1988); Itō Yuishin 伊藤唯眞, Jōdo-shū no seiritsu to tenkai (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1981); the genre of nyōgo no on-fumi is treated in Barbara Ruch, Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), and in Lori Meeks, Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan (Univ. Hawai’i Press, 2010).