Qīnluán shèngrén yùxiāoxí jí 親鸞聖人御消息集
Collection of the Letters of [the] Holy Man Shinran [compiler unknown]
About the work
A single-fascicle anthology of letters by 親鸞 Shinran, parallel to the Mattōshō KR6t0370 but more loosely arranged. The compiler is anonymous; the collection was probably assembled in the late Kamakura period (c. 1290–1340) at the Hongan-ji or a Kantō Shinshū center as a working corpus from which the more carefully edited Mattōshō was later distilled. Ten letters; some overlap with Mattōshō and Mattōshō kō-hen recensions.
Abstract
The ten letters are mostly doctrinal rather than personal — short responses to Kantō disciples on questions of shinjin (faith), jinen-hōni (suchness-spontaneity), and the relation between the Buddha’s name and the practitioner’s recitation. One letter is the autograph Zenran gi-zetsu jō 善鸞義絶状, Shinran’s letter formally disinheriting his son Zenran 善鸞 for heretical teaching among the Kantō disciples (the Hitachi-no-kuni go-jiken incident); the version preserved here differs in small details from the Mattōshō recension and is one of the principal manuscript witnesses to that key episode.
The compiler’s anonymity distinguishes this collection from Mattōshō (compiled by 從覺 Jūkaku in 1333): the Go-shōsoku-shū circulated in the Kantō Shinshū dōjō network rather than at the Hongan-ji, and probably represents the provincial-disciple line of Shinran’s correspondence rather than the Kyoto Hongan-ji line. Date: late Kamakura, certainly before the late-Muromachi inclusion of the Go-shōsoku-shū in the early printed Shinshū canon.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T83N2660) records the work as a single-fascicle anthology with no internal toc and no related-text cross-references tabulated. Internal numbering is by letter (10 letters total).
Translations and research
Standard critical edition: Shinshū shōgyō zensho 真宗聖教全書 (Hongan-ji, 1941), vol. 2. English translations of the individual letters are scattered across Ueda & Hirota, The Collected Works of Shinran (1997), vol. 1. The Zenran gi-zetsu jō is treated extensively in Bandō Shōjun, Zenran no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1969) and in James C. Dobbins, Jōdo Shinshū (Indiana UP, 1989), ch. 4. Relation to Mattō-shō analyzed in Hirata Atsushi, Mattō-shō kō (Hōzōkan, 1990).
Links
- CBETA online
- Parallel anthology: KR6t0370 (Mattōshō)
- Author of the letters: 親鸞 (Shinran)