Zhèngxiàng mòfǎ hézàn 正像末法和讃
Vernacular-Japanese Hymns on the Correct, Image-Like, and Degenerate Dharma-Ages by 親鸞 Shinran (作)
About the work
A single-fascicle hymn-cycle of vernacular-Japanese devotional verses (wasan) on the doctrine of the Three Dharma-Ages (正法・像法・末法 shōzōmappō — the correct dharma, image-like dharma, and latter-day-degenerate dharma periods of post-Buddha history), composed by 親鸞 Shinran in Kōgen 2 / 2 / 9, hour of the Tiger = 1257-03-15, around 4 AM. The third of the Sanjō wasan trilogy. Common abbreviation Shōzō mappō wasan 正像末和讃.
Abstract
The opening colophon is striking and unusual: “Kōgen 2 / 2 / 9, in the hour of the tiger, by night, a dream-revelation said: …” (康元二歳丁巳二月九日夜寅時夢告云) — the entire hymn-cycle is framed as proceeding from a dream-revelation (夢告 muku) received by Shinran at age 84 years. The muku dream-source is a muga-tariki authentication of the work: like the Senchakushū of Hōnen and the Rokkaku-dō dream-encounter that brought Shinran to Hōnen in 1201, the Shōzō mappō wasan presents itself as the gift of honji Kannon / Shōtoku Taishi rather than as Shinran’s own composition.
The doctrinal substance addresses the mappō doctrine: the conviction that the present age — calculated from the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa (variously dated, but conventionally placed c. 1052 in medieval Japan) — is the latter-day-degenerate (末法 mappō) age in which the correct dharma (shōbō) and image-like dharma (zōbō) periods have already lapsed. In mappō, only the Pure-Land path (the way of senchaku-hongan-nenbutsu) remains viable; all jiriki (self-power) paths have been rendered impossible by the degeneration of practitioner-capacity and the disappearance of vinaya-living monasticism.
Representative hymns:
- the golden body-and-vow of Amitābha — the kalpa-five name is entrusted to us of the Five-Pollutions mappō-age;
- Amitābha’s three karmic-deeds and the nenbutsu-practitioner’s three karmic-deeds are adamant-mind of each other and of each other; the settled position is thereby determined;
- broad-knowledge and pure-precepts are not selected; the precept-breaker and the karmic-sinner are not despised; the only well-Buddha-recalling persons — even tiles-and-pebbles transmute into gold;
- the diamond-firm faith-mind arises from the Buddha’s continuity; without the tariki-expedient, how could a settled-mind be obtained?;
- within the great-vow-ocean, the waves of kleśa have indeed never existed; having boarded the broad-vow ship, we are entrusted to the great-compassion wind.
- Having heard the vow-of-supreme-compassion, are we ordinary-beings of birth-and-death? Though our defiled body of āsrava remains unchanged, our minds are sporting in the Pure Land*;
- Among the six-eight broad-vows, the thirty-fifth vow of Amitābha specifically pledges to draw-and-deliver women …
These hymns are among the most theologically condensed in Shinran’s corpus, encoding the central Shinshū doctrine that in the mappō age the only viable Buddhist path is the unconditional-grace of Amitābha’s vow — which extends specifically to those traditionally excluded from the jiriki paths (women, precept-breakers, the unlearned).
Date. Precisely dated: Kōgen 2 / 2 / 9 = 1257-03-15, Shinran age 84. The dream-revelation framing implies a single inspired-composition moment, but Shinran continued to add and revise wasan through to his death in 1263.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
English translation: Hongwanji Translation Series, The Collected Works of Shinran (1997); Inagaki Hisao (trans.), Hymns on the Dharma-Ages: Shōzō Matsu Wasan (Ryūkoku Univ.). Treated in: James C. Dobbins, Jōdo Shinshū (Indiana UP, 1989); Jan Nattier, Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Asian Humanities Press, 1991) — the standard study of the mappō doctrine in its Asian-Buddhist context; Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida (SUNY, 1997); critical text in Shinran Shōnin zenshū 親鸞聖人全集 (Hongan-ji, 1985).
Other points of interest
The thirty-fifth vow of Amitābha (女人成佛之願 nyonin jōbutsu no gan, “the vow that women shall attain buddhahood”) — which Shinran’s hymn nine here specifically invokes — is the doctrinal foundation of Shinshū’s distinctive welcoming of women into the soteriological economy of Pure-Land. Together with the doctrine of akunin shōki (“the wicked person is the proper vehicle”), the thirty-fifth-vow doctrine made Shinshū uniquely receptive to women-practitioners in pre-modern Japan, and the Shinshū lay-communities (the kō) were the principal medieval-Japanese-Buddhist institutional space in which women could participate as full congregational members.
Links
- CBETA online
- Companion hymn-cycles: KR6t0356 (Jōdo wasan), KR6t0357 (Jōdo kōsō wasan)