Jìngtǔ zōng fǎmén dàtú 淨土宗法門大圖
Great Chart of the Doctrinal Gates of the Pure-Land School by 覺融 Kakuyū (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle large-scale diagrammatic doctrinal chart of Jōdoshū doctrine by 覺融 Kakuyū of Ugi Hōdō-in 鵜木寶幢院 (Seizan-Fukakusa branch). The opening identifies the work’s specific Seizan-school taxonomy: the three-fold ranking of practices established by the Seizan school — discard-and-establish, assisting-and-correct, accompanying (西山所立廢立助正傍三重名目 Seizan shoritsu hairyū-jo-shō-bō sanjū meimoku). The work is the structural companion to KR6t0343: where the Jōdo dōmō shiki-meimoku treats Pure-Land doctrine through enumerated topical headings (the meimoku genre), the Hōmon dai-zu presents the same material through visual diagrams (the dai-zu genre — daizu 大圖 / zu 圖).
Abstract
The doctrinal substance is organized through the three-fold practice-ranking distinctive to Seizan-school scholasticism:
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First level: Discard-and-Establish (第一重廢立 daiichi-jū hairyū) — the foundational doctrinal move of discarding the Way of Sages and establishing the Pure-Land Way; this is the level at which Jōdoshū differentiates itself from the eight schools of the established Buddhist canon (Tendai, Shingon, Sanron, Hossō, Kegon, Ritsu, Kusha, Jōjitsu).
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Second level: Assisting-and-Correct (第二重助正 daini-jū jo-shō) — within the established Pure-Land path, the further distinction between correct practices (正行 shōgyō — nenbutsu and its direct adjuncts) and assisting practices (助業 jogō — sūtra-recitation, contemplation-of-Buddha-image, circumambulation, etc.); this is the level at which Seizan-Fukakusa codifies its specific reading of the senchaku doctrine vis-à-vis Chinzei.
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Third level: Accompanying (第三重傍 daisan-jū bō) — the peripheral practices (the moral-and-meditative upaśaya of monastic discipline, ritual offerings, kuyō services, etc.), which are neither salvific nor obstructive but accompany the central nenbutsu practice as cultural-religious framework.
The visual diagrams (preserved as [IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE] placeholders in the Taishō text) original presented the three-level scheme as a series of kechimyaku-style branching trees, with the central nenbutsu at the apex and the various practice-categories arranged below it according to their soteriological rank. The daizu genre is the medieval Japanese-Buddhist equivalent of the European Christian summa in tabula form, and was widely used in Pure-Land, Tendai, and Shingon institutional pedagogy.
Date. As with the companion KR6t0343: a late-Kamakura to Muromachi date is most likely (13th–15th c.); no precise internal date.
Translations and research
No Western-language translation has been located. The daizu / meimoku doctrinal-chart genre is treated in: Fujimoto Kiyohiko 藤本淨彦, Seizan jōdokyō no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1988); critical text in Seizan zensho (1928–35); the parallel Tendai daizu tradition is treated in Lucia Dolce and Mark Teeuwen (eds.), Buddhism and Shintō in Japan (Brill, 2008).
Links
- CBETA online
- Companion work by same author: KR6t0343 (Jōdo dōmō shiki-meimoku)
- Cf. parallel-genre: KR6t0345 (Jōdo hōmon dai-zu meimoku — gloss-edition by Gyōkan)