Tànyì chāo 歎異抄
Lamenting the Deviations attributed to 唯圓 Yuien
About the work
A single-fascicle vernacular-Japanese doctrinal essay that is arguably the single most famous text of Japanese Buddhism. The work consists of an introduction, ten chapters in which the author records sayings of 親鸞 Shinran that he heard directly from the master (“the words I have heard from the late master”), eight chapters condemning i-gi 異義 — “deviating interpretations” — propagated after Shinran’s death, and a concluding postscript. The author is traditionally identified as Yuien 唯圓 of the Kawada dōjō in Hitachi, a Kantō disciple of Shinran active in the 1280s–90s, on the strength of internal allusions and a later marginal note in the Renny0-period manuscript line; the identification is universally accepted in modern scholarship but is not absolute. Composition is conventionally placed in the late 1280s, c. 1288–1290.
Abstract
Chapter 1 opens with what is probably the most-quoted passage in Japanese Buddhism: “Saved by the inconceivable benefit of Amida’s Vow, when there arises one thought of trusting and rejoicing — that one is to be reborn — already in that moment one is grasped, never to be abandoned” (彌陀の誓願不思議に たすけられまゐらせて、 往生をば とぐるなりと信じて、念佛まうさんとおもひたつ こゝろのおこるとき、すなはち攝取不捨の利益にあづけしめ たまふなり). Chapter 3 contains the aku-nin shō-ki 惡人正機 dictum — “Even a good person can be reborn; how much more a bad person” (善人なをもて往生をとぐ、いはんや惡人をや) — which crystallizes Shinran’s inversion of conventional soteriology: the bad person, precisely because he cannot rely on his own merit, is the primary intended subject of Amida’s vow.
The work’s structural division into first half (recorded sayings of Shinran) and second half (refutation of the eight i-gi deviations) reflects the principal occasion of composition: the post-Shinran (1262–) Kantō Shinshū community had splintered into competing doctrinal factions, and Yuien composed the Tannishō to provide a doctrinal benchmark from his own first-hand testimony. The eight deviations refuted include the senju-ichinen-gi (Kōsai’s radical single-thought exclusivism), the tariki-tanen-gi (continuous-recitation soteriology), the chie-ichinen-gi (gnostic understanding-as-cause), the seikyō-bukuyō-gi (Buddha-image worship as path), and others.
Reception. The Tannishō was concealed by 蓮如 Rennyo (1415–1499) in the 15th c. as “too dangerous to circulate” (it was thought to encourage antinomian misunderstanding among the unprepared) and circulated only in restricted manuscript transmission until the late Edo period. Its modern fame dates to the Meiji-Taishō period (~1890s–1920s), when figures including Kiyozawa Manshi 清澤滿之 and Soga Ryōjin 曾我量深 made it the central reading-text of Shinshū modernist theology; from there, in Suzuki Daisetsu D. T. Suzuki’s hands, it became the principal text by which mid-20th-c. Western readers encountered Jōdo Shinshū. It is now the most-translated text in Japanese Buddhism: more than 30 English translations exist.
Date. Composition: late 1280s, conventionally Shōō 1 / 1288; the autograph is lost. The Rennyo-shōnin shahon (Rennyo’s autograph copy, dated Bunmei 9 / 1477) is the textus receptus, preserved at the Nishi Hongan-ji.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T83N2661) tabulates the work as a single-fascicle text with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references.
Translations and research
The literature is enormous. Standard English translations:
- D. T. Suzuki (trans.), The Tannisho: Lamenting the Deviations (Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1965).
- Bandō Shōjun & Harold Stewart (trans.), Tannishō: Passages Deploring Deviations of Faith (BDK, 1980).
- Taitetsu Unno (trans.), Tannishō: A Shin Buddhist Classic (Buddhist Study Center, 1984; rev. 1996).
- Dennis Hirota (trans.), Tannishō, in The Collected Works of Shinran (Hongan-ji, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 661–684.
Major studies: Soga Ryōjin 曾我量深, Tannishō chōki 歎異抄聴記 (Hōzōkan, 1947); Kiyozawa Manshi 清澤滿之, Tannishō kōwa 歎異抄講話 (1899); Mark L. Blum, “Tannishō,” in Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton, 1999); James C. Dobbins, Letters of the Nun Eshinni (Hawai’i, 2004); Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida (SUNY, 1997).
Other points of interest
The Tannishō’s postscript (後序) includes Shinran’s reported saying — preserved nowhere else — “When I carefully consider the Vow that Amida brought forth after five kalpas of contemplation, [I see that] it was solely for me, Shinran, alone” (彌陀の五劫思惟の願をよくよく案ずれば、ひとへに親鸞一人がためなりけり), which has become the doctrinal locus classicus for the Shinshū doctrine of absolute personal address in Amida’s vow.
Links
- CBETA online
- Author: 唯圓 (attributed)
- Subject of the discourses: 親鸞 (Shinran)