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淨土和讃

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Text ID
KR6t0356
Date
1248–1248
Dynasty
日本

Jìngtǔ hézàn 淨土和讃

Pure-Land Hymns in [Vernacular] Japanese by 親鸞 Shinran (作)

About the work

A single-fascicle hymn-cycle of vernacular-Japanese devotional verses (wasan 和讃) on the Pure Land, composed by 親鸞 Shinran in the year Hōji 2 / 1248 at age 75 (per the traditional dating). The Jōdo wasan is the first of Shinran’s three principal wasan cycles, together with KR6t0357 Jōdo kōsō wasan (hymns to the Pure-Land patriarchs) and KR6t0358 Shōzō matsu hō wasan (hymns on the doctrinal age-periods); the three are collectively known as the Sanjō wasan 三帖和讃 (“the Three-Volume Wasan”), the principal devotional poetry of Jōdo Shinshū through the modern period.

Abstract

The work consists of 118 wasan, each in the Imayō 今樣 prosodic form — the standard medieval Japanese-Buddhist hymn-meter (four lines of alternating 7+5 syllables, occasionally extended to 7+7+5 or compressed to 4+5). The hymns are organized topically:

  1. Hymns on the canonical citations (引文 inmon) drawn from the Wúliángshòu jīng (the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha), the Guānjīng (the Contemplation Sūtra), the Amida-kyō (the Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha), and Xuánzàng’s translation of the Chēngzàn jìngtǔ jīng 稱讃淨土經 (T367, an alternative translation of the Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha) — the opening hymns cite Xuánzàng’s text.
  2. Hymns on the topical doctrines: Amitābha’s kalpa-five contemplation, the forty-eight vows, the raigō welcoming-descent, the Pure Land, the bodhisattvas of the Pure-Land assembly, the Three Pure-Land Sūtras, and the senchaku-hongan-nenbutsu doctrine.
  3. Hymns on the practitioner’s faith: the shinjin (true faith) as Buddha-given, the kishin (taking-refuge), the kankyō (gratitude-recital) of the nenbutsu.

The vernacular Japanese register — using kana orthography with limited Sino-Japanese characters, and the rhythmical imayō form — was designed for lay devotional use, especially singing during the kō (講 — devotional assembly) gatherings of Shinshū lay-communities. The hymns were sung responsorially between leader and assembly, often during the jūya-nenbutsu ten-night devotional sessions, and became the standard Shinshū lay-hymnal through to the present.

Date. Conventionally Hōji 2 / 1248, age 75, though some hymns may have been composed earlier and the cycle continuously revised through the 1250s. Shinran continued to add and revise wasan through his late-Kyoto period.

Significance. The Sanjō wasan are the single most consequential body of medieval-Japanese-Buddhist vernacular poetry — circulated and sung among the Shinshū lay community across pre-modern and modern Japan, and the principal vehicle by which Shinran’s doctrine reached the lay community.

Translations and research

English translations:

  • Hongwanji Translation Series, The Collected Works of Shinran (1997) — complete English translation of all three Sanjō wasan.
  • Inagaki Hisao (trans.), Hymns on the Pure Land: Jōdo Wasan, Hymns on the Patriarchs: Kōsō Wasan, Hymns on the Dharma-Ages: Shōzō Matsu Wasan (Ryūkoku Univ., various dates).
  • Roger Corless, T’an-luan’s Commentary on the Pure Land Discourse: An Annotated Translation and Soteriological Analysis of the Wang-sheng Lun chu (PhD diss., 1973) — translates selected wasan in introduction.

Scholarship: Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida (SUNY, 1997); James C. Dobbins, Jōdo Shinshū (Indiana UP, 1989); Lori Meeks, “Wasan and Sectarianism: The Place of Vernacular Hymns in Premodern Japanese Buddhism” in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 33/2 (2006); critical text in Shinran Shōnin zenshū 親鸞聖人全集 (Hongan-ji, 1985).

Other points of interest

The Sanjō wasan — and the Jōdo wasan in particular — illustrate Shinran’s commitment to the vernacularization of Pure-Land doctrine: alongside his scholastic Sino-Japanese Kyōgyōshinshō, he provided his lay-community with hymns in their own spoken language. This bilingual literary strategy — scholastic Chinese for the doctrinal elite, vernacular Japanese for the lay congregation — is one of the most distinctive features of Jōdo Shinshū institutional culture and contrasts with the more uniformly-Chinese textual culture of Chinzei Jōdoshū.

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